15 posts tagged “coaching”

The underlying purpose of coaching is for the coachee to learn how to think differently so that they can improve their life either personally or professionally. As a coach, you must find a way of raising their self-awareness and help to find ways of taking new actions to improve not only your coachee’s action but also enable them to move towards independence and self-sufficiency.

However, this process can be difficult for a person new to the world of coaching and it may take time for the coachee to recognise all the possibilities available to them. Yet, if a coachee is showing no signs of taking on board the information you wish to impart, it can be very difficult to continue with the coaching. As a coach you should be able to find a way to relate to your clients, no matter how frustrating it may be to meet resistance.

How can you reach out to your coachee?

• It could be that your coachee is still not very aware of their potential. You need to eke out a positive response and you can do this by admitting to your coachee that the sessions are not working as you expected and devise a plan to go forward together. Hand control back over to them.
• Could it be that there are external barriers stopping the coachee from progressing? They may not have originally been forthcoming with personal information that you need to be aware of, such as a sick relative, a complicated divorce or a medical complaint of their own. Coaching requires honesty on both of your parts and you need to adopt a holistic approach to helping a person improve professionally.
• Are your goals the same? As a coach, you may wish to help an individual improve professionally in different ways but your coachee may just want someone to talk to, to get issues off their chest. Some people just want to talk and be listened to. Some people do find a sympathetic ear empowering as it reminds them that they are worth listening to.
• Why has this person sought coaching? Some people truly want to improve their performance whereas other may simply begin coaching to please a superior. In a case like this, you may have to consider bringing the coaching relationship to an honest close as there is nothing you can do for them.

If you have tried for a significant period of time to engage with your coachee and find yourself getting nowhere, you need to be upfront with them. Realistically, you can only work with people who want your help. If the coachee is not willing to make coaching work for them, you need to assess whether or not they would benefit from you taking the time to persevere with their case.

Businesses often are unaware of the benefits coaching can give to their employees and as a direct result, their profits. It is often suggested that coaching is more effective in improving an individual’s performance than a leadership or management development programme. This is a somewhat subjective statement and as a business, you know you cannot afford to take a chance in these difficult times, on companies offering services that have little apparent and tangible results.

So what are the practical differences between coaching and leadership or management development programmes?

Firstly the coaching process is 1 to 1 and the focus is 100% on the individual, where as leadership and management development programmes are invariably for groups. By focusing on one person at a time, there is an opportunity to address the issues the coachee may not wish to raise in a group setting.  Also, the agenda and objectives for these group programmes are usually set in advance, meaning that it may not relate directly to the individual manager's specific developmental requirements. As the agenda for a coaching session is largely set by the coachee, the process becomes flexible and the results specifically tailored. On a leadership or management course, it is not easy to change the agenda and as the structure is more rigid, participants may leave with more questions than they arrived with.

When involved with coaching, the coachee may feel the call to action is stronger and more detailed than a participant of a leadership or management training course. The sessions where the action plans are often fewer and more general are clearly going to be less beneficial to those involved than action plans that are individually tailored and monitored by a coach.

A feature of coaching sessions is that notes will be taken, goals will be set at the end of every coaching session and managers will be asked by the coach if they have achieved their goals and how. Individuals are nurtured and are assessed to see if they need a different motivation technique. The ability to talk and act honestly, naturally and spontaneously is encouraged for a coachee whereas any displays of frustration, anger and emotion would be regarded as disruptive on a leadership or management training course. Managers should be encouraged to express their feelings in a constructive manner and this is generally more effective in one-on-one sessions.
 

There are of course, advantages for participants taking part in course-based activities, many people respond to group activity and create good networking opportunities, however, this is dependent on what you hope to get out of each method. Overall, I believe that subjects of coaching get more from their sessions purely through the specific advice offered to them. It has a powerful impact on their actions, performance but most of all, confidence in the subject’s own abilities and judgement. 

This would be nice to achieve but is not essential with every coaching relationship and it is unrealistic to expect this in every case. What is essential is a respect for each other and for what you can bring to the executive coaching relationship. What is key is respect for your skills as a coach and for your communication ability. You need to help the coachee to think differently and to look at things with fresh eyes and to provide a new perspective and to be a catalyst for them to ACT on this new thinking.

