Benefits of Coaching

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A Step A Day, coaching

How do I develop my skills to face challenges at work? How can I develop competences to grow within my organisation? How can I gain the confidence to carry out responsibilities I have never dealt with before? The answer to these questions for today’s executives lies in coaching.

Nic Paton writes that ” Coaching Is No Longer The Preserve of the Elite“. Apparently, as many as 7 out of 10 British employers use coaching in their organisations as compared to 2/3 rds a year ago. Nearly 8 out of 10 employers that offered coaching to all their employees used it for “general personal development”, with three quarters saying they used it for “helping poor performance”.

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The Coach is Not an Agony Aunt

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A Step A Day, coaching

I met a person who expressed interest in becoming a coach. When we got talking I asked him what made him think he would make a good coach. He promptly replied “I am a very good listener. People feel good talking to me”.

I told him listening was undoubtedly an important skill for a coach but pointed out that coaching meant more than just listening. I shared an experience:

After several meetings with one individual I was coaching. I recognized that we were not making much progress. This led me to do a bit of introspection. In the very first session he had so much to share that it was clear that he had a lot to get off his chest. I was patient and allowed him to speak. I finally had to interrupt him and speak of the agenda we needed to arrive at.

Use of Data in Coaching

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A Step A Day, coaching, Feedback

In a coaching assignment, you can’t just tell some one to change what has become a way of life for them. The aggressive person will not easily accept that he/she is aggressive just as the unassertive person will not like to accept that others find them easy to manipulate.

To make them reflect and understand that they have this drawback and how their behaviour is affecting others- and thereby themselves – adversely, we need to use a lot of feedback data to create awareness.

Coaching? Not for me!

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A Step A Day, coaching

There are some situations where , as a coach, we need to use considerable tact and diplomacy. Here are a few cases from my experience:

1. When I first met the lady executive who I was asked to coach, I could see the skepticism in her eyes. Her manager had not briefed her at all about my role and the coaching assignment. He had arranged for me to meet with her and felt his job was over. The lady was more upset about her manager’s role in this episode than being coached.
2. The executive concerned felt he did not need any coaching. He felt these new fangled initiatives were not for people like him.
3. The person concerned felt that the organization had singled him out for coaching. He feared that his peers would feel there were inadequacies in him which warranted such an action.

As you can see, in these cases, the people concerned were:

“What if…?”

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A Step A Day, coaching, scenario planning

A technique often used in coaching is the “What if…?”.

We use “What If ?” questions to prepare the coachee to:

• Face challenges consequent to a particular action planned and
• Open up their own thoughts to a diverse range of possibilities

They are pushed to consider what might happen under different circumstances. I was engaged in preparing Menon, ( not his real name) a senior executive, to present a plan to his top management team. This plan, about which he was very excited, involved a fair amount of risk and considerable investment on the part of the organization.

What Bugs You?

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A Step A Day, causes and effects, coaching

In coaching , we get the coachee thinking of specific incidents and talking about specific feelings to understand how they feel and why they feel the way they do. However, as we experience so many feelings all through the day, it is not practical or even desirable to attempt to capture them all.

Yet, it is easier to analyze specific situations which have caused the coachee frustration. Have coachees record or recall incidents when they felt frustrated, hurt, angry or down at work. Get them to relate what actually happened and help them see possible causes.

Motivation in Coaching

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A Step A Day, coaching, motivation

As the old adage goes : “It needs two hands to clap”. One cannot discount the importance of the motivation to learn and perform better on the part of the person being coached. However brilliant the coach may be, at the end of the day, results come from those being coached. These results are based on their motivation.

Both the fear of being left behind and the desire for greater rewards are potential motivators. Here are a few cases that come to mind:

Coaching Fundamentals

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A Step A Day, coaching

“What’s with this coaching stuff?” asked a young manager the other day. ” Can you tell me briefly what it’s about?” I explained that firstly a coach is not necessarily an external expert. As a manager, he too has responsibility for coaching his team.

Coaching seeks to close the gap between the current and desired performance of an individual or team. Help develop your team members by :

• mutually assessing goals and current performance
• understanding the present situation
• exploring possible solutions
• drawing up specific, achievable goals
• supporting them in their action plans

I clarified that as an external coach, it is not necessary to know everything about people’s work to coach them well. It is indeed advantageous to take an objective view of an employee’s goals without being bogged down by details.

Coaching succeeds when you help employees learn from their mistakes, identify their performance targets and take responsibility for implementing corrective actions.

