Coaching Essentials for Managers: The Tools You Need to Ignite Greatness in Each Employee

| Author : Sara Canaday, 2022

What’s It All About?

In the competitive and fast-paced world of manufacturing, managers and other leaders need to be more proactive than ever when it comes to attracting and retaining great talent. For many leaders, this might mean stepping up their coaching game to find new ways to make sure all employees feel supported, valued, and ignited into doing their best every day.

Managers can find all the skills they need in Coaching Essentials for Managers: The Tools You Need to Ignite Greatness in Each Employee by leadership development expert (and recent Mindfulness Manufacturing guest) Sara Canaday. In this compelling book, Sara explores the fundamentals and frameworks of great coaching. She also shares real-life examples to highlight how leaders can overcome common coaching challenges.

Coaching Essentials is a great read for managers and leaders who want to get a start of improving their leadership skills. It’s also an accessible read, with three easy-to-digest sections and plenty of resources, including a coaching self-assessment and a toolkit for using coaching essentials to increase your impact.

Favorite Quote

“Coaches start conversations rather than issuing demands. They ask what if it’s a different approach with a higher probability of igniting curiosity within employees and encouraging them to become strategic problem-solvers.”

Biggest Takeaway

Throughout the discussions on the fundamentals of coaching, Coaching Essentials for Managers frequently brought up the importance of building relationships. Before you can coach someone, you need to get to know them. As a leader, this means having frequent check-ins with your team. Ask your team members rich, open-ended questions, and get to know who they are outside of work. For example, find out about their families, their interests, and what they value. By knowing details like these, you’ll be able to build stronger connections and find the best way to communicate when challenges occur.

Reviewed by: Trevor Blondeel, June 8, 2023

At Manufacturing Greatness, Trevor Blondeel works with manufacturers to connect the top to the shop floor. If you’re ready to improve your own organization, contact Trevor to learn how Manufacturing Greatness can help you build stronger leaders and develop a dynamic, high-performing workplace.

Mindfulness Manufacturing

Our show is about providing listeners with real stories that come from a place of experience, transparency, and authenticity. Most importantly it’s about what we learn from these stories and applying Mindfulness in our everyday work and personal lives.
Our intention is to create an environment where people can learn through open honest discussions on how we apply Mindfulness. Although our experiences and stories come from time in a manufacturing environment hence the title “Mindfulness Manufacturing”, we still see our discussions and topics relatable to any organization or profession.

When a mistake occurs on the plant floor, your mind might jump to one question: who caused this issue, and should I write them up for their mistake? But there’s a more productive approach you could be taking—and in this episode of Mindfulness Manufacturing, guest Dr. Jake Mazulewicz breaks it all down!

With a background as a firefighter, EMT, and military paratrooper, Jake knows the challenges of high-hazard industries, and works with organizations to reduce errors and create safer, more reliable workplace environments. In this episode, Jake shares why you can’t procedularize everything, including the way you handle errors and accidents, and offers great insights and stories about how to use connection and curiosity to improve safety, address errors, and strengthen your organization.

3:35 – Procedures and policies are the work that is imagined, and on the floor is how the work actually gets done

4:19 – The work as-done is almost always radically different than the work as-imagined

5:20 – Even when you have standards and people show up wanting to do a good job, you can still see issues that need to be addressed

6:44 – There will always be areas that absolutely need to have procedures in place

8:02 – There are also adaptive jobs, which leans less into procedures and more intro troubleshooting and tacit human knowledge

10:56 – In an ideal environment, both mechanistic and adaptive models are used and respected and needed

12:11 – There are four levels, ranging from strict procedurals to looser guidelines that show what to do, but not how to do it

15:36 – Tacit knowledge gets shared through conversations

16:22 – A way to share important information is to have frontline experts record videos sharing their insights to problems, especially those that are not covered in procedures

19:44 – Through conversation and connection, more knowledge is shared

21:58 – Debriefing also plays a central role

23:45 – If you have strong discipline, you’ll find more freedom

25:31 – In most situations, errors are signals, not defects

27:07 – When an error occurs, be curious and find the deeper cause of the problem

Connect with Jake Mazulewicz

Find him on Linkedin

Visit his website