16

Coaching tools

As coaches ourselves, and in our role as management trainers, we run sessions to help leaders and managers develop their coaching skills. In both roles we use many different coaching tools and exercises to help these individuals reach effective outcomes. These tools will be useful for any coach to use appropriately as part of their coaching session with their coachee. In this chapter we offer you a selection of tools that you will find useful to draw upon when working with your coachee. The selection we offer are those we find most useful when working with our own coaching clients; however, this is not an exhaustive list. Rather it gives you a flavour of the sort of self-reflective exercises you can suggest to people as part of the coaching session.

These tools can be used for a variety of purposes:

• To help people reflect about an aspect of their coaching issue
  
• To offer a structure to the thinking process
  
• To give people reflective exercises between sessions
  
• To encourage people to think differently
  

When using any exercise or reflective tool you must ensure it is appropriate for the actual situation and that the coachee is happy to use it, fully understands what they have to do, and how you will use it as part of their coaching experience.

In the remainder of this chapter we will examine each of the tools and give a brief description of how you could use it.

Coaching journal or diary

We always encourage our coachees to use a notebook during the coaching sessions. This notebook (or in the digital world an iPad or similar) will prove useful for your coachee to make general notes, but more importantly to keep a record of their progress and to record ideas, actions and reflections. In addition to this it is used to make notes about any of the reflective exercises that you encourage them to do. It also provides a reference point for future coaching sessions. The coaching journal should be a private and personal document used only by the coachee and not shared with anyone (unless of course the coachee chooses to do so).

Johari Window

Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham developed the Johari Window to help them when giving feedback to others. The model is a useful tool to help people understand themselves and how others see them.

The open window relates to things both you and others know about yourself. The hidden area relates to things you know about yourself, but you do not share with others. The blind area is about those things that others perceive about you, but of which you are unaware. The unknown relates to things in your unconscious which neither you nor others are aware of.

The idea of the Johari Window is that as a coach you can use it to help explore relational issues with your coachee. You can work together to review how large each of these panes is in relation to different people. Our colleagues Dr Erik de Haan and Yvonne Burger have adapted the Johari Window for use in coaching.

This can help you as a coach to be aware of what is being told to you openly by the coachee – this is the open space. What the coachee is not telling you is the hidden space. As a coach you will need to observe and pick up any cues and clues that are suggesting to you that your coachee is not revealing everything. If you believe this is the case you would then probe and explore with the coachee. In the blind spot the coachee is unaware, for instance, of the impact of their behaviour, of their feelings or emotions, or even memories which can be brought to surface and thus into consciousness through the coaching process. Of course, you must always be aware that your coachee may be making a conscious choice not to share everything with you and this must be respected by you.

SWOT analysis

This is a simple reflective exercise to encourage people to think about their Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It is often used as an early exercise when people are considering promotions or looking for a new job, or going through some other personal or career change. SWOT analyses can help the coachee to raise their self-awareness in relation to their strengths and weaknesses, but more than that to encourage them to think about the opportunities and threats that may happen by making a change. The self-analysis can then serve as a prompt for the coaching session to encourage the coachee to examine their view of themselves and the issue they are exploring.

It is simple to do – ask the coachee to draw a 2 × 2 box in their notebook (like the sample below) using the whole page so that there is plenty of room for them to write their views in each of the boxes.

You would then encourage them to begin completing the chart. Our experience is that people find it relatively easy to put a few things in each box, but usually it is best to allow people some time to do this exercise perhaps between sessions! This will enable a more considered and thoughtful analysis and give you more to work on when you come to review it during the coaching session.

Life/role priorities radar

Again this is a simple exercise to encourage people to reflect about the balance in their life. You might use this when someone is feeling overwhelmed, talking to you about a disparity in their life–work balance or in the balance of time they are spending on certain aspects of their job. The idea is to encourage your coachee to think about their life or their role holistically.

There are three steps: first, thinking about what is going on for them at the moment; second, thinking about their ideal position; and third, thinking about the changes they may have to make to move towards their ideal position.

Ask them to draw a circle into their notebooks and to split this circle into segments annotating these segments with the main aspects of their life or current role. The example below uses typical life elements you may wish to consider, but you could use role specific elements, for instance client management, administration, team meetings, travel for business, etc. – whatever makes up the key elements of their role.

The challenge is to assess how much time or the level of satisfaction you feel about each of these elements. Using a scale of 0 to 10 (where the centre is 0 and the outer rim of the circle is 10) rate each segment marking it with a cross within the circle and then joining the marks to create a radar diagram of your current situation. Using a different-coloured pen you can then do the same again, asking yourself what your ideal allocation of time or level of satisfaction would be. Once the coachee has done this you then have the preparation done for a discussion about what and how they would like to change to create better balance. See above for a sample of a completed life/role priorities radar.

