Why Managers Fail as Coaches

Contact Rick Heaston via e-mail at touchpt@msn.com

Jack Welch, the former General Electric CEO, believes that great management revolves around developing great people. As far as he's concerned, that's a manager's No. 1 job. I rarely meet a sales manager who doesn't agree. If pushed, they tell me that developing people is their top priority, too. In reality, though, developing people falls low on almost all sales managers' priority lists.

Developing good people is all about coaching, a series of planned interventions intended to help others be more productive. It's reacting to the difference between the behaviors you expect and the behaviors you observe. Once you define these differences, coaching can be easy and productive. That's the good news.

The bad news is that not many managers are good coaches. And unfortunately, coaching is a lost art in the home building industry.