Is There Really A Silver Bullet To Running A High Performance and High Development Staff Culture?
My biggest regret, from a leadership development perspective, is that I didn’t taking coaching seriously or pursue a certification in coaching earlier in my career. My experience in the effectiveness of one on one coaching conversations with my direct reports is backed up by one of Gallup’s most famous leadership breakthroughs, based on meta-analytics of 100 million employee interviews. And, that is that great managing and supervising is an act of coaching, not one of directing and administrating.
In fact they discovered that a full 70% of the variance between highest engaged teams and persistently disengaged teams is the weekly coaching conversations the manager/supervisor has with his or her direct reports. So there really is a silver bullet to creating a staff work culture of high performance and high development. And, it all depends upon the manager/supervisor.
In other words, all the staff parties, free snacks, fancy staff lounges, bring your pet to work days and flex schedules are nice, but they don’t really matter when it comes to increasing performance. Gallup discovered there is little to no connection between these activities and lower stress and burnout, or improved results and better connections to customers and stakeholders.
Gallup’s Advice
While all of us with the responsibility for managing and supervising church staff want more productive, high-development cultures, we just don’t know where to start. Gallup offers this advice.
- Accept the desires of the new generations of employees. Gallup finds that all employees want a good job. This is especially true for millennials and even more so for Generation Z. More importantly, they actually want to learn and grow. The key then is for the manager/supervisor to address this desire to “learn and grow.”
- Announce and continually reinforce that you are transforming your culture from administrating teams to coaching teams. Gallup found that this is a real game-changer.
- Announce a change in how you will manage and supervise in your office culture. Gallup recommends that you define the change this way: We lead through a habit of having one meaningful coaching conversation per week with each team member. The one coaching conversation per week can be in person, on the phone, email, Zoom, at coffee break, or standing in the hallway. By studying what effective managers/supervisors do differently Gallup found that this one practice will immediately change your staff culture.
- The focus of each coaching conversation is goals. The silver bullet conversation is about progress on goals and how they connect to the mission and vision of the church.
Most church staff managers/supervisors have never been trained to develop their direct reports through one on one coaching conversations. Commit today to get yourself trained in coaching and everybody’s life will change – including yours.
Posted on August 24, 2021
