If you manage in China, you have to learn to do training and coaching. They are not the same thing.

Training can be done by you, an in-house specialist, or an outside specialist. It is teaching someone to perform a new skill or use a new process.
Coaching can only be done by you or a direct supervisor. Coaching is more about working with someone to improve their performance and help develop their potential.

Both are necessary, but serve different purposes in the China organization.

Training should be viewed as an operational and QC issue. It is required to complete the HR hiring & recruiting function. Even if you are hiring experienced people, there should still be a regular, systematic training program. You are probably going to want to attack the training challenge from 3 levels: 1 – Big picture and Vision stuff, which you should do yourself. 2 – Specific skills and job related things, which your managers and supervisors should be doing, and 3 – Basic, background or technical issues, which will probably require outsourcers.

Coaching should be done by a direct boss or senior managers. Coaching and mentoring are both extended dialogues between managers with the goal of improving performance over the long term. Western managers are always told that they have to be careful about building relationships with Chinese colleagues and staff. Coaching is a great way of doing just that. Done regularly and sensitively, it will form the backbone of a healthy long-term relationship with your team. It is possible to coach badly, however, which can make you look insensitive, condescending and mean. Timing counts. A few positive or helpful sentences every day is good; hour-long criticisms once a quarter are counter-productive.

Quiz: How much time do you spend coaching your top 3 managers every week? Be honest. Coaching is not chatting or criticizing – it must be intended to improve business performance. If your answer is somewhere between “none” and “whenever someone screws up, which is all the time”, then you might want to take a more systematic approach to your company’s coaching needs.

Build coaching into your management system. Use meetings and feedback systems to determine where your team needs attention, and schedule coaching sessions to diagnose and fix problems. Coaching is not criticizing or correcting – it is the foundation of your company’s management development program.