INsight/ Coaching in Three

A boxer and his coach in Ayala Triangle Park.

Manila, 7 July 2021 — What coaching challenge are you up to?

Story

It happened today. A colleague asked me to suggest questions to ask her audience. From my perspective as a coach, this request gave me a good feeling. Why? Because I know about the power of questions. Oftentimes, asking good questions is more effective than giving advice. No, let me change that to: most of the time. So what did I do? 

Well, I had two options. I could step into my role as a coach and ask her questions about what she wanted her audience to know and do. And help her to find the best questions to meet her purpose. Or, I could give her what she asked for: some good questions for her audience. What did I do? I took the second path. I suggested three questions, sharing that, in my experience, questions like those might help. 

What I actually did was giving her advice. And, with what I know from my experience as a coach, I could have predicted the result. My advice turned out to be not as great as I thought it was. Why not? Watch How to Tame Your Advice Monster to find out. Turns out that I had just given myself a review lesson on how coaching is different from giving advice. In hindsight, I believe that I would have made a better contribution by using the coaching style to help. Which is what I normally do. It was a valuable lesson.

Challenge

Because coaching is so different from other styles of helping, including giving advice, learning how to use a coaching style is easier said than done. Watching videos doesn’t do it. In my experience, the best way is to learn it live with a coach and plenty of practice. Just like the boxer I met in the park today as I was doing my exercise.

In the photo, see the boxer (on the left) taking a lesson with his coach? The practice was intense as the coach was giving the boxer plenty of challenges. He was also letting him go through many reps to build effective habits and hone his style. Learning to coach is like that, I thought. It took me years of training, ‘boxing’ with coaching challenges, to get there. To learn it the right way, coming to training must be your desire and commitment. 

In workplaces today, coaching is gaining in popularity, and there are several ways for you to engage and learn how to coach and be coached. Let me share three levels of challenge. The first is how to use a coaching style in your conversations with colleagues and help them move forward. The second is to dive deeper into the experience yourself as part of your own growth, or transition, as a leader. And the third is to get your managers trained as workplace coaches to lift the engagement and performance in your business.

Question

Three different levels of challenge, with three scales of benefits. Which of these three challenges is calling you? 

For the first, keep in mind that you can’t learn how to coach from watching videos alone. So invest in practice. For the second about your leadership growth, keep in mind that athletes, like leaders, work with a coach to reach their goals. So invest in coaching. If your challenge is about your business, keep in mind that introducing a coaching culture needs more than speeches. Your managers will need to learn new skills and how to use them with their staff. That takes training, practice, feedback, and monitoring the results of the investment.

Coaching is a special skill. I reminded myself of that this morning. So what about you: which of these three challenges is calling you? Let’s discuss what you need and how to get there. Book a Free Strategy Call. Consider it Dojo time.