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Developing behavioural agility - Coggle Diagram
Developing behavioural agility
The company secretary as team coach
The coaching leadership style along with the visionary leadership style significantly outperforms the more neutral and directive styles that have been the standard paradigms of leadership over the last century
Whitmore
provides a useful definition for coaching: ' Unlocking a person's potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them'
There are a number of generally recognised core skills and mindsets that underpin coaching
Building a trusting coaching relationship
Asking effective questions and listening to/noticing responses
Supporting effective goal setting
Providing effective feedback
Effective coaching questions
When people complete training courses on coaching skills, they often mistakenly eave with the impression that coaching is all about asking rather than telling
It is certainly true that there is significant power in simply listening to what some someone says and then asking a question about it as a way of both showing belief in that person's potential and as a key tool in building a trusting relationship
Coaching is more accurately described as being about raising awareness and generating responsibility in the person you are coaching
We may sometimes need to be directive when someone is unconsciously incompetent - that is they don't know what they don't know - to gain quick wins and/or in situations where immediate health and safety or other significant risk is concerned
We would ultimately want directors to be empowered and to take responsibility for governance themselves rather than the company secretary being the sole preserve of the governance professional - this means that questions become our default coaching approach.
It is true that those in most professions when they encounter coaching, need to reset their baseline percentage of ask-to-tell when transitioning to a coaching approach from telling around 10% of the time to asking around 90% of the time based on a shift to a belief in potential mindset - this is sometimes difficult to do having been schooled and rewarded for being an expert much of our career
With practice it is entirely possible to develop the ability to feel comfortable shifting one's style to suit the conventional need - this agility will be hugely rewarded in how one is then able to accelerate the independent learning and decision making of those who are coached
In addition to asking great effective coaching questions, there is also a need to notice and listen to a coaches response rather than breathlessly batter them with volleys of questions - this is also where silence also becomes a useful tool to allow people to fill the gap with their thinking, providing space for a more considered, systemic rather than symptomatic reflecting
General pointers
Open questions
These are the default question type to use in coaching as they are mostly likely to help a coach raise awareness of their issue
If a coach has their own solution in their head and is therefore unconsciously shifting to more expert mode, it is likely that open questions will cease to be used and we will naturally try and direct our coachee to our solution by using closed questions. Therefore practice and feedback in open questions can be useful to notice and to correct when this happens
Closed questions
Although perhaps subservient to open questions in coaching, they are useful at certain points such as when checking 'eg Am I right in saying that these are your options?'
'Why' questions
These are useful for opening people up to recognise the reasons for events being as they are.
Asking too many why questions in a row may make someone feel like they are under interrogation and may move the discussion into more of a counselling conversation
What questions
Help someone explore their current reality in detail and are a useful substitute for why questions
How questions
These are very useful to move us forward to where we want to go and are therefore voiced in coaching when considering options and actions
We must be careful not to move to how questions too early
It would be recommended to wallow in what questions for longer, rather than forcing people to solve problems too early in coaching conversations
Coaching mindset
The coaching mindset holds the belief in the potential of the person that we are coaching such that with appropriate support and challenge, they will be able to find answers within themselves to the questions that they are asking rather than be dependent on others
Although we may think we are helping by continuously dispensing directive advice and expertise when people come to us with an issue or dilemma, what we are actually doing is setting ourselves up in an uneven parent-child dynamic which reinforces a coach's incompetence, does not build their confidence or belief, does not stimulate deep learning or consequentially retention and promotes dependence on the coach to answer any future problems that the individual may have
Building coaching relationships
Trust is something that develops as one transforms the level that one communicates at from ritual and cliche to facts and information to discussing personal beliefs and attitudes and finally to disclosing one's emotions and feelings
Is it levels of relational intimacy that are also a foundational skill to developing in a one-to-one coaching relationship and indeed in any team coach roles
Regardless of the quality of the relationship there must also be an appropriate quality of interactions for a relationship to be built. Marcus Buckingham (2016) suggests that we need to have a meaningful check-in with a team member around every week or every two weeks at most to enable us to support their performance and drive their engagement
This empathetic approach to coaching and understanding the board members as individuals can be reflected into listening, questioning and being open-minded to individuals different drivers and priorities - understanding these drivers can enable any individual to be more effective in their relationships with others, thus supporting a more productive output from the relationship
Coaching models
Coaching has been described as a conversation with a purpose and one useful coaching model that gives coaching direction is the GROW model
This has been adopted by many organisations a their default method of coaching
GROW = Goal, Reality, Options and Will and denotes different types of questions that one can ask in a coaching conversation
Grow questions
What do you want?
What would you like to talk about?
Reality questions
What is currently happening?
Who is involved?
How much is this happening?
Options questions
What could you do?
Provide a bridge from one's current reality to one's goal
Will questions
What will you do?
What can you commit to?
One recommendation is to spend the most time on goal questions and then revisit them often, as coaching conversations will result in the goal shifting to something more meaningful as the coaching progresses
Coaching Habit 7 Questions
Coaching can be highly effective in only a 10 minute conversation using the following 7 questions
What's on your mind?
: This question enables a coach to get straight to business informally and non-agressively
And what else?
: This question is intended to be repeated to enable the coach to develop more ideas and possibilities beyond an initial answer that they may have already considered
What's the real challenge here for you?
: This question enables the coach to help the coach appreciate the underlying issue rather than the symptom of their issue
What do you want?
: Similar to the grow model's goal question, this simple question helps people voice their goal instead of the coach, assuming what it might be and also enables the coach to feel empowered
How can I help?
: This shows support and is especially useful if someone is feeling overwhelmed with the topic that they are discussing
If you are saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?
: This question is known as the strategic question and lets people appreciate that it is possible to say no to things which comes with a great sense of relief
What was most useful for you?
: This is a wrapping-up question that encourages the coach to identify the real point of the conversation and provide constructive feedback on the process
Coaching trends
A number of coaching trends have emerged in recent years
At its broadest level, one trend has been that more and more organisations are providing coaching to their staff
Successful organisations provide 20% more coaching to employee than companies that perform less well and that they target this coaching towards talent development, leadership development and manager coaching to generating an overall culture of engagement
Beyond one-to-one coaching, there is also a trend towards the recognition and proliferation of systemic team coaching - this is due to the recognition of the more systemic nature of an individual's behaviour such that a team coach might have a wider impact on a greater number of individuals with a broader coaching remit. Not only this, but team coaching can provide better value by providing coaching support to more people in less time
Another recent trend of one-to-one coaching is in coaching resilience. This is not surprising, bearing in mind the increasing workplace demands that are being placed on people