Coaching skills for managers

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to the course manager as coach. In this course, we'll have a look at the value of using coaching as an approach to management. We'll discuss some background and definitions within coaching. There we'll explore two useful models that you could incorporate into your coaching approach. Hi, my name is Carol mode. I teach project and change management both in the classroom and online. I also have a background in psychology. I'm a registered business psychologists. And I really enjoy the crossover between the soft skills of management and helping people to be the most effective when they are in these roles of projects or change manager, or really any other kind of manager. I really hope you get value from the course and I encourage you to try out the project and leave comments below and let us know how you got on. Share your ideas. Really hope you enjoy the course. 2. The context for coaching: To save the scene, I thought we're going to talk about in this class. Just to have a bit of a think about the business environment in which we operate these days and the sheer volatility that we needed to cope with. The first idea I'm just going to talk about to set the scene is the butterfly effect. Let's dive in. In the face of rapid disruptive change, managers can't be expected to have all the answers. And command and control leadership is no longer viable. Chaos theory is a field of mass that looks at situations in which small differences in initial conditions yield wildly diverging outcomes, which makes a long-term predictions practically impossible. One of the pioneers of this theory, Edward Lawrence, gave a talk on the subject in which he posed a question, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil with this search or to nato in Texas, he deemed this butterfly effect. The simple answer to the question is obviously know, a butterfly flapping its wings together with a huge number of other factors may contribute to the initial conditions for such an event. We need to bear this uncertainty in mind when thinking about an effective approach to management and leadership. 3. Command and control vs coaching: Given the context of modern organizations in an uncertain environment, many are moving away from a command and control type of leadership and towards a coaching approach. The command and control style of leadership managers tend to establish what needs to be done, teach others how to do it, and then evaluate their performance. This approach assumes that what needs to be done is knowable by the leader. In contrast, when using a coaching approach, managers know that they can't have all the answers. There are other facilitate problem-solving and encourage employees development by asking questions and offering support and the guidance. Employees learned to adapt to changing circumstances through innovation and commitment to outcomes rather than through processes. The role of manager or leader, therefore, it's changing into that of being a coach. This is a dramatic shift. More and more organizations are investing in coaching skills training for their managers and leaders. And coaching is becoming a vital element of a learning culture. And effective leader asks questions rather than providing answers, supports employees and their development and does not dictate what needs to be done. 4. Before and after: Thinking for yourself is the thing on which everything else depends. This is by Nancy Klein. This is the sentiment that underpins coaching, that the coach needs to be able to think for themselves and derive at workable decisions that they buy into and are likely to implement. Are you ready, willing, and able to coach? In Daniel Goleman's classic study of leadership styles, published in Harvard Business Review in 2 thousand leaders ranked coaching as their least favorite style of leadership. Cited statements such as these, as they reasons. Coaching feels soft, it takes too long my staff onto coachable. I don't know how to coach. Even though many leaders are unenthusiastic about coaching, they actually think that they're better than they are advocating. In one study in treating over 3 thousand liters, self-reported skills encoding did not align well with ratings of their skills by others. Almost a quarter of the managers that believed they were above average in the coaching skills were ranked in the lower third by their colleagues. Let's have a look at the before picture. In a training session, executives represented with a scenario in which they had to decide whether to fire or coach and employee whose performance was below standard. The employee had clearly made mistakes, but the managers have contributed to the problems by sometimes a micro-managing and sometimes ignoring the employee. Nine out of ten of the executives responded by saying that they would put the employee. But when they were asked to role-play the scenario as the manager, they did not do a very good job. They started out well by asking open-ended questions such as, how do you think things are going? The employee generally responded differently to what the executives hoped for. They would change tack a little and ask the question in a different way, which still didn't get them their desired response. Things quickly deteriorated into leading and directive questions such as, don't you think your most suited to a different role? This would induce defensiveness and the employee and make matters worse. Still, the role-plays generally ended in the Executive going into telling mode and imposing their conclusions on the employee. The bad news is that you may not be as good as you think you are as coaching. However, the good news is that with tools support and a salad method, practice and feedback, anyone can improve their coaching skills. 