For production managers, staff development is an important tool for growing a skilled, engaged and adaptable team to drive creativity and bring high quality projects in on time and on budget. While staff development may bring to mind investment in skills training, workplace coaching is an alternative approach to supporting and developing you and your team.  

Workplace coaching is a developmental process designed to help staff improve their performance, skills, knowledge, and achieve their professional goals. This is done through a collaborative, two-way dialogue between a coach and the person being coached, focusing on unlocking potential rather than simply imparting knowledge. The primary aim is to enhance staff member's capabilities and effectiveness in their current role or prepare them for future responsibilities. This approach has particular benefits for creative industries as coaching also supports people to find their unique point of view and skills, and to think creatively about how to approach tasks.  

As well as benefitting staff who receive coaching, evidence shows that coaching has broader benefits for businesses.  

• Evaluations of coaching interventions have found that coaching improves relationships, teamwork and productivity. 
   

• Coaching can also support mental health in a fast-paced work environment (see Managing Workloads blog), improving wellbeing, reducing levels of burnout and allowing coaches to think clearly and deal with unexpected problems and rising demands.
    

• Coaching and the benefits it brings has also been linked to higher staff retention levels. This could be of particular benefit within the UK film industry where 63% of workers report a negative impact of work on their mental health and 64% have thought about leaving. Therefore, while investing in coaching may have an upfront cost, this comes with a strong return for businesses, with one study finding that coaching interventions have a 5.7 times return on investment.  

You can put coaching into practice for your team using the resources you already have internally. While bringing in external coaches can be beneficial, equipping your own leaders and managers with coaching skills shifts coaching from a rare, external intervention to an everyday management practice that benefits everyone. There are several ways to approach this: 

• manager coaches – managers coaching their direct reports, typically with a focus on achieving work goals and business requirements. This is the most common form of coaching. ,  

• internal coaches – colleagues who are outside of someone’s direct line of management, providing an ongoing program of one-on-one developmental interventions, or 

• everyday coaching – an approach where all managers/members of the organisation learn key coaching skills to deploy in everyday work.  

You can also take different approaches to aims and levels of engagement through coaching, typically one of three types of coaching:  

• Skills coaching: Short-duration, focused on specific behaviours. 

• Performance coaching: Focused on helping staff to set goals, overcome obstacles, and monitor performance. 

• Developmental coaching: A broader, more holistic approach that deals with personal and professional questions. 

Whichever approach you use, coaching should have a clear purpose in terms of why it is being used in your context, and its impact should be measurable and tracked to ensure it is effective. 

Embedding coaching into your business will require the development of key coaching skills among managers and/or your broader team. While developing these skills will likely take more than reading this blog post, you probably already possess and use coaching skills in your daily and working life. 
  

A key approach to coaching is to move away from answering staff member’s questions directly or giving them a set course of action to follow when they come to you with a problem, and towards helping them to think through problems themselves. While this might be more time consuming in the moment, it will help them to develop their own skills and knowledge, allowing them to grow in confidence and ability, and not need to ask you next time they encounter the issue. Taking this coaching approach can be done using a few key skills:  

• Ask open ended questions – how, what and why questions can help a people to think their problems through, and give you more detail on the situation  
   

• Actively listen – often, people will have the answers they need already. By being present and showing them that you are listening you can support them to work through the problem and find a solution. You might try repeating back to them what they have told you (e.g. saying “I’m hearing that you…” “Am I right in understanding that you mean…”) to prompt further discussion and demonstrate understanding.  
   

• Support them to think through options and alternatives – rather than telling someone what you would do in a situation, ask them what the options are, and then go further and prompt them to think of alternatives. This can be particularly fruitful when making creative decisions.  
   

• End with an action – after talking, listening and thinking about the potential options, work with staff to decide what they will do next.  

This approach may not always be appropriate (for example when you are up against a tight deadline, or when someone genuinely doesn’t have the skills and knowledge to complete a task). However, you will likely find that there are many opportunities for staff to coach one another at work, leading to more confidence, creativity, and knowledge among your team.