How Hiring a Coach Impacts the Bottom Line

You’ve just hired some new employees.

They looked great on paper, the interviews were impressive, and you felt confident in their abilities to set and meet the goals that will ultimately increase your bottom line.

Out of left field they hit a road block and the goals are not met. The team suffers. Your bottom line suffers. You are left wondering what happened and how it can be avoided in the future. 

Often what happened had more to do with each employee’s self-efficacy: a person’s belief in his or her ability to get the job done; one’s perceived capability—can I muster up the necessary resources—confidence and skills—to meet this demand placed upon me?

Self-efficacy determines the goals that we choose to go after (I’m not going after a goal I don’t think I can accomplish). Therefore, not only do you need to set goals that help grow your business, you need your employees to believe that they have the internal resources to meet and even exceed those goals. 

According to Albert Bandura, who published his seminal paper on the topic of self-efficacy in 1977, self-efficacy has an impact on everything we do, think, feel and motivate towards. Hence, it has a profound impact on the bottom line, especially if your employees’ mindsets are skewed to the negative and their behaviors show it.

Companies pour millions of dollars (billions nationwide) on programs that extrinsically motivate their employees to change their behavior (to increase productivity or reach goals). However, trying to effect change at the point of behavior is like putting a Band-Aid on a wound that needs stitches. You need to go deeper to what motivates behavior, like self-efficacy and mindset in order to reach those darn goals. 

While the C-suite is investing in executive coaches, how are you investing in the minds of your new hires? Coaching is appropriate at all levels. All levels contribute to the bottom line. Until we target mindset and self-efficacy, behavior will remain the same.

Hire a coach who knows how to effect the most impactful long-term changes. Toss the Band-Aids and take out the sutures. 

Why sutures when I just want to hire solid, reliable talent?

Sutures because we’re talking about our brains here. I’ve often spoken about the fact that our successes in life (at work, in love, at home) hinge on how and where we live in our brains. Self-efficacy is no different. If we don’t feel capable or have trust in our abilities, the resulting internal chatter can cause a downward neural spiral and soon we find ourselves low in survival mode. Worse, we then release chemicals that keep us there, causing our performance, confidence and health to suffer.

When people find themselves stuck in survival mode, they’re not tapping into precious neural resources like problem-solving, collaboration and innovation. These resources are mined higher up in our brains and they are exactly where employees with greater self-efficacy live. 

According to a pre-Covid Gallup poll, 52% of the workforce is not engaged and 13% are actively unplugging what the remaining 35% are actually achieving. Using the brain analogy, you’ve got most of your employees living low. Who is throwing them a life line? How are you pulling them back up? 

Here are three ways to increase a person’s self-efficacy.

Our mind is hungry for direction (60,000 thoughts-a-day hungry) and it will digest the thoughts (nutritious or not) that we feed it. Though we lean negative, we can overcome this bias for the welfare of our brains and bodies.

To increase self-efficacy, become both positive and mindful when it comes to feedback, fairness and failure. 

First, feedback: The clients I coach who are in their twenties often (OFTEN) report that their bosses provide negative feedback on the daily. Impressionable brains (and self-concepts) are eager for a nibble of the good stuff. So give it to them. Young workers build their identities based on the interpretations they make of the interactions they have with you. How are you making those interactions positive? What positive feedback are you providing on the daily—directly or indirectly?

Second, fairness: How fair are you? When we deem something unfair, our brains respond by sending neural energy low—survival state—and by releasing the corresponding chemicals that keep us there. Unfairness disconnects us so much that we may become reactive, ruminate and even seek revenge. (And the object of the unfairness may become the target of our retaliation.)

On the other hand, fairness triggers pro-social behavior, collaboration and the feel good chemicals to produce results and spiral us into the higher processing and thinking areas of our brains. Think you’re totally fair—think again. Take an anonymous poll to find our where you fall short.

Third, failure: Failure is the option. Without failure we didn’t try. Imagine if we gave ourselves internal high fives every time we made a mistake? Instead of beating ourselves up, we’d be learning and growing and living higher in our brains overall. 

Everyday you have an opportunity to impact the bottom line by tweaking how feedback, fairness and failure show up in your environment.

You may have hired based on resumes and interviews, but you grow your employees (and your bottom line) by investing in where and how they live in their brains—by investing in their self-efficacy. 

Thanks for reading! I’m curious if this inspired some new thinking and perhaps some new actions. I’d love to hear from you.

~Paula