Mar
31
The dilemma of hiring a coach when you want to retain an employee.
Filed Under Leadership, Coaching, Career development, Human Resource Management ( HRM), Carnival of HR
I am writing this as a coach. I know this happens from my own experiences with my clients and from stories I hear.
Sometimes when an employee starts to work with a coach they find that they don’t want to be doing what they are doing any more and they resign!
Now if you hired a coach to work with your employee on some remedial issue in their performance that might not be an awful result but if it was part of a leadership development programme for which the employee has been carefully selected it could cause a major headache.
It should not be surprising though. A coach will work with an employee on any aspect of their job that the employee thinks is important. The employee and the employer might have agreed this in advance. But the employee is a whole human being with a life outside work, a history of experiences and aspirations for the future - aspects of which will come into the coaching conversations.
I work on the basis of positive psychology - finding out what someone is good at and encouraging them to think of how they might do more of that. If someone loves to build relationships and they would really like to do more of that but their current job role needs them to crunch numbers in front of a screen the mismatch might become obvious. More subtly if the employee’s values and those of the organisation are at odds some difficulties might be explained. The point is that the outcome of the process of reflection which is inherent in the coaching process is impossible to predict and the smartest employers are the ones that can work with whatever they get back from the employee.
It will come as no surprise that I have spoken with many women who have found that their view of work on returning after having their children has changed. For some that means rejigging they way they work for others they look for a different job altogether. But I have met men and women who had come to a time in their lives where what they were doing was fine - they were not really that dissatisfied - but when they had the opportunity to explore what the future might look like in the safety of a coaching relationship they allowed themselves to consider what else might be out there for them.
The upside of losing a valued and valuable employee is that they leave on good terms and might even come back at sometime having been trained by their next emlployer ( at their expense). At the very least they are likely to recommend you recognising that because you grew apart does not mean that you are not a good employer.
Obviously, not everyone who has the opportunity to be coached provided by their employers leaves. Coaching can be a powerful tool for improving even already great performance. The coaching process can highlight opportunities for employees within their organisations that they had not considered and, as long as the employer is willing to engage with the employee afterwards this can lead to a great and potentially longterm relationship.
So with this in mind - if yours is the kind of organisation that sees coaching as a tool to make an employee do what you want, that will not factor in time for discussion and engagement on the outcome and that needs to hold onto employees at all costs then I would recommend that you think twice about hiring a coach to work with them.
This is my entry for first Carnival of HR of April 2008.