Good coaching avoids telling people what to do. The worst word a coach can use is “ Don’t”. Instead help them understand consequences of their actions. Instead of saying ” Don’t be late” try “ Have you seen the benefits of coming on time?”

Look at the effect of coaching on delegation. If you don’t take the time and effort to coach, the capabilities of your team and the trust you have in them will be limited. This results in your doing most of the work yourself. You feel under stress and you cannot delegate.

On the positive side, by coaching for skills, you make your team members more competent. This makes trusting them to deliver more easy. You are able to delegate more to them resulting in higher challenges for them and less stress for you. It frees your time to concentrate on more important tasks.

“All said and done” I said “Coaching is a practical and useful way to develop skills and talents in your team”.

 

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Mike Chitty on Feedback & Coaching

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coaching, Feedback

I am not sure how many readers go through all the comments following a post.

Behaviour based feedback should be the first step in the development process and precede coaching says Mike Chitty, owner of Realise Development.

I thought Mike’s comment on my post on “A Coaching Model” should be reproduced in full:

“Great post Prem.

I hope I can add something from my experience in training managers to coach.

I think that often there are much more effective and efficient ways to help people learn than coaching and these should always be tried before coaching is used.

I try to get all the managers I work with to coach all team members on goal based coaching contracts all the time! This builds the ability of the team to be way more productive and more efficient. But coaching is only used when other simple techniques like feedback have failed to produce the desired results.

Helping managers to be specific about the behaviours they are trying to develop is always the starting point for me. I ask what kind of things they wish they could develop people on. Typical responses are things like to…’Show more initiative’ or ‘Be more of a team player’ or ‘Be more confident/assertive’ etc.

I then encourage them to think through what specific behaviours they have seen that lead them to think that this is an area that an individual needs to develop? Many managers struggle with this step. They have to spend some time watching people to figure out what it is that they are doing, or not doing, that leads to the diagnosis.

Once they are clear on the behaviours that are to be the focus of development I ask managers whether they have ever given feedback about them to the individual concerned. Usually the answer is no! This is a real missed opportunity because the simple use of consistent adjusting feedback (by a manager who is good at using both adjusting and affirming feedback) will often get results much more quickly and cost effectively than coaching.

If feedback does not work we then move onto goal based coaching.”

Thanks, Mike, for this perspective.

A Coaching Model

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A Atep A Day, coaching, Performance improvement

” My team needs coaching. How do I go about it? Is there a structured basis for coaching my team. Is there any model you can suggest ?” asked a senior executive the other day.

I told him my take on what makes coaching effective:

• Mutual respect
• Clarity of goals
• Action orientation
• Holding the gains

Without mutual respect, coaching doesn’t work. Period. There should be a clear understanding of the motivations and capabilities of the participant ( I prefer to use “participant” in the coaching process rather than “coachee” etc.) and the coach. Confidentiality is of the essence. Just as you cannot command your team to respect you, in coaching too, respect must be earned based on your competence.

Without goal clarity, we go nowhere. We need to mutually agree upon realistic expectations on what the coaching will achieve. I have found it useful to quickly cover in the conversation what it will not do as well.

Without an action orientation, you will not get the best out of this investment. To me, an action orientation means time-bound actions which the participant commits to achieve. Action orientation moves the coaching from the discussion venue to the workplace. What eventually matters is not what you talk about but what you actually do.

Without holding the gains, we tend to regress back to our old ways and earlier comfort levels. In my experience, holding the gains is key to coaching success. Participants need to incorporate new skills, new techniques that they have gained into their daily repertoire of managerial skills.

Your success as a coach depends on the accuracy of your assessment of the coaching situation. This assessment comes from gathering information. A model that is frequently used in getting information is the GROW model.

In this, questions are sequenced covering:

* Goal

* Reality

* Options

* Will

1. Goal: We get the participants to firm up where they want to be, or what they want to achieve. Working together we then define the goals as clearly as possible
2. Reality: We check the goals in the backdrop of the prevailing environment. We identify what is going on, what has been tried, what are the possible obstacles to success etc.
3. Options: We help participants draw up possible options to achieve the agreed goals. Can these be prioritized, we ask. What has the best chance of success?
4. Will: The participant must commit to, and take responsibility for, carrying out the agreed actions. I have found it useful here to get the participant to “visualise” success such that he/she knows the benefits of achieveing the improvement goals.

Coaching is not about merely listening to the participants woes, being encouraging and hoping for the best!
It involves, as I have tried to bring out in simple terms, clear objectives, mutual effort, choosing actions which have the biggest impact on the participant’s performance and practice with feedback.

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