Coaching secrets, becoming a better coach

What are your strategies for becoming a more effective coach?

Your Rant: I’ve got an employee who has a lot of potential. How can I help her to do a better job? 

911 Repair:

Did you hear about the German man who woke up very early one morning, stark naked, in the middle of the street? He wasn’t an exhibitionist, he was a sleepwalker. A rather cold sleepwalker at that. The Buchen police picked him up and drove him back to his house.

Unfortunately, many coaches are like that man in Buchen. No, they’re not naked, they just go about the coaching experience sleepwalking and not necessarily tailoring their coaching to the person and the specific challenges that he or she is grappling with. I’ve listed some tips below to help you be a more effective coach. For more, check out “Coaching for Leadership” (Jossey-Bass, 2000).

What process do the most effective coaches use? There are five stages that “Coaching For Leadership” recommends. First, assess the current skills of the “coachee.” Second, clarify the coachee’s expectations. Then, work together to establish the priorities for your time together. Next, develop a plan outlining what you hope to accomplish. Finally, watch the coachee’s performance improve. It is important to remember that coaching is different from teaching, which can often be a one-way street; coaching needs to be more of a dialogue. There are four main areas of coaching, and I’ve outlined each below:

Are you coaching for skill? The emphasis here should be on a specific task that the person needs to learn how to do. Coaching for skill tends to happen over a short timeframe and be very specific. The key to success is having a laser beam focus on the specific skill and to not get distracted by other issues.

Are you coaching for performance in their current job? The emphasis here is broader than just a task or a series of tasks. Improving effectiveness in a job usually involves identifying core competencies and then developing a strategy for improving them. Because this is more involved, it usually lasts for a longer period of time. Because the range of coaching opportunities can be large, it is important to prioritize on the best opportunities for improvement.

Are you coaching to prepare them for a future job? If coaching for performance involves improving performance in your current job, coaching for development involves positioning yourself to do a job that is somewhere off on the horizon. This requires a lot of creativity to envision what may lie ahead for a specific person and to create learning opportunities that would prepare the person to tackle a future challenge.

Are you coaching an executive? Coaching at the executive level usually requires not only addressing the personal issues of the coachee, but also a host of organizational issues. This usually ads a level of complexity and therefore usually requires a longer time frame.

Use these tips and you won’t get undressed in your next coaching session, you’ll help your coachee’s career take off.

911 Pulse:

Have you ever used a mentor or a coach to improve your performance?

• Many times, 38.4 percent
• Once or twice, 26.9 percent
• Never. I’ve done it all on my own, 34.6 percent

User strategy:

Get to know the coachee — Do they want to just do a good job? How important is their performance at work to them? Watch the coachee in action for a while — I look for one thing they can work on which will change more than one outcome. Then I let them know what my observations were, and together we discuss ways they can use that knowledge to get to their goals. Careful goal setting — Early in the learning curve I don’t like to give numeric goals, as people progress through their learning some want those goals. I’m always there to pick them up when they fall — It’s important for your employees to know you’re there ‘for better and for worse.’ They won’t want to let you down so you won’t often see the ‘for worse.’ I see other managers in my field who try to push people who aren’t ready to be pushed and they resist and then do not thrive.