How good are you at coaching your team and colleagues? Asked this question, many managers will say ‘pretty good’. However, a study published in the Harvard Business Review showed that managers consistently over-estimated their own ability to coach[i].
Coaching is often an over-used word within organisations and can be used to mean everything from training someone, to giving advice or even telling them what to do. However, done well, the power of truly coaching at work can have enormous benefits for everyone.
The ‘father’ of coaching, Sir John Whitmore, describes coaching as ‘unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance’[ii]. But what does this really mean? And how do you do that?
Coaching is at one end of a spectrum of ways in which we can help others – whether that’s about learning something new, solving a problem or achieving a goal. At the other end of this spectrum is the most direct form of helping: simply telling someone what to do.
In between telling and coaching, is a myriad of ways of helping others which we use every day without even thinking about it: instructing, training, guiding, advising, suggesting. With all of these options, you are helping to solve the other person’s problem for them. The biggest difference, and benefit, with coaching is that you are helping the other person to solve their own problem.
This might sound anything but helpful. Why would we leave someone to sort their own problem out? Surely they’ve come to us because they need help, and it sounds harsh to sit back and let them figure it out. The challenge with trying to solve others’ problems is that as human beings, we are coming at that problem from our own perspective, with our own experiences, values and biases. Which invariably is not the only way of looking at or solving an issue. By using coaching instead, we can enable our employees to develop new insights, challenge their own thinking and consider options they hadn’t previously.
The fundamental outcome of coaching others is their own growth, development and self-sufficiency. If as a leader, you want your team to be more knowledgeable, solve issues and come up with new ideas, then coaching is a key skill to develop.
What makes coaching so powerful is that you are enabling your team member to learn, become more confident and develop their resilience. There is absolutely a place for telling, suggesting and advising – the skill is to know when this is, and when to coach.
Managers will need to be more directive when they have someone who is very inexperienced or brand new to their role. One of the golden rules of coaching is that the coachee needs a degree of ability and will to resolve their own issue. However, you can still use coaching questions to ascertain the team member’s level of knowledge and experience before giving further direction. Indeed, you can use coaching more often than you think.
As a professional coach, I remain in the coaching space for the entire session with my clients. As a manager, you can move up and down the spectrum between coaching and telling even in the same conversation. The reason we spend a lot of time developing the coaching skill set with managers is because no-one I’ve ever come across has needed help giving advice or making suggestions! Coaching requires practise and skills development, but even with very little training, managers can start to use coaching questions in their everyday conversations which will make those conversations more fruitful for both parties.
I highly recommend the book Manager as Coach by Jenny Rogers[iii]. It explains how coaching works in day-to-day management using examples of typical conversations and gives practical tips on how to develop your coaching skills as a manager to get better outcomes for you and your team members.
You may think that you need certain qualities to coach others. The good news is, everything you need to be a successful coach can be learned. Effective coaching is a combination of skill, emotional intelligence and good judgement.
When we coach, we need to actively listen by giving our whole, undivided attention. We are listening not just to the words someone is saying, but how they are saying it – their tone, their body language, the pauses. Active listening tells us so much more about what is going on with someone than when we are doing our normal every day listening. Active listening also helps us to build empathy – a valuable and key element of effective coaching.
Open questions (any question which begins with What, Where, How, When, Who or Why) are the main types of questions we use in coaching. Using open questions enables the team member to consider and explore fully the issue. Consider the difference between these questions:
“Have you spoken to your line manager?” and “Who have you spoken to about this?”
The first question is a closed question, leading to a yes or no answer and it’s also an implied suggestion. If the answer is “No,” the obvious response would then be: “Well why don’t you speak to them and see what they say?”. This is one possible route to the solution.
The second question not only establishes what the team member has done so far, but it also elicits the follow up question: “Who else could you speak to?”. This leads to multiple routes to the solution.
As well as key skills, successful coaching also requires a high degree of emotional intelligence. The main thing that gets in the way of effective coaching is ourselves.
If we are not aware of how we are listening, asking questions or impacting our team member, we will not be able to coach effectively. We’ll slip into asking closed questions; we won’t pick up on the subtleties of what is being said, or not said; and our team member may realise that we’re not fully focussed on them. So self-awareness is key. We can develop our self-awareness by becoming conscious of how we are holding conversations.
If we are tired, stressed or feeling overwhelmed, we will find it very difficult to coach. Coaching requires emotional head space. So managing our emotions and stress levels is crucial. Realising that you aren’t currently in a place to coach effectively is one of the most important things you can do as a manager. Some simple tactics such as taking a break, getting some fresh air or even getting something to eat can help. Sometimes, you might want to delay your coaching conversation for a few hours until you are able to give your team member your full attention – and they will appreciate your honesty more than if you rush through a conversation with them just to get onto the next thing on your list.
Building rapport and trust between ourselves and our coachee is crucial for effective coaching, and developing empathy is a key way of doing this. If your team member senses that we don’t (or won’t) understand where they are coming from, they will feel less willing to be open and honest and the coaching conversation will be less effective. Empathy is the ability to be able to understand how someone feels in a given situation – even if we don’t or wouldn’t feel the same.
Knowing when and when not to use coaching is an important judgement call. Coaching is only effective if the person wants to be coached. If the team member doesn’t have the knowledge, experience or confidence to develop their own solutions, then using another way of helping them might be more appropriate. Mentoring is a good solution for this, because you can use a coaching approach (i.e., active listening, asking open questions) but also offering advice and suggestions based on your own experience.
In genuine emergency situations or where there is a clear important policy or procedure, coaching isn’t appropriate, as either time or protocol determines a particular path to be taken. However, once the situation is over, coaching can be used to help reflect on and learn from the situation.
You can start learning to coach straight away, by taking these 5 actions:
Coaching is a key part of any organisational skill set and as leaders, it benefits ourselves, our teams and our organisations to learn how to use coaching in our every day conversations with our colleagues and teams.
If you’d like to learn more about coaching, how it can benefit your organisation and how leaders can develop coaching skills, contact me at kate@kate-smith-consulting.co.uk
See more about me here: Linkedin
[i] Most Managers Don’t Know How to Coach People. But They Can Learn. Julia Milner and Trenton Milner. Harvard Business Review, August 16, 2018
[ii] Whitmore, J., 2017, Coaching for Performance: The principles and practice of coaching and leadership. 5th ed.
[iii] Rogers J., Whittleworth K., Gilbert A.,Manager as Coach, the new way to get results, 2012