5. Overview of coaching: What is coaching? John Woodman describes it by saying that in essence, coaching is about a partnership, collaboration, and believing in potential. We can take this a step further and say that coaching is a thinking partnership that focuses on the future and helps individuals to achieve their goals. Esa John bit more defined at skilled coaching, involves unlocking people's potential to maximize their own performance. Coaching addresses the inner world, the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and perceptions which lead to fulfillment and the outer world, the actions and behaviors which determine one's effectiveness. Let's have a look at the coaching process. So coaching is a process which enables coachees which other people being encouraged to define clear goals, identify and eliminate any blocks to their progress, any blocks to their progress. And to make sure that they're aligning their actions with their goals. The benefits of coaching includes empowered employees, improved performance and higher engagement. As far as we go with empowered employees, coaching helps empower employees to come up with solutions. And there are far more likely to buy into and implement those solutions if they came up with them themselves. For improved performance, it starts with providing clear direction for a specific task or goal, then facilitating the establishment of a path to achieving that goal. Then periodically checking in, ideally at least once a week to review and discuss the progress that has been made, help overcome any hurdles and highlight areas for improvement. This continued engagement enables the employee to make incremental and sometimes drastic improvements that would allow them to become an overall better performer for higher engagement. Gallup found that employees who have had conversations within manager in the past six months about the goals and successors are almost three times more likely to be engaged than those who have not had these conversations. 6. Developing new skills: I'd like to talk about the conscious competence model briefly. The model is included in the training for two reasons. First of all, to help you develop your coding skills, they need to help you support your staff in developing their skills and enhancing their performance. In this model, it started out at the unconscious incompetence stage. In this stage, the person is not aware that they have a lack of a particular skill. They're made in either relevance or usefulness of the new skill. And they must become conscious or aware of their incompetence before they can begin to develop the new skill. Once they have this awareness, that would put them into the conscious incompetence stage where they know that they lack the particular skill that they need. In the conscious incompetence stage, people realized that by improving their skills or ability in this area, their effectiveness will improve. Ideally, the person has an appreciation for the extent of the gap between their current skill level, the desired skill, their phone. The person ideally makes a commitment to learn and practice the new skill and to move to the conscious competence stage. We need to be aware that there will be a drop in performance as the learner moves through the stages. Let's use a simple example to illustrate this. Imagine that you need to travel to another country where people drive on the opposite side of the road are what you use. If you've been driving for a significant amount of time, you would currently be unconsciously competent in driving and wouldn't really need to give much thought to the process of driving wherever Once you go to the new country, first of all, the controls will be on the opposite side of the curl. And secondly, entering traffic circles, entering and leaving highways, etc, will all be opposite to your instincts. You're most likely to be very conscious of your actions, at least initially, until you get used to the new way of doing things. The funny thing is it might take a bit of time to adjust back to your original driving patterns when you go home again, the stage at the bottom of the curve we call the learning dip. The next stage is conscious competence. The personal G is conscious competence in a skill where they can perform it reliably at well, they can perform the skill without assistance, but there are needs to concentrate and think hard in order to perform the skill. The skill is not yet, It's second nature or automatic. Practice is the most efficient way to move from the stage of two unconscious competence. When we reach unconscious competence, the scale becomes so practiced that it enters the unconscious part of the brains and becomes second nature. Common examples are driving, sports activities, taping, manual dexterity tasks, listening and communicating. The stage of skill has become largely instinctual. So periodic reviews are a good idea to avoid complacency and to check if the skill holds up against the new standards. 7. The role of the coach: Let's have a look at different types of coaching. The first type we have is business coaching. This is coach's work with clients on developing vision, leadership skills and building a more profitable and efficient business. Then we have executive coaches who work with upper level executives and owners of companies who designed to accomplish or the corporate or personal goals more effectively and efficiently. Often it might be a combination of both professional and personal goals. We also have life coaches who work with individuals and making their personal life and the business life more balanced, successful, and satisfying. However, the type of coaching that we're talking about in this course is the fourth type, which is managers or leaders as coaching. This is the kind of coaching that creates a true learning organization. It's ongoing and executed by managers and leaders inside the organization. And its work that all managers should engage in with all the people all the time. And it has an influence on the organization's culture and mission. Effective manager as coach asks questions, instead of providing answers, supports employees instead of judging them and facilitates the development, instead of telling them what to do. Let's have a look at the coaches role. The first thing is that the coach asks questions. This will help the coachee to identify new ways of thinking and explore new approaches and options for themselves. The coach also creates a safe space that encourages exploration and openness. Needs to communicate openly and to reflect back observations that they are noticing when the code she is speaking. Coach also needs to hold the focus of the session. And to do this, we can use smart goals that the client sets for him or her. If the smart acronym stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-specific. The coach also needs to be non-judgmental, non-directive, and respectful of the client's process. As an example, being judgmental would be saying things like, Why did you do that instead of something else, like, can you explain your reasons for doing that? Just the approach and the tone used can make something feel judgmental or nonjudgmental. Being directed is telling the person what to do. Whereas being non-directive is aligning the coachee or client to think for themselves and come up with ideas. It obviously be respectful of their process. We could she also uses coaching tools, techniques, and concepts as appropriate to guide the session and assist the process. 