Three Coaching Skills to Use in Your Leadership Starting Today
Consciously adding coaching skills to your management repertoire can enable you to more effectively engage and empower the people you lead. That's because the central premise of coaching is that the person you're coaching has the wherewithal to solve their own problems. Coaching helps bring clarity, organization, conviction and focus to their thinking in order to support progress.
You’ve probably heard reference to a colleague as "needing coaching” on some behavior or skillset. This phrasing implies that coaching is about "fixing." It's not quite accurate.
Taking a coach approach to certain conversations you have as a manager allows you to hear and help support your direct reports in expanding their thinking. This may replace a habit you have to jump in and offer a solution to their problem.
When I was first trained as a coach in 2007 from Coach U, the program was structured with month-long courses, each focused on a specific coaching skill. Here are the three most salient skills from that curriculum that you can begin practicing today.
Suppose your direct report sets up a meeting to talk about their concern that there is too much on their plate and they're beginning to burn out. We’ll work with this example in each of the skills below.
Listening
True listening happens when you're seeking first to understand, completely focused and attuned to the communication being put out by the other. This requires you to not be doing your own thinking (which is on aspect to listening being so damn hard). The goal is to be able to track and organize what you're hearing without actually doing your own response thinking.
This will get easier with mindful practice. Mindfulness also helps you notice when your mind has wandered into your own thoughts and bring it back to the person.
Listen empathetically, for content and emotion. Listen for what's not being said in addition to what's being said. Listen without your own opinion clouding your ability to hear.
As your direct report describes their burnout symptoms, you may have flickers of your own similar experiences, but you quickly draw your mind back to what you're hearing. You maintain eye contact and calm body language. Subtle nodding and "mm hmms" show you're tracking with them. When they finish opening up about their concerns, you might respond with, "What I hear you saying is that the burnout is starting to feel very real for you and is impacting your health.”
Questioning
As a manager in coaching mode, powerful questions are essential to draw out wisdom of those whom you lead.
A question inherently steers the conversation somewhere. Yet, your questions can be relatively open-ended, widening the field of possibility instead of narrowing it down.
Powerful questions can do so much. They can motivate, inspire, clarify, remind and challenge. When your direct report has to think about the answer to your question, new neural pathways are formed, increasing capability on the spot.
As questions you don’t know the answer to. Ask questions that get your direct report thinking about where they are, where they want to go, and how to get there. Ask in a way that shows you’re not attached to a certain response, but truly holding the space for inquiry.
An example of a coaching-style question in response to this burnout conversation would be something along the lines of: “What do you think would move the needle for you?” Don't be surprised if they start with "I don't know." Just wait and see if they say more. If they don't, a gentle invitation to take a guess might help. Resist the temptation to tell them what you think would move the needle!
Acknowledging
Acknowledging is about saying, “I see you, I hear you, and I value you.” It is an underused skill. Articulating to someone what you see in them, particularly their best qualities, helps those qualities get leveraged even more. Acknowledging struggle can help build resilience.
An example of an acknowledgement would be to say: “I want to acknowledge you for your courage in coming to me with this concern. I know it's not an easy topic to raise. I'm here for you and I see how important this is to you to get a handle on. It's important to me too.”
Practice listening more fully, asking more open-ended questions that show true interest and curiosity, and acknowledge more generously and sincerely. You'll be amazed at how executing these coaching skills as a leader creates stronger connections between you and the people you lead!
(Want to learn about and practice these skills in more depth with other managers? Join our next round of Engage - Coaching Skills for Managers starting September 29th).
