Coaching skills for managers

Coaching is about:

·       Drawing out resources rather than trying to push them in. This can be particularly useful for young or inexperienced managers working with experienced and knowledge teams. Coaching will help them use their existing resources better, and enable you to learn from them.

·       Helping people learn to think. This can be particularly useful with new graduates who need to learn a whole new thinking pattern to do well at work as they discover that exam passing skills are not sufficient for career performance and development. 

·       Iluminating hidden skills, resources, knowledge, experience, and interest

·       Turning potential into capacity

Coaching is generally experienced as motivational and empowering.

It is important to be clear what you are coaching for

Examples might be:

To improve problem-solving skills

To improve emotional intelligence when interacting with customers

To increase confidence in own abilities and so ability to be pro-active and use initiative

To increase team collaboration and mutual support

To develop expert Excel skills

And also what you are not:

For example, while for one person developing expert Excel skills might be key for their job, for another their engagement with Excel may be a very rare occurrence. In this case, other ways of solving the problem might be more effective and appropriate. 

If people come to you expecting you to give them the answer, then you need to turn the conversation into a coaching conversation. These questions will help:

a) ‘That sounds interesting/challenging/important, what do you think might be the way forward? What ideas do you already have?’

b) If that is what you are worried about, what do you want to see happen instead?

c) If I wasn’t here, what would you do about this?

d) I can see you are looking for help with this, what is the most helpful question I ask you to help you with your thinking in the 30 seconds we have here? 

This is a crucially important part of the process where you are testing to see how committed, ready and energised they are to make this happen. To explore this you might ask questions like:

a) What’s your first step?

b) Who else do you need to talk to?

c) How will I know you are making progress?

d) On a scale of 1-10 how ready are you to get going on this?

e) What else needs to happen to increase your readiness?

f) How can I support you to make this happen?

Offer encouragement and support, express belief, and agree a ‘progress check’ process.

Coaching is not suitable for every occasion. Sometimes people do need to be told. Examples of when it is appropriate to give advice might be when:

They don’t know enough to even start to engage with the challenge

They are missing a vital piece of information, and need telling it

It’s an emergency, you have the answer and speed is of the essence

It’s not worth the time or energy e.g. it is doesn’t fit the criteria of lecture three

Blocking types of behaviour that makes it hard for them to engage in coaching, for instance:

It's your job to think, not theirs

They are still smarting about some previous managerial behaviour (this can go on for years)

They have zero confidence in themselves and their ability and are highly dependent on others

They are severely depressed, anxious or otherwise cognitively incapacitated

They are fully preoccupied with other challenges, maybe outside of work, and have no capacity to engage with being creative.

In this case you need to address these challenges before you can hope to get very far with coaching. 

So - be aware that coaching isn’t for everyone and every situation. Beyond that though, on the whole, once people genuinely believe that you want them to contribute and you will support them in their adventures of learning, they relish it; and they will grow in ability, confidence, initiative and general switched-on-ness before your very eyes!