Providing Coaching Support & Feedback As A Leader

What’s the best way to provide coaching support and feedback as a leader? While there are many ways to go about it, providing encouragement is absolutely critical to ensuring that your team—and each member in it—thrives. 

Why? Because as a leader, providing guidance and support through coaching can help team members develop new skills, reach their goals, drive better results, improve their performance, overcome challenges and, ultimately, become stronger members within your organization. 

However, the process of coaching can be complex, and it requires a deep understanding of each team member’s strengths, weaknesses, and motivations. Today we’re going to look at just a few of the many different methods you can use to provide coaching support and feedback as a leader, and how you can implement those methods to take your team to the next level. 

How to give feedback as a leader

1. Assume positive intent

When providing feedback to team members, it is crucial to start from a place of “positive intent.” What do we mean by that? Assuming positive intent means that whether or not a team member completed a task perfectly, your goal is to provide feedback from a place of compassion. Assume that they wanted to complete the task as effectively as possible—and if they failed to live up to that expectation, don’t assume it was because they were lazy, bored, uncreative, disengaged, etc. 

By assuming positive intent when giving feedback, you’ll be much more equipped to explore meaningful solutions for improvement. Instead of blaming their inability to complete the job on a personal failing—which does nothing for anyone, and actively harms your relationship—you’ll be thinking of ways to leverage their natural strengths. 

At the same time, seeing your employees in their best light has a self-fulfilling effect: if they think you see them as capable, they’re much more likely to feel capable, and they’ll want to perform in accordance with your view of them. 

2. Give many opportunities for growth

“What you focus on grows.” This is our most foundational coaching principle. It means that whatever truth we choose to hold onto, we’ll continue to find evidence to support that belief. The same goes for professional growth. If your team members are complacent and uninspired, you’ll continue to experience stagnation.

On the flip side, if you turn your attention towards new strategies, untapped resources, and learning opportunities, you’ll experience exponential growth. How can your team members improve the skills they already have? What creative solutions have they never tried before? Are there courses or other ways they could expand their knowledge? 

Giving your team many growth opportunities is like lighting up a sign on your chest that says, “I’m invested in you. I believe in you.”

3. Put success measurement in their hands

This might sound radical, but it’s not always best to take charge of setting goals and expectations for your team members. While it’s definitely important that you make your vision clear of what organizational success looks like and what outcomes you’re after, they can have ownership in how they achieve those results.

Try letting your teams create their own scope and success measurements. See how they do when they hold themselves accountable—and then, once you’re able to review, provide meaningful feedback on how they fared, and how they might improve in the future. 

4. Tap into outside resources

A leader’s greatest strength isn’t their ability to tackle herculean tasks all by themselves. Instead, their real strength lies in their ability to develop a network—and lean into that network—in order to get things done more efficiently and proficiently than they could have alone. 

To that end, one of the most important ways leaders can provide feedback and coaching support to teams involves tapping into third-party coaching resources. By learning tried-and-true coaching strategies directly from an experienced coach, you’ll discover how to have powerful conversations with your team members, leading to improved performance, results, and satisfaction.

Providing feedback as a leader

Providing coaching support and feedback as a leader is crucial for the growth and development of your team. By assuming positive intent in your team members, giving them opportunities for growth, allowing them to measure their own success, and gaining your own coaching skills, you’ll see your team members improve dramatically. 

Want to hone your coaching and leadership skills? Learn from an expert.