In a business setting, the person responsible for counseling the staff is the manager. To be an effective counselor you need to understand what a counselor is and is not. A counselor is a person who gives advice or recommends a course of action. A counselor is not someone who ‘lays down the law’ with a heavy hand.
As a manager, it is your responsibility to keep the big picture in view and guide your staff toward reaching these goals. If you are a new manager, then the people you are supervising may have been in place when you were given the role of manager. To properly counsel these employees, you need to understand what task they are assigned to perform and how they must get it done. You also need to understand the environmental factors of their particular position that can have an affect on their quality of work.
I work for the largest franchise in the country in my particular industry. Prior to giving me any direct responsibility for resolving problems with the staff that I would be managing, my manager allowed me to work with these people for a number of weeks. Once this was completed, and he and I both felt that I understood the business, he started to give me the responsibilities that came with the position.
One of these responsibilities is to notify the employees when they make a mistake on an invoice. I could just go to the employee in question and tell him to ‘get your act together’. This would have a decidedly negative affect on this person, and the results would be a disgruntled employee whose quality of work would suffer. I chose instead to use the approach of a counselor. Understanding that these people work long hours performing physically tiring work allows me to realize how mistakes can happen. My job as the manager is to look for ways to ensure that the mistake does not continue to happen before I speak to the employee.
When I meet with the employee I follow a set pattern that allows them to realize my respect for them and that they are part of the problem solving process. (The invoices come to me with questions or corrections on them from the accounting department.) I approach the employee with the invoice, and ask them to tell me whether the question or correction is a valid one. This allows them to move past the comments from accounting and evaluate the invoice as a whole. I realize that they have a unique knowledge of this sale that nobody else will have because they were there when the services were sold.
