Posted on January 26th, 2012
Coaching is all the rage these days. We don’t have managers in our organizations anymore, we have coaches. We were already moving in the direction of coaching before the demographic research showed that the younger generations don’t want bosses and managers, they want coaches and mentors. If you are in a position of leading or developing other people in your organization, developing coaching skills may be one of your greatest assets.
The concept of coaching has come out of the sports arena. We kind of have a view of coaching as being a laid back process where everyone should be having lots of fun, although this isn’t always the case. When I do coaching workshops I will often start them by asking the questions from their sports experiences, “What makes a great coach?†“What makes a bad coach?†As people list off the attributes it becomes really clear that what makes good and bad coaches in the sports arena holds true in the work place.
Good coaches focus on skill and team development and they receive Certificate 4 in training and assessment to help them with this. Why should our expectations and support of coaches at work be any different? Yet coaching in the workplace can, and does, fail. When it fails, it is usually for one of two reasons: the coaching did not follow a sound coaching process and/or the coach did not take responsibility for their role in achieving outcomes.
On the second point, most people can be coached. If we find them uncooperative, hard to work with or not producing results, rather than faulting them for why it isn’t working, maybe we need to examine our assumptions, expectations and process around coaching. Maybe it isn’t them. Maybe it is us. Often a change in approach will produce different results.
Which leads into the first point: understanding the process of coaching. Coaching is a structured process of skill development where learning takes place through discovery and reflection rather than total instruction. It is about building trust and creating a safe environment for the person being coached to be open and honest and take some risks without reprisals.
Each coaching session is really a conversation and this can be misleading because it often feels very casual. The coaching conversation will only be successful if it is logically and psychologically satisfying to the person being coached. This happens when they perceive they can influence the outcome of the conversation, they believe their emotions are acknowledged and understood and they have sense of completeness or closure at the end of the conversation.
In coaching one of my clients on how to coach a member of his team about a particularly upsetting event, the first reponse was “I’m going to lay down the law!†We explored what the likely reaction to that would be: shutting down the conversation because the team member would perceive no ability to influence the outcome of the conversation. My client decided to start with a question: “What do you think my motives are in this situation?†It generated a healthy discussion that never would have happened otherwise.
Emotions always need to be acknowledged up front. You don’t have to agree with the emotion and you don’t have to know you would have experienced the same emotional response to the same situation. All you really have to be able to do is say something along the lines of “I can understand why you would feel this way†and genuinely mean it. It is always astonishing what happens when emotional reactions are acknowledged. It clears the path for dealing with issues.
There are two processes of coaching. The first is responding to needs. Someone approaches you and says they want help with achieving a goal, changing something or growing professionally. The second is initiating alternatives. This is usually when someone is underperforming or not meeting expectations in the workplace and this is always more difficult than when things are going well.
In the first instance, you need to clarify expectations, establish outcomes, provide resources like information, advice, instruction or cert 4 training depending on the circumstance, confirm mutual understanding and build strategies to agree on next steps. It is important at this stage that the person being coached takes on responsibility for outcomes and next steps, otherwise no progress will be made.
The first challenge of this stage is that it is usually missing a feedback mechanism. We have the meeting, decide on actions and there is no follow up meeting to see what has taken place. The other common issue is not clearly delineating outcomes. We don’t have to follow up if we’re not clear about outcomes.
The follow up piece is even more commonly missed when the coaching is about initiating alternatives. We are so relieved to have the meeting over with and the situation handled that we don’t give a second though to a follow up meeting. And we are always surprised when the situation does not miraculously resolve itself. It is at this point we often blame the person we are coaching. In fact, the missing piece is likely the lack of accountability created by the knowledge of a follow up meeting.
Once next steps have been agreed to, it becomes pretty easy to say “let’s check in next Friday morning at 9:30 to see how you are making out with thisâ€. Establish a firm meeting time and stick to it.
In the follow-up meeting itself, start with what’s working and what has gone well. This helps people see their progress and focus on success. Then you move to what hasn’t worked so well by framing concerns or road blocks as “How could I ….†To get around the road blocks, you ask the person being coached to generate ideas to move forward and then select specific ones they want to work on, as detailed in this article.
A successful coaching model begins by establishing outcomes based on current competence and areas identified for improvement. Once the outcomes are established, it is pretty easy to identify next steps, goals or learning objectives that are mutually agreeable. It is particularly important that the person being coached take the lead on this so that the goals have energy for them. The person then works on these goals during the course of their work, prepared to report back on progress because specific follow up sessions have been set. In the follow up session, the coach asks what worked and what didn’t, helps the coachee identify solutions and provides feedback or observations on what they see happening. This is also a good time to ask questions to get the person being coached to work this through themselves. Finally, you establish new goals and a new follow up meeting until the outcomes are achieved.
Good coaching questions to ask are:
Posted in | Comments Off