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A Focus on Coaching: Snow Easy Job

by Mike Ma

As with all New Year's resolutions, we too have them at kasina. One of them is to rejuvenate our commitment to coaching our employees: the very same goal that many of our clients share with us as well.

I've learned a lot about this from my second job I just started. I signed on as a snowboarding instructor at Mount Snow's Perfect Turn Program (you know, just in case this kasina thing doesn't work out). Two things I would like to share that are helping me be a better coach:

1. Strength ID and Enhance - these four words were beat into us by our trainers - over and over again. It basically means, no matter how bad your student is doing, find what their asset is and work from there.

A student who is screaming like a banshee while plowing straight down the bunny hill
- You're doing an awesome job of keeping your board straight. Let's go diagonally across the mountain and work on some traverses so you can feel the edges this time.

A dancer who swings his hips like Elvis on crack to make a turn
- You do a great job of initiating your turns with your hips. Let's enhance that by cutting the hip speed by half. Also, you can try moving the front knee with your hips to have even more fun.

Strength ID and Enhance over and over again. I thought of this as a pragmatic, rapid fire way to apply the Marcus Buckingham First, Break All the Rules school of thought.

Try it sometime. It's hard to do. You also have to fight all the old urges to yell or scold your team members (You did what with that call?!? That marketing piece was missing THAT?!?!). What's more, unlike many of the training programs we observed in our last study on sales training, focusing on strengths requires you to a) realize what the strengths of your team members are and b) individualize comments using specific, positive feedback.

2. Focus on Fun - As Dan Pink has so eloquently written in A Whole New Mind (one of my Book Club picks), work is the new play and those who are really good at playing tend to be good at working. I'd like to challenge the idea of "Job Training" and refocus on "Play Training". To illustrate, if you listen to the best instructors here is a sampling of what they say:

- Try X this time. See if that is more fun for you. If not, we'll try something else.
- Are you hurt? Are you smiling? OK, then we are snowboarding!
- OK. Less talk, more playing.
- This run, I'd like you to work on your smile. Not nearly enough smiling going on.
- Go play.

To some degree, I know all this may sound hokey, but consider this: If it works when we are getting people to strap a sliding piece of wood and fiberglass to their feet for the first time and pay for it, then imagine if we did this for people who are already trained and experienced for the function we pay them to do!

If you want to test this some time, drop me a line. I would be happy to give anyone from the industry a Learn-to-Ride lesson if they want to meet me in Vermont. We'll go play.