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Coaching Leadership

Coaching Spectrum

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The spectrum of coaching approaches is presented by Miles Downey, and is an excellent way to recognise when we are being more or less directive in our approach as coaches. It is a powerful way to recognise how your interactions will shape the outcomes and determine your future effectiveness.

Non-Directive / Following Interest
Listening to Understand
Reflecting
Paraphrasing
Summarising
Asking questions that raise awareness
Making Suggestions
Giving Feedback
Offering Guidance
Giving Advice
Instructing
Telling
Directive

As coaches, we are pushing towards the top of the spectrum, the further up we are then the more likely we are helping a coachee find their own solutions.

As a leader, you will flex up and down the spectrum as appropriate for the situation. If something is on fire, you might ‘tell’ or ‘instruct’. It’s a situation that requires the directive approach. Afterwards, you might give feedback on how the situation was handled, and then return to a coaching posture by letting your direct report consider ways to prevent the fire happening again, while you summarise or reflect to cement their understanding and commitment to the solution.

We aim to move up the spectrum as high levels build stronger commitment and ownership of solutions from a coachee, and empowers them to solve future similar problems with their own resources.

Each step up you can take will make your coaching more effective in the long term, so look out for opportunities to jump up to the higher levels wherever you are able.

 

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Coaching

I’ll Know It When I See It

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Sometimes it’s incredibly easy to tell if you’ve achieved your goal. If it’s measurable, if it’s concrete, or if it’s a binary yes/no outcome, then you will just know. You either get the promotion, or you don’t.

A lot of the time, you’ll want to work on something that isn’t easily measured. It can be anything from improving your presentation skills, to expanding your emotional literacy. What can you do to understand this growth and progression, without being stuck in an “I’ll know it when I see it” hole.

Self-Reflection – Do the thing you want to get better at. Have a tough conversation or give that presentation. Afterwards, write down what went well and where you felt there were areas to improve. Focus on those areas, do it again and repeat the cycle. This is great for understanding the things that you can see and recognise, and an excellent resource to take into a coaching discussion.

Feedback – Gather thoughts from a trusted partner. Sit them in the audience, then ask them what was the best moment of the presentation, and what was the weakest. This opens you to the views of others and lets you close down your blind-spots.

Surveys – In a leadership position, you might be lucky enough to benefit from the results of regular engagement surveys, or you may be able to run these following a particular interaction. These are sources of large sets of feedback with an aggregate view. The aggregation is key here. Don’t get hung up on outliers or single comments, but look for themes and trends to measure improvement.

Recognition – If you are the go-to person for a skill or a trusted source of advice on a topic, then that’s a strong indicator you are really great at that topic. If you don’t feel you deserve this recognition, then ask the people coming to you what’s driven that decision. This will really let you understand what’s helping you succeed, and to see the growth you’ve managed through the process.

If you are working to improve a skill or to make a change that’s hard to measure, then use these techniques to understand your progress. They are powerful tools for growth and learning that will turbocharge your journey to greatness.

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Coaching

Where’s your Reality?

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Before you can make any great plans to achieve your goals, before you can feel that your goals are within your reach, you must understand your current reality.

In these times, it’s especially relevant. You might be safe at home and working remotely. You might have to suddenly manage childcare, work and support for others in an unfamiliar new configuration. You may be working endless days in the most extreme of environments.

This is not normal, and you’ll need to recognise this.

People are busy celebrating free time, taking on major projects and streaming to the world. If you aren’t in a place to do those things, then reflect on where you are, then do what’s right for you now.

Given the changes to our daily lives, you’ll need to do a fresh accounting of your now. Once you understand this, then you can re-evaluate your goals, set your direction and drive forwards towards positive change.

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Coaching

Recognising Choices

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There is always a choice available to help you achieve your goals.

It might not be obvious to you, but it’s definitely there.

