We know coaching is important–sadly we invest too little time in high impact coaching. Spending 30-60 minutes a week, per person is hardly adequate. But this article is not about the time we spend in coaching.
I find people confused about what coaching is. The examples we see of coaching, the tools people leverage in their coaching don’t seem to capture the heart of what coaching is. Is coaching call intelligence and helping someone understand and analyze their calls, or whispering into their ears during a call? Is coaching role plays, helping people practice and execute better? Is coaching reviewing a performance dashboard, inevitably offering “You need more pipeline, you need more activity?” Each of these activities represent things in which we can apply our coaching skills–and in which our people can use coaching. But, contrary to what people might want you to believe, these represent perhaps the smallest moments of coaching.
So let’s start at fundamentals. What is coaching?
“At its core, coaching is the act of helping someone become more capable of thinking, deciding and acting effectively!”
It applies to everything they do. How they spend their time. How they do their jobs. How they work with their peers, partners, customers. How they effectively use the resources, methodologies, systems, processes, tools. How they grow and develop. How they better align with the values, culture, beliefs of the organization. How they better align and more deeply understand their customers. How they deal with challenges, struggles, not achieving their goals.
For coaching to have massive impact, there have to be through-lines across all these elements. We can’t coach an individual in one area, then coach them the opposite for something else. That’s not coaching, that’s confusing. Consistency in what we coach, across all areas of our coaching is critical to achieving the goals we share with those we coach.
Our coaching is, sometimes, overwhelming. “Do these 5 things to improve your deal strategies, do these 7 to get more qualified leads, focus on these 3 areas of your pipeline, make sure everything is updated well, block your time……..” We have to focus on the top 2-3 areas we and the individual seek to change and improve. Then we have to apply those in each area we coach–deal strategies, prospecting, pipeline, and so forth. (some areas may not apply to all, but usually they do).
And as the person develops and begins to master these, we look at the next 2-3 areas, then the next…..
Coaching is not telling the person what to do. It’s guiding them to figure out how to do things right, how to improve, how to change, learn and grow. Again, it’s improving their capability to think, decide, and act effectively. The best analogy is “Give a person a fish, they eat today, Teach a person to fish, they eat the rest of their lives.” Guiding them into figuring things out themselves enables them to constantly grow and develop.
Coaching is not limited to our “coaching sessions.” In fact when you look at the data, when under time pressure and constraints, the first thing managers eliminate is coaching (probably bad judgment, but the current reality). In high impact coaching we integrate coaching into every encounter we have with our people. A deal review, a pipeline review, a 1 on 1, a 5 minute conversation standing in line at Starbucks.
Coaching is always based on a context. While we have the through-lines of our 2-3 key improvement areas, we adjust that coaching to the specific context or situation we are talking about.
Coaching is built on a memory or history. We see how people have behaved in the past, how they have responded, consistent challenges, they face, where we may have made mistakes, how we continue to improve what how we coach.
Coaching is as much for the coach as it is for the person being coached. We constantly learn and improve in the process. We get deeper insights about the people we are coaching. We learn about ourselves through the eyes of the people we coach, and from that improve. Coaching is as much about receiving feedback as it is giving it.
Coaching is not about finding things right or finding things that are wrong. It’s about continually developing the capabilities of the people we coach, helping them do more of the right things, the right way, at the right time with the right people. It’s about learning from where we have failed and figuring out how to improve.
Coaching is not training, but supports and reinforces training. It may adapt the training to the individual Where training focuses on what we need to do, coaching gets into why it is important to do these things, and how we might improve what we are doing.
To coach effectively, we have to have people who are coachable–open to learning, growing and change.
To coach effectively, we have to be coachable.
I’ll stop here.
I think it’s important to understand what coaching is. It’s not just one thing. It doesn’t focus on just a specific aspect of a job like reading performance dashboards. While those incorporate coaching for that thing, by themselves, they are insufficient. And without being interconnected with the other elements of high impact coaching, they do not allow us to help our people achieve their full potential.
Afterword: Here is the AI generated conversation of this post. Enjoy!
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