Why Coaching Skills for Managers Are Important to Your Business
A study by Bersin & Associates indicates that when senior leaders coach effectively they often improve business results by 21%. But how and from whom do these leaders learn effective coaching skills for managers?
Their teachers are role models – former managers, mentors, athletic coaches, teachers, parents – and ye’ old seat-of the-pants approach. Some leaders learn to coach by way of training programs and/or working with an executive coach. Reading helps as well. And on that note…
This series describes, in detail, a multilevel approach to effective coaching skills for managers. I’ve taught a number of leaders to use these skills when coaching employees at different levels, including:
- Showing and telling less experienced coachees and/or those developing new skills.
- Guiding questions to help employees discover their own solutions
- Coaching for insight with more experienced employees who are solving complex problems and/or managing direct reports
How to Coach for Insight
Coaching for insight, for the most part, consists of finding and asking questions that help your coachee tap his own insight, which is defined as,
Apprehending the true nature of a thing, especially through intuitive understanding
Penetrating mental vision or discernment; faculty of seeing into inner character or underlying truth
Incisive questions help your coachees uncover what they already know but don’t trust or see clearly. Your questions are aimed at helping them mine for the inner gold that lives below the surface. When you listen well, with no agenda of your own, you’ll hear the quiet whisper of that inner wisdom. It exists within a thought your coachee quickly dismisses, a question they’re asking, a pattern of statements over time.
The Coach Who Listened for Insights
(The following vignette is based on a real life example.)
Imagine yourself as Eric, Sheila’s manager. You’ve been coaching her for the past six months. For much of that time, Sheila’s been discussing Fred, one of her direct reports, who’s been under performing and having a negative impact on the group’s sales numbers.
In this session, Sheila says she’s hit a roadblock with Fred. She feels “frustrated and stuck”. She also reports that whenever she gives Fred direct feedback, he misses work for the next several days. After their last one to one, he took a three week medical leave due to stress.
During her coaching sessions, Sheila often asks what she’s doing wrong and why she’s not getting through to Fred. Today she wondered aloud, for the first time, whether Fred might not be a good fit for a high pressured sales role. “If he gets overly stressed when dealing with direct feedback, how does he manage the rejection that comes with selling?” She didn’t pursue this line of thinking and shifted, instead, to looking for different approaches to helping Fred.
Eric interrupted and asked her to reflect on her statements about fit and rejection. He suggested they explore that path, not because it was necessarily right, but because a new and different line of thinking might be a way out of the stuck zone.
Eric had also walked in Sheila’s shoes, so he understood the inclination to feel responsible for, and therefor continue the attempts to “fix”, under-performing employees. This, along with his ability to listen deeply and hear the potential wisdom in Sheila’s statements, allowed him to shed light on her insights.
Epilogue
Fred eventually told Sheila of a debilitating anxiety disorder that made it difficult for him to face challenges when he was in the presence of others. They both concluded that a high pressure sales job wasn’t a good fit, and Sheila understood why Fred missed work following their feedback sessions. Sheila’s insight, the one she almost missed, was spot on.