When you help your colleagues overcome obstacles in applying a new method at work, you have got a chance to show them the reason why that change is neccesary. Although it is not an official training session, you have helped them improve and develop their capability. This is the concept of “Coaching”.
There are three requirements for every position at IMC: completing the task, ensuring the growth of you and ensuring the one of your colleagues. In order to achieve these goals, one method is to guide the staff to perform more efficiently with higher productivity at work.
We usually spend time with employees who have low productivity or often get trouble at work. High performance employees therefore are often neglected until one of them comes to the manager and reports that he is no longer interested in the job. He has not got enough challenge at work and there is no opportunity to develop himself. Only then do we realize that every employee deserves to have a chance to develop.
IMC has two methods of coaching:
- Focus on knowledge development.
- Focus on leadership skill.
Focus on knowledge development.
In Marlow’s hierarchy of needs, the individual always strives to reach higher targets, to move up the pyramid of needs.
The duty of managers at IMC is to assist their employees in realizing their targets and their needs.
Realizing their needs in the hierarchy will help us identify accurately each employee’s motivations. Then we can come to an agreement between their personal development target and the goal of IMC. From this agreement, appropriate coaching methods will be used; for example: a pharmacist working in Purchasing Department is passionate for research and wants to develop further in this area. She will then be given an opportunity to learn and experience in a project within Research & Development Department as long as she ensures that her current work is unaffected. In other words, she will be given a heavier workload with more challenging goals.
The method by giving more responsibility with more tasks is also applied to other members of the department in order to find those with potentials.
To reiterate, it is crucial duty of the managers to build and to come to the agreement of setting meaningful and challenging targets for employees. This will ensure the development of both the employers and the employees.
Coaching management skills and leadership
The managers also have the task of preparing the next generation in their departments. Each manager has to be able to train his staff to answer the question: “Who can take his responsibility or replace him in the operation of his department and the department’s objectives can be fulfilled”.
In this case, the manager needs to prepare his staff for next generation when he leaves and he must choose some key persons, coaching them for this.
After identifying the potential persons, the managers should do the coaching by performing management, leading tasks under our direct supervision such as guiding, training new staff, conducting the meeting of team or department… They also need to clarify the coaching objectives for the next generation to other employees in the department so that their employees can understand and support them. This also helps to avoid the cases that other people in the team misunderstand that there is unfairness and then get jealous, which affect the core values of system.
Summary
We have only 24 hours per day but if you have a strong belief and implements aggressively your goals, you will have enough time and energy to achieve your passion.
I’m really convinced by Jack Welch’s statement on human potential: “We can squeeze infinite juice from the lemon”. The statement is illustrated by achievements of his company – General Electric (GE), one of the largest companies over the world. Starting as an employee in Research and Development team, after 10 years, he became the director of Plastic Manufacturing Division. Under his leading, the department brought the excellence revenue to GE that accounted for 20% of total revenue. Ten years later, he became CEO of GE and under his management, GE grew up 6 times more. He becomes model for the unlimited development of human beings and the conception “Focus on people first, then everything will come” that he applied successfully at GE.
This conception of Jack Welch is similar to the core value of IMC – “Investing and promoting in developing human potential”. I also believe that you and I, at IMC, have a chance to develop ourselves without limit.