Become A Better Coach

Coaching is more than just a buzz word.

You may be a creative entrepreneur, good decision maker and productive manager, but are you an effective coach? Honestly? Coaching is not just some trendy new concept for the soft and fuzzy types with extra time on their hands. If you want to seriously drive your team and business to new levels of performance and success, you can’t afford to lag in your coaching ability. Yes, coaching is a skill, yet few executives or managers have received any formal coaching training (those Saturdays spent out on the field screaming instructions and encouragement to young children doesn’t count!). There are many coaching theories and models, all of which contain numerous helpful strategies and techniques, so it doesn’t matter which one you choose to adopt and explore. Through 10 years of coaching executives I have identified six simple modifications that my clients have made that significantly increased their coaching effectiveness. Following these 6 Do’s and Don’ts will have an immediate and meaningful impact on your coaching effectiveness. Try them, you’ll see immediate results!

4 Key Coaching “Do’s”

1. Ask permission

• to coach your team members. If you launch right in with “you know John, what you need to do is……” Your coachee may not be open, willing to listen, or even interested in your input and insight. Don’t invest your time unless they agree to engage.

2. State your intentions.

• Trust is critical for feedback/coaching to be received openly – especially if it is perceived as negative. Don’t leave it to your coachee to guess why you are taking time to talk to them, they will likely be suspicious. State why you are taking time to share your observations with them; “John, I think you are a valuable employee and I believe you could contribute even more if you did a few things differently….or John I would like to see you experience even more successful here, so if you are willing, I’d like us to spend some time together talking about…..”

3. Listen 51% of the time.

• Coaching is not about YOU doing all the talking. To be effective you need to listen to THEM more than you speak. Try to fully understand your team member and his/her perspective, challenges and fears before providing input and guidance.

4. Answer questions with questions.

• You are smart. You have years of experience and a deep understanding of your business and what makes it successful. So when one of your employees comes to you with a question, what do you do? Of course, you immediately answer it! Isn’t that your job? (It feels good as well). Isn’t that why YOU are the owner/leader/senior executive/manager…not them? WRONG!!! Yes you know more, and while you probably have the “best answer,” by answering their question with an immediate answer you are robbing them of the opportunity to learn and think creatively for themselves. Your business can’t afford to have only you doing the thinking for everyone. Providing all of the answers conditions your team to stop thinking because it is much easier to just come and ask you for the answer. You create a culture of non-thinkers. If you answer their question with a question, they will likely surprise you with a better answer than you had sitting on the tip of your tongue! Try it! You are paying for experienced, senior resources, so task them with more of the heavy thinking. You are guilty of this common mistake if you’ve ever said to yourself “why do I always have to do all the thinking around here?” The next time an employee says, “Should I call the customer and talk to them about this issue? Don’t immediately respond with a yes or no, followed by the reason why, instead say “that’s a good question, what do you think we should do?” and if he/she comes up with an unworkable or inaccurate answer, you follow with “that’s one possibility, can you think of something else that we could do?” A few experiences like this and your employees will spend more time thinking BEFORE they come knocking on your door for answers!

Absolute “Don’ts”!

1. Don’t TELL.

• Walking up to an employee and telling them what they have done wrong and how they should do things differently in the future is NOT good coaching! TELLING is not coaching. How will your team ever learn from their mistakes if they aren’t held accountable for their actions? Effective coaches ASK questions. They ASK, rather than TELL, an employee what they believe they did wrong. They ASK employees to come up with strategies for doing things differently in the future, and then ask WHEN they are going to do it. Why is asking so much more effective than telling? Because employees buy into solutions and actions, and experience a far greater degree of personal accountability, when they admit their weaknesses to you (instead of you pointing them out to them) and when they (not you) are the ones who develop/recommend a behavioral change or solution. As a youth, when you found yourself in deep trouble, what created more permanent change in your behavior… admitting a mistake to your parents and telling them what you were going to do to change in the future, or listening to them tell you what you had done wrong and what you will need to do differently in the future?

2. Don’t ask WHY questions.

• Why are you always late? Why is your department over budget? Why didn’t you close that deal? Every WHY question will drive a BECAUSE response! BECAUSE……an excuse, a justification, a story. WHY questions always produce a list of all the reasons WHY they didn’t perform as expected AND your employees will become defensive and shut down emotionally; which undermines their ability and desire to listen to you. To receive coaching guidance your employees need to feel open, not defensive. So instead of asking WHY questions, focus on the other W’s (what, who, where, when) and how.  What contributed to you arriving at the meeting late this morning? What do you think is the main issue causing your department’s budget challenges? How can we make sure we win the next deal?

Try these simple coaching “do’s” and “don’ts” and let me know how it went! Happy coaching!