12

Supportive skills

As a coach your role is not to give advice and solutions to your coachee, but rather to explore their issues with them, and help them discover their own solutions.

Although you should not usually give advice, what you can do instead is to support and encourage the coachee and also challenge their thinking and assumptions. It is quite difficult to do both as most of us have a preference for one or other of these, but mastering the balance between support and challenge is one of the critical roles of the coach. Your role as a coach is to support the coachee to help them develop new ways of thinking and behaving, and to challenge them to see things as they really are. We have discussed how to challenge in Chapter 9, so in this short chapter we will focus on supportive skills.

Why supporting is important

Supporting your coachee is critical. If all you were to do as a coach were to challenge, the coachee would soon become uncomfortable. Therefore what is needed is a skilful blend of challenging and supporting. Coachees are often worried or nervous and it is your job to notice what is going well and be supportive of any efforts the coachee is making which are helping them move forward. Using an appropriate level of supporting behaviour will help build your coachee’s confidence and self-belief to work through difficult issues and try out new ideas.

How to support

Blind and unthinking support is not useful. What you need to do is look for evidence of where the coachee has really made an effort, and praise the effort. It’s no good saying things like ‘Good job’, or other generalities. You need to be specific and think of praising the effort that the coachee has put in. You don’t need to praise the result itself, but more the effort that has been put in. Your general attitude should be supportive. It is difficult enough to be a coachee when you receive feedback which is not always easy to hear, and are trying to change attitudes and behaviours without having any support.

The four A’s of supporting

We think that there are four critical aspects of supporting:

• Attending
  
• Acknowledging
  
• Affirming
  
• Appreciating
  

Attending

It is important to show that you as a coach are fully present in the meeting. By ‘fully present’ we mean bringing all your senses, focus and awareness to the coaching session. You are not trying to play a role or be someone else, you just need to bring your authentic self to the session, and be prepared to let go of your own issues and concerns for the duration of the session. So then you can focus on the coachee, listen to them properly and show them that your attention is on them. This will lead to the coachee being able to fully share what’s on their mind. If you are not prepared to focus fully on the session then it is unlikely that the coachee will either.

Acknowledging

One of the basic human needs is to be recognised and included. So it is important for you as a coach to be able to properly acknowledge what the coach is saying and also what he or she is feeling. This means showing patience and taking the coachee’s issues seriously. We have noticed that some managers have a tendency to trivialise their coachee’s concerns or issues during coaching sessions, by saying things like, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be fine!’ They may indeed be fine but it’s not your job to say so – you don’t actually know if they will be fine. Also the role of the coach is to listen to people’s concerns and take them seriously, not to try somehow to make them appear less significant than they are.

Affirming

Affirming is building on the coachee’s strengths – recognising them and reassuring the coachee about these strengths. It seems rather obvious to say this, but in practice many people have a very clear idea of their weaknesses, but a far less clear idea of what their strengths are. Effective performance comes from your strengths not from your weaknesses. As the late Insoo Kim Berg, co-founder of Solution Focused Brief Therapy, said: ‘Always look at the person’s resources first.’ So, keeping an eye out for someone’s strengths and resources, and then making sure you give the coachee feedback on them, is a key aspect to coaching.

Appreciating

This is about being positive and giving positive feedback to the coachee. So, as a coach you are aware of when the coachee has done something positive, or taken steps in the right direction. Then you share that with them. Research suggests that in general a ratio of three positive remarks or interventions to one critical one is helpful. Giving compliments is part of being appreciative; they are used to identify and highlight the coachee’s strengths and resources, and any progress that has been made. It is very difficult for some managers to give compliments; it seems they would rather say nothing at all than say something positive to someone. It can, of course, be affected by culture. Some national and organisational cultures are masculine where giving praise and compliments can be viewed as a sign of weakness. There is a German proverb which says, ‘Nicht geschimpft ist genug gelobt!’, which in English means, ‘Not criticising is sufficient praise!’ You can imagine that giving praise and being appreciative in such cultures could be rather difficult. But we know from our research that many people, especially Gen Y, want a different style of leadership, one that is more coaching oriented and appreciative.

The first step to giving compliments and being appreciative is to be on the lookout for what people do well. Instead of doing what we usually do and being critical and judgemental, try noticing what you like, or what you value about something or someone. Suspend your judgement on the things you don’t like for a moment and focus on the positive. Then share it in a straightforward and simple way, ‘I like the way you did that.’ If you find that too difficult then try wrapping your compliment up in a question, for instance, ‘How do you do that so effectively?’

When you are next coaching someone try to suspend your critical self and remember the four A’s – Attend, Acknowledge, Affirm and Appreciate.

Appreciation is a wonderful thing: it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

Voltaire

Tips for success

• Show appreciation and support; this builds confidence and self-belief in others.
  
• When showing appreciation ensure you give evidence for that appreciation and that it is genuine.
  
• Suspend your natural critical self, look for the positives, then tell your coachee what you like.
  
• Pause before responding to your coachee and think about what they are feeling and how your responses might make them feel.