Coaching refers to the process of facilitating the self-awareness, learning, and performance improvement of an employee, often on the job. Individual coaching is a learning relationship between two employees: a manager and someone he or she supervises, two managers, or a worker and a co-worker. It is focused on a specific learning need, a performance deficit, or a problem between employees.
Coaching is more than a strategy: it involves listening, asking, and speaking to draw out and augment characteristics and potential that are already present in a person. It is based on the premise that learning will take place in a safe and challenging environment created by someone who will listen without judgment. Listening is the basis for an effective coaching relationship that facilitates learning. The following suggestions for listening effectively have been adapted from The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook:
Some Tips for Effective Listening:
• Stop talking to others and to yourself. You can’t listen if you are talking. If you are talking to yourself, you are really trying to create an argument in your mind for a particular position you want to take with the person you are coaching.
• Put yourself in the employee’s shoes. Imagine yourself in her position, doing her work, facing her problems, using her language, and having her values. (What must she be feeling about the situation?)
• Be interested. Show your interest through your body language and your verbal responses.
• Observe body language and other actions to understand the meaning behind the words.
• Don’t interrupt unless a short interruption can be used to clarify what the employee is saying to you.
• “Listen between the lines” for what is not being said but what is meant.
• Speak only affirmatively while listening, using only short comments. Resist the temptation to jump in with an evaluative remark. For example, “That’s a good thing to do; that is against policy; or I don’t agree.”
• Rephrase what the other person has just told you at key points in the conversation, such as when the employee has finished speaking about one major idea or experience.
• Again, stop talking to others and to yourself. This is repeated because it is so important.
As a coach, you are creating a partnership that puts the focus on the employee’s learning, rather than on your teaching. Your job is to support the learning and performance of another employee. You do this by asking questions and giving feedback in a nonthreatening and nonjudgmental way, so that there are no defensive thoughts and feelings that get in the way of learning. The way to do this is to follow these four steps, adapted from Cory and Bradley:
Step One:
Ask the person what worked well for him/her during the activity (the meeting, the conversation, the presentation, the sales call, etc.) and why he/she thinks it worked well.
Ask what didn’t work well and why.
Step Three:
Ask what he/she might consider doing differently next time.
Step Four:
Offer any feedback you might have from your perspective. Start with what worked, and then describe the behaviors you observed that didn’t work and options for change.
Your job as coach is to reduce or eliminate obstacles to learning. Some of the key obstacles include employee perceptions about one’s capability and how that capability appears to others. Here are some examples:
• Wanting to appear competent and knowledgeable
• Assuming that the need to learn indicates a deficiency
• Fear of being judged
• Self-doubt about being able to perform to the expectations of co-workers
• Trying too hard to learn
Coaching is a relationship between a “client” and a coach in which both are learning. The coach focuses on how to facilitate employee learning, rather than on telling employees what they are doing right and wrong (this is what most supervisors do).
You might have a coaching discussion with an employee while he/she is practicing or actually trying to apply new knowledge or skills, but more often, the coaching occurs on-the-fly, and not while employees are applying what they have learned. A delay occurs between the coaching session and application of learning.
Follow-up is essential to ensure learning. Be sure to reinforce the new, positive behavior by praising the employee immediately when you see the desired action (“Good job!”). Your supervisee is more likely to continue this more positive behavior when he or she feels recognized and appreciated for the change.