I’m sure we can all agree that coaching is important; sadly, we invest too little time in high-impact coaching.
Spending an hour each week per person is hardly adequate; however, this article is not about the time we spend, it’s about how we spend it.
I find people confused about coaching. The examples we see of coaching and the tools people leverage in their coaching don’t seem to capture its heart.
Is coaching ‘call intelligence’ and helping someone understand and analyse their calls, or whispering into their ears during a call?
Is the coaching role play assisting people in practising and executing better? Is coaching reviewing a performance dashboard?
Each of these activities represents how we can apply our coaching skills, and our people can use coaching. However, contrary to what people might want you to believe, these represent the smallest coaching moments.
So, let’s start with fundamentals.
What is coaching? At its core, coaching is the act of helping someone become more capable of thinking, deciding, and acting effectively.
It applies to everything they do. How do they spend their time? How do they do their jobs? How do they work with their peers, partners, and customers?
How do they use resources, methods, systems, processes, and tools effectively? How do they grow and develop?
How can they better align with the organisation's values, culture, and beliefs? How can they better align and more deeply understand their customers? How do they deal with challenges, struggles, and not achieving their goals?
For coaching to have a massive impact, there must be through lines across all these elements.
We can’t coach individuals in one area and then coach them in the opposite way for something else. That’s not coaching; that isn’t very clear. Consistency in what we coach across all areas of our coaching is critical to achieving the goals we share.
Our coaching can sometimes be overwhelming. We must focus on the top two or three areas we and the individual seek to change and improve.
Then, we must apply those in each area we coach. As the student begins to master these areas, we move on.
Coaching is not telling the person what to do. It’s guiding them to figure out how to do things right, improve, change, learn and grow.
Again, it’s improving their capability to think, decide, and act effectively. The best analogy is “Give a person a fish, they eat for a day, teach a person to fish, they eat for the rest of their lives.”
Guiding them to figure things out themselves enables them to grow and develop constantly.
Coaching is not limited to our “coaching sessions.” When you look at the data under time pressure and constraints, unfortunately, the first thing managers eliminate is coaching.
This is probably bad judgment; however, that is the reality. In high-impact coaching, we integrate coaching into every encounter with our people.
Coaching is always based on a context. While we have the through-lines of our two or three key improvement areas, we adjust that coaching to the specific context or situation we are discussing.
Coaching is built on memory or history.
We see how people have behaved in the past, how they have responded, the consistent challenges they face, where we may have made mistakes, and how we continue to improve our coaching.
Coaching is as much for the coach as it is for the person being coached. We constantly learn and improve in the process.
We get deeper insights about the people we are coaching. We learn about ourselves through the eyes of the people we coach, and from that, we improve.
Coaching is as much about receiving feedback as it is giving it.
Coaching is not about finding things right or finding wrong things.
It’s about continually developing the capabilities of the people we coach, helping them do more of the right things, the right way, at the right time with the right people. It’s about learning from our failures and figuring out how to improve.
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Coaching is not training; however, it supports and reinforces training and may adapt it to the individual.
Where training focuses on what we need to do, coaching explains why it is essential and how we might improve our actions.
We must be coachable people –open to learning, growth and change to coach effectively.
I think it’s important to understand what coaching is. It’s not just one thing. It doesn’t focus on just a specific aspect of a job, like reading performance dashboards.
While those incorporate coaching for that, they are insufficient by themselves.
Without being interconnected with the other elements of high-impact coaching, they do not allow us to help our people achieve their full potential.
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