Tag: coaching

What goes where?

Employees are faced with a range of tools to communicate, collaboration, share and network. Simply deploying new tools just confuses an already overworked organisation.

To expect many to understand what tool should be used in which context is foolish. One of the most important documents you can produce in the early days of a collaboration tool deployment is guidance to participants about what goes where.

This could be dressed up as a content strategy document, outlining where implicit and explicit knowledge / content should be stored or a straightforward guide on which tool to use when. Just map out some business scenarios and give people ‘guidance’ on which tool can be used to accomplish the task most efficiently.

Get this document into the environment early and it will save you lots of time answering questions from confused new adopters of the collaboration platform.

It’s more than just the coaching

At my current client we are running a series of ‘beginners guide’ coaching sessions for those that are new to business networking platforms.

We run through the basic concept of using a networking site, the importance of your profiles, how to use the network to get value by following people and groups, etc.

Most platform vendors will claim that little training or coaching is needed as their respective tools are intuitive. But not everyone is on a social network in their personal life and I find some coaching is needed to ensure ‘no one gets left behind’. It’s a common approach, particular from IT departments that run these projects.

But the challenge does not end there. Just because someone now knows how to do something doesn’t automatically mean they will begin using it.

We mustn’t confuse ways of imparting knowledge with ways of changing behaviour. To encourage a behaviour we need to generate the best conditions for it to arise and then reinforce it. Merely knowing what you should do is often insufficient to reliably bring the behaviour about and merely knowing doesn’t offer much in the way of reinforcement.

So to support the behavioural change we are also coaching how colleagues can
develop highly engaged communities through some hints and tips around building habit formation as a step to changing behaviour online – some steps you can take to ensure your colleagues begin to regularly participate on the business networking platform.

Coaching participants on how something works is fine but the value comes from coaching on how to develop habits to utilise the capabilities of the network on a regular basis.