8. Coaching models: It's useful to use a model or framework to guide your coaching. Framework gives you direction and helps you to make the base to use as a time available. There are a lot of frameworks available, but perhaps the best known and most widely used model is the grow model. It's straightforward, easy to remember and explain. The steps stands for Goal, reality options. And will. The other model that I've chosen for this training is the Oscar coaching framework. It's one of the most popular solutions focused coaching models used by organizations. And it's particularly useful for managers to use with their team members. The steps down for outcome, scaling. Know how a firm and action and review. In the next sessions, we'll go through both of these models and you can decide for yourself which approach you'd like to try out with your teams in the project at the end of this course, I encourage you to try out both of them and see for yourself which one works well in practice. It's up to you whether you just keep the model in my entry or so flow if you share it with your team members, my preference is to share it so that at demystifies the process and sets the tone that you share responsibility for the session. 9. GROW model: Let's go through the grow model step by step. As we can see, it's an acronym and the words, as we saw in an earlier slide, it's Goal, reality options and what will you do after the session? Let's have a look through each of these steps and see what each step involves. If we started with a G for the goal, the first letter in the acronym. The purpose of this stage is to work out together. So the manager and the team member work out together. What the team member wants to achieve during the session. Goals starts at broad. Then the manager or coach can guide the process to narrow it down to something achievable for the session, manage expectations, and do something that is doable. The coach also ensures that the team member takes responsibility for the content of the goal. And does the coach makes sure that the goal is specific and realistic to achieve within the session and get buy-in about this from the KOG. Also keep notes of the bigger picture goals for future reference. Here are some example questions That's the coach could use during the gold part of the process. You should use your own words, but these are just examples that you can use to help you to think of a way of doing this that would be authentic for yourself. Questions such as, How can I help you today? What would you like to work on in the session? When you leave the session today, what would make you feel that it had been already worthwhile session? Or what are you hoping to achieve by the end of the session? Really just setting the scene, the big picture, and having a target to aim for by the end of the session. The next stage of the process is the R, which is about reality. It's all about what is the current situation. And the aim here is to understand What's going on for your colleague. As the coachee went to gain an understanding. And actually your colleague by verbalizing what they want to talk about can also come to a greater understanding themselves off the current situation that they're in. As the coach, you would ask open exploratory questions in this stage. And a really important part of this is to listen. You can paraphrase and summarize what they're saying to ensure understanding. But don't do this to the point of being annoying. The content of the stage might focus on events or more and the emotions that your colleague has experienced related to the event. So your job is to coach. He has to guide the process. Keeping the session goal in mind that was set in the previous step. Goes long as you feel is useful and productive to understand the current situation, the conversation starts to go off on a tangent. You could remind the colleague of the goal of the session, then validate whether the goal is still applicable. Sometimes the exploration stage illustrates that the original goal was not the best focus for the situation at hand. And you could agree together if this should be changed. Here are some example questions that you could consider using during this part of the process. You could simply ask what's going on at the moment. Then you could check the assumptions. How do you know that that is accurate? What's your concern about the situation or how would you prefer the situation to be? If they describe a difficult conversation, you could acknowledge it and say that sounds like a difficult conversation that you had. How were you feeling at the time? You could also then prove a bit further and say, are there any other factors that you feel are relevant to the situation? You could ask what resources do you need and confirmed what resources do you already have that you could use to help in this situation? Once you've explored the current situation or the reality, the next step in the process is the o for the options. This is looking ahead to the options available for your colleague. In this part is really important as the courage to refrain from offering your own suggestions. Your colleagues suggestions are lucky to be better than yours because they know their own situation, background, personality, emotions, and so on, much better than Eugene. Secondly, they're