If you can’t see a way forwards, think about doing nothing. If you don’t change things, will you still get closer to your goal, or are you moving away from it?

How does that make you feel? If doing nothing is a good choice, maybe you need to revisit your goals, be more ambitious or find something else to chase. Nevertheless, nothing is a choice, and it’s a valid one to consider.

Once you’ve looked at nothing, wave your magic wand and cast aside everything that’s stopping you or holding you back. Does it make you feel awesome, energised and engaged. If it does, then this is a great goal.

Look at those things you’ve cast aside, discounted or stepped around. Which of them can you envision tackling successfully. What’s the smallest step, easiest or most valuable thing to do? Answer this, and you’ve just opened up a whole set of options to consider and choices you can make.

There is always a choice, you just need to recognise what it is. Empower yourself to make decisions and you’ll have a path to positive and long term change.

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Coaching

Getting Virtual

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Lots of us are working from different spaces, with different setups and totally changed routines.

There’s dozens of great articles talking about how to work from home, coming from those who’ve been doing it for years and those who are starting to figure it out for the first time. It’s definitely different to the previous models, so don’t get hung up on hitting perfect from day one, try out a few different things and keep what works for you.

I’ve given lots of virtual coaching sessions, and find that they can be absolutely as effective as face-to-face time.

To have a great session:

  • Give yourself five minutes to clear your mind before you start. Get up, walk around and get your energy in the right place.
  • Set yourself up, comfy chair, drink of water, pen, notepad and anything else to smoothly get through the next hour.
  • Change up a bit from your usual teleconference. This might be a great time to pick a different part of the room, or a more casual setup.
  • Mute your phone, turn off all notifications and permit yourself some time fully focused on your own development.
  • Be open and committed to a successful outcome, and you’re more likely to get one!

If you’re ready to give it a go, then schedule a time with me now, or drop me an e-mail and we’ll sort something out.

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Coaching Leadership

Don’t let facts get in the way of coaching

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It’s impossible to coach someone to discovers facts that they just don’t know. As a coach, you can guide a coachee through the tools and techniques they have available to discover answers, but you can’t unpick those answers themselves.

This situation most often occurs in an organisational context, or when you are applying coaching methods in a management role. The example I tend to use is a manager who’s working with a direct report and is discussing some recent annual leave. In this scenario, if the coachee does not know what the holiday policy is, then no amount of coaching will bring them to enlightenment.

In this situation, there are a couple of options. If it’s urgent, then you can choose to break out of coaching and share some information. This isn’t the ideal solution, but it can drive you past a sticky point and allow you to switch back to the coaching mode.

You can also choose to step through the coachee’s thinking, and seek to find appropriate options to empower them to discover the relevant information. In the case of policies, that may involve things like contacting HR, research on the corporate intranet or reaching out to other colleagues. Selecting one of these options and reporting back the findings might be an excellent small outcome for the coachee, which also gives them more autonomy in the future.

As a coach, watch out for the times when there is definitely a right answer. That’s the time you should pause, review the conversation and find a way forwards without getting stuck in the mud trying to bring a coachee to a factual solution they are not equipped to discover.

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Coaching

Riding the Elephant

I recently came across an excellent metaphor for the interaction of logic and emotion, presented by Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis.

Imagine that logic is a person, riding the elephant of emotion. Sometimes the elephant is quiet and logic steers the way. Sometimes it’s not, and nothing that the rider does can alter the course. The harder the rider tries, the less likely they are to have any impact at all, it may just get worse.

In these cases, you have to let emotion take its course, ride with it rather than fight it and hold off on trying to set direction.

Doing this successfully requires great self-awareness, and you won’t always manage to get it right. If you can start to recognise when the elephant is making its presence felt, then you can start to understand what’s going on in your mind and how it’s impacting your life. If you can’t, then you are doomed to be dragged around whilst flailing inconsequentially on the elephant’s back.

Logic doesn’t always win. Recognise this and you’ll ride the elephant to a much better place!

