As a coach, you care about your employees. This personal touch in a business environment is what most distinguishes you from your dinosaur manager doppelgangers. You care about your employees' futures, too. In fact, this is one area where you have no choice. You must concern yourself with your people's career development because of the nature of today's job market. That is, you must lord over an enriching work environment, where your employees can augment their skills and not fall behind the times — or you're going to lose the bulk of them to the competition.

If you box in your employees, and cut off all learning opportunities, many of them will leave your employ for bigger and better things. It's that simple! This is yet another reason why conscientious goal setting is so critical. The goals you set with your employees are, in actuality, their growth and development potentials verbalized and then acted upon.

Boldly Go

Contemplate this: When you set goals for yourself, you anticipate being more adept at something when they are realized. Think it through. If, for example, one of your goals is to see your entire department increase total sales by 20 percent in a six-month period — over and above the previous year's same time period — and you achieve that goal, you are a highly prized managerial commodity.

By reaching your bold — but obtainable — goal, you've positively charted your future. You've immediately afforded yourself more choices in where you can venture next in your career.

As for goal setting in concert with your staff, the same logical reasoning applies. Your employees are naturally thinking about their careers — their futures — and not yours. Don't feel too bad about this! Just work closely in assisting them in setting their uniquely personal goals in the framework of the business goals you need to accomplish.

Be always cognizant of how their present on-the-job goals can positively impact their futures. By making this enlightened long-range connection with your people, you will bond with them like crazy glue, and they in turn will work their arms and legs off for you.

Let Your Employees Structure Their Goals

Both you and your staff should always view goals in the larger context of what all of you will have gained when they're met. This is precisely why your employees' job-related goals must be made with your employees and not for your employees. When individuals are largely responsible for charting their own courses, they more fully appreciate what goal setting means for their futures.

You know what's best for your own career development. But it would be presumptuous of you to assume that you know what's best for any one of your employees' careers. Remember that coaching is a support system first and foremost. Support doesn't mean dictating jobs, goals, or career moves.

Advising Employees in Their Careers

What follows are some valuable career-development pointers that you should drive home to your employees. It's based on the experiences of successful men and women in business, their many lessons learned, and an overall understanding of the way things work and, of course, the way things are going to work tomorrow. The tips are designed to empower individuals to chart their own career courses.

• Establish Credentials

  No matter what kind of work you do, keep on doing it, and doing it well. A successful track record of accomplishments gives you the vaunted credentials that so many jobs demand. Whether you want to write a book on botany, or hope to manage an office staff of 60 people, you're going to be asked, “What are your credentials?”

  If you've majored in accounting in college, and worked as an investment banker, and have nothing else on your resume, you're probably not the best-qualified person to write a book on botany. Similarly, if your job history is that of a night watchman at a milk-bottling plant, you're not the best candidate for managing an office crammed with people in the light of day.

  So, always give it your best in Job A, for it will help you get Job B. And Job C will be largely based on Jobs A and B. That's the way the cookie usually crumbles. A solid job track record adds up to solid job credentials. And with solid job credentials, you can write your own career ticket.

• Strengthen Strengths

  Coaching and mentoring deem individuals to be unique beings with special talents and unique abilities all their own. Coaches labor valiantly to maximize individual performance by carefully tending to people, and understanding what they're all about, on a one-on-one basis. You know best what you excel in and what you most enjoy doing. These are the areas you should concentrate on and rely on to fulfill your career objectives and long-term ambitions.

  There's nothing more deflating than individuals in careers that bring them little joy and satisfaction, even when the money fields are green. Develop your special qualities to their fullest. Strengthen your strengths and know your weaknesses. Don't end up a square peg in a round-hole job.

  Career development is something coaching and mentoring management practices are cognizant of at all times. Both you, as the coach, and your employees are in an environment where achieving on-the-job goals places you all on higher planes as worker commodities. In other words, there are more positive options available to you along the highways and byways of your individual career journeys.

• Be a People Person

  Don't ever look upon your coworkers as if they are invisible, or worse, as obstacles in your career path. The most successful businesspersons are the ones who work alongside people and produce results in harmonious team settings. These men and women view their peers as extraordinary individuals — each with something to teach them. And they know that someday, one of these people may be in a position to help — perhaps in getting a job or supplying the name of somebody who can provide an important lead.

  The bottom line is: Establish amicable, professional relationships throughout your whole working career. Do this and you'll have plenty of useful contacts to tap into as your career unfolds and takes those inevitable twists and turns. It helps to know people. People, that is, who both know and respect you.

• Instill a Sense of Destiny

  A crucial role of a coach is to instill in workers a sense of destiny. If you manage with the realistic goals we've talked about, for both you and your employees, and you all realize them, you are on to something big — really big. Your employees' success here will convince them, like nothing else could, that they're the prime movers in charting their career courses. By seeing goals through, individuals in all positions are better for having set out to do big things, succeeded in doing them, and emerged from the whole goal-setting process more valuable worker commodities and better human beings, with greater knowledge, skills, and self-esteem.

• Conduct a Reality Check

  All of this focus on the importance of goals in the workplace sometimes confuses people unfamiliar with the purposes of coaching and mentoring in business circles. They think that coaching gives rise to a workplace more on the entertainment side of the ledger than the work side. These misguided souls envision the work climate under the leadership of a coach as something akin to visiting a theme park with cotton candy melting in their mouths and big red balloons in their hands. It's time to burst those balloons.

  Please your staff and the company that pays your salary, and you've accomplished what you were hired to do. This one-two punch always leads to success on numerous fronts. That is, you've improved your immediate lot and the lots of those who work alongside you. You've also brightened your future, as well as the futures of hardworking employees.

  Coaching and mentoring have nothing to do with employees having a grand old time, nor are they about satisfying workers' delusions of grandeur. Coaching and mentoring methodologies are nothing if not firmly planted in reality. It's a reality of what people can do, and what makes them want to do it and do it well.

  So, it's an absolute necessity that you always keep your employees rooted in the possible, because impractical goals are more than just pointless; they are disruptive in a business setting and harmful to job satisfaction and the overall bottom line of the company. On a person-to-person analysis, you've got to assess what each member of your team is truly capable of, and in what time parameters they can produce the results you need.