How To Coach A New Employee At Your Company?

Leadership and coaching is a skill set. You might be a star player in your company with all your executions. But when it comes to delegating work, motivating and leading your teammates. It’s another story.

Here are 6 tips on how to coach a new employee at your company.

1. Be clear on the deliverables

Tell the new employee exactly what to deliver (end goal), when’s the deadline, and why is this task important. It would be helpful if you could breakdown the tasks for them at the beginning as well.

2. Give them as many references as possible

Give them frameworks, templates, or examples of your past work. Building from scratch is hard and time-consuming. Having reference materials can help them understand the current standard or what the deliverable looks like. They can always improvise later on.

3. Constant feedback loop

Give them an expectation that there would be a lot of iterations and corrections because after all, it is their first time working on this task.

Don’t check-in with them after the entire task is done. Have milestones in between for feedback. For example, if I have delegate 3 pages of PowerPoint slides for my Associate Consultant to create, I would always ask them to draw the framework and storyline on a piece of paper first, before putting all the time and effort into making actual slides.

Encourage them to ask as many questions as possible.

During each check-in milestone, point out what s/he has done great, and what could be improved. Explaining why you do how you do is important. Extract certain principles behind for your employee to keep in mind. For example, I would provide explanations on why I would structure my PowerPoint presentation in a particular order and with certain elements, and how it would improve the readers' experience to my Associate.

Praise your employees if they’ve done a great job, don’t be greedy.

4. Give them ownership to a task, with support

If it’s possible, give your employee an entire big task. This would give them more ownership, than doing nitty-gritty work here and there. It would be challenging for them, so you need to check in with them constantly- ask from time to time, “What are you working on now? What’s the biggest obstacle that you are facing now? What support do you want me to provide for you?”

In the beginning, always be their safety net. When my Associate needs to present to our sponsor, I would always review their presentation slides, and be in the meeting with them. If the sponsor asks really challenging questions, I could always provide support.

5. Raise the bar

One of the most critical things that a senior needs to do is raising the standard. How can something be faster, better, stronger than what’s being delivered now? Don’t do it for the sake of doing it though.

6. Encourage learning and new ideas

Once your employee can do the basics. Encourage them to provide new ideas to the project and encourage them to spend time learning stuff related to their work. One of my associates is great at statistics, so sometimes he could provide great insights on how to build better modeling. Some of my colleagues would take courses on project management or data science. It really helps the team to achieve more, and evolve together.

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