Coaching the coaches: Helping managers give effective employee feedback

Sometimes it pays to coach the coaches.  And that’s exactly what Ben Dattner suggested in a recent Harvard Business Review blog post (Dattner actually sets up the encounter as between a senior manager and an outside coach, but the concepts apply with equal ease between HR and managers).
Tips you should pass along before the sessions to make your managers/coaches more successful, according to Dattner:


Determine broad objectives, and accentuate the positive. Dattner acknowledges that the more specific you can be about how you define success for the participant, the better. But managers also want to identify larger professional development goals. And these should be phrased in a constructive way.
So instead of the manager saying, “You need to get along better with your co-workers,” the objective can be stated thusly: “You’ll be able to get more resources and support for your ideas if you navigate department personality differences with a little more patience.”


Give them as much information as you can. This might include past reviews, personality assessment reports, or online or interview-based 360 degree feedback, Dattner says. While the employee may already have a lot of this information, if he or she hasn’t been working for the coach/manager for an extended period, there might be a lot of data in there that the manager’s not familiar with.


Make sure the coach is prepared to take concrete action steps. Dattner offers an example:
“The head of a division in a pharmaceutical company had a staff member with a reputation for being brilliant but over-committed. 
“When the coach sat down with the manager to define goals for the coaching, the manager was able to articulate two clear prescriptions for the direct report who was working with the coach: 1) Respond to everyone within 24 hours, even if the response was just a simple reply to set expectations about when a full answer to the voicemail or email would be forthcoming and 2) Create a “not to do” list of tasks that the participant would either not take on or would delegate to others.”


This is an opportunity to be blunt — take it. This is a good time to cut through the politically correct jargon and candidly describe what you see are both the strengths and weaknesses of the employee being coached. Such unvarnished comments are often incredibly useful to the manager/coach, who may not be entirely sure of how the process is going to work and what the end result will be.