We see it happen in sports, the coach pulls a player aside and gives them advice on how to handle the other team.  Why can’t we do that in business?  You can and here’s how.

Before we begin, let’s review what coaching is and isn’t.  Coaching is helping your employees find solutions and understand their position (and decisions) affect the organization and others.  Coaching is not given them a task to complete or giving them the answers because it’s faster.

Ok, how this works is simple (at least in theory).  An employee comes to you with a question on how to resolve a situation (insert a common situation in your company). Instead of giving them the answer as this would be faster, you are going to ask them “what do you think you should do?” or “why don’t you give me a couple options and we can discuss them.” Now what you are doing is having the employee think for themselves.  When they come back with a solution or two, talk them through and ask questions like “why”, “how does that solve the problem”, “what does that mean to the next person with the same issue” or to steer them in a particular direction say “have you thought about xxx”.

In theory this is simple but you will need to make a conscience effort to do this everyday until it becomes natural.