When I talk to members about frontline rep coaching programs, they often want a set of proven rules and concrete, granular steps every supervisor should take to be a successful coach.  It’s akin to the instructions on the back of an instant cake mix box.  Just add an egg and some water – and voila! – you have a delicious cake every time.

While I’d love to tell you I can give you the five easy steps to coaching success, I’ve come to believe that coaching isn’t a science we can replicated identically among our supervisors. 

In fact, it’s more of an art form.  And in art, we can give folks the tools – brushes, colors, and canvas – to create a great piece of art, but we can’t tell them exactly what to do.  We can’t tell them how to hold their brush or precisely how to create the most eye-catching color.  Sure, we can give suggestions, but it’s up to the artist to figure out what works best.

So – just like in art we can give supervisors the tools they need to coach effectively, but we can’t mandate a set of discrete actions to success.  And, like Pablo Picasso’s innate artistic ability, some supervisors are naturals and coach effectively from almost day one. 

Many though, don’t have the innate skills required to coach effectively right out of the gate.  But, if there’s no five step recipe for success here, short of the time and resource consuming task of hiring a set of super-coaches, what can we do to help these supervisors approximate the behaviors of their highest performing peers?  

Well, I don’t think all is lost here.  I do think we can help supervisors discover their own path to effective coaching through several methods:

1. Look at what your best supervisors do.  Just like art historians study Picasso’s works to teach back his techniques to others, so should service organizations take a hard look at their highest performing supervisors to identify their behaviors and attributes.  Watch your best supervisors in action – what do they do that’s so different from their peers? 

CCC found highest performing supervisors have the following: a true desire to coach, a deep awareness of development areas for each individual on their team, and the agility to adapt their coaching style to meet the individualized rep needs.  How’s that for a starting point? 

CCC members, check out our quantitative findings on the subject.

2. Provide high-quality tools. It’s not enough to say ‘go forth and coach well.’  Service organizations should provide tools to support supervisors in their coaching efforts.  While it’s up to the supervisors to figure out how to best use these tools – their absence can leave a supervisor rudderless.  How about a template that helps a supervisor think through his coaching prep from surfacing the source of rep development areas to identifying the most effective coaching  formats? 

CCC members, take a look at our tools for coaches, including Coaching Prep Plan, Coaching Starter Guide, and e-module series.

3. Coach your coaches.  You’ve gotta practice what you preach.  Managers should watch their supervisors in action and get feedback from the frontline, then identify improvement areas and use development sessions to coach supervisors accordingly.  Coaching isn’t just for our frontline, in fact it should permeate within the organization as an always-on activity.      

So, what do you think?  Is coaching a science or an art form?

CCC members, check out our analysis of how the best coaches coach, and communicate the importance of coaching using CCC’s training materials on best in class coaching methods.

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