At its core, coaching is a simple idea: Help your direct reports improve both what they do and who they are. But it’s not a simple process. Good coaches create a safe space to have an open discussion, ask the right questions (and genuinely listen to the answers) and constructively challenge the employee.
This is hard enough to do when you’re sitting face to face. What happens when some of your direct reports are hundreds or even thousands of miles away?
It’s challenging, largely because you don’t have a shared context with them. On any given day in the office, employees pick up countless pieces of information about their colleagues. Such information becomes part of a mental database we use to interpret situations, decode interactions and understand motivations.
This database is critically important in coaching. When you coach, you’re helping people understand the consequences of their actions and recognize any disconnect between what they wanted to accomplish and what actually happened. That is harder to do from a distance. Also, not sharing context reduces trust—a cornerstone of effective coaching. The people you’re coaching need to trust you enough to share their successes and failures, expose their vulnerabilities and ask for help.
Even with only intermittent visits or phone calls or video conferences, a manager still can coach:
1 Get the problem out in the open. Have an honest discussion about the challenges of establishing and maintaining an effective coaching relationship at a distance. Thus you build rapport and trust by creating the shared experience of working together to overcome the distance factor.
2 Formalize the informal. Plan ahead and set a fixed schedule for how often you will interact. Research shows that a predictable rhythm is a key driver of trust at a distance. Spend part of your time together establishing a shared context with the people you’re coaching. Ask not only what they do in the office but also where they choose to spend the rest of their time. Thus you gain a deeper perspective on their personal and professional life.
3 Find a sounding board. If possible, seek out someone in your reports’ location who can serve as a sounding board—someone you trust to help you assess whether your recommendations make sense locally. Distance takes away much of the information we need to understand our distant reports. Putting in place a few simple structures and processes can help bring you closer.
Mark Mortensen is an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD. Mark Mortensen