Using High-Performance Coaching for Managers to Address Performance and Behavior Issues

Coaching has grown to be highly popular. Many individuals, business owners, or organization managers find themselves needing a helping hand or find themselves thrust into the role of offering advice to others. That is especially true of managers who, while conducting performance reviews, may find a need to provide specific feedback and advice about what to do to improve job performance to those individual employees or teams reporting to them.

It is an honor and a privilege for coaches to provide coaching for individuals, teams, organizations, and organizations’ leadership. In whatever capacity, these individuals or organizations are placing their trust in the coaches, as internal managers-as-coaches or as external professional coaches, trainers, facilitators, or consultants. In all these cases, coaches’ skills and competencies make a difference in developing the intent of coaching undertaken. This webinar and its presenters utterly take this trust and professional responsibility and offer a systematic approach to high-performance coaching. It is designed for you if you must offer to coach to help your clients or employees improve on-the-job performance.

The phrase performance coaching refers to a category of coaching that advises workers about how they should behave and what results they should achieve. It clarifies the means (behaviors) and ends (results) to be achieved. Unlike non-directive coaching, which prompts coachees to reflect on their own, performance coaching relies on the experience of the coach to direct the coachees’ attention to what should be achieved.

Performance coaching can be an important tool for managers faced with workers who do not achieve the results that the organization requires or who behave in ways not aligned with organization policies, procedures, or managerial expectations. Through performance coaching, managers or experienced co-workers guide workers through what they should do, how they should behave, and how best to measure success. Performance coaching often plays a key role in performance management, performance evaluation, and performance reviews. Workers cannot achieve the necessary results if they are unclear about what they are. Performance coaching clarifies what measurable results should be achieved

This webinar is based on a newly published book High-Performance Coaching for Managers, by the presenters, which differs significantly from other books in the coaching market. Many webinars on coaching cast coaches as facilitators who question their clients (the coachees), helping them to articulate their problems, formulate their solutions, develop their action plans to solve problems, and measure the success of efforts to implement those plans. That is called a non-directive approach.

But this webinar and its related book adopt a directive approach by casting the coach as a manager who diagnoses the problems with worker job performance and offers specific advice on how to solve those problems. While there is nothing wrong with a non-directive approach, it does not always work well in job performance reviews in which the manager must inform the worker about gaps between what is needed (the desired) and what is performed (the actual). The significant difference between what is currently available in the market and what is offered in this webinar and book is the authors’ collective experience of over 70 combined years of hands-on research and delivery experiences in the Human Resources Development field.

While many approaches to coaching could help to facilitate performance improvement, the presenters of this webinar favor a planned approach to coaching that is geared toward helping others identify what they need to do to improve their job performance and productivity. An effective high-performance coaching effort meets the organization’s and its people’s needs. It relies on a positive view of people and the situation and a strong effort to encourage participation and inclusion in all aspects of the coaching experience.

This webinar provides a comprehensive, step-by-step approach to implementing a high-performance coaching effort for human resource practitioners, business coaches, consultants, managers of all kinds, and others interested in managing and improving human performance and increasing individuals' and teams' productivity.

• Define Coaching, Performance Coaching & Professional Coaching
• The general context of a relationship between a performance coach and employees
• Distinguish so-called directive coaching from non-directive coaching
• Review when to use directive and non-directive coaching
• Describe a model to guide you step-by-step through high-performance coaching
• Apply the performance coaching model to typical job performance problems
• Use the high-performance coaching model to address behavioral problems

Coaching is a necessary skill for managers. It is important as a fundamental part of an organization’s talent efforts including talent acquisition, development, and retention strategies. For a coaching program to succeed in an organization, it should be recognized as a useful approach throughout the organization and become part of the fabric of the corporate culture. High-Performance Coaching for Managers provides an important tool for organizations to use to train their managers on coaching, which directly impacts their engagement with employees’ behavioral issues, using proven models, methods, and coaching techniques.

According to the Harvard Business Review (2015), workers generally expect their immediate supervisors to give them honest feedback on how well they do their jobs and specific advice on what to do if they are not performing in alignment with organizational expectations. When workers do not receive advice but instead are questioned about their views-they regard their managers as either incompetent or disingenuous.

Effective managers should be able to offer direction to their employees. These directions could be in the form of directive coaching or non-directive coaching. After all, managers are responsible for ensuring that their organizational units deliver the results needed by the organization. If they fail to do that, the organization does not achieve its strategic goals. This webinar gives managers direction on how to offer directive coaching to their workers while having access to elements of non-directive coaching for further employee development.

Suppose you are in a management or supervisory position that is involved with managing individuals, teams, groups, or departments. In that case, you will receive valuable information on how to provide coaching for your people and how to get them to start thinking about ways to improve their performance and increase their productivity.