much more likely to implement ideas that they've come up with themselves rather than being told what to do. And 30 respect to their ability to come up with their own great suggestions. If they are totally stack, then you could perhaps tentatively put forward ideas to help them continue thinking. But it's a good idea to ask their permission today that you're trying to help your colleague to generate broad, creative options. A really good question here, as simple as it sounds, is, once they seem to be running out of steam is just to ask what else? That can often just prompt them to think a little bit further and get them going again. Don't be afraid of silence to sit with a colleague. And if they're thinking, allow them that space and the psychological safety just to think things through in a safe environment. You can then help them to analyze the options. And help them to evaluate how realistic and desirable the different options are. Let's have a look at Christian you could use while they are generating options. What options have you thought about so far? What else could you do anymore ideas? What strategies have you tried in the past, and how well did they work? Have you noticed strategies that others use effectively in similar circumstances? When evaluating options? How would you like to evaluate the options? Are there any options that you would like to eliminate? Straightaway? We look at the pros and cons of the remaining options. What are your head and heart saying to you that can help people just to look at the logic but also the emotions of the situation and see how did they feel about the options. What's the logical about them and what's the combination saying to them? Once you've had a look at the options, the fourth step in the growth model is what will or way forward. Different people use different words for the W. But really it is about planning what is next, what are the next steps? So this is where the Coach enables the colleague to identify specific steps that they can take towards achieving their goals. Coaching is about change and movement. And so having a specific plan can help to motivate your colleague to take the agreed action. The actions are owned by the colleague, not by the coach. The coach has job is to help them make sure that they are specific to the goal. And challenging yet realistic actions are too easy and it won't achieve much. Whether the actions are too hard, they might be set up for failure. They've got to be reasonable, perhaps a stretch but not overwhelming to achieve those. Example, Christians at the coach could use at the stage using the grow model. We've talked about several ideas. What will you do? What do you think is the most effective way to achieve this? How realistic is this for you? What's a suitable timeframe to get this done? Again, we're exploring the smart acronym, looking at specifically what are you going to do? Is it measurable, achievable, realistic, and time specific? You could ask what obstacles may be in your way. And if they named some obstacles, what support do you need to overcome these obstacles? How would you get that support? Quite likely that it might be you as the manager that will provide that support, but not always. And it's worth exploring that question just to see how well that person get the support that they need. Once the actions are established, it can be quite useful to ask the question to say, on a scale of one to ten, how committed are you taking that action? And if it's lower than say a nine, then there is some doubt if the person will do that action or not. And if that's the case, you could say, what could you do to raise your commitment closer to a tin? Or perhaps you need to revise those actions and come up with different actions that they can feel more committed to. Some final thoughts on the growth model. It's effectively simple. It's easy to learn. Remember the G ROW, and it's easy to share with your colleagues and make it open. And as I said earlier, to demystify the process, the model can be used in a wide range of contexts to explore an issue to a significant depth. 10. OSKAR model: All right, let's go on and have a look at the Oscar model. This acronym stands for outcome scaling, know-how, affirm and action, and review. The Ask a framework is one of the most popular solutions focused coaching models used by organizations. This was developed by coaches mark and Rococo and Paul Jackson, published and there are 2002 book, the solutions focus making, coaching and change simple. If we look at the first letter, the O, which stands for outcome. The idea here is that between the coach and the coachee or the manager and the colleague to jointly determine the desired outcome or objective for the coaching session. Here we can see some parallels with the grow model where we set the goal in grow. Here we are sitting and outcome ensure that the team member takes responsibility for the content of the outcome. And keep notes of the bigger picture outcomes for future reference. If the initial ideas were too big for one session, keep note of those and perhaps go back to that in future sessions. Some example questions that you could use at the state of the Oscar process. What are your goals? And these could increase short, medium and long-term goals. Then bring it back to what's realistic and achievable in the current session. For example, what outcome would you like to achieve from this coaching session? Or what would you like to focus on today? You could also ask what needs to happen for you to know that this session has been a success or asking it in another way, imagine you have achieved your goal. What changes do you see? The scaling step of the model is designed to help the coachee refine their goals and to make sure that they are achievable. This is done with a help of a simple one to ten scale. One is nowhere and tin is fully achieving your goal. You could ask the coachee, where are you now? This is when you're in the scaling step of the Oscar model. You could ask, where do you realistically you went to get to? You are at n Now, whichever number that they've given you, what did you do to get there? What would get you to n plus one? So to maybe to the next level and the