Using coaching conversations in your leadership approach → and how to get results
Why you should be having coaching conversations → and five questions to incorporate into your next one
As a leader, your role is to facilitate your team to be the best they can be and, ultimately, achieve the overall goals of the business.
Coaching helps your team members to reach their full potential, to work through challenges to find their own solutions and it increases their likelihood of achieving their goals.
Research from BetterUp Labs shows that the effects of coaching include a 2.1x increase in productivity, a 149% increase in resilience and a 35% decrease in burnout.
The best leaders I’ve worked with know how to use coaching to achieve these results.
In this post, we’ll explore what coaching is and isn’t and I’ll provide five questions for you to try out in your next coaching conversation.
Let's get into it 👇
This post covers:
What is coaching?
Using the GROW model for goal setting
Five questions to use in your coaching conversations
Recommended resources
TL;DR
👔 Coaching comes in many different forms and isn’t always a formal process or prearranged session
👩🏫 Mentoring and training differ from coaching and all require different skills and mindsets
🪴 There are many frameworks available to support your coaching delivery
🤝 Coaching requires an ongoing commitment from both sides to be successful
❓ Using AWE (And What Else?) ensures that all bases are covered during your coaching conversations
What is coaching?
What coaching is
A definition of coaching that I have always resonated with is: "Coaching is unlocking people's potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.” → coaching is simply about facilitating the fulfilment of that potential through questioning and goal setting.
Coaching can be formal or informal. It can be focused on a specific topic or it can be broad and varied. It can be long-term (e.g. career goals), short-term (e.g. specific skill development) or one-off (e.g. in the moment when something happens that requires coaching).
As a leader, you have most likely received coaching in your career. It may have been from your boss, it could have been from a peer or you may have worked with a certified coach. You may not have even realised you were being coached at the time.
What coaching isn’t
It’s also important to understand what coaching isn’t:
Telling someone what to do and giving them solutions
Only to be used when something isn’t working or when a mistake has been made
Just a session - coaching is a mindset and can be used formally and informally
Therapy or counselling - if you think someone needs additional support you should refer them to your HR team
Teaching or mentoring (see below 👇)
Coaching vs mentoring vs training
Coaching often gets mistaken for mentoring and is also distinct from the process of training. While all three methods can and should be used in conjunction to facilitate employee development, they are separate techniques that require different skills.
Here’s some key ways that each approach differs:
Using the GROW model for goal setting
The GROW model is a framework often used in coaching to define realistic goals and a plan to achieve them. The GROW model is an effective framework for new and experienced coaches alike as it provides a well-defined and clear process to follow.
GROW stands for:
Goals - what are the future goal(s)?
Reality - what is the current state?
Options - what actions could be taken?
Will - how will the goal(s) be achieved?
The model is versatile and can be used in different scenarios including specific skills development, career progression planning, and performance improvement.
Recommended reading: GROW Model Questions: 60 Questions To Enable Employee Growth
Five coaching questions to try
There are five questions that I have found to be particularly effective in coaching:
1. What’s working/not working?
This question can be used for many different scenarios including coaching around a specific problem, development planning and career conversations.
Coaching can heavily lean towards improvement and, therefore, what isn’t working. I like to start by asking ‘what’s working?’ as it enables the employee to recognise what is going well and what to keep doing.
Asking ‘what’s not working?’ helps to delve into the areas that need to change or issues that need to be worked with or goals set around.
Both questions help your team member to uncover things that they may not have already identified compared to asking closed questions such as ‘what problem do you want to solve?’ or ‘what opportunity do you want to address?’.
When to use: This question works best in the Reality stage of the GROW model.
2. How will success/progress be measured?
You’ve probably heard the saying “What gets measured gets done.”
And - it’s true (from my experience anyway).
By defining measures as well as the end goal, the employee knows what they need to achieve to reach their goals, has a clear flag when they are going off track and enables you, as the coach, to provide accountability which is a key part of the coaching relationship.
When to use: This question is most relevant to the Will stage of the GROW model.
3. What could get in the way of achieving this?
By thinking ahead to what could get in the way of the goal, mitigation plans can be put in place when issues do arise.
It is also an opportunity to uncover if the goal is realistic ahead of setting it.
When to use: This question is most applicable to the Will stage of the GROW model.
4. What needs to happen to get back on track by next week/month?
A big part of being a coach is providing accountability.
But let’s face it, goals slip and progress gets delayed. A different priority may have emerged, there may have been a poor planning decision or there may simply be a lack of buy-in.
The key thing is to understand what has gone wrong and what tangible actions need to be taken to get back on track.
When to use: Coaching is an ongoing commitment from both sides to be successful and this question should be asked throughout the journey to achieving the goal.
5. And what else? (AWE)
I first came across this question in The Coaching Habit and have used it many times in practice. It helps to uncover what else is going on or has been left unsaid when you know that there is more to explore to get the most from someone.
This question is much more likely to get your team member to open up and provide more detail than a closed question such as ‘is there anything else?’.
When to use: You can use this at all stages of the GROW model.
Recommended resources
Book: The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier
TED Talk: Leaders who coach are creating better workplaces, and so can you by Saba Imru-Mathieu
Podcast: 5 Coaching Skills for Leaders and Managers by Enhance.training
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