In a recent blog post on hbr.org, Professor Monique Valcour presents a powerful suggestion for managers to connect with and get the most out of employees. She argues that “if your job involves leading others, the implications are clear: the most important thing you can do each day is to help your team members experience progress at meaningful work.”

So how do you know what is meaningful to them? By developing a coaching relationship and having coaching conversations. These conversations will allow managers to understand what drives each person, help build connections between each person’s work and the organization’s mission and strategic objectives, provide timely feedback, and help each person learn and grow on an ongoing basis. The goal is to develop the employee, just as the goal of a pitching coach is to develop his pitchers.

To do so, she lays out 5 tactics for managers.

1. Listen deeply. Listen with your full attention, and create a high-quality connection that invites your team member to open up and to think creatively.
2. Ask, don’t tell. In a coaching conversation, it’s essential to restrain your impulse to provide the answers. Your path is not your employee’s path.   Similar to the Socratic method,  open-ended questions, not answers, are the tools of coaching.
3. Create and sustain a developmental alliance.  Follow-up is critical to build trust and to make your coaching more effective. The more you follow through on supporting your employees’ developmental plans, the more productive your coaching becomes, the greater your employees’ trust in you, and the more engaged you all become. It’s a virtuous cycle.
4. Focus on moving forward positively. Similar to Professor Smith’s recommendation to have a 5:1 positive to negative feedback ratio, the reverse is true here — when an employee focuses on the negatives during coaching conversations, it’s the job of the manager to end the venting session and steer the discussion into a positive, solution-based dialogue.  You might ask, “Which of the activities you mention offer the greatest potential for building your knowledge and adding value to the company?” “Could you schedule two hours of time for developmental activities each week as a recurring appointment?” “Are there skills or relationships that would increase your ability to meet your primary deliverables?” “How could we work more efficiently within the team to free up and protect time for development?”
5. Build accountability.  In addition to making sure you follow through on any commitments you make to employees in coaching conversations, it’s also useful to build accountability for the employee’s side of formulating and implementing developmental plans. Accountability increases the positive impact of coaching conversations and solidifies their rightful place as keys to organizational effectiveness.

I wanted to share this article because viewing management through a coaching lens resonates with me. To this day, I deeply appreciate and have nothing but fond thoughts towards my high school athletic coaches — they took a genuine interest in developing me as an athlete and as a person. I’ve yet to have a manager take this same kind of interest my own development, but I imagine my response to that kind of attention would be to make my time at work more meaningful and encourage me to do more meaningful work.