How Coaching Helps Improve Morale

by Seth Sinclair

In my last post, I discussed the results of the 2014 Federal Employee’s Viewpoint Survey, which demonstrated that morale at federal government departments and agencies was low—and getting lower every year.

Low morale results in lower employee engagement with the goals of the organization—and employees who don’t feel connected to their organizations’ successes.  In an age in which ever-higher levels of quality service are demanded of all employees, including those who work for the government, lowered morale has the opposite effect and puts quality at risk.

As agencies throughout the government search for ways to turn things around, one approach is to invest in employee development, with individual and/or group coaching as a proven effective solution. Coaching is linked to better morale.  It fosters a learning and growth process that can help employees whose morale has been suffering to reconnect with their organizations’ goals and needs while advancing their own professional development.

Coaches are uniquely positioned to help employees at all levels define their personal and professional goals, improve self-awareness, understand others’ viewpoints, and ultimately increase their effectiveness.  They accomplish this by assessing individuals’ personality and leadership styles, and the ways in which they interact with others.  They use this information to create new insights and foster a learning process tied to specific individual goals. 

A good coach can get to the bottom of the reasons many respondents to this year’s Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey are unhappy in their work—and help employees choose intelligent and rational actions to reduce that unhappiness and make them once again engaged members of the workforce.  In times of stress, including those times when resources are constrained, coaches can help employees to focus on what they can control, instead of feeling overwhelmed by what they can’t. 

Coaches can help employees cultivate a positive mindset about the future, instead of dwelling on past negatives, and help them learn lessons about the past to create success in the future.  They help employers shape the future by increasing their ability to retain talented employees, and to retain and develop new generations of skilled employees.

Finally, coaches work with managers and leaders to improve others’ morale, by helping them explore and implement strategies to get their staffs excited, motivated, and energized about their mission.  

Great executive coaches are fully trained to help employees achieve all of these objectives.  I’ve written about the skills coaches bring to the table in many previous posts.  In our next post, I’ll talk about a different way to support morale in federal agencies and elsewhere—by training agency leaders themselves to act as coaches themselves, in addition to their other responsibilities. 

I call it “coaching as a leadership style,” and every leader will benefit by having the basic coaching technique I outline in his or her arsenal of leadership tools.