Let’s say you’re a manager in one of these environments:
- 24/7 logistics hub
- Just-in-time manufacturing
- City centre restaurant
- High-street department store
- International customer contact center
- Event management
- Major engineering project
Now, let’s say your company set up a coaching program and offered you training to help you coach others. You signed up because it seemed like a good idea, and the training gave you plenty to consider.
But back on the job, reality hits. You were determined to be an effective coach. You really planned to stick to the two hours of regular one-on-one time promised to each of your direct reports. But right here, right now, there are 10 people waiting for answers from you, several looming operational crises and 20 conversations you absolutely must have before you can even think about going home.
Tomorrow and the day after will be the same. Soon, the excitement and determination to use the tools you learned will fade.
The GROW model
Why is it then that, despite managers’ best intentions, coaching just isn’t working? One reason is the way coaching training is delivered: the GROW model. It’s the basis for pretty much all coaching training, and it’s worn out.
For those who don’t know, GROW stands for Goal, Reality, Options and Will. It’s the basis for a structured conversation that the coach navigates to help the coachee find solutions to issues and take action. GROW is a great model. In certain environments, it works. But it’s also very time-hungry. It relies on the coach and the coachee being clear-headed, tucked away in a room, free of distractions, frequently and for appreciable chunks of time.
Put yourself in the shoes of a manager in one of the fast-paced environments described above. What do they need? What tools could help them get more from people, engage more, and contribute more to the business?
To really be transformational, we need to have all managers using coaching-related behaviors every day, at the moment…and that’s a very different proposition to the executive coaching approaches that are still being taught, which are based around episodic sessions and focused on a specific coachee’s development agenda. Many leaders and managers may only ever receive a one- or two-hour introduction to coaching and are then supposed to be able to deploy these new skills to transform the relationships they have with their team members or direct reports. The implicit assumption is that now you’ve had coaching explained to you, it can become a transactional skill you can add to your toolbox. But where are the behavioral adaptations that might help anyone to build those skills into their everyday approach?
Organizations need a coaching mode that reflects the way people actually work: in the moment and on the fly. What managers need most is for coaching to move out of the quiet meeting rooms and into the operational heart of the business.
Here are three steps L&D can encourage their managers to take to help them make coaching truly succeed in their day-to-day interactions with employees:
Stop and take a step back
When an employee comes to their manager with a problem, the manager’s typical response is a command-and-control approach, providing solutions by telling or advising the employee on how to fix the problem. Though coming from a good place, the manager has inadvertently prevented the employee from learning how to resolve the problem for themself. L&D can help managers to learn to stop, take a step back and bite their lip, rather than sharing their opinion so readily. This brings them into the moment to assess what a better response could be for the benefit of the employee.
Identify coachable moments
The next step once managers have made a conscious effort to stop, is to be able to identify whether the situation is a coachable moment. There is a series of considerations that can help managers to determine coachable moments with their staff. L&D can help managers think through questions like ‘is it an emergency situation?’, ‘is there the potential here for learning?’, ‘is the person open for this conversation right now?’ and ‘am I able to have this conversation now?’. Deciding whether it is a coachable moment can happen almost instantly, giving the manager the option to choose how best to engage an employee to help them resolve a problem themself instead of fixing it for them.
Ask more powerful questions
Having identified that a situation is a coachable moment, managers must practice an inquiry-led approach by learning how to ask more powerful and stimulating questions that generate a positive outcome. Questions are key not only to increasing performance and engagement but also to fostering an authentic connection with staff. For example, L&D can begin by encouraging managers to stop asking ‘why?’ questions all the time and instead start asking more ‘what?’ questions. Why-based questions can feel personal, like the employee is to blame somehow or that they’re being criticized, which can lead to defensiveness. Replacing why…? with what…? removes the (unintended) personal inference from a question and focuses on the situation itself. The employee is then more likely to be open to exploring specifics rather than feeling that they need to justify or defend their actions.
And who wouldn’t want to have their boss do more of that?
