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Is It What They Know? Or How Skillfully They Use That Knowledge?

Guest post by: Patrick T. Malone

Article Overview: Educating someone about a concept or an idea is relatively easy. Training someone to utilize that information skillfully in everyday business is an entirely different matter. For instance, your managers have been trained and educated on how to deliver feedback and manage their team, and when their employees follow the steps that the managers have been taught, all is well. But what happens when an employee fails to stick to the script and acts differently than the manager’s training manuals say an employ should act?

Is It What They Know? Or How Skillfully They Use That Knowledge?

Educating someone about a concept or an idea is relatively easy. Training someone to utilize that information skillfully in everyday business is an entirely different matter. For instance, your managers have been trained and educated on how to deliver feedback and manage their team, and when their employees follow the steps that the managers have been taught, all is well. But what happens when an employee fails to stick to the script and acts differently than the manager's training manuals say an employ should act?

Too often in these non-textbook scenarios, managers just avoid employee confrontations. These managers may have been educated adequately and have the knowledge they need, but they do not know HOW to put that knowledge to work. Without these skills, they lack confidence. In other words, knowledge can be taught, but skill must be coached.

Consider this. If you managed a soccer team (or any team for that matter) and you wanted your team to be talented and proficient at a particular skill, would you hire a motivational speaker? Have the team read a book? Show them a video or have them attend a seminar? Or would you have a skilled coach work with the team to practice the skill so that they would the feel of doing it well?

Motivational speakers, books, videos and lectures are all important mediums for gaining knowledge about a particular subject. However, to be truly talented, proficient and skillful at utilizing that knowledge, you must train, just as an athlete and you need a coach.

This is true with company managers as well as with sales professionals, customer service personnel or anyone else in the organization whose performance impacts either the top or bottom line. Better results are achieved through practice with an expert coach. Coached practice is exactly how we learned to ride a bicycle, drive a car, dance or swing a golf club. Coached practice is the answer if the objective is "How well can you do it?" and not simply more understanding.

Practice is repetitive and focused on building upon success. You will become more skillful, faster, by building on success after success and by focusing on "how well", not on what went wrong. Amateurs practice until they get it right while professionals practice until they can't get it wrong.

Just like riding the bike or driving the car, the practice has to be real. Role play will build a deeper understanding and maybe a willingness to try it, but it doesn't build the confidence and the competency necessary for talent and proficiency. Would you give the keys to your car to a teenager who has only practiced in a driving simulator? Probably not! Practice has to be real world.

When most people think of real world coaching they generally mean one-on-one mentoring. Before the coaching process can start, a mentor must do a needs-assessment to determine what needs must be met. Basically, the person to be coached falls into one of four Needs groups: The person Needs Knowledge, Needs Skills, Needs Challenge, or Needs Mastery.

Needs Knowledge - This baseline need requires teaching, educating and/or informing. Mentors must be aware of the range of learning styles that best suit their charges. This could range from experiential to visual to verbal, with a vast array of combinations of all three. The challenge is employing the right learning style for the student, not necessarily the right teaching style for the mentor.

Needs Skill - This need requires drills, practice and rehearsal. Mentors begin by establishing clear, measurable expectations and then observing performance against that standard. The gap, if there is one, identifies the coaching opportunity. If there are multiple gaps, the mentor should identify the one or two that will yield the largest result quickest. Attempting to coach more than two gaps simultaneously usually overwhelms the learner and produces failure and frustration. If there is no gap, the student is ready for the next challenge.

Needs Challenge - This need requires risk taking which can be daunting for some people. If a learner is risk adverse, a mentor should start small and build one success after another. If the learner is a tightrope walker, then challenges may present an opportunity to learn from failure. Just as with the first two needs, a mentor must customize the challenge to the learner.

Needs Mastery - This, the last interaction a mentor has with a student, involves a lifelong pursuit of continuous improvement. Jack Welch described this as the sustainable competitive advantage, when he said, "An organization's ability to continuously learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage."

Individual mentoring can be very expensive and may be too slow if the desire is to develop skill across an organization or a functional unit. To be efficient, coaching has to be effective in groups of participants.

An alternate coaching methodology is built around the concept of inviting people to a business meeting to present and implement as many business improvement ideas as possible. During the meeting, highly specialized skill coaching is added as needed. These skills include presentation, listening, problem-solving, teamwork, influencing, leadership, selling, decision-making and customer service skills that drive the business processes.