Life- or timeline

This self-analysis exercise is used to help coachee’s reflect about their life so far. This exercise is a useful way of encouraging someone to reflect about their whole life, or his or her time in an organisation or job role – depending upon the purpose of the exercise. It enables people to tell the story of the highs and lows using a single path. It can help your coachee to recognise achievements, challenges, to understand how experiences can be linked, to explore their responses to certain situations that will enable them to learn and move forward. Timelines are particularly useful when a person is feeling stuck in a rut or becoming despondent about their job or life in general, or in turbulent times when change is causing lots of uncertainty for individuals.

Again you need a notebook and/or a large sheet of paper. Stage one in creating your life- or timeline is to reflect about your life or time in the organisation or role and identify the highs and lows. In the coaching notebook make a list of the major events that have happened in your life or time in the organisation or role. Be sure to list those events that you consider to be both positive and negative. Now order these chronologically and annotate them with a ‘+’ for the positives and a ‘−’ for the negatives. After this reflective preparatory stage you can then create your timeline.

The timeline provides you with a pictorial view that can be more useful than a simple list as it can prompt people to see patterns or omissions. It also gives you the basis for analysis and discussion to review together and to identify what the coachee learned from each event and how they dealt with both the positive and negative events that might help them with the current issue. As a coach you can use this to explore several areas and ask many different questions, for instance:

• Can you talk me through your timeline explaining the major ups and downs?
  
• Can you identify any additional events that you may have omitted?
  
• Are your major events mainly issue or relationship driven?
  
• What did you feel at the time (for each event)?
  
• What patterns are becoming obvious?
  

Finest moment

This is an exercise we frequently use on leadership development programmes. Its purpose is to get people to think about a moment in their life when they have been proud of something they have achieved. It is a useful exercise to do with someone who is losing their confidence, demonstrating feelings of low self-esteem, demotivation or low morale. It can help them to focus on more positive times, re-energise the discussion and to draw lessons from the experience or event that can be applied to the current situation or topic under discussion.

Ask the coachee to think of a time when they have achieved something they are proud of or that stands out in their mind. Get them to describe in detail what the situation involved. Explore their motivation behind the achievement, get them to describe what was involved in detail including an exploration of their feelings during the event and finally get them to think about the lessons they can draw from this experience that could be applied today and in the future.

Scaling

This approach is written about more fully in Chapter 15 as part of the section on solution-focused coaching. The idea of scaling is that you encourage coachees to think about their issue and rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 with one being low and 10 being high.

So, for instance, let’s say you are coaching someone who is having a problem with a colleague. You can use this technique to begin a conversation about improvement. Ask the coachee to rate their current relationship. They may say a 3 out of 10, so then ask them why they say this. Once you have discussed this you might then ask them where they would like the relationship to be – they may say a 7. Jumping from a 3 to a 7 can be a tall order so then you can ask them to think about how they might move incrementally from 3 to 5 on their journey towards 7. Encourage the coachee to identify specific actions they will take to improve the relationship. One of the major benefits of scaling is that it enables the coachee to see a path towards improvement by making small changes that will contribute towards the goal.

Force field analysis

This is a useful visual technique to help an individual to think through decisions in times of change. It encourages you to think first about the pros and cons of the decision, and then to help you analyse and communicate your rationale for your decision. Social psychologist Kurt Lewin first used this approach in the 1940s.

Let’s imagine you are helping your coachee to decide about taking on a project overseas. The first stage is to be clear about the objective and to write it down. Then note down all the forces going for the change and then all the forces going against the change. Once they have done this initial thinking, they then create the force field analysis by drawing a rectangle in the middle of the page, then list the forces going for the change on the left hand of the box using longer or shorter arrows to indicate the importance of the force. Then list the forces going against the change on the right, again using the length of the arrow as an indicator of the importance of the force. Figure 16.8 sets out an example of a force field analysis.

A force field analysis can be done interactively during the session or by the coachee alone – doing it together may be particularly appropriate if you are the coachee’s boss or have some knowledge about the issue at hand. Take care not to lead them to your own decision, but rather prompt them with questions to encourage them to think about the various factors that will influence the change, don’t simply offer your opinion.

Personal decision analysis

This is a simple yet effective tool for helping people to make decisions, especially in relation to two possible outcomes; for instance, if you are working with a coachee who is trying to decide whether or not to move from a branch office to head office as part of their career progression. Draw a 2 × 2 box on to a sheet of paper (or even on to a post-it note) and annotate the horizontal axis ‘move’ at the top and ‘stay’ at the bottom, and the vertical axis + on the left and - on the right. See the example in Figure 16.9.

Once you have drawn the framework then ask your coachee to complete the four quadrants with the positives and negatives relating to each option. You might ask them to think about the main benefits of moving and then list them in the top left quadrant with the disadvantages listed in the top right quadrant, and so on. This then gives a good start point for exploring the decision in more detail and can be extremely beneficial to help your coachee structure their thinking, to achieve clarity about the decision they have to make and to see their rationale.

