Developing Project Management Potential

Moving beyond training – the principles of coaching

In this series of posts I have been looking at how to develop project management potential in employees. In the previous articles we have seen that project management requires a broad range of competencies and that the current approach to developing them – sending people on accreditation courses such as Prince2 and PMI – is a poor way to improve workplace performance.

In this article I want to focus on coaching as a development method. I think the best way to develop project potential is to send employees on accreditation courses and then back this up with long-term coaching, which supports the individuals in applying the theory to their work place.

What exactly is coaching and how does it differ from training? In everyday speech the two words are used pretty much interchangeably. But in management development they have come to mean something different. I think “training” is more about telling people how to do something, maybe in a classroom, whereas “coaching” is facilitating a process which supports the individual to use their own resources to tackle a challenge.

All coaching adheres to three principles:

The person being coached (the coachee) keeps responsibility for their development.
Behavioural change comes from a greater self-awareness.
Coaching supports the coachee through a period of discomfort whilst they change their behaviour.

Principle 1 – The coachee keeping responsibility for their development.
Imagine you had a problem with your eyesight. You went to the optician, but instead of testing your eyes and finding lenses for them, he took his own glasses off his head and offered them to you! It’s highly unlikely that you would be able to see anything through them. When someone comes to us for help, we can all be guilty of offering up solutions that have worked for us. Also when we go for help to our peers and bosses, we often expect answers. Coaching tries to avoid this. The coach asks questions and carries out exercises with the coachee, to get them to explore their current situation and work out for themselves what is best.

Principle 2 – Behavioural change comes from a greater self-awareness.
I run an exercise in my coaching workshops where I get the attendees to close their eyes and focus on how tense their brow, their jaw and their facial muscles are. During the exercise most of the attendees naturally start to relax. It shows that we are not aware of many of our behaviours. The good news is that noticing these behaviours is all that is required to change them.

Coaching conversations brings this self-awareness to the coachee. By asking the right questions the coach is able to focus the coachee’s mind on what is happening in their work and give the coachee time to evaluate and become aware of their behaviours. This in itself is a powerful way for a coachee to be able to spot new and better ways of working.

Principle 3 – Coaching supports the coachee through a period of discomfort whilst they change their behaviour.
Getting better at doing something is uncomfortable. Why? Because improving implies we are doing something different that we are used to. Any different way of acting, for a while at least, is uncomfortable. A good example is when we are trying to lose some weight. We’ve been used to being lazy in our eating and exercise habits. When we start a new healthy regime, it feels awkward. Going to the gym is not what we want to do after a hard days work. Eating fruit and vegetables makes us crave for some chocolate. But if we stick with it, after a while our new way of living becomes the norm.

With principle number 3, the coach’s role is to support and encourage the coachee through this period of discomfort, until the new way of behaving becomes comfortable.

In this next article I will look at how to structure a coaching session using the GROW technique.