Are Your Senior Executives Lousy Coaches?

If you are not training your company’s senior executives to be effective coaches and mentors to your high potential leaders, you are missing a huge opportunity.

Coaching and mentoring by senior leaders is a critical element of high potential development programs. But, to be blunt, many senior executives are just plain lousy when it comes to coaching employees. They either don’t value spending time coaching and developing their people, or, more often, they have not been trained to be effective coaches.

Does it matter? It does if you want to engage and retain your top performers. Employees are engaged by leaders who inspire confidence in the future, managers who respect and appreciate their employees, exciting work that employees know how to do, and employers who display a genuine respect for their employees and their communities. Confidence, respect, and appreciation are communicated primarily via relationship. And the primary vehicle leaders and managers have for relationship with employees is coaching.

So don’t be afraid of offending your senior executives by providing them with some training in how to be effective coaches and mentors to your high potentials.  The risks are high if you don’t, and the payoffs are huge if you do - increased engagement, retention and productivity from your high potentials.

How effective are your senior executives at coaching your high potentials?