‘What if?’ question

The ‘what if?’ question helps individuals to remove barriers to thinking and to encourage creative and positive thought. The idea is that if a coachee is struggling with an issue and can only see problems, a question that removes the problems and barriers from the discussion can help them to see other possibilities. Suggest to your coachee that you are going to try something different to get them unstuck and that this will require them to suspend judgement and do a bit of make believe. Then ask a ‘what if?’ question which would go something like this, ‘What if the colleague you are having problems with today arrived at the office tomorrow and those problems had disappeared, what would that feel like? What would be different? What would the colleague be doing that would be more acceptable?’

This is a similar technique to the miracle question we discussed in Chapter 14.

Some people find this technique difficult to get to grips with and you may need to help them further by prompting, for instance, ‘Don’t overthink this just give it a go. What would you like things to be like? Describe it?’ Once the coachee has spent some time describing their ideal to you, it will of course be necessary to follow up with more questions to determine what he or she can do to move towards this ideal.

Relationship network mapping

When coaching a colleague there will often be much discussion about the people your coachee interacts with, and helping them to deal with their challenge sometimes involves relationship issues. We find creating and working with a relationship network map to be very useful for both the coach and coachee.

This technique involves using mind-mapping principles to create an image of the people in your coachee’s relationship network. So it might look something like that set out in Figure 16.11.

Of course for most of us it would be rather more complex with many more named people, but this gives you an example of how your coachee might construct their own chart.

The relationship network map can be used for several different purposes during your coaching sessions, for example:

• To help you (the coach) understand the various business relationships your coachee is involved in.
  
• To help you to understand the position, impact and interrelationships between various people in the coachee’s network when discussing different relationship issues.
  

You can also ask the coachee to annotate this map in all sorts of different ways as part of a relationship network analysis, for instance:

• Those people who are most important for your coachee’s success in their role.
  
• Those people the coachee has a good-quality relationship with.
  
• The people the coachee finds challenging.
  
• The people the coachee feels would be worthwhile developing a better relationship with.
  
• The people you wish to prioritise if you are trying to influence them about something.
  

When we use this exercise with our coachees and with our programme participants the feedback we get is that it is a real eye opener in that many people had not previously thought their relationships to be as numerous or as complex. People have also told us that this process helps them to prioritise and structure their influencing and relationship development conversations so that they can be more productive.

Work relationship analysis

This analysis is a good way of helping your coachee to describe their work-based relationships, to explore the quality of each relationship based on 2 dimensions – work need and social need. For example, work need is where it is necessary for you to have an effective working relationship with an individual. Social need is where you choose to socialise with an individual. Looking at your relationships in this way can help your coachee to identify those relationships that work and those that require development.

It can also be used in conjunction with the relationship network map to assess each relationship.

So, first draw a 2 × 2 box on to a sheet of paper and annotate it as per the example in Figure 16.12.

The idea is to use the analysis to assess the quality of each work-based relationship or possibly one or two specific relationships that the coachee is having problems with. Each quadrant on the chart describes, in a general way, how the coachee might describe the relationship with a person:

• Transactional is a relationship where a person is important for the coachee’s work but not particularly important as a social relationship. This may be a colleague who you know and is important to your effectiveness in the job but whom you choose not to socialise with.
  
• Casual are those relationships where there is little work need and you don’t particularly have a social relationship with them either. These people are often on the fringes of your relationship network and may be more junior or provide an occasional service for you.
  
• Social relationships are with the people you enjoy being with. You like their company and may use them as a sounding board or devil’s advocate when you want to share problems and challenges with someone. However, there is very little direct work need for the relationship.
  
• Mutually beneficial are those relationships where you have both a high work need and a high social need. These are people you like, trust and work well with.
  

Once you have positioned people on to the chart you can then use it as the basis for a discussion about why your coachee has positioned the relationship where he or she has, and what the implications of this are. Also, ask if there are any relationships that he or she would wish to move from one quadrant to another or to adapt in some way.

The aim is not to get all your relationships into the mutually beneficial quadrant (this would be unrealistic); rather it is to understand more about the quality of each relationship to help your coachee to develop effective action plans during coaching sessions.

Some of these tools relate and link to other processes and models in this book, while some have been developed and used by others and ourselves in our training and coaching practice, and some are well-publicised ideas for use in self-development.

The vital issue in using any tool during a coaching session is to be sure it is appropriate for the person being coached and the topic under discussion.

Tips for success

• Use appropriate tools, techniques and exercises to support your coaching discussions.
  
• Ensure your coachee fully understands the purpose of any tool used.
  
• Develop new tools and exercises that work for you and your coachees.