So what is coaching exactly?

You have probably heard the term ‘coaching’ before. Perhaps you have even had a coach yourself. A little like sports coaching, a professional coach is someone who can help you to unlock your potential and reach your desired goals. Unlike sports coaching, professional coaching does not require the coach to be an expert in your profession and they never tell you what to do - or make you do push ups!

There are various different ways to coach someone and lots of different models to help you to achieve great results. The belief that underpins all professional coaching is that the coachee has the answer to their own questions. The coach brings the right questions and the coachee has the answers.

Ultimately only you have the power to solve your problems or define and achieve your goals. A coach is there to challenge your assumptions so that you can find a clear path to where you want to be.

They will ask you questions that you are likely never to have asked yourself and these questions will give you a greater insight into both what you want to achieve and what might be holding you back.

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What coaching is NOT

Coaching is not mentoring - though the two often get conflated. Mentors are people who are experts in a particular field and their role is to share their knowledge with you. They are often more senior than you so that they can share the benefit of their experience. If they are a peer mentor then they are likely to be at a similar stage in their career / role to you and the purpose of the relationship will be to share experiences, validate each other’s concerns and decisions and offer advice.

A great coach will not offer advice unless asked or before seeking your permission. They do not have to know anything about the nature of your work - their profession is coaching. Nancy Kline, a prominent figure in the wider coaching world, sees the value of coaching as a way to provide space to think.

For this coaches also need to be great listeners. As a coach, ‘you matter because you don’t matter at all’. The power of coaching is when that time to think and some insightful questions helps you to unlock your potential.

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How can coaching help?

You don’t have to be a trained coach to develop coaching skills. Using a model called GROW will help you to have a good coaching style conversation / to work through a coaching process yourself. It’s a particularly useful skill if you are a manager but you don’t have to be a manager to use it. GROW is one of the simplest coaching models around. Developed by former racing car driver and academic John Whitmore in the 1990s, it is still widely used today.

Try working through the model yourself, thinking of a specific work situation e.g. a problem you need to solve, something you want to do or achieve:

‍Goal: The purpose of this part of the process is to ascertain what you are working towards. You may find you need to come back to this and refine it once you have worked through the rest of the process.

Questions to help you define your goal: What do you want to achieve? What will success look like? How will you know when you have achieved it?

‍Reality: This is the time to analyse what is going on right now. The most important thing to remember is to dig deep and avoid trying to find a solution or come up with any new ideas. This is hard and can feel uncomfortable, but it’s a crucial part of the process and something we often skip over outside of a coaching environment.

Questions to help you to explore your reality: What have you tried so far? What have you done to contribute to the achievement of your goal? What were the results? What’s working well and what isn’t? Who else is involved and what impact do they have on the situation?

‍Options: This is the time to explore all the possibilities available to you. Think big, no idea is too outlandish. Think about what you could do if time, money and skill weren’t an issue. These creative thoughts will help you to access more realistic ideas later on. The trick here is to keep going until you have run out of all ideas.

Questions to help you explore your options: What could you do that you haven’t tried already? What else could you do? What would you do if there were no obstacles (real or perceived)? What else could you try? What else? What else…? You get the idea!

‍Will: This is where you decide on a course of action that will get you closer to your goal. This idea will likely have been sparked in the previous stage but it could also be something you have known all along! This is where you commit to take action - one tiny step, or something bigger…

Questions to help you define what you will do: So, what are you going to do? How will this help you achieve / work towards your goal? What will you do first? Who else is involved? Who will help you? Who will hold you accountable? When will you take this action? How will you know if it has been a success? What might get in your way and how will you overcome this?

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How to ask a good question...

To use a coaching style with other people (including, perhaps, your Voco partner...), you need to hone your questioning skills.

You should always start a coaching conversation - or any conversation really - with an open question. Open questions are categorised as those that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no answer. They require more thought and will elicit a richer response.  

It’s harder to ask an open question than you might think! A common pitfall will be to ask a good open question and then follow quickly with layers of closed questions. For example, ‘how are you feeling today? Are you feeling okay? Is everything okay with…?’ You might do this because you don’t like the idea of putting someone under pressure and you want to show empathy by filling in the information for them. Sometimes it might be because you don’t really have the time to listen to the answer and sometimes you are simply unaware that you are doing it.

If your question starts with the words, how, why, what, where, when or who then you are asking a true open question. Once you’ve asked it…pause for an answer before filling the silence. If you have asked a great open question there is likely to be a moment of silent reflection, even for the most fluid communicator.

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So when should you coach?

You can use coaching skills whenever the need arises. You don’t have to run through the full GROW model. Simply asking some great open questions and truly listening to the responses without judgement or agenda is great coaching in action.

If you want to use the GROW model, make sure that you seek permission first and explain the process. If you are a manager, try using this technique in a regular catch up with one of your direct reports. You could use it to help them to solve a problem you feel they probably already know how to fix or in the context of a development conversation.

Don’t coach if you have an agenda, for example, if you have some feedback to give. Asking ‘how do you think it’s going?’ when you know the answer and you need to deliver some feedback is NOT coaching! Use coaching skills to help someone figure how they can respond to feedback, not to deliver it.
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Coaching can help you to find the solutions to problems, define a goal and figure out how to achieve your goal. You can use a coaching style when thinking about your own development and you can use it to help others. Open questions and focussed listening are fundamental and you can use the GROW model to drill right down into specifics.

And remember, coaching should be used in a development context only and never as a tool to deliver feedback.

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NEXT >> How to unlearn your conversation skills

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