This type of group coaching is most effective and efficient with a group of six to eighteen people. Before the group gets together, each participant is asked to come up with three to five real business improvement ideas to bring to a meeting. These are ideas that could lower costs, increase speed, grow profits, increase sales, improve turnaround time, increase customer satisfaction, etc. These ideas might even include a few recommendations of a non-business nature, i.e., community projects or civic ideas they believe will improve living conditions. But whatever the ideas may be, they should be customized to concentrate on the organization's current primary focus.

The key is that all participants have important and results-oriented ideas to discuss. This setup defines accountability measurements. During the meeting, participants have numerous opportunities to present and gain support for their ideas in order to produce measurable business results. Everyone participating immediately starts "doing business" one-to-one, then in small groups, and finish with the entire group. They face the challenges of leadership, teamwork, listening, problem solving, influence, negotiating, sales, customer service, and decision-making - the core competencies of business.

Throughout the meeting, a mentor coaches these targeted skills while participants actually use them. Ultimately, coaching occurs between participants. This Just-in-Time coaching produces immediate, measurable business results and enables each participant to embark on a continuous improvement process that leads to mastery.

No better coaching opportunities exist than just before, during, and after actual use of a skill, and there is certainly no better coaching than collaborative coaching during real business interactions. This structure creates teamwork along with developing talent.

The program leader, or coach, must be highly competent at demonstrating and coaching the skills. He/she must be able to coach skills in-the-moment. As participants become more talented, the meeting leader leverages their skills by allowing them to coach each other to even higher levels of talent and proficiency while the mentor coaches the coaches.

This is much more fun than "school" because it works better, faster and is repeatable. Dozens of hands-on skill applications doing real work and tangible results let participants prove that coached skills work. Best of all, participants experience little or no drop off in competency from the business meeting environment back to their regular workplace.

One more point to know: If you are an executive in your organization, you are coaching, even though you may not be a mentor or be involved in formally coaching groups. You are engaged in coaching your people whether you realize it. Every interaction is in fact a coaching event. They hear what you say. They see how you act and what you do.

Unfortunately, your people often hear one thing and see the opposite action. When your words and your actions conflict, you are still engaged in coaching but it may not produce the results you want. Any time there is conflict between words and actions, your people usually believe what they see, rather than what they hear. The cartoon character Pogo summed it up nicely in one of his Sunday funnies when he looked into the well and said, "We have seen the enemy and he is us."

However, and this is important to note, when your words and actions are in harmony with each other, you send a consistent, powerful message. Finally, remember the goal of every coaching session is Conscious Competence that is measurable and repeatable.

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Article Tags: Coaching



Related Forum Posts
Hello all... - Hello everyone - this is just a short intro. My name is Evie Parsons and I'd just like to say hello to everyone. As everybody knows that nowadays forums are the best source of Knowledge, and through forums we can learn a lot. I look forward to meeting you all and wish you the best of success.
Re: Service Or Product? - I agree with starting a Service-based Business in the economy. Here is what I think is critical: 1. Researching that your Service business has a market. 2. Marketing the Service with as much leverage as possible. 3. Product-izing the Service (aka Package Expert Knowledge). This will only help elevate you as "the" expert in your niche and make you accessible to people in different price points.
Re: Franchise of a popular call center - If you have knowledge in running a call center and know how to manage it effectively then it sounds like it’s a good business for you. Workforce management relates to employee matters like payroll, HR, and employee training. Knowledge management relates to research, strategies, innovations and the effective use of technology. In both cases your prime clients are corporate sectors especially those who want to reduce their cost and increase performance at all levels.
Re: 21 Ways To Get New Customers In A Slow Economy - Thanks Evan, Your ideas are full of wisdom required for a time like this. I`ll like to add another idea to your list : Update your Knowledge and Sharpen your Skill on a daily basis. The economy may be considered slow,but customer awareness is on the increase,therefore,if the pocket (disposable income) of the proposed new customer is of any interest to you,then you must stay ahead by at least one step in your skill and knowledge. The 21 ways as listed by Evan is a sure way to increase in knowledge and sharpen you skill.
Re: Is getting a formal education worthwhile for entrepreneu - Knowledge in whatever form is valuable. Its not just about usefulness in the business that you plan to start. The knowledge that you gain via an education system definitely is not enough for an entrepreneur because Facts that you will face in your role as an entrepreneur will be much different than what you have learnt. But having an education will definitely equip you with getting the leads in handling situations. So my suggestion is that you continue with your studies and gain as much knowledge you can. You are already aware that the learnings you make can be applied on the Website. Same also applies for all your other learnings. The only thing is you will have to wait for the time to apply what you have learnt.


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