Coaching Skills for Managers: Help Employees Set and Clarify Goals

In organizations, Managers have many things that they’re responsible for—including leadership development and support for employees. One way that you support your employees is by helping employees to set and clarify goals.

Whether you’re a manager helping your employees set goals for overall team performance, or you’re helping them set goals to address an underperformance issue, it’s critical that you use coaching skills and have a goal-setting process in place that can be used for your entire team to eliminate bias and encourage all employees to participate in the goal-setting process.

Here are coaching skills for managers that are tied to helping your employees set and clarify goals:

1.) The Employee sets the goals. At the heart of a coaching relationship is the idea that the person in the client seat leads the way. When Managers coach employees, they need to listen more, talk less, and provide support rather than outlining a strategy. Listen to your employee to determine if they want to climb a ladder or if they want to go deeper in their role. Climbing a ladder to the next level role is not always what an employee wants. Some employees set goals where they can go even deeper and gain more expertise in their existing role.

2.) Set employee goals that are realistic for your organization. If you know that there is no way upper management will approve a raise or promotion, don’t tease that out for the employee. It’s fine if the employee wants to set a goal for a raise or promotion, but be transparent with them about where the organization is at.

3.) Ask the employee to proactively write out their goals. This gives you both time to review them before a one-on-one meeting, which means you have time to see if the goals the employee is setting are realistic within your organization’s current climate. This also gives you time to brainstorm alternatives. Maybe right now you can’t give them a promotion, but could give them a budget for a self-paced training program through Udemy or Coursera that would further their career and position them well for when promotions are possible.

4.) Ask “why” as part of the discussion. Why does your employee want to set that particular goal? Knowing more about their underlying “why” will help you to find additional resources that support their overall growth, and gives you a window into their thought process.

5.) Map out a roadmap for each goal. The roadmap should be shared, transparent, and have dates and progress indicators mapped out for when you will check in. Make sure that you as manager are actually checking in on those goals. If you tell your employee that you’re going to check in quarterly, and then you go 3 quarters without checking in at all, you’re sending them a message about how much (or little) you value your ambitions or progress.