There’s been a lot of talk about coaching in the management press as THE way to improve performance. But what is it, how do you do it and what benefits does it bring? In this article we’ll get you up-to-date with some of the fundamentals and show you how you can use the ideas to improve you and your team’s performance.
In sport, whether it is golf, tennis, rugby or football, top professionals understand the need for a coach. But the idea of coaches in the office is sometimes resisted; managers can feel threatened or even condescended by the idea. However over the last few years coaching is gradually becoming more accepted. Organisations like Shell and the BBC are reporting that, even for highly skilled managers, coaching can bring all sorts of benefits to their work.
My dictionary says that coaching is “to give tuition or instruction to a pupil.” However, in today’s coaching industry, the word means something subtly different. Instead of the concept of the coach “giving” something to the pupil, coaching is more about creating an environment where the pupils can “give” something to themselves. It’s about self-enabling the pupil to draw on their own resources. There are two key aspects to doing this effectively; making sure that the person being coached (the coachee) keeps responsibility for their development and making them more aware of how they are currently performing.
At the beginning of our coaching workshops, to help students understand the concept of responsibility, we run an exercise. We split the class up into groups of threes and ask that each group contain a coach, a coachee and an observer. At this point we haven’t discussed how to coach. The coaches have to help the coachee’s through a work issue of their choice. The observers – unbeknown to the other two – are secretly watching to see if the coachee is working out their own problem – hopefully helped out by the coach’s questions – rather than the coach telling them how to solve it.
Afterwards some observers usually say something like, “The coach started off listening and then spent the rest of the time giving advice” When we ask the coachee how they felt about this, they might say, “Well I appreciated the advice but I felt I was getting more from talking through the problem myself, it seemed to help just having someone listening”
The reverse of this sometimes occurs, where the coach is quite good at not taking on responsibility, but the coachee wants to give them their problem. Here the observers will often say something like, “Initially the coachee got upset that the coach wouldn’t solve their problem, but the coach just kept on asked questions and in the end the coachee started to think through how to meet their challenge”
All of us, to some extent, are pre-conditioned into expecting advice on how to solve problems; maybe we get this from school. I am not saying this is wrong; there are many cases where someone’s expertise is useful. However other people’s advice will be based on their own experiences, abilities and weaknesses, it’s unlikely what worked for them will be exactly right for us. Also advice is often given without fully understanding the problem. And lastly the approach does not encourage independence. A manager who thinks they should solve everyone else’s challenges, is going to be a busy manager
So if the coach’s role is to question and listen, how does this help the coachee? The answer is that it helps give the coachee better awareness of their behaviour and their situation. Once they have this, they can often help themselves.
This concept of awareness can be used in all sorts of ways. Attendees of my presentation skills courses often start off speaking in monotone voices, with grimaced expressions. When I ask them how they think they’ve done, they’ll usually say okay. They are not stupid; they know animated and smiling performances are the right thing to do. The problem is that they don’t realise how rigid and monotone they are. They are suffering from performance delusion.
To improve the poor speaker, the first thing I work on is their self-awareness. I ask them to redo their presentation and this time focus on one aspect of their behaviour. For example, rate how much of the time they smile, from one to ten. An amazing thing happens. As they become more and more aware of what they are doing, they become better and better at presenting. Rigid expressions blossom into happy faces. No tips have been given; they are just more in the moment and focused on what they are doing. Sports people often call this ability being “In the Zone”
This illustrates is an important characteristic of all humans which coaching uses. We all have the innate ability to learn. We don’t have to be told how to do everything. In fact being told what to do may interfere with us being in touch with what we are doing. We are so busy thinking what we SHOULD do we are not aware of what we are ACTUALLY doing.
Another example of using the awareness principle was when I worked with a company who complained that their meetings were long and unproductive. I went to one and I could see the problem right away, one of the directors was dominating the meetings so no one else had a chance to talk. He also didn’t keep to the agenda. I developed two exercises. Firstly, one person recorded how long everyone talked and reported that back at the end. Secondly someone else had to put their hand up each time they went off the agenda. After three meetings there was far more input from everyone around the table and the discussions became more focused.
A lot of coaching takes the format of one-on-one conversations. The coachee selects a challenge and then the coach will ask questions around that topic to encourage them to work through the problem. The process of talking about a challenge with someone who is genuinely listening has an amazing ability to increase awareness of possible solutions. Sometimes, as a coach, you can literally see the light bulb going on over the head of the coachee as a bright idea occurs to them!
Modern business coaching is becoming more and more complex, with competency frameworks and new techniques and approaches being constantly introduced. Many of them have a lot to give a coach to improve their technique. However, the most important ideas to understand when it comes to developing performance are always the same – leave responsibility with the coachee and develop their awareness.
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