Wellbeing check: Are we ready to have these coaching conversations?
Fellow managers: are we ready and skilled to have the conversations we need to have to support our colleagues and team members? And, in turn, are our managers ready and skilled to have those conversations with us?
Developing coaches and leaders as coaches is what we do in MSLOC/ELOC. This also means we spend a lot of time reviewing research to improve coach education. The 2021 bestseller Wellbeing at Work: How to Build Resilient and Thriving Teams recently caught our attention. Authors Jim Clifton and Jim Harter suggest that all of us managers need to be ready, skilled, and committed to having conversations with our team members that go deeper than deliverables. Clifton and Harter share Gallup’s research about the five elements of wellbeing–career, social, financial, physical, and community—and advise organizational leaders to invest in developing managers (including themselves) to support these elements in their teams by both “repositioning” and “upskilling” managers as highly effective coaches.
Managers who are also skilled coaches have the frameworks, self-awareness, and toolkits to facilitate the toughest and most critical conversations with their team members, and they do so while setting and maintaining healthy, mutual boundaries. Clifton and Harter invoke these boundaries by clarifying that while “managers are in the best position to know each employee’s individual situation,” this “does not mean managers should play the role of financial adviser or life coach. It means they should integrate wellbeing conversations into their management practice and ongoing conversations.” (p.81).
As I was reading the Clifton/Harter book, I marked down each time a unique type or topic of manager-as-coach conversation came to mind so that I could go back and gauge my own preparedness to have these conversations with team members. I provide this (incomplete) quiz of wellbeing conversations in the hopes that you will join me in seeing how ready we are—not necessarily comfortable but equipped—to have these conversations with team members.
We need to have these conversations with our team members who manage others too, making sure we avoid the trap of forgetting that managers are people and employees too.
How did we do?
Some additional reflection questions for us:
-Was I looking for a "score" to tell me how good my leadership skills are?
-What do I want to do about any "no" responses?
-What do I want to do about any "yes" responses"?
-What information or context do I need from my team members to check my assumptions about these conversations?
Personal reflection: On my first pass through the quiz, I felt I was ready and equipped to have most, if not all, these conversations. Some of them I have frequently now, and most of the others I’ve had at some point. On my second pass through the quiz, I asked myself only how regularly I’m having each of these conversations and the results were mixed. While I continue my skill-building and practice as a manager as coach, I will also be focusing on regularity and breadth of conversations with this list as a guide.