It seems like everyone is talking about coaching in business these days, and perhaps with good reason. In their 2005 Strategic Research Findings, the Sales Executive Council identified that teams not receiving coaching under perform by a significant margin. On the other hand, teams that report receiving more than three hours of coaching per month exceed their goals by 7% on average.

The report went further to identify that managers repeatedly under perform in the critical skill area of coaching their people. So, let’s explore one of the reasons this might be a problem.

To understand what works in terms of where to put your time and energy in coaching, consider a performance distribution curve. Arguably, across any organisation about 15% of people could be termed high performers, about 70% could be termed average performers and the bottom 15% low performers. It is now acknowledged that the opportunity for maximising organisational productivity lies in lifting the performance of your average performers, since they are not yet performing to their capacity and they make up the majority of your people.

In terms of coaching, conventional wisdom says to focus on our high-performers. They’re the people delivering for us so we want that to continue and we want to retain these people. However, most managers spread their coaching time equally across all of their team members. They don’t differentiate between their high, average and low performers.

What works best is something different again. If the opportunity to maximise productivity lies with our average performers, then the place we should spend most of our coaching time is with them. On the other hand we want to retain our high performers and continue to encourage their willingness to work hard, so we have to continue to spend some time with them.

Except for new, high potential team members, there is no evidence to suggest that spending coaching time with low performers delivers a substantial return on investment.

So, stop treating your people all the same. You have limited time to coach your people. Use it wisely by spending most of that time with your average performers.