jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #92 on 17 Sep 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals, Becoming A Manager: Coaching
How to coach an employee who is performing well - Claire Lew, Know Your Team
Researchers not taking enough time for career development - Sophie Inge, Research Professional News (paywalled)
As managers, the tendency is to focus on problems, and on team members who aren’t performing well in their current tasks. As a result, team members who are capable and already growing tend to suffer from benign neglect; but this isn’t fair to them, and it’s a missed opportunity for the manager. Someone who’s already shown they can grow under conditions of benign neglect can grow faster with some help. What’s more, if you don’t offer that help, they may reasonably start looking for jobs where their growth and career development is actively encouraged - wouldn’t you?
Lew walks us through the steps of making sure someone who’s doing well and is already growing gets the coaching they deserve. As always, coaching isn’t about you telling someone how to do something better, but about giving them the opportunities and resources - and accountability - to grow their skills:
As with so much of management, this isn’t hard or complex! The difficulty is in the discipline to keep performing the practice. In #68 I shared the quarterly goal setting & review template I use; by checking in every three months, and understanding their goals in their larger career, as well as at this job, that makes it much easier to ensure that new opportunities and resources support them in their growth as well as in the work the team needs.
All of this is incredibly important; as Inge points out in a paywalled article, while researchers know that career development is vitally important, they find themselves “too busy” to improve their own skills and thus productivity. That attitude spreads outwards to researcher-adjacent staff. We’d all agree that putting time and effort into growth and development is vital, and yet too often it doesn’t get done. One of our biggest roles as a manager is to make sure our team members (and ourselves) do take the time to grow our skills, so we can take on more ambitious efforts and be more satisfied in our work.