one to ten scale. You could also ask, can you think of anyone who is a tin in relation to your goal as a role model that they could look to, to emulate and to perhaps get advice from. Once you've established the scale of what they wanting to achieve, the next step is K for know-how. And the know-how step is designed to help coaches understand the skills and resources that they require to reach their goals. This helps him to appreciate the capabilities they already have, but also those that they must still acquire in order to achieve their goals. And here we can think back to the unconscious competence model to think about where they might be in that performance curve, the coachee starts to form a loose plan of action which will be further developed in the next step. Example, questions at the coach could ask during the know-how step. Things like what knowledge can you draw on to help you achieve your goal? You could also ask them, how have you achieved something similar before, which helps them to recognize and acknowledge the skills that they do have and have used to perform. You could ask what additional knowledge would help in this area? What resources are already available to help you? Then? Are they more resources that you still require? And if so, you could explore how the coachee could access the additional resources that they need. So that's in terms of resources. Then we could also ask about support. What support do you already have? And what additional support might the person need? What new skills should you invest in to help you reach your goal? What do you need to change in order to achieve your goal? That's exploring the note how the resources and support and skills at hand and those that need to be acquired to achieve the goal. Then we move to the next step of the Oscar mono, which is the a, which stands for him and action. The affirmative action step helps the code to reflect on their thinking they've already done in the session. So it's a bit of a recap and kind of underpinning what's already been discussed. The coach can affirm that giving positive reinforcement based on the strengths and attributes revealed are raised by the team member in the discussion. As a manager, you might also have some knowledge and add in your own affirmation of things that perhaps the person didn't mention directly. Then the action part of the step focuses on drawing out actions that the cocci and tends to undertake to help them to achieve their objectives. If we look at an example, questions that could be used in this step of the Oscar process. We could ask what's working well currently. Another way to look at that, which might reveal additional answers is to ask what would others say is effective in the way that you're doing things now? You could ask, are there things that you would like to continue doing that are currently working well? What behaviors might you want to change in order to achieve your goals? You could also ask which actions do you need to take to reach your goal? And an important question is, what is your first step? Just to make it not seem insurmountable, but to break it down into baby steps. You could ask what are the three key actions that you will do? Then the final step in the Oscar model is the review step. This is the last step, the review stage. And so it usually takes place at the beginning of a subsequent session. The purpose of this stage is to help the coachee reflect on their progress, but also to keep them accountable for progressing their actions. Example questions you could use here, what progress have you made since the previous session? This also shows the continuity and the tying together of the whole process from one session to the next. If the coachee knows that that's what you're going to ask them first. They will prepare themselves and make sure that they have something to say. You could ask, what did you do differently that helped you make progress towards your goals since our previous session, how do you feel about your progress and what do you think he will change next? Questions about asking the person to think about what they've done so far and to do a bit of reflection and use that reflection to help them to move forward and continue to make progress. Some final thoughts on the Oscar model. It's a collaborative approach. It's also easy to learn, remember, and share. And it really emphasizes progress and positive achievement. It's particularly useful to managers using a coaching style of management. 11. Summary and comparison of models: Let's wrap up with a summary and comparison of the two coaching approaches. Both models are widely used an organizational coaching, and they're both future oriented. The growth model focuses on more pure coaching questioning methods and provides a framework or roadmap for each coaching session. While the Oscar models specifically uses a solution focused approach, and it is explicit about knowledge sharing rather than providing a roadmap for each session like the grow model, the Oscar model is more of a set of tools in a toolbox that can be selected and applied as needed. Roads. I'm forgetting to the end of the training. In the next section we'll discuss the course project that I highly encourage you to do. 12. Class project: More than for completing the class. Now let's talk about your class project. Ask one or two of your colleagues if they'd like to take part in a coaching session. Both to give them some value and to help you develop your coaching skills. Plan at least two sessions with each colleague and plan to use the grow model in one of the sessions and the Oscar model in another. Once you've finished the sessions, reflect on your practice and see what do you think you could have done better? What do you think works really well in the session? Once they get feedback from your colleagues, ask them which approach they found most helpful and why. And if they can give you any other feedback as to how you can improve in the future. Reflect on which of the models you feel most comfortable using and think about why that is. Then make a plan to develop your skills further through reading, research, further practice, and more training. I wish you all the best in your coaching journey.