Human Resource Management

Posted by Winnie Melda on October 19th, 2018

Manager as Coach: The New Way to Get Results: Jenny Rogers, McGraw-Hill 2012.

Rogers (2012),managers play numerous roles in organizations. One of the most important roles that require managers’ engagement is employee coaching.  Rodgers discusses management coaching practices and how they influence organizational results (Rogers, 2012). Managers utilize coaching as a useful way to develop employees’ skills and abilities in order to boost performance. Coaching also helps prevent issues and challenges that may become major problems to the organization. Despite the significance of coaching to employee development and organizational performance, in some organizations, coaching is still used as a corrective tool. However, the 21st-century organization should consider coaching as a positive and prove approach for helping employees effectively achieve personal and organizational goals. Organizations are in the age of the knowledge worker where job descriptions are grayer, and skills are softer due to technology. Every employee in the workplace has a large number of new platforms to collaborate, communicate and get work done. These changes have affected management roles. Effective managers now must devise ways to optimize employees’ softer skills and individual performance. Managers need to coach employees more than they manage work. Employees no longer need to be managed as it was in the industrial age.  The intellectual age requires managers to get the most out of employees. During coaching, managers inspire employees to improve personal performance in the organization and beyond. Often, the practice of coaching must begin with good leadership skills.

Unfortunately, in most organizations, coaching is not part of what managers are expected to do. Research makes it clear that employees value learning and career development. Sadly, the lack of management to view coaching as an important aspect of their job negatively impacts employees and the organization. At times, managers lack necessary coaching skills or lack the time to conduct coaching.  Yet, the largest part of learning and development happens on the job rather than through formal training programs. When managers are not actively involved, the result is a stunt in employee engagement, growth, and retention. Whether a manager tries to develop employees or themselves, it is important to know that one of the key ways to impact positively on the business is through coaching than management. Organizations with leaders who coach effectively improve their organizational results compared to those that do not conduct coaching.

Coaching is considered as one of the most effective management practice in employee empowerment. Empowerment involves allowing employees to have additional input into their roles and decision making. Coaching allows employees to carry out their responsibilities and decision making effectively in order to efficiently achieve personal and organizational goals. Employee empowerment has become an important topic as coaching style management becomes common. The traditional organizational contexts involved learning in workshops, classrooms, and other venues that are traditionally associated with learning. The non-traditional Contexts involve learning in contexts that cannot be traditionally conceptualized as learning environments such as self-development, academic advising, departments, professional research groups, academic committees, and colleges. Organizational Learning involves learning through coaching employees.  It may take a series of coaching sessions to produce a valuable result.

Apart from the need to be prepared for change, coaching is imperative for the individual and organization involved.  Today, employees form a sustainable competitive advantage for organizations. In such a context, coaching is a strategic tool that improves behavioral flexibility as well as skills.  Coaching can be used to build skills. One form of coaching in organizations today is leadership coaching.  There is an increasing recognition of the costs related to derailed managers and firms are starting to accept the gains of pre-emptive and proactive executive coaching.  Also, managers’ success is often viewed as a factor of the productivity of the employees.  The situation demands better-developed employee coaching.  In an organizational setting where knowledge is recognized as a key asset, it is important that organizations improve employee development to help in the retention of valuable individuals.

Timely and effective coaching can make the development and execution of a business strategy more encouraging and successful in the long-run. The statement is particularly true in highly fast paced, competitive and uncertain environment.  Senior executives who desire their initiatives to succeed often utilize the services of external and internal coaches to add value with new insights.  Such challenging inquiry improves individual accountability. Coaching helps to stimulate creative thinking, break old habits and establish an integrated process that helps in clearing ways to attain sustainable results and improved profits. These are essential factors in business strategy development. Research findings support the results-driven value of utilizing expertise in coaching teams and individuals during business strategy development. This is based on the idea that several well-established elements necessary in building a successful business strategy include creative thinking. Others include gathering information from diverse perspectives; encouraging involvement and participation of key resources; assuring outcome-focused implementation; opportunity for a focused dialog for realistic implementation planning and consensus building;  and having competent leaders who guide the activities and monitor results. 

A factor that necessitates coaching is that organization performance is often scrutinized, and the penalties or rewards for failure or success are intense.  Many organizations are more concerned with the lack of right talent to enable the organization to achieve its goals.  Coaching today takes many forms of practices aimed at improving performance.  Organizations engage in coaching for reasons including to increase leadership capabilities, to support learning, or provide customized and personalized managerial development. Every aspect of coaching guarantees great return on investment when specific behaviors are identified, clear guidelines are set and organization support is in place

Handle With CARE: Motivating & Retaining Employees, Barbara Glanz, McGraw-Hill, 2002.

