Feedback helps resolve employee performance issues. But if you want employees to grow into effective leaders, you need to go beyond feedback and coach them. In this post you’ll learn about my innovative ADDER model, which provides a framework for aligning growth with identifiable goals, diagnosing issues, developing specific solutions, executing the plan, and reviewing the results.
How to Coach Employees to the Next Level
Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It’s helping them to learn rather than teaching them.
—Tim Gallwey
I have some bad news for you. Most leaders who think they’re coaching are actually just giving feedback.
Don’t get me wrong! I’m not dissing feedback! (If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know how strongly I believe in feedback as an essential management tool.) But too often people use feedback and coaching interchangeably, when in fact those terms describe two very different practices.
- Feedback is used to help employees change behavior and learn from previous mistakes. It focuses on past behavior, emphasizes evaluation, and involves giving advice or telling someone what to do.
- Coaching is used to help employees move ahead by releasing their potential (even if they don’t know they have it in them!). It focuses on future behavior and emphasizes inquiry and exploration.
In short: Feedback improves performance, whereas coaching builds capability.
Do you need to address an immediate concern with how someone is doing their job? Feedback is what you need!
But if you want an employee to be ready for the next level (or level up an existing skill), you’ll need something more in-depth and more long-term than a good conversation. That’s where coaching comes in.
How to Use the ADDER Model to Coach Employees to Excellence
Coaching is one of the most effective leadership styles that can transform, empower, and unlock people’s potential. Ask more, give advice less, and elevate your impact forever.
—Farshad Asl
To help your employees grow, you must do more than just correct them: you need to develop them through active and tailored coaching. Drawing on my decades of experience in leadership, management, and coaching, I’ve developed a five-step approach that guides you through this process: the ADDER model.
Align
First, you define the target. Most leaders coach an employee for their current job when they should be looking ahead at the employee’s future roles. When the target isn’t clear, though, development efforts can be scattershot and random.
Defining what an employee’s “next level” actually looks like makes it possible for you to set clear expectations beyond the role they have today. “Let’s talk about where you’re headed next and what success looks like at that level” establishes growth as the goal.
Diagnose
To avoid “gut feel” coaching, you need to gather data so you can see which issues need to be addressed. Use observation, feedback, and analyses of behavior to build a detailed picture of an employee’s skills, strengths, and gaps. Don’t spend too much energy on one-off mistakes; instead, pay attention to patterns.
Get your employee’s insight, too. Questions such as “Where do you feel strongest?” and “Where are you getting stuck?” and “What feedback have you heard before?” can help you get the information you need to ensure that your coaching is based not on wild guesses but on actual data.
Develop
This is the step that most leaders tend to overcomplicate or even skip entirely. When a plan is too complex, it quickly becomes overwhelming, and progress grinds to a halt. But without any plan at all, your employee will struggle to move forward.
The key is to build a simple, focused plan with one or two specific development goals that are tied both to the employee’s current performance and to their future roles. This plan can include growth opportunities such as stretch assignments, shadowing, mentoring, and targeted training.
A purely theoretical plan won’t cut it here. Issuing a vague statement about the need to “improve leadership skills” isn’t coaching. You need to give your employee practical and specific suggestions (such as “lead two client meetings this month” or “present in the leadership meeting next quarter”). You don’t have to put together ten-page development plans; a brief statement of clear actions and timelines should do the trick.
Execute
This step is the heart of the ADDER model. It’s where you coach in real time, and it’s where the big changes take place. It’s also the likeliest point for employee development efforts to fall short, because most leaders fail to follow through with coaching during the actual implementation of a development plan.
Nestled within this step of the ADDER model is a tool called GROW (a tool I’ve used for over decades to develop my direct reports):
Each part of this tool presents specific questions that, when answered, can make your coaching more effective.
- Goal: What are you trying to achieve here? What are your long-term objectives?
- Reality: What’s happening right now? What have you tried so far? Who or what is involved in that?
- Options: What else could you do? What haven’t you considered? Where else can you find ideas or input?
- Will: What will you do next? When will you do it? What help do you need
As you work with the GROW tool, don’t miss opportunities to dig a little deeper with sixty-second coaching conversations built around questions such as ““How did you approach this?” and “What tradeoffs did you make?” and “What would someone at the next level do differently?” Above all keep in mind that GROW itself isn’t a development system but a coaching tool to use while the work is happening.
Review
This is the make-or-break step of the ADDER model. What you do at this point can determine if your development work will actually stick.
Here you review your employee’s development work through consistent, frequent and thorough follow-up. (A quarterly chat won’t cut it; aim for every couple of weeks or so.) Ask your employee to tell you about where they have made improvements and where they are still stuck.
Be sure to highlight any progress (even small wins), because recognition will fuel motivation and performance not just for the employee but throughout the rest of the team and department. (The positive impact of employee recognition is supported by extensive research, including numerous reports by Gallup analysts.) At the same time, take note of where improvement is needed—and make adjustments to the plan in order to help the employee hit those marks.
How to Avoid Common Coaching Mistakes
Coaching is about enabling individuals to make conscious decisions and empowering them to become leaders in their own lives.
—Maria Nemeth
The ADDER model provides a solid development framework that can work for nearly any situation or employee. As you implement this model, though, be alert for challenges and pitfalls that can impede progress. These can include:
- Coaching only when something goes wrong
- Talking more than the employee
- Giving answers instead of asking questions
- Not connecting coaching to the employee’s future roles
- Failing to follow up with the employee
Once you are aware of such potential problems, you can take steps to avoid them (or at least mitigate their impacts).
Final Thoughts
That’s the beauty of coaching. You get to touch lives. You get to make a difference.
—Morgan Wootten
As a leader, you have to wear many hats: strategic thinker, innovator, organizer, mentor, planner, etc. Being a coach is also on that list. In fact, helping employees reach their full potential is one of a leader’s biggest responsibilities. (I think it’s also one of our greatest privileges, too! I love that coaching enables me to have such a significant and positive impact on someone’s career!)
Today’s employees are tomorrow’s leaders, and you need to use the right tools to help them grow into those future roles. If you want your employees to become better performers, give them feedback. But if you want them to grow into great leaders, coach them with intention.
