Coaching: Why Bother?

Organisations are downsizing, rightsizing, restructuring and re-engineering. Whole layers of management have disappeared in many organizations. “Lean and mean” are the operational words in today’s firms. Often, leaders are required to deal with wider spans of control (more employees report to them), increased workloads that were delegated to them from their bosses and overworked employees who need to be even more productive.

In addition, employees’ jobs are becoming more technical and complex. According to recent reports, the growth of technical workers as a job class has tripled compared to that of the workplace. This means that leaders are now required to supervise employees who, likely, know a great deal more about their jobs than their leaders. Helping highly-skilled employees who know more about their jobs than their leaders will require that leaders use coaching skills with their employees to enhance productivity. So, it’s no wonder that astute leaders are looking for (make that “hungry” for!) new ways of managing.