Dr. Bill Howatt, Founder and CEO Howatt HR.
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Does your organization behave like it cares about employees’ well-being?
Yes? No? Not sure?
One effective way to be sure is to ask your employees, through focus groups, one-on-one conferences or surveys. When exploring this question, try to understand through the employees’ lens what caring looks like and what would let them know their employer cares about their well-being (i.e., how they feel).
Good employers do care about this because they understand that how employees feel directly impacts their engagement levels, retention and time lost due to physical or mental illness. Employers can prevent mental harm and promote mental health by implementing protective factors to protect employees, such as policies (e.g., a safe and respectful workplace) and programs (e.g., leadership development).
Since employees are employers’ most important assets, protecting them is good for business.
Leadership Development: A Proven Protective Factor
Leadership development can positively impact employees’ relationships with their direct managers, one of the most critical workplace relationships. Employees who feel supported by their manager are 3.4 times more likely to report feeling engaged at work; the same study also found that feeling trusted and supported was key to employee engagement.
Employers should prepare their future leaders through leadership training. North American employers spend billions of dollars yearly on leadership development, but unfortunately, much of it fails to achieve an impact. To have an impact and become a protective factor (e.g., positively impact the employee experience), leadership development must adequately support leaders' ability to transfer the knowledge and skills they learn into effective leadership habits.
Employers benefit by being thoughtful when designing leadership development, to ensure not only knowledge transfer but also facilitating habits that can positively impact employees’ experience, like empathy. Leadership development can vary from short to long courses and can encompass in-person classes, webinars or online training. All can be effective for achieving a desired outcome, such as preparing employees to become psychologically safe leaders.
I have found that one-on-one coaching is an excellent approach that allows for both knowledge transfer and habit development. One-on-one coaching is also an opportunity to explore and discuss how the leadership curriculum will help leaders positively impact their teams.
The Forbes Council post “The ROI of Executive Coaching: A Comprehensive Guide” provides insights into the potential benefits of leadership coaching to achieve targeted outcomes, such as creating a caring culture with trusted, psychologically safe leaders (a topic I’ve also written about).
Tips For Leveraging One-On-One Leadership Coaching To Create Desired Leadership Habits
One-on-one leadership coaching allows leaders to learn new habits, and practicing and relearning can help correct the forgetting curve. Some additional factors that influence the effectiveness of leadership coaching include:
• Matching to the right coach: I recommend ensuring leaders are empowered to choose their own guides. Ensure leaders and coaches are matched with integrity so both parties feel good about the matches. This is important because even a skilled coach may not be the right fit for every leader's style and needs.
• Selecting the right leadership curriculum: The primary benefit of one-on-one coaching is the ability to create personalized learning. Based on the leader's needs, the coach and leader can collaboratively design the curriculum and determine the resources, such as books or online reading, that will be leveraged to obtain the knowledge and skills for the targeted leadership habits.
• Defining program length and what success looks like: Ensure the milestones for the learning journey are defined (e.g., desired key performance indicators such as lower turnover in a group), as well as frequency of coaching and length of the coaching engagement.
Personally, I provide my leaders email access for real-time questions and also hold regular weekly meetings that usually last 60 minutes. I expect regular progress reports before our coaching sessions to understand what the leader has practiced and accomplished since we last chatted. The model I use is a minimum six-month program because it can take months for a new habit to develop. My experience suggests it usually takes two to six months of practice for a new habit to become automatic. This coaching structure helps even the busiest leader stay accountable and focused on their developmental goals.
• Measuring progress and evaluating the program: Be clear on what measurements you will use to monitor progress and what kind of program evaluation will be done. I encourage organizations investing significant dollars into leadership development to carefully consider how they will measure the ROI of any medium they use, such as classroom training or coaching. Evaluation must be considered upfront to ensure that the required data is tracked.
There are many ways to use "checks and balances" to measure progress, like leveraging 360-degree feedback, triangle meetings with the leader’s direct manager and employee experience pulse checks and engagement scores. A trusted coach can use these tools to help leaders receive feedback and make meaningful action plans to close gaps, maintain focus and practice strengths.
Final Thoughts
Fostering a workplace culture that genuinely cares about employees’ well-being is not just a nice-to-have; it’s a strategic imperative. Always keep a keen eye on the goal of creating a positive employee experience; this increases the likelihood that your workplace will be perceived as psychologically safe and inclusive.
I believe one-on-one coaching is an effective way to facilitate leadership development, a critical protective factor for improving employees’ experience. Organizations must keep in mind that leadership development information is useless until it becomes a habit. I advise employers to consider the power of one-on-one leadership coaching because it is a personalized, flexible and results-driven approach to developing leadership habits that can help your workforce flourish.
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