How To Coach As A Manager: A Vital Skill

Managers, do you want to learn how to coach? If you’re interested in having a direct, positive impact on both your team members and organization, coaching is a vital skill to learn.

First, what exactly is a coach? A coach is someone who helps another person reach higher levels of effectiveness by creating a dialogue that leads to awareness and action.

Let’s look at this definition in detail:

-To help another person, you need to have concern for another person and want to see them grow.

–Reaching higher levels of effectiveness means that they’re better in all areas of their work.

–Create a dialogue with the person by asking questions and fully listening.

-All of this leads to awareness, which helps the person discover the ways in which her attitude is hindering her level of success.

-Then that person can take action and do something differently to change behavior and be more effective in all areas of her work and life.

How do you know when to coach?

In order to know when to coach, use the Success Equation. This strategy was constructed to help managers and leaders:

a) pinpoint what’s going on that may be causing a problem for that employee (clarity); and

b) analyze how successful a team member is going to be before he even begins the work (certainty).

Here is the Success Equation:

Aptitude + Attitude + Available Resources = Success

In this equation Aptitude is defined as the skills and competence to complete the task. Attitude is defined as the drive, focus and motivation to complete the task, and Available Resources are the physical tools needed to complete the task. All three components must be present, in equal parts, to achieve success.

A very simple example is a child learning to ride a bike (the Success Equation applies universally, not just at work).

At first, the child has the Available Resources – the bike, perhaps even training wheels, and a safe place to ride. The child also has the Attitude – the motivation, energy, focus and desire to ride. However, in the beginning, the child lacks the Aptitude – the skill sets or competence. So in the beginning, he will be at most 66% successful because he’s missing one of the critical components to the Equation.

Once the child practices and gains the Aptitude through experience, all three components are present and he’s off to the races, successfully riding his bike.

Business is no different. Let’s look at the Success Equation for an analyst. She needs Aptitude – the required skills to analyze and interpret data. She needs the right Attitude – the motivation and energy to work with others, as well as the focus and determination to stay positive and maintain a challenging schedule. And she must have the Available Resources – a phone, a computer, a software program. If any one of these components is missing, she will be 33% less successful.

How Does the Success Equation Work for Managers?

How does the Success Equation work? It can be leveraged when someone comes to you with a problem, or at the beginning of a project. If Rebekka comes to you with a problem, ask her if the problem is about Aptitude, Attitude, Available Resources or a combination of the three. And if one of your employees is about to embark on a new project, ask him if he has the Aptitude, Attitude and Available Resources to do the job.

If the problem is an Aptitude issue, you give your employee skill training to build their competence. If it is an Available Resource issue, you get the resources they need, within your budget. And if it’s an Attitude challenge, you coach them to success.

But how exactly do you coach?

The Coaching Process

Let’s look at the coaching process. As a reminder, when it’s an Aptitude issue, you train. When it’s an Attitude issue, you coach. And when it’s a lack of Available Resources, you reduce, reuse or reallocate resources.

The difference in communication styles between manager and coach is profound. The former is often one-way, enabling and potentially disempowering. The latter is two-way and engaging, and as a result, precipitates two things: awareness and action.

If you want thoughtful, empowered people on your team, it is critical that they are self aware of how they can get in their own way with old patterns and beliefs. They also proactively think for themselves and take action.

Effective Coaching Requires the Right Questions

By asking coaching questions, you grow your team members into thoughtful, empowered people. Here are the five key components, in order of importance, to asking an effective coaching question:

1.    Open-ended. Questions that can be answered in one word preclude anyone from having to think. If you want to turn your team into thoughtful, aware people, ask open-ended questions that open up a conversation and begin with “what” or “how”. Examples might be: “How can you move forward on your idea?” or “What’s the impact of that on the team?”