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Coaching Leadership

Dedication to Goals

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I’ve worked with a number of junior leaders, and there’s often a theme that comes through in our conversations. The people that they are coaching are not dedicated to achieving their goals.

When we probe into the idea of dedication, there’s usually one of a small number of issues at hand. I’m going to talk about a couple of them today, and share a few techniques for overcoming them if you recognise them in your own endeavours.

Externally imposed – A person will tend to own their goals if they have created them and stated them for themselves, rather than had goals imposed on them from an external source. When you’re coaching, the coachee will bring their full understanding and potential for growth to the conversation, so let them set the goals. As a leader, share examples of times when people have been successful. Build that understanding, and then when you are coaching, let the coaching take it on to form their own goals.

Saying what you want to hear – Sometimes a coachee will try to guess what the coach wants to hear, and set that as their goal. You might recognise this when the coachee is actively seeking approval from you for their suggestions, latching on to any you view favourably. It’s challenging to overcome this behaviour. You need to build more trust with the coachee, maybe by considering other topics before returning to this goal setting. Expand the conversation. This encourages the coachee to dig deep, and find what’s really relevant to them. Don’t accept the first answer they give, but do let it be their area of focus if that really interests them.

Too big and scary – If a goal is overwhelming, then it can cause a coachee to lose heart, showing in this lack of dedication. A leader could recognise that the goal is not well formed, or it’s stated in very simplistic terms. “Get promoted” or “Be excellent” are examples of goals that might be too big for some coachees to progress with. Here we can probe on the details, strengthening the stated goal by allowing the coachee to make it more specific. We can encourage the coachee to break the goal into smaller steps, maybe by focusing on core skills to improve to position them well to succeed. Finally, we can use scaling to understand and highlight the gap that they’ll need to cross, whilst also showing the stages of progress towards achieving the goal.

These various scenarios and techniques can help you understand where the lack of dedication to achieving a goal is coming from, and give you tools to find the right goal for the coachee, and to empower them towards success.

 

Categories
Coaching

Recognising Now

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Before you can achieve your goals, you must build a deep understanding of where you are Now.

Reflecting on and recognising your reality sets the strong foundations for your future growth and success.

Think about your environment, what’s giving you energy and what’s draining it away. Who is there to support your commitment to change, what will make it more difficult.

How are you spending your time, where are you doing the things that you want to do.

Use the people around you to expand your thinking and clarify your understanding. They can fill in your Blind Spot, and give you more information to build the true picture of where you are.

When you know where you are, then you can figure out where you really want to go.

Coaching can help you focus on this reflection and accelerate your path to positive change. If you are ready to take the next step, then I’m always excited to hear from you.

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Coaching

Coaching Tools – Model T

Miles Downey shares the simple ‘Model T’ tool in Effective Modern Coaching. It’s a really great way to get past the initial thoughts of a coachee, and to really dig into the issue that’s most important to them right now.

It’s a model to enable us to move further up the coaching spectrum, following interest rather than giving advice or guidance. It’s especially useful for novice coaches, who may find it easy to latch onto the first suggestion from a coachee, rather than spending time to explore other options.

If you find yourself jumping on the first suggestion offered by a coachee, starting to move into problem solving too soon or falling into mentoring modes, then pause and use this model to move back to a coaching posture.

The model has two stages, first we Expand, which forms the cross bar of a capital T. Here the questioning is aiming to put more options onto the table, empowering the coachee to share anything that may be of interest:

  • Tell me what else you notice?
  • What else?
  • One more thing?

Then we Focus, diving into the most important topic, the downstroke of the T. The questions are driving this focus, selecting the most relevant area for the coachee:

  • What’s most interesting?
  • What stands out?
  • What’s most important to you right now?

Use this simple model to help set the topic of a session, to expand on goals or options, or anywhere else you need to spend more time understanding the coachee’s thinking.