If you’re a coach, you know that it’s not always easy to give feedback and get meaningful insights from your team. At the same time, if your team members are used to receiving feedback in a particular way, they may not feel comfortable with the process. Similarly, if you want to know how people perceive your coaching style or how they feel about working with you—but haven’t had any formal training in how to get this information out of them—this can be very challenging.
In today’s world of digital coaches and online courses, there are many options available for people looking to improve their coaching skills and make sure they’re getting maximum value from every interaction with their team members. The problem is that most platforms focus on giving generic advice or information which doesn’t tie into real-world situations where one-on-one conversations happen regularly between peers. As a result, many coaches find themselves stuck between traditional methods that don’t work well anymore such as face-to-face meetings and newer online tools.
Coaching Challenges
There are two key challenges to overcome.
- You need to build the internal coaching capability of leaders and managers. The role of leadership is evolving in a digital world, but what does this mean for you? How will you develop and implement the skills needed?
- Unlock the incredible power of feedback in your organization by getting more from 1-2-1’s, check-ins and capturing in-the-moment conversations.
Watch and Learn lets everyone in your organization create meeting slots to ensure coaching is easy to access.
Digital Coaching Culture
A digital coaching culture is one that focuses on using technology to improve the performance of people. This includes using an online platform, such as Watch and Learn to provide feedback and guidance for employees.
Digital coaching can include:
- Booking 1-2-1 coaching sessions via self-service
- Recording virtual workshops and sharing this with the wider organization for feedback
- Posting voice notes back and forth between coaches and learners to work around busy schedules
Watch and Learn can easily identify patterns and themes in feedback which enables individuals to get a clear picture of how they are doing at work. The platform will help you to improve your coaching skills, be more data-driven in your approach and gain deeper insights into what’s really going on. It can help you to uncover talent, re-evaluate expectations and help everyone to be better at their jobs. Coaching sessions can be played back as shown below and coaching transcriptions gives you further analytics on how coaching can be improved. You can measure the energy in the coaching session, see who is talking too much or not enough and gauge the overall engagement levels.
Easy access for everyone
A coach’s feedback should be easy to access, understand and share. Watch and Learn lets you coach live or playback on-demand dependent on the learner’s preference.
It should also be easy for everyone to use the tool. This can be challenging when we have different learning styles or preferences. If a coaching tool has too many options and features, it will become difficult to navigate for non-tech-savvy users. Below shows an async coaching session between a line manager and an employee using voice notes.
Self-reflection is the key to improvement
One of the most important things to understand about improving your skills is that you need to be able to look at yourself honestly and not just with rose-colored glasses. Self-reflection is the key to improvement, but it’s also the hardest thing to do! Recording video and voice notes of yourself for playback is a good way to reflect and recap. You can quickly build up a library of conversations over the past week, month or year to inform your learning journey.
To get better at anything, you have to know where you are right now, so that means taking time every once in a while and thinking about how well your current habits align with what you want. This process of reflecting on yourself helps reveal areas where your behavior might be counterproductive or ineffective, which can help guide future behavior change efforts. The more feedback we get from others who know us well enough that they offer valuable suggestions for improvement, the better off we’ll all be! But don’t forget: we all need some guidance sometimes too—it doesn’t hurt anyone if a friend takes a glance at what’s going on with their lives every once in a while.
Below shows a wordle graph for the sales team’s messaging group on Watch and Learn. James is a key member of this group given the frequency of his name! Other key themes include targeting medical companies, future event attendance and webinars. All videos and voice notes on Watch and Learn are transcribed so it’s easy to gain insights from conversations.
Watch and Learn will help you to improve your coaching skills, be more data-driven in your approach and gain deeper insights into what’s really going on. It can help you to uncover talent, re-evaluate expectations and help everyone to be better at their jobs. What’s more, you can easily identify patterns and themes in feedback which enables individuals to get a clear picture of how they are doing at work. Watch and Learn supports recorded live coaching sessions or coaching interventions in the flow of work with voice notes, screencasts and video messages. Modern tools are needed to support coaching in this new hybrid work era where in-person coaching has become less popular.