Be A Coach, not a Supervisor.

We certainly did not know exactly what to expect with the CMRxchange webinar. Holly Czuba, George Simons and I accepted the offer to present a live session on coaching, communication and collaboration to an online audience of contact center professionals.

George had the idea of taking each topic and asking a lead-in question to promote listener participation. Everyone was on mute, but there was a chat feature on the screen for us to see the answers and comments coming through. For example, we asked everyone to type in their favorite coaching tip and then we asked them to send us a word or phrase they wanted to banish from their workplace. To our pleasant surprise the chat room lit up with streaming suggestions and ideas. Even though we were the only ones to talk for the whole hour, the chat room became a nice learning resource for us, too.

One topic in the coaching section has really stuck with me over the last few days. We defined a coach as someone who leads change in a specific behavior. We compared the language of a coach to that of a fan and how the fan is focused on results while the coach is focused on behaviors. There’s a big difference.

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When we supervise, the purpose is to make sure outcomes or results are reached. When we coach, we’re teaching the process, not the results.

For example, supervising could be monitoring conversion rate results while coaching is teaching presentation skills. To paraphrase a parable, supervising is as far from coaching as East is from West, while coaching is as close to teaching as bone is to marrow.

We covered twelve communication topics in the webinar session and received more through the chat session. Our marketing department plans to provide snippets from each category to be used in coaching sessions. In the meantime, if you want to watch the entire broadcast, it should be available on our website. Regardless of your title, if you have people reporting to you, or you are simply helping a new employee on your team, strive to be a coach.

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