MAINTENANCE OF THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

In the new JUSTinTIME business world, coaching-style managers are absolutely necessary to the competitive advantage that comes from consistently motivating and retaining the best workers. These managers are so effective because coaching is, in itself, a process geared to more than a single win in a single instance: it is geared to solid achievement—to developing and maintaining the conditions for long-term success. Coaching-style managers achieve results by:

   Getting employees up to speed quickly so they can start adding value right away

   Helping employees anticipate knowledge and skill gaps and other learning needs on an ongoing basis

   Making sure employees have access to the right learning resources at the right time

   Building credibility so they can work with employees regularly on…

— personal effectiveness

— career planning and professional development

— leveraging information, skill, and knowledge routinely in daily tasks and responsibilities

Such managers stay in constant touch with employees, watching for “red flags” that signal unnecessary turnover. They build personal retention plans each day with their most valuable direct reports; when necessary they help the best employees find internal “escape hatches” by moving them around the organization into new skill areas, new projects, new locations, new teams, or new work schedules.

Nowadays it seems that everyone is remapping the way to success, trying to find the best course of action for navigating through the most profound economic changes since the Industrial Revolution. Technology, globalization, and the accelerating pace of change have yielded chaotic markets, fierce competition, and unpredictable staffing needs, impelling business leaders to turn the traditional model of work on its head. Downsizing, restructuring, and reengineering have fundamentally reshaped the nature of work and radically altered the employer–employee relationship. Skilled workers now trade security for mobility, and more and more consider themselves “free agents.”

With the revised model of work, and the free-agent workforce charting a whole new career path, many traditional management strategies have become obsolete. Managers might still rely on them, feeling there are no alternatives, but few can reasonably expect employees to be motivated by prospects of long-term employment and progression up the organization hierarchy: both are remnants of the past. And six-month reviews, annual raises, and other traditional rewards and incentives no longer have the impact they once had.

However, there is one tried-and-true management strategy that fits the workplace of today even better than it did the workplace of the past: day-to-day coaching-style management. Today this strategy is a business imperative because it is in perfect sync with the needs of the new free-agent career path and the dynamics of the new JUSTinTIME workplace.

Organizations that adopt this strategy, and insist on turning every manager into a coach, can get a handle on change and successfully make it work for them. They will lead the competition in the economy of the future because they will be able to:

   Recruit the best people and get the desired return on their recruiting and training investments

   Handle workplace changes with flexibility and dexterity

   Become centers of innovation and new value creation

Coaching-style management fulfills a crucial, multifaceted organizational need in the new economy. Time will only intensify this need, too, for in essence the workplace of today no longer straddles the past and the the future: it is the future.

As you have learned in this book, the best coaching-style managers have something very important in common: they give employees FAST Feedback. If you are not practicing FAST Feedback already, begin today and transform your role as a manager and your relationships with the people you manage. There is a great coach inside you. FAST Feedback will bring out that great coach and put that coach into action.