In general, a management coaching meeting should take place only after an employee understands clearly what’s expected and has received feedback at least once that his or her performance is not what it could or should be. However, in some cases, certain significant events may be focus of a coaching meeting, before they develop into a pattern of behavior. For example, a manufacturer decided that any safety violation – no matter how minor – would be addressed in a coaching discussion and, if significant, could lead to formal discipline.

Coaching involves these critical elements:

• A two-way dialogue
• A series of interdependent steps or objectives
• Specific coaching skills and strategies
• Courage and conviction
• A personal sense of humor

The management coaching process has two primary areas of focus: helping an employee recognize need to improve his or her performance and developing an employee’s commitment to taking steps to improve performance permanently.

While all of steps in C.M.O.E coaching model are important, most critical one is often not understood or carried out effectively – getting an employee to recognize and agree that there is a need to improve his performance. That step is equally important whether an employee has a specific performance problem or an employee is an average performer who could do better. Without a felt need for change and greater self awareness, there’s little likelihood that any improvement will occur or that it will be permanent.

The Center for Management and Organization Effectiveness (CMOE) seeks to improve individual leadership and team member skills within organizations.

Every executive has strengths in some arena. The first key to effective leadership is correct placement. If an executive doesn’t have talent for one area, he or she should be given opportunity to do a different job. Richard Branson, billionaire founder of Virgin Group of companies, believes strongly that if an employee is not excelling in one area of company, he or she should be given opportunity to do well in a different Virgin Group job. At Virgin, firing is seldom an option.

Coaching, too, can make a difference. It’s understandable that company leaders would hesitate to throw good money after bad by investing in coaching for problem managers. However, many organizations indiscriminately assign rising managers to executive development programs regardless of specific needs of individual. This is clearly a waste of time and money. Highly targeted and personalized executive coaching can be far more cost-effective in developing leadership competence.

Today’s organization can’t afford to lose quality people due to managerial incompetence. But wasting time affixing blame won’t help. Greater investment in effective evaluation and coaching is a drop in bucket compared to expense of recruiting and training new people – not to mention ultimate cost of employee disengagement and apathy.