• Business Owners
• Business Managers & Supervisors
• Business Entrepreneurs
• Employees who are committed to learning more about being professional
• Professional Coaches & Consultants
• Management and Business School students
• Workforce Education students
• Workforce Education and Development practitioners
• Human Resources practitioners
• Human Resources Development professionals ·
• Organization Development practitioners
• Workplace Learning practitioners

William J. Rothwell, PhD, DBA, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, CPTD Fellow, RODC, FLMI is a Distinguished Professor in the
Workforce Education and Development program in the Department of Learning and Performance Systems at the
Pennsylvania State University, University Park campus.
Work Experience
Dr. Rothwell worked full-time in human resources, training and Organization Development in both government (Illinois Office of Auditor General) and in a multinational company (American Brands, #48 on the Fortune 500 list) from 1979 until he joined Penn State University as a professor to head up a graduate program in Human Resource Development/Organization Development He has been a consultant for over 50 multinational companies. Among his many clients are Motorola University China, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Siemens, Sony, GM Shanghai, Phillips, Erickson, HP, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the American Red Cross, Care, the U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. Postal Service, and many more. He is President of two consulting firms: (1) Rothwell & Associates, Inc. (a firm that focuses on public speaking online and onsite) and (2) Rothwell & Associates, LLC (a firm that focuses on consulting with an emphasis on succession planning, talent management and related topics). He is also, with his wife, a business owner of The Rothwell Partnership, which controls 10 homes for rent. From 1997 until 2022 he and his wife also owned and operated a personal care
home (Greenhills Village and Assisted Living Residence) for the elderly that was licensed by the State of Pennsylvania for 54 residents and employed 27 full-time and part-time employees.
Education and Professional Certifications 
Dr. Rothwell earned his Bachelor’s degree in English with High Honors and Department Honors from Illinois State University; he earned a Master’s degree and completed all courses for the Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; he earned his Master of Arts in Business Administration (MABA) from Sangamon State University (a university since renamed the University of Illinois at Springfield); he earned his Ph.D. with a specialization in Human Resource Development from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and, in 2022 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) by the Alliance International University in Dutch Curaçao in the Caribbean. He has also earned multiple professional certifications: the Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) from the Human Resource Certification Institute; the Society for Human Resource Management Senior Professional in Human Resources (SHRM-SCP); the Registered Organization Development Consultant (RODC) designation from the International Society for
Organization Development and Change; and the Certified Professional in Talent Development (CPTD) Fellow (member of the Hall of Fame) from the Association for Talent Development. He is a Fellow of the Life Management Institute (FLMI) designation based on passing 10 graduate courses in the insurance field. (The latter is essentially a Master’s degree in insurance.)
International Work
Dr. Rothwell has been to China 83 times, to Singapore 32 times, and has visited every continent (except Antarctica) to do training, consulting, college teaching, and research. He has chaired 110 Ph.D. committees at Penn State, has served on doctoral committees at foreign universities in England, China, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates, and is still listed as a visiting professor at Nankai University in Tianjin China, a visiting professor at Shanghai JiaoTong University in Shanghai, and a special speaker at Renmin University in Beijing China. (He taught 10 MBA courses at Nankai University and 10 MBA courses at Beijing University.)
Awards
In 2022 Dr. Rothwell was named a Distinguished Professor in the College of Education, was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Organization Development Network, and earned the Global Lifetime Achievement Award by Penn State Global Programs (the university’s highest award for doing work internationally). He received the Distinguished Researcher Award from the College of Education in 2016 and was given the Graduate Faculty Teaching Award in the 2004-2005 academic year. (The teaching award is a single award given to one faculty member on Penn State’s 24 campuses each year.). In 2011 he was given the Association for Talent Development’s Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance Award; in 2016 he received the Best Global Training and Development Leadership Award from the World HRD Congress in India, and in 2014 he was named a Brandlaureate in Malaysia. In 2022 he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by The OD Network; in 2023 he was inducted into the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame; in 2024 he was named to Marquis’ Who’s Who in America; and in 2024 he has been notified that he will be given the International Society for Performance Improvement’s (ISPI) Thomas F. Gilbert Distinguished Professional Achievement Award at the 2025
conference. 
Publications and Presentations

Dr. Rothwell has authored, coauthored, edited, or coedited 158 books since 1987 and has delivered over 2,000 professional online and onsite presentations over 30 years in 15 nations. His recent books since 2020 include Succession Planning for Small Business and Family Business, Rethinking Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, High-Performance Coaching for Managers, Organization Development (OD) Interventions: Executing Effective Organizational Change, Virtual Coaching to Improve Group Relationships: Process Consultation Reimagined, Adult Learning Basics 2nd ed., Increasing Learning and Development’s Impact Through Accreditation, The Essential HR Guide for Small Businesses and Startups, and Workforce Development: Guidelines for Community College Professionals, 2nd ed.