Coaching Your Team vs. Managing.(versus)(Brief Article)

The most destructive word in corporate America is employee. It's a divisive word. It disconnects management from 90 percent of the company. It immediately emphasizes the separation. Wherever you are in the management chain, I want you to do yourself a tremendous favor. I want you to stop sabotaging yourself. Forget you ever heard such words as employee or staff or workers--you can even forget manager. You are a COACH, and you have a TEAM!

Coaching is different than managing. It's an entirely different concept--a different mind-set. And blessed is the company that is composed of coaches and teams rather than management and employees.

I've been invited to motivate dozens of championship sports teams, and I know how the system operates...how and why they win so consistently. And do you know where winning starts? It starts in the coach's office. You get the sense of the system immediately when you realize that from day one, the coach has a photo of his or her team on the wall...everybody from rookies and subs to star players.

Coaching is personal. It's family. The very word "coaching" is personal. Right from the start, a coach/team atmosphere is unmistakable--it is a "we" thing, not a "me" thing. It's one for all and all for one. Everybody knows the team's mission, and everybody is there to help everybody else make the team invincible. Each person on the team has their particular assignment, and the coach makes sure that every person knows exactly where they fit in and how necessary they are to the team effort. Nobody is ever in the dark as to his or her importance.

A coach brings his or her team together, sometimes every day, to discuss problems and strategies, boost morale and listen to suggestions. Everybody has a voice; communication is constant. There is a lot of caring going on--finding out where people are hurting, counseling them, giving them a boost and assurances. A good coach doesn't have team members who just want to do a good job--they want to EXCEED the coach's expectations.

I set out one day to list a thousand ways good coaches motivate their teams. In a couple of hours, I'd listed over 200 ideas, very, very few of which I'd ever seen in a corporate climate.

Why is there such a disparity? It's because business practice tends to place power in the hands of individual managers rather than in teams. The coach's very reason for existence is to enable the transfer of power, authority and achievement to their teams. Teamwork is the coach's primary objective. It is on this psychological foundation that consistently superior performance is assured, It involves entirely different concepts and approaches in which personal ...