Case Study 10 | jimanderson

Employee Coaching Meetings

How To Free Your Employees To Move Beyond Their Limits

Small business owners and managers all have challenges with their people. This is the #1 most frustrating area of running a business. It is not easy getting people to do things they don’t want to do, and that is part of the problem, that they don’t want to do things. Most managers don’t realize that you can’t motivate people to do anything. This is why they end up doing the important things themselves. They don’t know how to create an environment where getting things done is more important than not getting them done. Where people feel valued for doing things well and are motivated to move beyond their limits.

Increased productivity of a staff of 21 direct reporting employees producing $2.5 million in additional revenue by developing a coaching and mentoring system

To grow the business, it seems most people immediately think about hiring more employees. I decided to start developing our employees, rather than just managing them, to increase the productivity of our staff and increase their capacity. This meant creating an employee development system. I have the philosophy that a manager is really more of a coach. So having regular coaching sessions with each individual employee made sense. We had 21 employees with company revenue of $3.5 million. By developing an agenda for employee coaching sessions to help employees improve productivity, we grew the company without hiring additional employees to handle the workload. The meeting included the use of a Problem Resolution System that coached employees in problem solving. The meeting agenda was:

Identify key objectives
Review work progress
Identify and resolve work issues
Identify and resolve personal development issues
Discuss other issues
Identify items to carry over to next meeting
Confirm schedule for next meeting

From the time we implemented these meetings we did not create a single new position in the company and grew the revenue to $6 million without sacrificing the quality of our service or overworking our employees.