The phrases “managing by coaching” and “manager as coach” describe a management practice involving the application of various coaching principles to the management of employees and employee groups.Managing by coaching is a more practical, real-world implementation of the phrase “managing by walking around,” since, to me, the walking around part did not give the employees or the manager much opportunity to chat.At its heart (and soul), managing by coaching is about the manager talking with his employees to understand what motivates and excites them and how the manager and the employees can develop a continual dialogue on a variety of work related topics.It might be that the manager has an idea to improve a specific work process. He may not know exactly what is needed so he engages his employees in a problem-solving discussion. He enters the dialogue with his employees confident that, collectively, his employees will develop a solution and will be able to implement it. He understands his role to be that of the facilitator, the encourager, the coach.The manager may have the talents to facilitate the process review or he may have a team member who has been trained in that process. The central element here is that the manager understands it is more his role to encourage dialogue, problem solving and discussion. He understands he is more effective as a manager by encouraging his employees to arrive at solutions.I have worked with quite a few managers who were not certain, at first, that they could perform this managing by coaching role very well. Certainly they could learn how to manage, create a productive work environment, or establish effective motivating procedures. But they were a bit uncertain about the coaching role. They also sensed that they were missing a better understanding of the management role they occupied.When I see this uncertainty it is important to quantify its cause. I have found that diagnostic profiles assist managers in understanding what their strengths and talents are in motivating their employees better. These profiles help managers to understand not only their own behavioral preferences and drivers; they also help the managers to understand how to assess their employees’ behavioral preferences and drivers.It is important, as part of a managing by coaching program to help the managers and their employees become more success focused by training the manager to learn successful management techniques, successful coaching techniques, and the effective use of appropriate diagnostic profiles.The use of formal authority to lead and manage others does not yield effective results over time. Managing by coaching is effective at motivating and managing employees to excel.
Health and Fitness Software, What Should Be In It? Part 2
A good health and fitness program needs to focus on factors that prevent us from becoming unhealthy. One factor that has definitely a correlation with unhealthiness is obesity. The health consequences for being overweight or obese are vast and may include high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, gallbladder disease, sleep apnea and some cancers to name a few.Losing weight and becoming healthy for obese and overweight people is imperative and well designed fitness software can support this. One way it can be helpful is to calculate a person’s calorie balance and correlate these numbers to their body measurements and vital signs. It is very encouraging and motivating to see yourself lose weight and in the same instance your blood pressure and cholesterol levels go down.Weight loss all boils down to your calorie balance. If your intake is higher then you spend, you gain weight. In part 1, we talked about the calorie intake side of the calorie balance equation. Part 2 describes the requirements for the calories spent module.Let’s start out with the assumption that the calories spent will significantly vary between people and can not be generalized between high, medium and low activity level. We need a more precise method than that. If we look just plainly at the factors that influence our energy spending, we can conclude the following:Larger people will spend more energy than small people. It makes sense that when you move more weight it costs more energy. Younger people will spend more than older people. Males will spend more than females. Tall thin people will spend more energy than short stocky with the same weight. The tall thin person has more body surface and loses more heat. Lean muscled people spend more energy than the average or overweight person with the same weight. Muscles use more energy than fat cells. Active people will spend more energy than sedative people.During a day we execute many activities all with a different length of time and intensity level. Between activities there can be huge differences in intensity level. For instance fishing is way less intense than rowing a boat. Also within the same activity different intensity levels exist. For instance 30 minutes running will cost more energy then 30 minutes jogging or walking. Executing an activity with a high intensity level will spend more energy per unit of time.When calculating the calorie balance, the fitness software should take all the above factors into its formula and adjust the variables automatically. For instance if somebody loses weight, this should be immediately reflected in the outcome. Let’s say I weigh in on Monday and the system calculates 2500 calories spent and two weeks later I weigh again and provided my daily activities were exactly the same but I lost two pounds, the system should automatically calculate the new calories burned taking the 2 pounds lost into account.You should have the ability to create multiple activity plans in the system, individualized per person. Most people repeat their daily activities on a weekly basis, if today is Tuesday, next Tuesday my activities will be pretty much the same. From Monday till Friday the activities may be similar, but they can differ significantly from weekend to weekend.In order to calculate the calories spent during the day precisely, you will need to record all activities, the length of time for each activity and the intensity level it was executed. Doing so could mean a lot of time behind the computer entering all this data. To circumvent this problem, the software should allow you to create a plan that is repeated on a weekly basis with default values. Now you need to only to copy this plan and update the differences from what actually occurred. The actual activities with their time length are noted on an activity worksheet that can be printed on a daily basis. This way your data can be recorded within 30 seconds.Next we need to be able to compare our calories spent with our calorie intake. This can be done in the form of a chart that displays the calorie balance per person over time. See the following example: calorie analysis. This chart makes abundantly clear what your calorie balance is and consequently shows the reason why you lose weight or not lose weight.In the next article I will talk about body measurement and vital sign readings and how they correlate to your work outs, supplement intake etcetera.