Fundamental Coaching Skills

SUMMARY

Are you expected to do some coaching in your leadership position, and you're not quite sure what that is; you've got different ideas that you've heard about, but you're not really sure what it is that you're supposed to do?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, emotional intelligence speaker and trainer of the year, and master coach trainer, and today I want to help you understand and develop fundamental coaching skills.

Let me unpack them for you so that you know what to focus on. And over the coming weeks, we'll continue to develop some of these skills and go a little bit deeper.

1. The ability to establish a coaching relationship.

2. Listen with curiosity.

3. Ask powerful questions.

4. Provide relevant feedback.

5. Celebrate small wins.

6. Hold the space.

Coaching is such a rewarding profession. And being able to do that as a part of your leadership role means that you are going to be able to grow yourself as well as help the people that you're coaching as well.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week when we continue this conversation around coaching and mentoring, where we tackle the first of those fundamental skills of establishing a coaching relationship.

I'll see you then.

TRANSCRIPT

Are you expected to do some coaching in your leadership position, and you're not quite sure what that is; you've got different ideas that you've heard about, but you're not really sure what it is that you're supposed to do?

Well, stick with me because in this week's episode, I want to continue our conversation around coaching and mentoring others. By helping you to understand what are the areas that you need to develop so that you can be a great coach.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, emotional intelligence speaker and trainer of the year, and master coach trainer, and today I want to help you understand and develop fundamental coaching skills.

I've been a coach professionally for many years. However, when I came into coaching, I found that I'd been doing it for years; I just didn't know that's what it was called.

Now, last week we talked about the power of coaching and we talked about what coaching is and what it isn't. And it's a word that's thrown around quite a lot. And over the next few weeks, I'm going to continue to unpack that for us.

However, coaching in the context of a leader in the workplace is a little bit different to running your own practice. There are particular skills, which are not limited to the sphere of coaching, that a leader can work on so that they can have a more effective coaching environment for themselves and the people that they coach.

So, let me unpack them for you so that you know what to focus on. And over the coming weeks, we'll continue to develop some of these skills and go a little bit deeper.

Mastering the skills is 90% of being a great coach.

1. The ability to establish a coaching relationship.

Coaching is all about mutual understanding and respect, where two people, a coach and a coachee, come together in a relationship. It's something that has a beneficial aspect for both. It's an environment where there's trust, where there's rapport, where it's okay to speak in certain ways, where there is a framework, there are expectations.

So, the number one skill that you need as a leader, as a coach, is to be able to establish that relationship. Unfortunately, I've witnessed people just jumping in with the next skills that I'm going to take you through without getting this relationship established.

So how do we establish relationships? We use our social skills. We use our social intelligence, particularly things like empathy. So being able to establish a relationship means that it's going to be more viable moving forward.

Next week, I'm going to go deeper and look at this vital area of coaching -- establishing a coaching relationship.

2. Listen with curiosity.

Listening is a skill that we all know we need to have as a leader. In fact, a leader of self, let alone a leader of other people.

Yet, listening is one of those skills that's been watered down a little bit because everyone knows. "Yeah, I know I need to listen." However, there's a certain type of listening that you need to be an effective coach. You need to be able to actively listen.

Listen, with more than your ears. You need to be able to listen to what's being said, and what's not being said. For me, this is the greatest skill that I have to be able to be the coach that I want to be. The ability in a well-established relationship to just listen more than I talk, to be able to understand and look through the lens that my coachee is looking through.

So actively listening, listening below the surface, reflecting what you hear to make sure that it's accurate -- this is a fundamental skill of being a great coach.

3. Ask powerful questions.

Being able to understand what the other person is navigating in a particular moment could be guesswork, or we could take the greater road and ask. And being able to ask questions that don't just get an answer.

Asking powerful questions as a coach opens the unconscious mind, it opens the possibility of what could happen. And when a question is phrased in a particular way, it goes beyond "Just tell me this: Yes or no?" It creates an ongoing environment where you find out more and more about the underlying reasons for the presenting behaviour, for the mindsets, what's going on.

The greatest gift of a coach is to be able to facilitate a conversation where the person that they're coaching gets awareness and gets the answer. A great thing about being a coach is that it's not something that you need to do. It's about you asking questions and then helping them to find the answer.

4. Provide relevant feedback.

We've all heard the term "constructive criticism". And for me, that's an oxymoron. So, let's just throw that one back into the 20th century where it belongs. We've shifted that to feedback.

As a coach, we need to be able to provide feedback on what we see and hear is coming up. And the reason I've put the word relevant there is we want to keep focused on the door that we've opened. So, keeping the feedback relevant in terms of what you have witnessed in that coaching conversation means that you're going to be able to make an incremental change; you're going to be able to take that awareness and do something with it.

I love to phrase what I'm saying with: "What I'm hearing here is this...", "What I've noticed is that there's a pattern of this..." "What I'm thinking right now is that you are operating here. What do you think about that?" So being able to make sure that the feedback is relevant to right now, to what it is that you want to do, what you've agreed to do in that particular coaching conversation.

5. Celebrate small wins.

Be the one that instigates the celebration of milestones. And when I say milestones, I'm not talking about this big grandiose change -- what we want to do is remember that coaching is a journey of incremental change -- change in mindset, thinking, and behaviour.

So, you want to recognise with your coachee those moments. In a coaching conversation there are many opportunities to give praise to someone that you're coaching and praise them for the awareness that they've just been able to get for themselves in the coaching conversation.

Celebrating small wins ignites the pleasure circuits in the brain where the brain said: "That felt good. Let's do that again."

I like to start every coaching conversation by celebrating the wins that have happened from our last session up until now. And then looking at that and working out: What did you do differently in your thinking and your behaviour to get that win so that we can take it forward and use it in future things that we're going to work on?

6. Hold the space.

We've established a coaching relationship. We've established how we're going to do things. We've got a plan.

I believe there are two key elements of coaching -- support and accountability.

Holding space means that as the coach, you are the leader. You're the one that holds them accountable in your coaching conversation and helps them to understand when their small voice is doing the talking.

Coaching is not about you. It's about them. I understand that. However, that's not a license to just let them run it. Otherwise, they don't need a coach. So, when you recognise they are slipping into old thinking, that they are at effect and not cause, as the leader being the coach, it's your role to hold them to account.

I remember years ago, my coach quoted something that he'd heard somewhere: "If I let you off, I let you down." It's a holding space that is all about giving that support, giving the accountability when it's needed, and being their big voice until they create their own.

So, there you have six key fundamentals of coaching. Coaching is such a rewarding profession. And being able to do that as a part of your leadership role means that you are going to be able to grow yourself as well as help the people that you're coaching as well.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week when we continue this conversation around coaching and mentoring, where we tackle the first of those fundamental skills of establishing a coaching relationship.

I'll see you then.