Coaching

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

One of the biggest challenges for leaders and managers is keeping track of what is going on when team members are dispersed. Part of that includes how to distribute their attention between the relative immediacy and ease of conversations with colleagues in the workplace or office, and the more time-consuming, non-spontaneous, may-need-to-be-scheduled chats with those working remotely.

How can interactions about performance be kept relevant to:

• Business priorities and targets?
• The situation?
• The job?
• The team and individuals?
• Shared ownership of agenda, goals, insights and actions? And,
• How can they be timed to enable reflection, appropriate action and follow-up?

Coaching

One of the most direct and effective means of satisfying interactions about performance is Coaching. Coaching is not a formal, hour-long meeting between leader and team member going through a whole process. In the real, fast paced working environment it’s a way to conduct intelligent conversations on the go, checking how things are going, what’s happening and what do colleagues need to keep things moving along.

There is one model for coaching that can be applied in this way, and has proved highly productive in the work context. It is called the GROW Model. The GROW Model was created and first published in 1992 by Sir John Whitmore in his book, Coaching for Performance. The GROW Model is uncomplicated, easy to learn, and is renowned for its simplicity, clarity and usability in workplace conversations.

GROW stands for:

G = Goal: Clarify and agree a realistic and motivating outcome

R = Reality: Raise awareness of what is happening now

O = Options: Stimulate ideas and choices of new ways to perform

W = Will: Check commitment to options and action

According to Timothy Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis, whom Whitmore studied with, coaching is “Unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.” The great beauty of this is that, if a team member has expertise beyond that of their manager or team leader, which is often the case, the leader does not need to have greater knowledge or experience in order to coach successfully.

Coaching insists on solutions and responsibility for action remaining in the hands of the person being coached. A helpful metaphor to describe the role of a Coach is to imagine white water rafting where the team member has fallen into the water and is floundering. The churning water represents the contents and details of the issue to be resolved. The Coach’s job is to stay on the raft and out of the water, helping the team member to get back on the raft. When a team leader coaches with a deeper understanding of human beings and learning, the quality and effectiveness of results are multiplied considerably. A team leader should be cognizant of, and have an understanding that:

• Everyone is capable of achieving the goals they genuinely desire
• Each of us has the capacity to develop exquisite levels of awareness
• People have their own unique pace which needs to be respected
• My colleague has unlimited, unknown, untapped potential
• Ownership of ideas is the only route to real commitment
• Raising awareness of what is creates more choice of what could be
• Everyone's way of learning is unique to them

The prime intention of coaching is to ensure the learning, growth and personal and professional development of the receiver is encouraged, whilst helping them to get the job done. It’s an ideal vehicle for:

• Clarifying and transmitting goals and objectives
• Monitoring progress without micro-managing
• Stimulating creativity in day-to-day, instead of periodic, management of performance

Coaching also lends itself to the variety of contexts and interactions demanded by hybrid and remote working environments. If the business or organization prefers to maintain a performance assessment or review and reward system, all of the necessary information is up to date and available. Managers are better equipped to make informed judgments of team members’ progress and contributions because they have been there with them.

Conversational skills

To coach effectively demands a set of skills which includes, among others:

• Sharpening the senses and paying attention
• Establishing and maintaining rapport
• Listening and concentrating
• Asking questions

Benefits of coaching

In today’s working environment, objectives and targets can change and update so rapidly that setting and appraising quarterly or every six-months can be untenable.

Coaching is gradually becoming a leader’s imperative skillset. Coaching in the workplace provides leadership advantages including:

• It supports delegating, making it easy to monitor progress without controlling
• It focuses on solution-seeking rather than problem solving
• It stimulates self-awareness and growth of an individual’s skills, confidence and competence
• It encourages openness, honesty and sharing of ideas
• It is highly suited to working with short-term as well as longer term goals
• It can be rapid, spontaneous and immediate
• It enables rapid pivoting if objectives change suddenly
• It enables intelligent conversations and builds relationships and mutual trust
• It fits in with setting and agreeing performance targets, monitoring progress, clarifying requirements and supporting achievement
• It works at every level to cascade corporate strategy to departmental or functional goals, to team objectives, and to individual performance