Manila, 1 July 2020 — What are the traps to avoid when using a coaching style?

Call for Coaching

The call for coaching, and for learning how to use a coaching style, has never been as loud as today. The number of times I am asked by leaders to teach how to do it, or even to become a professional coach themselves, has increased with time. In my experience giving leadership training for groups, the sessions on how to use a coaching style have invariably produced the most memorable moments of the week for the participants. That came out clearly and consistently in the feedback forms.

That’s why I am excited that in #Grow3Leaders, we will be unpacking the coaching style this month of July with the motto that ‘Leaders know how to use a coaching style.’ If you have coaching skills high on your wish list of leadership abilities to add, then now is a great time to join us. Click the link at the end of this post to send in your request. You will get basic insights and three tools to start experimenting with a coaching style in your conversations at work. That will help you consider pursuing formal training afterward, individually or with a group of interested colleagues in your workplace.

By and large, we have the Millennials to thank for raising the demand for coaching to new heights in companies and organizations around the world. It’s now well known that Millennials typically prefer to be coached on how to do their work better, and why that matters, than be simply told what to do. Does that sound familiar?

A Changed World

It’s no wonder most emerging leaders now think that way. Work, workplaces, and careers have become highly unpredictable and vulnerable in our inter-connected world. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us in dramatic fashion what we instinctively already knew, that the next disruption is just around the corner.

How to adapt to the constantly changing conditions at work and in the market while making progress in one or more careers, and overcome the challenges along the way The lockdown work-from-home crash course that we didn’t sign up for has already turned into a journey to discover the new normal. Both the rollercoaster experience and the result have been wildly different from what we and our bosses thought just a few months ago.

No wonder that coaching is in demand. Being told by your boss in a traditional command-and-control style what to do based on past experiences just doesn’t cut it anymore for professionals today, when many paradigms around us are shifting.

Meanwhile, managers are time-poor, feeling at a loss to cope with the multiple changes and crises that pop up almost continuously around them and their teams. The idea of coaching their staff may sound good, even attractive perhaps, but they don’t have time. So what can be done? Thankfully, there are good experiences and new solutions to explore. Leading organizations are already investing in this.

Yet what we need to do first is to understand and stay clear of the Three Coaching Traps.

The Hearing Trap

When you are in this trap, you surely will not get off to a good start with a coaching style. You are hearing what the other person says in the conversation, but you’re not listening. Instead of showing up attentively and with an open mind, your mind is racing with ideas, your own ideas.

If you’re that time-poor manager, all those crises will be hard to get out of your head when you sit down with a team member for a coaching style conversation. And if you are a driven and ambitious professional on the way up, your head will likewise be full of thoughts and ideas when you sit down with a colleague or staff reporting to you.

There’s no need to feel bad about this. It’s just that the coaching style is very different from the conversations you normally have. That is, until you discover it and turn it into a new normal for you. It takes self-awareness, learning, and practice to get there.

Meanwhile, the Hearing Trap prevents you from really showing up and being present for your workplace colleagues. When we hear but not listen, little of importance can happen to make a positive change. First, you need to show up in a meaningful and effective way.

Jumping from problem to solution rarely helps. And your solution might not be the right one, as we will discover when we look at the second trap. You need to learn how to be open and help your colleague by listening carefully, to unpack uncertainties, pain points, and the desire to turn these into something great.

The Advice Trap

Leaders I work with will invariably say that this is the toughest trap to get out of, even as they discovered that it can be done. What happens in this trap is that we jump to give our best advice to our colleagues, including all the knowledge, ideas, and experiences that our mind and memory are full of. Most of that will, of course, be yesterday’s knowledge and experiences. Even if you realize that you’re likely to get trapped into sharing your best pretty much at every opportunity.

Michael Bungay Stanier, the author of The Coaching Habit, talks about taming your Advice Monster. In this interview with Marshall Goldsmith, a leading executive coach, he explains why giving advice is rarely a good idea. That might come as a surprise to you. This trap tends to really distort your view, and you may not be conscious of it.

Apart from the fact that serving up your best advice might not actually be what your colleague needs most, it’s possible to do more damage. A pattern of giving advice might create a risk of an undesirable dependency that doesn’t serve to empower your colleague nor the business as it moves forward.

And if you’re a manager or team leader, the Advice Trap might also confuse your colleagues about the difference between feedback, performance review, and coaching. Most of all, keep in mind that your best advice in today’s complex workplace may not be as good as you like to think it is. That’s often because your data, assumptions, and beliefs that lead you to give your advice may not hit the bullseye for what your colleague needs.

That’s where we start to see that the coaching style is based on a very different paradigm. It’s a style that will often bring better results, but only after you come out of this trap.

The Banana Trap

When I coach leaders through a transition, we choose between Banana or Bamboo as two approaches that bring different results. The Banana Trap is what causes vast sums of money to be wasted every year in leadership development around the world. When you’re in this trap, you are tricked into assuming that a single event, like a good conversation with a coaching style, will bring a better result. That’s not what happens in reality. While a good conversation can generate an invaluable Aha! moment, this is much like eating a banana will give us an immediate sugar kick. That’s why we love bananas.

What is most important when using a coaching style in conversations is not what happens during the conversation, but what happens after. It’s the actions, and the behavior changes, that will make the difference we’re looking for. There needs to be a follow-up about actions taken. When we are looking for performance to improve, and innovation to advance, we need to make a coaching style in conversations part of a process that, like growing bamboo, will produce consistent and rapid growth and sustainable results.

When coaching-style conversations are embedded in an organization’s culture, what will make the difference is how actions are taken between the conversations. Without a systematic approach and a simple yet effective framework to use in conversations, we will still suffer from being in the Banana Trap. This is especially important to the time-poor managers who are willing to test a coaching style in brief discussions with their staff.

One of the factors that prolong our stay in this trap might surprise you. It is the Ego of coaches and the managers who will use a coaching style. Once they discover the tremendous power that the coaching style brings to the table, there is a natural human desire to be recognized for the help they bring. That’s a trap because it will divert attention away from the only things that really matter, which is that people grow, performance improves, and innovation continues.

Until you start building a Bamboo process, you are at risk of being stuck in the Banana Trap. Many managers and their businesses and organizations stay there for years and even decades, as documented by researchers. Don’t be one of them. The rapid changes demanded by Covid-19 offer a precious opportunity for change to usher in a truly new normal. If that happens depends on you and each of us.

Just before getting locked down for Covid-19, I was fortunate to complete a certification training to partner with Lai Wan Chung and CM Loke at the MasterCoach Institute in Singapore. If you’re a manager in a leading organization that is looking for new ways to lift teams to higher performance in these challenging times, we should talk.

Getting Started

As we will discover this month, coaching offers a powerful solution for organizations that want to be seen as leaders in their market and by society in our rapidly changing world. To make good use of it, we first need to sort out what stops this from happening. That means getting out of the Three Coaching Traps. You can think of it as bringing the two penguins in the header photo to turn around and come together.

If you’re interested to dive into the coaching style, join us now in our cross-generational community of leaders. Find three workplace colleagues to come with you and you’re ready to take on our Grow3Leaders challenge to become influencers and multipliers of positive change in our workplaces. We learn and practice effective leadership behaviors together and ‘out loud’ to create positive change in our workplaces, especially during these difficult times of dealing with Covid-19. Joining us is free of charge—not free of commitment. And let’s chat in LinkedIn to set up a call.