Over the past few years, a lament I’ve heard time and time again from leaders, especially in big companies, is “Our best people are the ones who leave. They get seduced away by cool startups, or decide to stat their own company, or leap at the chance to work for companies they assume are wonderful, like Google or Apple.”
Finding and keeping great talent is one of the key challenges facing organizations today. So, what’s a leader to do? You can’t single-handedly change the culture of your company to make it more employee-friendly. And you can’t usually do too much to change your organization’s approach to employee compensation or benefits (at least in the short-term).
But one thing you can do: coach your employees to support their growth. Survey after survey shows that people want autonomy, mastery and purpose in their work – even more than they want money or job perks. In other words, people want to do work that has meaning for them (purpose), and they want to get good at it (mastery) so they can do it in a self-initiated and self-directed way (autonomy).
Becoming a skillful coach for your best employees can help give them all three. I’m defining coaching here as deciding with your employees how they can acquire new skills and capabilities (that you both want them to learn), and then supporting their learning. In other words, helping them master new skills and therefore become more autonomous in ways that serve a purpose for them and for the organization.

Here’s a crash course on what you need to be a good coach for your employees:
The Mindset Of A Coach: Before we talk about how good coaches behave, let’s focus on how they think. Good coaches have what we call “the mindset of a coach,” which we define as believing in people’s potential and wanting to help them succeed. This mindset results in self-talk like “I really think Joe can grow, I just have to help him get clear on what it will take,” or “Hmm, I wonder what more Sally needs to learn in order to succeed? We should sit down together and figure this out.”
I would go so far as to say that if you don’t have this mindset about an employee you’re trying to coach, you won’t be able to coach that person.  Think about it: as an employee, have you ever had a manager who didn’t believe in you?  Who wasn’t invested in helping you be successful?  For most people, it’s very difficult - like walking through quicksand carrying weights. And it can also be a continual wearing-away of your own positive beliefs about your potential:  it’s much harder to believe in yourself when the person who’s responsible for managing your work day-to-day doesn’t believe in you lowest credit card processing.

I’ve experienced that in my career (no fun!) – but I’ve also experienced having a boss who did believe in me; who thought I was capable and talented and who made it very clear – through his words and actions – that he wanted to help me grow.  And even though that was very many years ago, my memory of working for him is an inspiration to me in dealing with the people I manage even today.