You may not actually greatly like or warm to the person that you are coaching, nor they you. We are all different individuals and there is ample scope for us to recognise the different perspectives, ideas and beliefs that other people possess. Where this can become difficult is in the area of values, behaviours, management styles and standards. I would find it hard to coach or be coached by a person who lacks fundamental integrity, who was rude to or dismissive of me or his/her people or who wanted to manipulate them or me to do something negative or illegal or completely against their will. If their style is completely autocratic and controlling and if they could not see the possibility of leading and managing in a more positive, democratic way then I would not be able to build and sustain the required rapport and positive relationship with them that I need to establish for me to be an effective support to the people that I coach. I

nterestingly enough, if I look back on the hundreds of people that I have coached over the past 15 years I realise that there have been very few coaching assignments where I have not felt that I could establish the necessary relationship and rapport with my coachee. I suspect that this is largely because the pre-coaching engagement routine that we go through with new people would discourage those with inappropriate values, styles and expectations and that both they and I self-select out of a coaching relationship with someone that we cannot identify with.

Yes they do need to know that they are being coached. How else can they be expected to play their part in this complex process? How will they understand the approach and techniques that the coach is using? How else can they be expected to be willing to take responsibility for their own issues, learning, thinking and actions?

If you don’t tell them upfront that they are being coached then there is little or no chance that they will play their part in addressing their issues and actively and purposefully work at addressing their issues and acting to resolve them. Furthermore when they do eventually find this out might they then feel manipulated into doing what you want them to do rather than what they really want and need to do? Is this necessarily a bad thing anyway? Well not if you are happy to be manipulating them to take action in the short term that will help you to achieve your goals. But in the long term, when you are not around and leading and controlling their behaviour then how will they act and react and what will their motivation be to do the best job that they can?

“If it is that easy to understand and use the C.O.A.C.H. technique and model in a two day coaching course - how come it takes a number of years and a load of coaching experience for me to become an effective coach?”

The answer to this is both simple and also complicated.

Yes you can understand what coaching is and is not about, examine the skills required, learn and practice the C.O.A.C.H. model and be ready to apply it for real within the relatively short time of a focussed training course. However you need to also consider that the example coaching practice experience that you get on the course by coaching a fellow participant and peer is not quite the “real” life coaching experience that you may see it as.
This is for these reasons:-

the peer that course participants are coaching is likely to be in the same mental state of preparedness, openness and motivation to learn about coaching as you are.

They have also been listening to, thinking about and learning about the subtleties of coaching in the same environment, time and space that you have

They are tuned in to coaching just like you – they are also just about to go through a reciprocal coaching session with you but in reversed roles

They are not about to give you a hard time, or not quite understand what you are getting at, or to feel significant mistrust of you (unless they have good reason to do so.)

In short, these coaching practice sessions are slightly unreal, run with a “trustee prisoner” who is trying to help you to learn and experience the COACH technique and questioning sequence as well and as quickly possible. It is in their direct interest to help you through the coaching process and for you to reciprocate.

So in addition to any training course or theoretical reading and preparation about coaching, to become an effective coach you also need the guided experience of coaching a range of different coaching subjects in different organisations. You need to do this in order to get a feel for the range of individual differences that exist and to start to develop your own individual style and approach to coaching - but within an overall proven technique and approach.

The UK Government has recently allocated significant funding and resource to train and develop CBT professionals to help people with low level mental health disorders. It has been the driving force behind the new IAPT initiative (improving access to psychological therapies) being implemented for local communities, to help people suffering from common mental health problems - anxiety and depression being the most prevalent. This form of talking therapy is different from counselling, which goes back to the past and helps a person to uncover the reasons why and any route cause of their difficulties.

Counsellors explore difficulties that the client is having, the distress they may be experiencing or their dissatisfaction with life. By listening attentively and patiently, the counsellor can begin to perceive the difficulties from the client’s point of view with the aim of helping the client to see things more clearly, possibly from a different perspective.

In a counselling session the client can explore various aspects of their life and their feelings, talking about them freely and openly in a way that is rarely possible with friends or family. Their bottled up feelings, such as anger anxiety, grief and embarrassment can become very intense and counselling offers an opportunity to explore them with the possibility of making them easier to understand.

