Congratulations! You got promoted to manager. Now what?!

Imagine you are a successful individual contributor who has just been promoted into your first management role.  You have 8 direct reports that you’ve worked with in the past, but do you really “know” them? All eyes are on you as you have to begin demonstrating your coaching capabilities… something you’ve never had to do before. Where do you begin? 

Use competency models to provide coaching structure

If you have competency models for the roles of your team, and a competency assessment tool, your fear, uncertainty and doubt (“the FUD factor”) are over. You can use the skills in the model, and the skills assessment data (yours and those of your team members) to have a data driven conversation about specific areas where they are strong, and where they have skill gaps and need help. 

This has never been more important than it is today, when digitization, AI, and automation are changing job requirements quickly. With the pace of change in the future of work, it’s hard enough for a person to keep up with their own changing requirements. How can you possibly keep up with the changing requirements of each team member’s job? And how can you coach them effectively to those requirements?

Ensure each competency model is easily accessible and actionable

If you have a role-based competency model sitting in a PowerPoint or PDF, you can reference it. And that’s a start. But the model is not really actionable. To be an effective coach, you need to both assess a situation, and then activate change that a person buys into. And that buy in is critical. “Push” doesn’t drive sustainable change. You need to create “pull” and learning agility. You want your team members to WANT to change, and be intrinsically motivated to do so.

Encourage role-based competency assessments

“Pull” happens through self-awareness. Everyone wants to be great at their job. Role-based competency models identify what “good” and “great” look like, represented by behavioral examples of each task or skill.

A competency assessment is performed on those identified tasks/skills, where a rating is selected based upon how they do that task, which defines their proficiency level. In other words, a competency assessment measures How (behaviors) someone does the What (task/skill). The individual’s selected proficiency level is then compared with the target level, defining proficiency or skill gaps for each task.

When your team member does their self-assessment and becomes self-aware of their capabilities and skill gaps, they will be motivated to change. And that gives you the best chance for coaching success. They are ripe to hear what you have to say. But only AFTER you also assess them on those capabilities, so that you can have a data driven conversation about perception and reality.

Your assessment ensures that you also objectively know the requirements of the role (even as it changes over time), and you’ll have your own perception documented.

Practice having a coaching conversation

Practice having a coaching conversation with your team member by using this as a guideline. Because you have real data and examples to reference, there is no coaching guesswork, so even without coaching training, you can conduct this talk effectively with active listening.

Your discussion can go something like this:

You see a perceptual difference – some skill where they think they are strong, and you think they have lower proficiency. Look at the behavioral examples of that task/skill.

You: “You appear to have a real strength in this area, and I’m not familiar with it. Can you give me some examples where you have performed these behaviors?”

You both agree on a particular area of strength they have.

You: “You’re really strong at this skill. There are several people on our team/in the region that could really use assistance improving here. How do you feel about being assigned as a task-based mentor to one of those people from time to time so you can grow your capability even more?” (More on mentoring)

You both agree on some skill gaps they have.

You: It looks like you have 4 skill gaps. Which 1 or 2 do you think most affect your success in your role? Have you picked one to start developing? Let’s take a look at what learning opportunities are available to close them and be sure you pick just one you can do in the next month. What do you prefer? Would you like to work with a mentor on this activity? Let’s look at the behavioral examples, to see what types of projects or experiences might be useful for skill building.

Now, in every subsequent 1:1 conversation, you’ve got great talking points.

• What progress have you made on the activity you selected? (While you want completion, asking about progress helps the coaching conversation)

• What did you learn from it?

• Would you like me to observe you and provide feedback? (While looking at the behavioral examples for objectivity)

• How can I help you to apply what you learned?

• What experiences can I provide for practice or to complement the activity?

• How can we celebrate your achievement?

• What will best help you prepare for your next role?

A best practice is to keep it manageable by focusing on only one task/skill at a time. This makes it easier to build a new habit. The more you let the team member guide both the selection of the priority, and the activities they pursue, the more effective your coaching will be. You’ll be guiding the “pull” instead of making a “push”.

After the person has performed several activities and improved in that one skill, encourage them to re-asses on only that one item, so they can objectively use the behaviors to determine that they’ve made progress. Seeing this change drives their motivation to continue learning. And that makes your coaching incrementally easier.

Prepare for great coaching results

The quality of one’s manager, and their ability to have great conversations and develop them is one of the reasons people stay in a job and remain engaged. And conversely, when a manager can’t do this well, it’s why they leave. When a manager has a roadmap to do this well, you drive skill gap closure, engagement and retention.

If you’re a manager looking to improve, or your responsible for improving the capabilities of your managers, don’t let fear, uncertainty and doubt get in the way. Embrace competency models and make them actionable so they can be used to drive daily coaching success.

Also on LinkedIn and ATD.