Photo by The Space
“You should spend more time coaching your team and coworkers.” If you are in a leading position, you might have heard this before.
There is hype around coaching. People say they coach. Yet, not everyone can coach.
Coaching can be useful because it helps people use their skills, acquire new ones, and motivate them to reach their goals. It sounds amazing, but managers are often left alone in their coaching endeavors.
So, leaders end up thinking they coach while in fact they micromanage, supervise, or train instead. Coaching is not about you sharing your experience and best practice. It is not about giving them orders.
Coaching is a structured dialog full of open questions and listening.
Therefore, your coachee determines the direction and sets goals. Your role is to support coachees, ask questions they have not considered, and open new horizons in which they could use their skills and interests. You hold them accountable, but do not blame them for failures.
For coaching my coworkers, I use this simple 5-step circle:
Discover
Assess and prioritize
Plan
Support
Review and learn
It does not mean you always have just five sessions. Some steps might take longer to complete.
It usually works like this:
You get to learn about your coachee - where is he, what he wants to achieve, what he struggles with. Then, you help him assess and prioritize goals and paint a vision of his future self. It should be inspiring, but not overwhelming.
Then, you set a game plan with steps and schedules. Afterward, you support him throughout the process. Evaluate what’s working and what is not working to get to the end of the coaching cycle.
There are two scenarios for the end of coaching - either goals achieved and the cycle is finished, or goals not achieved, and you open a new cycle.
I wrote a free coaching guide to help start with coaching.
Grab it here: https://bit.ly/3bJAk9K
To build a coaching habit, try to focus on these:
Ask a lot of questions
Listen more than you speak
It is tempting to talk about yourself, but when you coach you give your full attention to the other person. Listening is fuel for coaching. So, to start with coaching, work on your listening.
See you again next week.