As an alternative approach, CBT attempts to highlight maladaptive thoughts and behaviours and replace them with more effective and adaptive ones. The therapy is very problem focused and looks at the relationships between people’s cognitions, emotions, physiological responses and behaviour. Focusing on one of these areas can have a significant knock on effect on the other areas. CBT aims to make the client their own therapist, assuming that the client is the expert in their own problems and life experiences. CBT is a “here and now” approach which concentrates on helping the subject understand the realities of how they feel right now in various situations and to think about what they can do about this in future to improve their life experiences and mental well being.

It helps them to set and achieve short, medium and long term goals and develop skills and strategies of their own for the future if the problem arises again. To the extent that it focuses the subject on the here and now, on the options for future action and on the personal responsibility to do something different, it is a similar approach to coaching. What is different from coaching is that often the situation and the sort of problems and symptoms that a CBT client is faced with, tend to be more marked and unusual than the situations faced by most coaching subjects wrestling with the day to day, work related pressures encountered by people in reasonably successful employment.

When I have been asked to coach a number of people from the same team the question has arisen about whether and when to work with them as a group as opposed to working with them as individuals. The focus of my coaching work has always been centred around working 1 to 1 with individuals, in order to concentrate on them, their issues and agenda without the distraction or complication of other people being involved. This also applies to the responsibility of the coachee to focus on themselves and their own agenda, issues and objectives rather than this attention being diffused or diluted by other people being involved. This 1 to 1 relationship and these coaching conversations also acts to protect the coachee’s confidentiality and allows them to talk more freely and openly than would otherwise be possible. It does not guarantee confidentiality however – this is still down to the integrity and actions of the coach!

However over the years I have often been involved in executive coaching a number of individuals from the same team, often helping them to achieve a shared team goal and in these circumstances I feel that it is appropriate to bring them all together at key stages of this work. I do this to help them both as individuals and as a team to achieve their overall team goal and to add value to the individual 1 to 1 coaching process. The sort of team goals that I refer to could be about improving team understanding, roles, responsibilities, efficiency and effectiveness, or improving communication and relationships. With one recent coaching assignment I have been coaching eight managers in an engineering team with the overall goal of improving the culture and performance of their business. In this case I have a 1 to 1 coaching session with each person each month, focusing on their role, issues and agenda and I have held two group sessions with them as follows:-
An introductory session where I brief all of the potential coachees together in one group about the approach that I plan to take to their coaching, the process that we will be going through and I describe the COACH model that I am using. This also provides all of us with the opportunity to understand the shared goals for the team and to discuss how these individual coaching sessions can contribute towards this goal achievement. It also provides the opportunity to talk about the broader scope of this coaching and what else it can potentially offer to the coachee in exploring and working on their own personal agenda. If the line manager, team leader and sponsor of this coaching work is present, which I regard as essential, then it gives us all the opportunity to discuss and explain the confidentiality required and for this to be aired clearly and explicitly with all participants.

The second group coaching session that have then held has been approximately half way through this 9 month coaching assignment when the coachees have been fully immersed in the coaching sessions and have also made some progress in taking their actions to improve culture and performance. This has given us all the chance to check on the teams progress towards its goal, to remind participants about any key learning points that are important and to encourage them to share their learning, insights and any questions or issues about the overall process with each other.

Towards the end of this assignment I plan to hold a further group session to check on the overall success of the work and to help the participants to make the transition from coachee and learner to independent and effective performer. I sometimes do this by encouraging the team members to peer coach each other and to have one or two practice sessions to experience this.

The other situation where it could be important and beneficial to hold a group coaching session would be when something is going wrong with the overall project process or relationships or where something radical has changed in the scope, environment or goal for the work. In this circumstance it could be very helpful to get a clear understanding for everyone about the changing reality and to gain shared commitment from individuals to play their part in working to improve things.

This is an important question to answer both during but particularly at or after the end of a series of coaching sessions. This question also leads on to some others e g who should decide, when, against what criteria and using what sort of evidence?

If we use the Kirkpatrick Model, commonly used to evaluate the effectiveness of training, this gives us a useful model to start with. This model suggests that there are 4 levels to look at when evaluating the effectiveness and value of a training intervention and these can also be applied to a coaching intervention.

