Coaches Inspire Dramatically Higher Extra EffortMany organizations have increased their efforts to strengthen the coaching skills of their supervisors, managers, and executives. That’s because of mounting evidence showing that coaching effectiveness dramatically improves employee engagement, levels of customer satisfaction, productivity, safety, and profitability while reducing turnover, absenteeism, and costs.

Coaching skills have an especially vital impact on “volunteerism.” This is the discretionary effort that goes well above and beyond basic job requirements. Enthusiastic extra effort is at the heart of delivering outstanding customer service and the highest levels of teamwork, safety, or quality.

Zenger Folkman has a database of over 250,000 leader assessments allowing us to correlate degrees of extra effort and coaching effectiveness. The left side of this chart shows respondents who marked a 5 on a 5 point scale in response to the question “my work environment is a place where people want to go the extra mile.”

Across the bottom are ratings of approximately 25,000 leaders on their coaching effectiveness. These scores are totals from The Extraordinary Coach 360 assessment covering 14 coaching competencies including skills such as supporting the development of others, generating trust, listening, questioning, providing and welcoming feedback, inspiring others to change, giving recognition, and others.

Coaching Impact on Extra Effort

Terrible coaches in the bottom 20% of ratings generate very low levels of extra effort. Good coaches in the middle 2/3 of the chart inspire higher levels of volunteerism. Notice the big jump that outstanding coaches in the top 20% — and especially extraordinary coaches in the top 10% — foster in extra effort.

Extraordinary coaches aren’t outstanding at all 14 competencies. The Halo Effect, so central to strengths-based leadership development, is reflected in our research. We’ve found that leaders can become extraordinary coaches in the 90th percentile by developing just 5 of the 14 competencies into profound strengths.

I get much deeper into this research, the 14 competencies, and how to develop extraordinary coaching and leadership skills in this webcast on 6 Steps to Extraordinary Coaching Skills, Elevating Feedback, and Strengthening Leadership. Click the link to view on demand.