21 Oct TSLH #042: 2 Essential Skills To Be a Coach For Your Team
Read time: 4 minutes
Coaching is a very fashionable word nowadays. The issue is that many leaders fail to really understand what coaching is.
So let’s start with what coaching is not.
Coaching is not mentoring: Mentoring is about supporting someone by teaching or showing them how you would address a specific challenge or solve a problem. Mentoring relies heavily on your own experience and how you would have done something or made a decision. In essence, when you mentor someone, you give them a solution, you teach them something.
Coaching is not consulting: Consulting is about giving a turnkey solution to someone based on a problem they gave you to solve. Consulting usually relies on best practices or built experience of the consultants.
While mentoring and consulting can be two very efficient approaches to solving problems, they are completely different from coaching.
According to the International Coaching Federation (ICF), coaching is “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.”
This is where coaching becomes critical in your role as a leader: To maximize the performance of your team or organization, have a team that is engaged, accountable, collaborative and productive, you need to add coaching to your toolbox. Coaching could very well be the skill you need to develop in order to get beyond where you are today in terms of performance.
Although coaching may sound hard to use initially, especially without any specific training, you need to know that it boils down to 2 essential skills that are very easy to develop and practice:
- Listening
- Asking powerful questions
Listening. Developing the skill of listening can be very hard, especially if you are an extrovert, because extroverts tend to speak, be loud. This is not what will work in a coaching mode though.
To be a great listener, you have to focus on how you listen.
Most people listen to themselves when they listen to someone else. That means that as the other person speaks, they might think “Oh, I know how to solve this, I had the same issue last month.” or worse, they might be completely distracted, thinking “I need to ask a question here to show I am interested.” or “This is boring, I have my next meeting to prepare.”
Needless to say, that level of listening does not make you a great listener and won’t give you the ability to coach the person successfully.
To enhance your listening skills, you need to focus on what the other person says, and not only hear what they say, but also how they say it. Great listening is all about being intensely focused on what the person says – without interferences from the past or the future or your own ideas intruding – and looking for body language cues that the person is giving and that will inform you about the emotional field.
For instance, you might see the other person being under stress, or speaking very quickly, or making clear signs with their hands, legs, etc. All these are signs that you can take to listen to what the person is really saying. And you can rebound on these signs by asking questions, getting curious.
My advice is to practice, and you will become much more adept at listening not only with your ears but with your eyes as well. This will allow you to change your leadership radically, becoming a coach for your team and giving them the support they need to be highly efficient.
Asking powerful questions. The next thing you want to be able to do and develop is asking questions.
Not just any question. In coaching we speak of powerful questions.
Powerful questions have some basic requirements:
- They are curious, open-ended and invite new possibilities and perspectives.
- They tend to be short, for instance “What do you know work in such situations?” or “How did you react to this?”
- They typically start with WHAT or HOW. You may also use WHERE or WHEN in some instances. Be cautious with using WHY though.
You need to be careful with how you ask the questions too.
For instance, WHY questions need to be used sparsely because they tend to sound like an accusation and often invite to provide an excuse. To counter that, you can turn a WHY question into a WHAT question. For instance:
Instead of “Why did you cut development time by 2?”, ask “What was important in cutting development time by 2?”
Of course, occasionally, a WHY question definitely works. For instance if you ask “Why is this important to you?”
You also need to be cautious with questions that may try to camouflage your own opinion or advice – which may mean you are offering a solution and are therefore not coaching.
A poor question would be “Have you considered re-organizing by product line?”
A better question here would be “What sales structure have you considered?” or “What have you tried already?”
Here too, practice is key. Over time, you may develop your own questions.
To give you an edge and get you started, I have a gift for you this week. I have created a document that has 150 powerful questions that you can ask in any leadership situations. You can download this guide by clicking on the button below. I sorted out the questions by leadership situation, but of course, these questions are interchangeable and you can use them as you see fit in any other situation you have at work or even in your life. Play with this and I’d be grateful if you sent me some feedback on how you made progress towards becoming a coach for your team or organization.
I wish you a great read. I’ll see you next Saturday!
TL; DR (Too Long, Did not Read)
2 essential skills to be a coach for your team
- Listening.
- Asking powerful questions
Download the “150 Powerful Questions for Different Leadership Situations” Guide
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1️⃣ Work 1-1 with me to step up as the authentic leader you aspire to be.
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