Asking powerful questions is a necessity for a successful coaching
conversation. However, asking someone a bunch of random questions does not
necessarily mean that you are coaching them. A
coaching conversation has three distinct components:
1. Determining whether or not the situation requires
coaching by using the Success Equation.
2. Asking questions to create a dialogue that builds
awareness about the issues at hand
3. Empowering the coachee toward action that will create
more effective behaviors
There is a simple process to
Build Awareness and Move to Action, which you will find in Brian Emerson and my
book, A Manager’s Guide to Coaching. We call
it the W.I.N. B.I.G. model because when you help an employee become aware of
what’s going on and take action, you WIN BIG and they WIN BIG.
There are six steps in the
W.I.N. B.I.G. model. Three
of them Build Awareness and three Move to Action. They
are:
Build Awareness
·
W-onder About Root Cause
·
I-nvestigate Wants
·
N-ame Possible Solutions
Move to Action
·
B-uild a Plan
·
I-nsure Action
·
G-ive Affirmation
Creating a dialogue that
progresses through these six steps will help you increase your employees’
effectiveness, make you a better manager, and allow everyone involved to WIN
BIG.
Today we will talk about how
and why to build awareness while coaching; in our next blog, we will talk about
moving employees to action.
Build Awareness – W.I.N.
W-onder About Root Cause
When there is a problem at
hand, most people want to jump in and immediately move to action. It’s easy to
see that sales are decreasing, for instance, and assume that the sales team
must be the problem. However,
99% of the time, what you see is just a symptom, not the real problem. Your job
as a manager is to step back and wonder about the root cause of the problems
that arise. Why are sales decreasing? What
else is happening in the organization? How
effective is your customer service?
It is often difficult to see
the benefit of stepping back to build awareness about the situation. Yet, in the first step of coaching, Wonder About Root Cause, your
job is to ask questions that will help your employee be curious about what’s
really going on under the surface.
This stage can sometimes be a
challenge for busy, problem-solving managers. Notice
the first word of this stage: Wonder. It’s
not Fix, Control, Stop or any other action-hero type of word. Coaches don’t, shouldn’t, and can’t have all the answers; the
person in front of you has many more answers about themselves than you do. If you always fix their problem yourself, then you’ll be known as
a good fixer and a so-so manager at best.
Start off by getting really
curious. You know this employee can do good work, so what’s going on? Take time to wonder, but don’t judge. Because it’s your job to
help your employee get curious so they can Build Awareness. Ask questions in a
manner that makes this fun, not scary. Some good questions for this stage of
the process are:
·
How does that impact you?
·
If you were watching this
on TV, what would you say was going on?
·
What’s the main obstacle
getting in the way here?
·
What’s underneath all of
this?
·
Which of your buttons are
really getting pushed here?
Don’t confuse ‘Wonder About
Root Cause’ with getting all of the nitty-gritty details and facts about an
issue. For example, if an employee comes to you frustrated about a conversation,
she had with a team member, don’t ask for a recount of what happened. Instead,
look for what the anger is really about—the root cause. In this case, you may
find out your coachee has been working with someone who can’t meet deadlines,
which interferes with her meeting deadlines, and therefore her ability to be
successful in her role. In the case, the issue isn’t actually about the team
member conversation at all.
On to stage two—Investigate
Wants.
I-nvestigate Wants
As people, we usually get what
we say we want; the problem is we usually aren’t clear on what we really want,
so we end up with the wrong things. Raff
is miserable at his job so finds another one. In a few months he’s miserable at
his new job. That’s because Raff was miserable in the first place because he
had no one to challenge him and help him grow. If he had known what he actually
wanted before taking another job, he’d have been much more likely to find a job
he liked.
The goal of the second stage in
W.I.N. B.I.G. is to help your employees investigate what they really want
(Investigate Wants). In
the first stage, you create safety by asking open-ended wonder-type questions
and get to the root cause of what is going on. Next,
it’s time to look at what the person wants, how they want to be seen as things
move forward, and what they want things to look like on the other side. This requires you to ask questions that open up possibilities and
help the person paint a clear picture of what they want their world to look
like. Here are examples of questions that help the employee think bigger
and look to the future:
·
How would you like people
to describe you as you resolve this?
·
What would success look
like?
·
If you could use a magic
wand to re-create the scene, how would you want it to look?
It’s important here, more than
anywhere else, not to tell the employee what you think she should want. You have no way of knowing. We
are all really good at thinking we know what others want, but we don’t. Be sure to give the person space and time to figure it out for
herself. She may even need a few minutes of silence to think it through. Let her have that time without filling the empty space. If she
feels stuck, just ask another open-ended question about her desired outcome. The bottom line is: deep down, we all know what we want. We just don’t always get a chance to voice it.
On to stage three—Name Possible
Solutions.
N-ame Possible Solutions
There is a definite reason why
this stage of W.I.N. is called Name Possible Solutions and not Name the Solution. Remember that you are still trying to Build Awareness, so the goal
of this stage is to help the person become aware of the multitude of possible
choices they have in the situation. Typically, if left to our own devices, we
humans will go about implementing the same solutions that have worked for us in
the past—even if there is a potentially more effective or efficient way of
doing it. Your job is to get the employee to think big and outside the box, to
explore all the possible options before settling on a specific strategy of
action.
This is a tempting place for
managers to jump in and solve the problem—to help the employee and maybe even
save the day for them. But
remember, coaching is about letting the person come up with his or her own
answers.
Your goal here is to help the
employee have fun and brainstorm. A
good way to do that is to ask questions like:
·
The 85-year-old you is
looking back at this situation; what does she say to do?
·
What do you have to do to
get where you want to go?
·
How would Bill Gates tell
you to solve the problem?
·
What would it take to work
this out?
A key here is to be sure to ask
follow-up questions. Do
not settle with just one solution (even if you think it’s a great one). Inspire your employee to think bigger and consider different
options. So, ask follow-up questions or statements such as:
·
What else could work?
·
That’s a great idea;
what’s another?
·
Great! Let’s think of 5
more.
After you have generated lots of
options together, you need to start weighing the impacts of the top ones. One
of the biggest things you can do here is to help the person map back to what
they said they wanted during Investigate Wants. Sure,
their solution may solve the problem, but does it really get them what they
want? When you have a few solutions on the table, ask questions like:
·
So which option gets you
closest to what you want?
·
What would be the impact
of your favorite solution?
·
What possibility is your
favorite? What would that get you?
Now that we’ve looked in detail
at how to build awareness of the problem when coaching an employee, it’s time
to talk about how to move them into action. Stay tuned for the next post for
all the how’s and whys.
Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send
me an email,
or find me on Twitter.
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