Sharpening Your Coaching Skills
In our last post, we talked about the factors driving coaching’s rise to prominence in the workplace, the foundations for solid coaching, and how to get into the coaching mindset. Now, let’s look at how to refine your leader-coach skills to deliver that shared success for which you and your employees strive.
Push and pull
The mechanics of coaching are critical to its effectiveness. The most impactful coaching conversations are a balance of “push” and “pull.” Push involves “pushing information” with positive and corrective feedback and guidance to help increase awareness. In contrast, pull focuses on drawing out information through deep listening and effective questioning, to help people find their their own solutions.
Coaching conversations cannot be just feedback-driven, nor should they feel like an interrogation. Our experience is that many leaders who believe they are “coaching” actually spend most of their time “pushing,” with a minimal amount of effort devoted to asking probing questions and truly listening. The quality of the questions drives the quality of the coaching.
You can practice your pull skills with a simple partner exercise:
- Help a partner resolve a work problem by only asking questions
- Do NOT use the following questions “have you tried?”, “have you considered?”, “what if you?” or “have you thought about?”
- Avoid making statements
- Avoid using questions that offer suggestions of advice
- Ask questions for a full seven minutes
- Repeat the exercise by switching roles
This exercise underscores the challenge of questioning/listening as opposed to simply advising. It forces you to truly focus on the other person, and his or her motivations and needs.
The framework
Having a framework in place for coaching conversations can help keep the dialogue focused on information that’s meaningful to the coachee. Four key areas for a leader-coach to explore include:
- What? – Establish the topic, define the focus/outcome, and clarify the goal. Sample question: “What is the outcome you most desire?”
- Why? – Identify whether the individual is “connected” to the outcome. Explore how the person finds his or her energy. Sample question: “If you can’t achieve X, what will it feel like?”
- Why not? – Clarify the barriers, roadblocks and problems that limit action/improvement. As a coach, you may not have to ask a question to understand how the individual creates his or her own barriers. More often than not, you will pick up on the challenges simply by listening.
- How? – Build a plan together for action and/or improvement. Sample question: “Are you being realistic – is this too big…or are you not going far enough?”
This framework can help keep the conversation on track and focused on a win-win for both parties – but it’s by no means a linear process. Through listening and discussion, you can adapt it to the coachee in a manner that makes sense for everyone.
Action planning
Part of being an effective coach is having a plan for your coachees. Of course, not every aspect of your coaching relationship will be planned, but developing a coaching conversation action planner can help keep your major conversations focused forward movement.
In developing a coaching conversation action planner for each coachee, identify:
- The type of coaching needed – what type of conversations should be had – performance, development, career or multiple categories?
- Mindset – what is your mindset related to developing this individual? Do you have the trust, belief in his/her potential, and commitment to shared success?
- Navigate – Considering the conversation you have to have, note key points regarding their north, east, west and south.
- Next steps – what is the next thing you are going to do? What else do you need prior to having a coaching conversation with this individual?
Summing it up
The transformation to leader-coach doesn’t happen overnight; it requires a strategy and a dedication to that strategy. If you’re ready to take the next step, talk to your mentors, peers and experts to learn more about effective coaching techniques and begin developing a plan that works best for you.
Learn more on our HCI webcast on demand!
Interested in learning more about becoming a leader-coach? Watch our on demand HCI webcast, How Leaders Who Coach Can Change The Game: A Guide to Developing Your Coaching Skills.