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REACH Out to Your Team

By James A. Baker
Founder and Chairman
Baker Communications, Inc.

Maybe it is because we are in the middle of the football post season coaching shuffle right now, but I have been thinking a lot about the important role that coaching plays in becoming an effective, successful manager. There is so much pressure on you and your team these days to perform at higher levels; “do more with less and do it faster” is the rule today. You can’t achieve the results you need in today’s competitive climate unless every member of your team is highly effective at doing their job, and it is up to you to make sure they can do it. This means you need to spend less time managing and more time coaching. Let me explain.

Typically, managers spend a lot of time organizing and planning and going to meetings and giving directions and measuring performance, but times are changing. You need your team to be better, and you need them to get better faster. Having you standing around giving directions and setting higher goals for them won’t help if they don’t know how to get better at what they are doing right now. Instead, they need for you to come along side them and work with them, so they can grow and learn. This is important to do even with experienced team members (if you’re not growing, you are dying), but it is urgent to provide focused, personal coaching for newer or lower performing team members.

Unfortunately, many managers need coaching around how to coach! Maybe you would like to help, but you don’t know how. The REACH model is a simple system that I have discovered works really well for managers in any industry working with team members at any skill level. As you work through each step in the model, the goal is to interact with the team member about the issues and opportunities they encounter every day, and discover ways to improve. The summary below assumes that you and your team have been using this model for awhile, so for your first coaching session with a member of your team, you can probably skip R and begin with E...

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