Last Updated on 2024/06/17
Dear Friends,
Happy New Year! May 2024 be a wonderful year for you.
Each year we facilitate several Effective Everyday Coaching training programs. There is also a “coaching lite” version called Developmental Dialogue.
Most of the participants are leaders or project managers who want to learn to use coaching techniques to boost performance, enable development, and empower others to do their best work.
Coaching Gets Results, But…
The benefits of coaching are well established. Coaching dialogue stimulates thinking. It unleashes potential. It builds trust and leads to higher levels of satisfaction and engagement.
But…learning to coach effectively can be challenging for many leaders. A few common issues that come up:
How can I take the time to coach when I need them to produce results now?
Why coach someone to find their own best answer when I can just tell them what works best?
I ask questions and my team members don’t know how to answer them. They expect me to tell them what to do.
Am I a manager, or am I a coach? I can’t be both.
These are good questions. If you would like to know how I answer them, read on.
*This is the first in a series of three editions of True Insights devoted to Coaching at Work.
Why are We Coaching?
The first thing to clarify is the purpose of coaching.
Do we coach to improve performance or to support learning and development?
The answer is both. If you coach only around performance, you will miss opportunities to support another person’s learning. This is often as simple as remembering to ask, “What has been the most valuable thing you learned this week?” in a one-on-one conversation.
If you only coach for development, you are ignoring the practical need to solve problems, develop better solutions, and reach or exceed targets.
If you coach well, you will experience a number of benefits.
- People will be less dependent on you or others for solutions. They will be able to do their work more efficiently and at a higher quality standard.
- You will help others build confidence in their capabilities.
- It will stimulate creativity and critical thinking.
- Motivation to do great work will increase.
- You will help people understand their potential and perform at their best.
Who is Coaching For?
The answer to this question is crucial to your effectiveness as a coach. If you are coaching to make your life easier, you will fail to coach well.
Am I suggesting that you should coach for purely altruistic reasons? No, but I am suggesting that if you coach for any reason other than to support the success and growth of the person you are coaching, you will use an approach to coaching called “coaching for compliance.” You will expect certain answers to your questions. You will judge the quality of the other person’s thinking. You will ask leading questions. The person you coach will feel pressured to please you. All of which will result in failed coaching.
If you don’t believe me, Google Dr. Richard Boyatzis’s work on Coaching for Compassion versus Coaching for Compliance.
Coaching must be done as part of an effort to help someone succeed, learn, and be the very best they can be. It doesn’t mean we don’t challenge the way people think. The best coaching will challenge people’s thinking, but not because we want people to think the way we think. We challenge thinking in the people we coach because we want to help them think in a way that is most helpful to them.
The ironic thing is, if you coach someone you work for their benefit, you will benefit as much as they do from your coaching.
When to Coach and When to Teach
Coaching is not always the best way to communicate with team members. Let’s say someone just joined your team and on their first day, asks you where the restroom is. Would you coach this person? “What is your goal?” “What options do you see?” “What is getting in your way?” Your new team member would have serious doubts about your sanity.
Experience is the barometer that tells us when someone would benefit from coaching, and when they need us to teach them or share our experience with them, aka, mentoring.
Some weeks ago, I had a conversation with a bright student at my graduate school (Thunderbird in Phoenix, Arizona). He wanted to discuss how he could network with others in a way that felt more natural to him than the typical approach to networking he’d observed. He’d obviously thought about the subject for a while, so I started with coaching. I asked him what he hoped to accomplish with his networking activities. I asked him what felt unnatural about the way he sees others networking. Then I asked him what kind of relationships he likes to build with people, and how he goes about building those relationships. Asking him these questions helped him think more clearly about how to network in a way that feels good to him. He was less puzzled.
Then he asked me if I felt that a lot of networking seems to be about building shallow relationships in which two people use each other for mutual gain. It would not be helpful to him for me to ask him a question in response, so I shared my experience with him. I told him there is no need to build shallow relationships, that he would be better off following his heart, and that this would lead to building relationships that would be meaningful and helpful to him and others. In other words, by sharing my experience, I taught him something he might not have known before.
The best conversations you will have with your team members will be similar. A mix of telling or teaching, mentoring, and coaching. All of them have their use, depending on the situation.
Next Time: The Coaching “Dance”
We’ve begun to address some of the questions managers ask when they are learning to coach. In the next edition, I will explain how to be a “manager who coaches.” Someone who drives great performance without needing to use the command-and-control style of management that is of very limited value in today’s workplace.
Yours in learning,
True
P.S. See True Talk #17 for my Top Three Tips on how to optimize the effectiveness of your coaching.