2.    Keep it short. Most people ask long questions or worse, ask 3 questions in one sentence. This results in skipped questions and critical data being missed. Ask one short question at a time, preferably 8 words or less. “What resources do you need?” is more effective than “What possible resources will help you achieve this exciting goal, how will you get those resources and when will you do it?”

3.    Advice-free. Part of the reason you made it into management is because you know the answers already. Most managers tend to think for their team members and consequently, the employees never learn to think for themselves. They become robots with a tie. Advice-free questions with team members may take a bit longer in the short run yet will make your life a lot easier and more leveraged in the long run when you have team members who can think for themselves and make good decisions on their own. So avoid questions such as, “Have you tried this?” or “Why don’t you do that?”

4.    Forward focused. Get out of the story and into the action. Translated, this means get out of the past and into the future. The story only creates drama. Drama is a productivity-killer. Forget what happened in the past. Move on and focus on what action to take in the future to fix, improve, or exceed. Instead of saying, “What happened when Josh did that?” ask “How do you want to behave with Josh in the future?”

5.    Thought provoking. As you get well-practiced and eventually master asking coaching questions, you’ll get to this “ninja” level of asking thought provoking questions that literally cause people to stop in their tracks. Your question is so powerful that it pushes people beyond the limits of their current thinking capacity, and forces them to take some time on their own and report back to you. These types of questions can be simple: “What is your role in that situation?” or “Where can you take responsibility?” If you want maximum thinking people on your team, ask these types of questions often.

Coaching Goal: To Move Someone from Awareness to Action

Now that you understand how to ask effective coaching questions, let’s look at moving someone from awareness to action. This means moving someone from understanding the impact they are having on the team to having them commit to small steps that will change their behavior.

Key to Awareness: Understanding Impact

Most managers are good at the action part—setting goals, building a plan and ensuring accountability. The awareness part is often more challenging. For this, coaching for managers is also provided by many organizations. How do you help someone see the impact they’re having on an organization and team? First, start with the five effective questions tip detailed above. Then ask questions that focus on impact, such as: What’s the impact of that on X? You could never ask this question enough. For example: What’s the impact on the person? Team? Organization? Stakeholders? Clients? Donors? Community? Employees? Once they start to understand the impact of their behavior, then they will move to action on their own, instead of being told what to do.

The next crucial element of coaching is listening. Next week we will explore why listening is so important for leaders, and outline ways to improve listening skills. In the meantime, if you are a supervisor, manager or leader committed to being an excellent coach, check out our two-day course: Coaching to WIN BIG.

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, or find me on Twitter.

 

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Three Coaching Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

 

Anahita committed to coaching her employees two months ago and is already seeing positive results. Unfortunately, she’s struggling with one of her employees, Mathias. Despite her coaching, his engagement is still low, his productivity hasn’t improved, and his relationships with team members is lacking. Is she doing something wrong, or is he resistant to coaching? Let’s take a look at their last session. 

A Look Into a Coaching Session 

Frustrated With a Teammate

Last week Anahita and Mathias had a check-in meeting. When Anahita asked how things were going, Mathias immediately shared his frustrations about one of his team members, Davi. He explained that Davi interrupts people in meetings, rarely listens, doesn’t read the full email she’s replying to, and misses key points. 

Anahita wanted more details. She asked who Davi was interrupting and what she said. She was curious what kind of information Davi missed in emails and what else she missed at work. Anahita also asked Mathias how his other team members were reacting to Davi. After a thorough analysis of Davi, Anahita moved on to asking about Mathias’ goals. 

Not Meeting Goals

One of Mathias’ goals was to build trust with his own team. His plan was to have weekly, informal check-ins with his team members. These could even happen when passing in the hallway—the point being that he touch base with each person on a weekly basis. He was to ask them about their lives in an attempt to get to know them as human beings, which in turn would develop relationships and increase trust. And in these conversations, he would approach them with empathy. 

When Anahita asked Matthias if he had met this goal, he was hesitant to respond. He explained that he did meet with a few team members, and that the interactions were positive, but he didn’t get around to meeting with everyone yet. Anahita suggested he look more closely at his time management skills, in order to meet this goal. 

