Training young IT pros to be effective, self-assured employees may require some coaching on your part. Here are some tips for guiding your up-and-coming staffers so they develop self-confidence, motivation, and self-direction.
1. Provide the best instructions
Newer IT pros won't have the same level of background and experience as other IT pros in your organisation, so they'll need clear and direct instructions. Be explicit about what you need and expect. You may have to be more specific than you've had to be in the past. But the better you become at giving clear, specific instructions, the less coaching you'll have to do to correct differences between your expectations and how the novice staffer executes on your request.
The first step to providing better instructions is to realise that you can make no assumptions. You can't, for example, expect that young pros will know how to edit an Autoexec.bat file. You may have to help them understand things that would appear to be obvious at first glance.
2. Promote self-confidence
Most young professionals aren't completely self-confident yet. Self-confidence is a key component of professional development because it allows young pros to accept constructive criticism. It helps them understand that the feedback is simply about work-related behavior and not a personal slam.
Good feedback is always about behavior, but it's impossible to completely eliminate the possibility that an employee will take negative feedback personally. A lack of self-confidence complicates this process by making them perceive every behavioral comment as a personal attack. One of your goals in coaching young professionals is to foster, encourage, and develop self-confidence so that it becomes easier for them to accept negative feedback from anyone ââ,¬" even people with whom they have no relationship.
You can encourage self-confidence by providing a substantial amount of positive feedback and taking an interest in the young pros and their lives outside of work. People find strength in different areas of their life, whether it be spiritual, personal, or professional. No matter where a staffer draws his or her strength, it's important to facilitate the ability to take more from it.
3. Coach for motivation
Coaching your staffers through tactical day-to-day issues is certainly an important part of developing a young professional. But to truly unleash the raw energy contained within them, you'll have to do more than just coach for the tactical objectives. You'll need to coach for the advanced topics of motivation, problem-solving, and selfdirection.
An epidemic is occurring in organisations of all sizes: More and more individuals are "retired on active duty" (ROAD) or, as Denny Faurote of the Faurote Group would say, they "Quit and stayed." In other words, the employees are still showing up to work, going through the motions, and collecting a paycheck. They are not engaged and motivated to make the organisation a better place, to better themselves, or to learn something new.
The key to developing motivation is to allow young professionals to find tasks that interest them and that they do well. By allowing and encouraging them to work on such tasks, you'll motivate them to try to do more ââ,¬" even in those areas where they do not excel. Motivation is like a fire. It can jump from forest to forest and across roads, ditches, and other obstacles, if it's allowed to grow to a point of critical mass. Motivation must reach a critical mass, too, by feeding upon the belief that the work being produced is gifted work. Once motivation has achieved critical mass, it will spread like a fire into every area of an individual's life.
4. Coach for problem-solving skills
Teaching problem-solving skills is difficult because it requires a careful balance between providing the detailed clear instructions and feedback staffers need to meet expectations and allowing them the room to come up with their own solutions. Another challenge to teaching problem-solving skills is learning to recognise when a problem can be solved without your involvement. Encouraging young professionals to do their own problem-solving in a safe environment creates a feeling that solving problems on their own is an acceptable, encouraged way to do business.
For example, I remember a situation when a help desk professional approached me with a printing problem. We were working in DOS on a Novell 3.11 system. As I recall, the problem was fairly simple. Something had disturbed the mapping of the printer port to the Netware Queue. He wanted me to solve the problem for him, and I refused. Instead, I asked him explain to me how printing worked and how he might test each step. Initially, he was upset. He just wanted an answer to his question.
However, after he solved the problem on his own and came back to tell me what the problem was, he was happy that he'd worked it out himself. From that day forward, he never asked me to solve a problem again, although he asked me to be a sounding board for how he understood things worked. He started solving his own problems and made the transition into being a substantially more valuable professional.
5. Coach for self-direction
Self-direction is in many ways the natural result of combining motivation and problem-solving. Self-direction is an attribute we all seek in the professionals we work with. However, it's a skill that's getting harder and harder to find in the professionals we hire. Self-direction is seen as simply not having to continually worry about what a professional is doing. Self-directed individuals seek additional activities when they're no longer productive and locate problems they can solve when they have downtime.
Being motivated allows professionals to want to keep busy. They have the desire to continue to work so that they can continue to improve. The problem-solving component allows them to identify problems of all types, which they can solve. By coupling the two skills, they become motivated to solve any problems they run across. People who are constantly trying to solve problems and make themselves better never need people to tell them what to do.
