Providing Coaching Support & Feedback As A Manager

What’s the best way to provide coaching support and feedback as a manager? While there are many ways to go about it, providing encouragement is absolutely critical to ensuring your team—and each member in it—thrives. 

Why? Because as a manager, providing guidance and support through coaching can help employees develop new skills, reach their goals, drive better results, increase their performance, overcome challenges and, ultimately, become better members within your organization. 

However, the process of coaching can be complex, and it requires a deep understanding of each team member's strengths, weaknesses, and motivations. Today we’re going to look at just a few of the many different methods you can use to provide coaching support and feedback as a manager, and how you can implement those methods to take your team to the next level. 

How to give employee feedback as a manager

1. Assume positive intent among employees

When providing feedback to employees, it’s important to always start from a place of “positive intent.” What do we mean by that? Assuming positive intent means that whether or not an employee completed a task perfectly, your goal is to provide feedback from a place of compassion. Assume that they wanted to complete the task as effectively as possible—and if they failed to live up to that expectation, don’t assume it was because they were lazy, bored, uncreative, disengaged, etc. 

By assuming positive intent when giving feedback, you’ll be much more adept when it comes to providing meaningful solutions for further improvement. Instead of blaming their inability to complete the job on a personal failing—which does nothing for anyone, and actively harms your relationship with your employee—you’ll be thinking of ways to better finish the job next time. 

At the same time, seeing your employees in their best light has a self-fulfilling effect: if they think you see them as capable, they’re much more likely to feel capable, and they’ll want to perform in accordance with your view of them. 

2. Give many opportunities for growth

“What you nurture grows.” It’s as true of coaching as it is gardening. If your employees are stagnating, you might not be giving them enough opportunities to reach new heights. How can you push them to do more, achieve more, be more? How can you help them learn new skills that will make them more competent and skilled at their jobs?

Giving workers lots of growth opportunities is like lighting up a sign on your chest that says, “I’m invested in you. I believe in you.”

3. Put success measurement in your workers’ hands

This might sound radical, but it’s not always best to take charge of setting goals and expectations for your employees. While it’s definitely important that you make clear what you’re asking of the people who work for you, taking the process of measuring success away from them will ultimately harm them when they’re tasked with developing their own measures down the road. 

Try letting your teams create their own scope and success measurements. See how they do when they hold themselves accountable—and then, once you’re able to review, provide meaningful feedback on how they fared, and how they might improve in the future. 

4. Tap into outside resources

A manager’s greatest strength isn’t their ability to tackle herculean tasks all by themselves. Instead, a manager’s real strength lies in their ability to develop a network—and lean into that network—in order to get things done more efficiently and proficiently than they could have alone. 

To that end, one of the most important ways managers can provide feedback and coaching support to employees involves tapping into third-party coaching resources. By bringing an outside coaching network into your business, you’ll not only attract prospective employees interested in developing as career professionals, but you’ll also connect your workers with true coaching professionals—people who are able to inspire them to reach and surpass their goals. 

Of course, not just any coaching service will be right for you or your workers. From life coaches to executive coaches, there are many different coaching mentalities out there—which means that finding a coach that meets your specific business needs is key to ensuring your employees get the most out of the experience.

Providing feedback to employees as a manager

Providing coaching support and feedback as a manager is crucial for the growth and development of your team. By assuming positive intent in your employees, giving them opportunities for growth, allowing them to measure their own success and offering outside resources for additional coaching, you’ll see your team members improve dramatically. 

Want more top-tier coaching tips? Ask an expert. We’re here to talk when you need it.