Top 10 Principles of Employee Empowerment
The Credo of an Empowering Manager
(By Susan M. Heathfield, About.com)
1. Demonstrate You Value People
2. Share Leadership Vision
3. Share Goals and Direction
4. Trust People
5. Provide Information for Decision Making
6. Delegate Authority and Impact Opportunities, Not Just More Work
7. Provide Frequent Feedback
8. Solve Problems: Don't Pinpoint Problem People
9. Listen to Learn and Ask Questions to Provide Guidance
10. Help Employees Feel Rewarded and Recognized for Empowered Behavior
Coaching for Improved Performance
As a coach, I've practiced this method with considerable success. If we don't learn from the past, we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes and have the same problems over and over again. Then, we'll never grow and develop as a person; we'll effectively stagnate both emotionally and intellectually.
Improving Employee Performance
Theories and models of human behavior can guide the development and refinement of health promotion and work human resource efforts. Thus, this article reviews and briefly describes elements of behavioral and social science theories and models.
Business Coaching Recommend Book
Coaching for Performance - John Whitmore
Whitmore emphasizes the facilitative nature of coaching in this excellent definition: ‘Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them’. The book also introduces the GROW model, which is now a widely adopted framework for coaching in business.
Solution-Focused Coaching: Managing People in a complex world - Jane Greene and Anthony M. Grant
Another distinctive feature of the book is the way it highlights the importance of coaching in a knowledge economy - ‘a world where ideas and power lie in ideas, imagination, knowledge and the information you control’.
The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey - Ken Blanchard, William Oncken Jr and Hal Burrows
This book does an excellent job of showing how you can reverse this cycle, empower your people by delegating tasks and decisions - and ‘insure’ yourself and your team members against failure.
Why Employees Don’t Do What They’re Supposed to Do - and What to Do About It - by Ferdinand Fournies
If you are a manager trying to deal with ‘difficult’ people in your team, this book is for you. After all, if someone is plain lazy, what can you do about it? Probably not much. Fortunately, as Fournies points out, to be an effective manager you don’t need to rebuild their personality - just influence their behaviour. To help you do this, he gives 16 answers to the question that actually give you practical options for solving the problem.
Coaching and Mentoring: practical methods to improve learning - Eric Parsloe and Monika Wray
A book that gives an excellent overview of the coaching profession and methods, as well as practical advice on core skills, especially feedback, listening and questioning. Parsloe and Wray emphasise the value of simplicity in coaching: ‘Success comes from doing simple things consistently’. Simple things like ‘make sure you meet’, ‘keep it brief’ and ‘ask don’t tell’.
First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently - Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
Not strictly a coaching book, but I’m including it as it’s a thought-provoking and useful read for managers who want to raise their team’s performance through coaching. It is also based on a key coaching principle - find out what works well and build on it.