Glanz (2002) offers strategies and techniques that make employees feel appreciated and improve their performance.  Effective management of employees ensures that an organization achieves the greatest productivity from individuals and combined employee competencies (Glanz, 2002) The area of motivation relates to strategic human capital management processes and programs that add to the significance of human capital by positioning, employing, remunerating and developing employees. Successful managers sustain an organizational culture centered on performance and achievement. They also exhibit a strong ability to engage employees ensuring that all members of the enterprise embrace understand business strategies by realizing how they contribute to the achievement of goals. Today, delivering a project on budget and on time is no longer a sufficient measure of success.  The adage that employees are the most valuable organization assets has been called into question by research reports showing that employees’ motivation strategies enforced by organizations are not successful.  Although organizations spend a considerable amount of dollars towards staff motivation and retention, increasing staff turnover increases costs, reduces diversity, motivation, and performance.  It is therefore, a concern that motivation and retention strategies do not seem sufficient to retain talent in organizations. Employees are the lifeline of an organization. Organizations run with the help of individuals who contribute to their productivity and success. Employees ought to be effectively motivated so as to deliver their best and develop a sense of attachment towards their organization.

There is a wide range of motivational practices that managers may engage in. Managers may use a combination of both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Motivation affects employee retention through job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is a major variable in employee commitment to an organizational. On the other hand, job satisfaction and employee commitment influence employees’ intentions to leave the organization.  There is a strong relationship between turnover and pay satisfaction. Pay satisfaction significantly determines the level of employee commitment to the organization. Motivation is among other factors that determine employee productivity and turnover. Today, employee retention is an issue considered to be the most difficult among organizations. Due to its impact on organizations, the issue has received tremendous attention from human resource managers. It has proven to be one of the most costly and serious issues affecting businesses today.

While motivation involves a range of practices, different motivational practices have different impacts on satisfaction. Motivation should include both include monetary and non-monetary components.  An example of a motivation practice that has been continuously adopted by organizations is Employees’ training. Training can help employees understand how their work fits into their organization’s structure, goals, mission, and achievements. As a result, workers can become more motivated about their work and understand how what they do matter to the achievement of the organization. Even though an organization's compensation strategy consists of the philosophy of how the business will position itself in the market, it should incorporate strategies on how it will achieve this goal. Motivation is one of the strategies that organizations may use to achieve their goals. Compensation forms a primary component of motivational strategies that organizations may use.  However, compensation is influenced by internal and external factors such as ability, government policy, and competition among others.

Today’s organizations are concerned about the increasing cost of doing business, including labor cost. To add to the challenge, they are faced with the problem of managing union-negotiated compensations increases that do not bear any relationship with inflation and performance. Other concerns include managing long-serving employees and their compensation, the rate of growth in compensation as compared to those of turnover and profitability. Other challenges revolving around motivation is the ability to retain the right talent and how to keep them motivated. Compensation evidently impacts on employees motivation and consequently on job satisfaction. When employees do not get enough compensation to enable them cater for their needs, the level of job satisfaction decreases. This interferes with role performance, and its impacts may spill over to the job. Motivation, therefore, determines the level of job satisfaction

The feeling of being unappreciated or rightfully rewarded causes job stress. When the task undertaking requires unusual exertions, it stimulates stress.  When an employee experiences high levels of job stress, they are poorly motivated and may become unproductive. Prolonged stress may lead to burnout due to the mental, emotional and physical exhaustion. Managers may feel overwhelmed and unable to meet constant demands. When the stress continues, they begin to lose the interest or motivation that may have led them to take on the job role. Most employees lacked recognition or rewards for good work.  The prolonged stress leaves employees feeling increasingly hopeless and resentful. Effective motivational practices should also take into consideration the psychological well-being of employees. The motivation decision human resources practitioners make can determine where an organization stands in terms of profitability and survival in the marketplace. Some organizations can afford to offer extremely competitive wages and provide outstanding benefits packages, others provide competitive wages and offer standard benefits, and still others offer high wages and minimal benefits.

References

Handle With CARE: Motivating & Retaining Employees, Barbara Glanz, McGraw-Hill, 2002.

Manager as Coach: The New Way to Get Results: Jenny Rogers, McGraw-Hill 2012.

Sherry Roberts is the author of this paper. A senior editor at Melda Research in nursing writing services if you need a similar paper you can place your order for Customized Research Papers.