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Essential leadership coaching skills

COURSE NOTES

Why take a coaching approach to leadership development?

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

• Illuminating hidden skills, resources, knowledge, experience, and interest

• Turning potential into capacity

Coaching is generally experienced as motivational and empowering.

And the downsides?

• Initially it takes longer

• You will need to build up a culture of coaching over time. It can take time to change
expectations of being spoon-fed

• It demands thought and self-control

• It can be frustrating when the answer seems to you to be staring someone in the face and
they just aren’t making the connections

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

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And also, what you are not coaching for:

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 which case, other ways of
solving the problem might be more effective and appropriate.

Select appropriate opportunities

Coaching is only one of a number of management interaction styles or leadership development

processes and is not right for all occasions. In emergency situations, for instance, you are better off
just telling people what they need to do.

Some indicators of a good opportunity for coaching are:

• Whatever the person is struggling with, or asking for help with, is going to be a recurring
challenge

• There is no panic. Heightened emotional states, such as panic, can lead to unhelpful
learning. For instance, they ‘learn’ that you are obstructive and unhelpful rather than that
you helped them develop a new skill or to think for themselves

• There is time to assure yourself that they are good to go after the conversation and that you
are happy with their next steps. This needn’t take long, but there needs to be time to
conclude the conversation

• Someone asking for help

• Someone comes to you with a problem, and it’s clear they have a solution in mind

• You are trying to help someone and they are resisting all your suggestions

Use turning questions

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:

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

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

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

‘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?’

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After asking any of those, or a similar question, put an expectant expression on your face and stop
speaking! Create a big space full of expectation and hope for them to answer into. Hold your nerve.

These questions work to turn the question away from your resourcefulness towards theirs. It also
helps move them from passive recipient waiting for an answer, to active agents in finding a way
forward.

Help them draw on existing resources

Part of the coaching process is to help people identify the resources they have that they can bring to
bear on the challenge. When people are lost in the anxiety or uncertainty of the present moment,
the resources from their past experience or current network often aren’t immediately accessible or
apparent to them. Your role is to help them identify the resources they already have that they can
draw on to address the challenge.

So you might ask questions like:

‘When have you tackled something similar? Not necessarily here but in other places you’ve
worked or in other situations? How did that work out? How could what you learnt from that be
relevant here?’

‘Who else knows something about this and might be interested to work with you on finding a
way forward?’

‘What ideas do you have?’

‘Where else might there be some information on this that might stimulate ideas? For example,
websites, in-house training, forums, professional associations?’

Explore and develop opportunities

This is where you finally get to feed your knowledge, problem-solving skills, and expertise into the
conversation, but in a different way.

You use it to help shape up the idea into the best it can be while still clearly being theirs:

‘Explain to me more about how that’s a good idea? How do you see it working?’

‘Have you considered/ taken into account/ thought about...?’

‘So what will you do if....?”

‘Hmm, I’m just wondering how that might go down with... what do you think?’
‘Great, what do you see the risks as being? How will you deal with them?’

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This is also where you set any boundaries on action. This might range from ‘It’s a
great/interesting/novel/exciting/challenging/provocative idea and I truly am sorry to have to say I
can’t support it as it will be too expensive/take more time than we have/be seen as too risky.’

Then move swiftly too:

‘However, I think the bit about ... could work, let’s explore that more.’ Or ‘what else have you got?’

Road test for readiness

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:

‘What’s your first step?’

‘Who else do you need to talk to?’

‘How will I know you are making progress?’

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

‘What else needs to happen to increase your readiness?’

‘How can I support you to make this happen?’

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

When coaching is not appropriate

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

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Blocking factors

Sometimes particular people or even groups of people get stuck in patterns of belief 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 these cases, you need to address these challenges before you can hope to get very far with
coaching.

Final thoughts

So, be aware that coaching isn’t for everyone and every situation. Beyond that however, 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!

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Copyright 2017 – Skill Boosters and Sarah Lewis