These four levels are:-
Reaction of the student (coachee) – what they thought and felt about the training, usually measured through a brief feedback questionnaire delivered at the end of the training event. The equivalent for me with my COACH model approach is to ask my coachees for some immediate and direct feedback about how well the session has gone at its end – what they liked or disliked or would have me do differently next time.

Learning – the resulting increase in knowledge or capability. This can be judged by either the coachee themselves and/or by their manager/sponsor - particularly if these improvements were agreed as part of the original objectives or brief for the coaching assignment.

Behaviour – the extent of behaviour and capability improvement and implementation/application of it. Again this can be judged by the coachee and by their line manager/sponsor – but against what criteria? Is the criteria provided by the organisation manager or sponsor or is it to be assessed more directly and personally by the coachee themselves against their individual criteria?

Results – the effects on the business or environment resulting from the trainee’s (coachee’s) performance. This is the acid test and needs to be assessed at some later date after the coaching sessions have been concluded and after reasonable time has elapsed for the effect on performance to be established. Given that the underlying aim of coaching is to help the coachee to maximise their satisfaction and performance at work then this is an entirely reasonable but it also needs to be tempered with any other, broader or personal objectives that the coaching sessions may have been designed to address.

This still leaves us with the questions about exactly who should assess the coaching impact at these four different levels, against which criteria and using which vehicles or inputs? We will look at these questions in my next article later on this week.

These are the sorts of characteristics that outstanding coaches possess.

* The confidence but not arrogance to support and challenge another person effectively.
* The ability to be client centred, to set our ego to one side and thereby not to be thinking about ourselves or our own issues and to keep the coachee focused on their own reality, issues and opportunity options.
* To be able to ask good questions, even if some are not fruitful and the skills to probe and help the coachee to distill the essence of their issues and agenda - and to translate this into actionable areas.
* To use both their intuition as well as logic in talking through their situation and in considering their optionsd and actions.

* The ability to challenge a person to get real about their situation and to get really committed to doing something about. Empathy and rapport such that the coachee will trust themselves tell the coach everything relevant about their situation - even things that they may not have dared to share with anyone else.

* To possess and use their breadth and depth of understanding of people, of organisations, of relationships of groups and teams, to the full advantage of the coachee.

* The ability to take effective notes either during a session and whilst talking or listening to a coachee or shortly after the session has ended.

* To make the links between different aspects, pieces of information and themes within a session or sessions.

* To be non-judgemental of the coachee and to demonstrate flexibility of thinking to adjust and help the coachee to adjust to new information and feelings as they emerge

Inevitably we take our personality along with us into any coaching relationship. We cannot avoid this unless we decide to behave or act in a way that is fundamentally different fro our core personality.

I recognise that in preparing for and particularly when conducting coaching sessions then some of my senses and behaviours are heightened. I will actively listen more. I will really think about the coachee’s response, what it might mean and where to go next with the conversation. I will ask them the very best questions that I assess will help them think more deeply and clearly. I will carefully observe their body language for signs that indicate how they are thinking and feeling. I will work hard to suspend my judgement, remain open minded and block out thoughts about my own world and situation. In short I will “give them a good listening to” as someone once described it back to me.

I will also be direct and honest with any feedback to them or responses to their questions of me. I will not infer things or drop hints in the hope that they will “get it” and work it out for themselves. I will also admit it if and when I have got lost in the discussion or when I am unsure about an answer to a question. I sometimes admit that and come back later with a more considered opinion.

However I will not suspend or deny my own personality. I will express things as I normally would and use plain language. I will react, laugh smile or look quizzical in my normal way. I will bring my natural personality “to the coaching party” and act in an authentic way. I do this because it is me, it demonstrates integrity and because I would not be comfortable doing it in any other way. After all we expect our coachees to be honest with themselves and with us so we should be modelling and demonstrating the way for them.

If my natural approach and personality does not work for someone and they don’t understand or appreciate my approach then I am not the coach for them. This is regrettable but fine by me and I explain this to them at the initial coaching meeting and I invite them to consider my appropriateness as a coach for them. I would rather that they opted out at this early stage if they feel that I am wrong for them than to soldier on through a number of sessions when they have not bought in to me and my approach. In practice this has rarely but occasionally happens.