As a leader you want people, including yourself, to increase or enhance performance. After almost 30 years of coaching people, and watching people coach people, here’s one of the most important pieces of advice I can give you about coaching:

 

Coach the performance of people through data.

First, ask these two questions:

  1. What measurements matter to performance?
  2. What is the current variance (above or below norm) of those measurements.

Once you know the answer to those two questions, you coach performance based on the variances in those measurements. If the variance is above the norm, you ask why and how to continue the trend. If the variance is below the norm, then you talk about why and what adaptations to enhance performance.

Without data, you’re just speculating in your coaching. Use data!