The Talent Shortage

Somewhere in your mind you’ve imagined the perfect turn-key employee. They parachute out of the sky and hit the ground running with no onboarding, no training, and a smile on their face. They have the right skills, experience, and personality to seamlessly integrate with their entire department. This vision is so desirable that you actually start believing it’s going to happen, which only makes every interview more painful.

Back in the real world, every new hire—even the most experienced, sought-after candidates—will require time to get up to speed with your workflow processes and company culture. Perfect employees don’t exist, but setting your sites on the right skills for new hires can take the pain out of onboarding.

The solution lies in looking not only at the technical skills and competencies required for the open position, but to a few specific soft skills that are better indicators of job and culture fit. Given the investment you’re making in a new employee, it’s worth taking the time to identify the soft skills that make the difference between acclimating and stonewalling.

These soft skills, such as humility, self-awareness, willingness to learn, and the ability to adapt, allow the possessor to quickly learn and apply the behaviors that lead to success. Some call it emotional intelligence, others call it people skills. We call it “coachability.”

There are incredible hires and incumbents all around you that possess coachability. You can create a coaching culture to cultivate their performance by first providing an ideal environment, then getting out of their way. That ideal environment allows your people to showcase their talent and learn from their own mistakes. Strong coaches know how and when to support both.

Organizations need to embrace the language, trust, and practices of coaching. It’s not about managing performance, but about enabling the greatness of employees.

And don’t overlook one of the many additional benefits of cultivating a coaching culture. Employees who experience growth and advancement on the job are far more likely to stick around. That means more return on investment and less onboarding.

High performance is inevitable when employees with the capacity to be coached work alongside managers who build trust by having effective conversations. Managers can incentivize their coachable people by:

1. Listening to challenges and successes

2. Sharing opportunities for career advancement

3. Assigning projects for growth

4. Granting increased responsibilities

The formula for navigating the talent shortage: coachable team members + great coaches = high performance organizations. Learn more in this e-book.