What coaching means to me
Firstly what it’s not:
- Telling someone what they should do. I think we should ban the word should.
- Giving advice or my opinion
- Judging – good or bad, right or wrong.
- Providing technical information
- Counselling – helping to ‘heal’ the past
- Shoulder to cry on
- A “course” of formal learning or training
- Definitely not ‘agony aunt’
- Nor it is passive listening
- And it’s certainly not about ‘fixing’ people
- Working with someone who doesn’t want to be coached.
For me coaching is about raising awareness and responsibility for action in order to achieve a particular business result in the future.
Awareness and responsibility
When I am working with an executive or leadership team I will ask: what’s the purpose of this work? What’s the purpose of this team? What’s the business result you are setting out to achieve? These sorts of questions raise awareness of drivers, motivations and outcomes. I may also ask: where are you now, tell me about your situation, what’s holding you back, what are you brilliant at?
Sometimes when I am working with a team I ask for twenty incontrovertible facts that describe the situation, organisation or team. Frequently people are amazed by some of the facts that emerge – “one construction project completed every day for the last 85 years”. These sorts of questions raise awareness of different perspectives, individual and collective reality
I then ask questions that help raise responsibility for doing something about the current situation in order to get from here to there i.e. from where you are now to where you want to be – the business result. Then you the executive and the team works out the path and own it.
I passionately believe in the people I work with and that they have all the necessary intellectual resources; my job is to help them surface and make sense of their thinking and work things out for themselves. A big part of my job is to help create time and an open, safe ‘space’ for thinking and dialogue.
My prime tool as a coach is to ask questions based on what I see and my curiosity. And as I am curious and creative my questions can be challenging though are always intent on my customer’s success.
So here is a question for you – how do you feel when you receive unsolicited advice or get told what to do? And how do you feel when someone tries to ‘fix’ you? And what does that do for your performance?
OK, I get it.
So now, how are you going to lead and get the very best from your people?