Last week I was invited to teach an MBA class on leadership at a local college. One question that I've never heard so directly was asked by a young woman who managed a number of clerks: "Why should I coach beyond the basics when they'll just take their new learning and move on? That means I'll have to take the time to coach someone else."
It's a question deserving of an answer.
For one thing when you coach, inevitably you'll gain better insight into that skill. Research shows that one of the best ways to develop depth-expertise of a skill is to teach it to someone else. Training forces you to analyze a skill in depth, to thoughtfully deal with the questions and concerns of others and even to recognize uses of a skill that you may have not seen as a part of your own development and use of that competency.
Coaching also teaches you how to understand and work more effectively with people. When someone has difficulty or even fails to learn, you'll find yourself asking questions about that person as well as about your own processes of working with people. You can't go through experiences like that without developing your skills of diagnosing, relating and problem solving. The thinking required to work with people is far different than that required for technology. Coaching people is never garbage in, garbage out. Managing the variables and complexities of an individual is far different than managing the complexities of a software program. It's another valuable process that's grown, not innate.
Finally, and this is no small thing, coaching builds your reputation. Managers and execs take notice of capable coaches. After all, developing people is at least a third of many execs' responsibility. Not only would your reputation for coaching get around your organization, but it also provides one of the most basic rationales for a promotion. In a recession, it's not the coaches who work well with people that get let go, but the chronically poor performers who make little contribution beyond their daily work responsibility.
If you're new to the workforce, you may think that coaching is for the higher-ups, but that's false. Don't wait until you have subordinates before you think about coaching. When you notice someone having difficulty with a job that you've mastered, ask if you can help. You might say something like this: "I don't want to be pushy, but I've worked with that too. Would you be willing to let me share what insights I have?" A little bit of self-deprecation followed by an offer can be the path to recognition.
Here's the rule: Effective coaching teaches the coach as much as it teaches the learner.