Feeling Stuck and Unmotivated

In the last part of their meeting, Mathias confided that he was feeling stuck and unmotivated. Anahita asked Mathias what’s getting in the way, what his problem was and then suggested how she moves forward herself when she feels unmotivated. She also asked how he planned to fix his morale issue. That’s when their time was up and Anahita rushed out the door to another meeting; Mathias headed back to his desk.  

______________________

Reviewing the scenario above, it becomes clear why Anahita hasn’t seen any positive results with Mathias. It’s not for lack of effort on her part; it’s just that she’s fallen into three very common pitfalls of coaching. Let’s take a look at what these pitfalls are, and how to overcome them.

Tips for Overcoming Three Common Coaching Pitfalls 

Tip 1: Coach the Person in the Room

Far too often, a coachee will talk about someone else in a coaching session. We saw this with Mathias as he discussed his team member Davi—that she doesn’t listen, interrupts, misses key points in emails, and more. It’s easy for a coach to fall into the trap of wanting to know more about the person ‘outside the room’ because the coach may think that knowing more about the person will help them address the problem with their coachee. 

The truth is that as a coach, you want to coach the person in front of you, not someone else outside the room. Why? A coachee can’t change anyone; they can only change their own behavior in response to a situation. So instead of focusing on the person ‘outside the room’, focus on the coachee and what she can do about the situation. In the case of Matthias, Anahita might have asked questions such as: “How do you want to respond next time you’re interrupted?” or “What would success look like for you at the next meeting?”

Your time together is valuable. You don’t want to spend it discussing another person whom you have no control over; instead, help the coachee grow and develop by discussing their response next time the situation occurs.

Tip 2: Acknowledge Success

It’s easy to minimize a coachee’s success, or only acknowledge success when the full goal has been achieved. Yet remember, what may be simple for a coach may be difficult for a coachee, so don’t apply your achievement standards to your coachee. Instead, every time your coachee moves forward toward the goal, help them see that progress with, “You took another step toward your goal,” or “You’re steadily moving toward achieving your goal.” In this case, Anahita could point out that Mathias did meet with some of his team, and that shows progress.

Be sure to keep the Progress Principal in mind. Teresa Amabile developed this principle based on research into nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from over 200 professionals working inside organizations. 

When comparing the research participants’ best and worst days, it showed that progress made by the individual or team is a common event that triggers a “best day”. Steps forward occurred on 76% of people’s best-mood days. The most common event triggering a “worst day” was a setback. 

With that in mind, the practice of recognizing even small wins is very important—because on the “best days”, employees report more interest and enjoyment in the work itself, and more positive and supportive relationships with their teams. They also report emotional effects such as feeling more joy, warmth, and pride.

Tip 3: Empathize

Time is precious and sometimes a coach will rush the conversation, to move to action and next steps. To a coachee, this can sound like non-stop questions, one firing right after the other, which can feel intimidating and overwhelming. While asking questions is important, it’s also important to empathize and let the coachee feel heard. 

For example, when Mathias said he felt stuck and couldn’t get motivated to do anything, Anahita responded with multiple questions. Her instinct to move him forward toward a solution is correct; and it would be more effective for her to show empathy. So rather than respond immediately with, “What’s getting in the way of you feeling motivated?” she could say, “Feeling stuck is no fun. What’s the impact on your overall morale?” or “Feeling stuck is challenging. How does that impact the current project?” The key here is to be open to what the coachee says, not drive your own agenda. 

As you can see, these coaching pitfalls are easy to stumble into. But with awareness, these mishaps can be avoided. In all interactions with your coachees, remember to focus on the person in the room, acknowledge their successes (no matter how small), and approach them with empathy. You’ll be well on your way to coaching success!

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, or find me on Twitter.

 

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The W.I.N. B.I.G. Coaching Formula

 

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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