Workplace Coaching 101: An Introduction to the Coaching Skills Every Manager Needs

In this video, I'm going to give you a short introduction to the most important things you need to know about workplace coaching. Workplace coaching is a development method which is designed to enhance the performance of individuals in your workplace. And crucially, it's all about bringing out from that individual what they already know and what they can develop for themselves. It's about emphasising people's personal responsibility for their own performance and harnessing their ideas and their commitment to do it. It's important to distinguish workplace coaching from other similar terms like counselling or mentoring or training. However, in the real world, things are always going to be messier than nice, neat training course or training video definitions like the ones I might give you. In the real world, a little bit of coaching with a little bit of mentoring and a touch of counselling and maybe a tiny extra of training can all go together very nicely. But typically, counselling is more about empathy and feelings and emotions rather than about the practical getting things done and performing effectively. And also counselling can include a healthy dose of advice. Mentoring can also include advice. It's often about sharing the experience of the mentor with the less experienced mentee. Whereas coaching is more about drawing out the experience and ideas from the coachee with the coach merely asking questions. It's important to note also that in some contexts, mentoring often refers to career development. But in my understanding, coaching and mentoring can both be focused on career development or on any other aspect of workplace performance. And finally, there's training. Training is about imparting a body of knowledge, often through a process and often in a very structured way. Whereas coaching is far more focused on the immediate moment, the immediate challenge, the context, the situation that the person you're coaching is facing and drawing from them the ideas that they need to be able to resolve the challenges in front of them, rather than giving them a whole set of ideas that can apply to many, many different scenarios. Having distinguished coaching from other things that are like coaching, it's also worth saying, however, that there are many different flavours of coaching, as you might expect. There's performance coaching, which is designed to get the best performance out of someone. And skills coaching, which is about helping people to develop specific skills. There's career coaching, which is about helping people develop their own careers. And executive coaching, which is designed to help executives focus on their career and the challenges that they face at the executive level. Developmental coaching is designed to help people to develop, to extend their skills and become ready for the next stage in their career. And then there's team coaching, which is all about coaching a whole team together, usually around team performance, but it can be around other things as well. Workplace coaching became very popular throughout the second half of the 1990s, and it did so because it brings very many benefits, both to individuals and to organisations. For individuals, it can bring increased confidence, self-awareness and skills development. That can lead to performance improvement, job satisfaction and ultimately career advancement. For organisations, coaching can bring increased employee knowledge and skills, leading to better performance and higher rates of productivity. It can improve communication, collaboration and team effectiveness. And as a result, you can see increased employee engagement and commitment, and as a result, better staff retention. All of this can have a significant impact on the bottom line. So what are the principles behind workplace coaching? I'm going to suggest to you that there are four big ones. And the first one is the importance of invoking a high quality of awareness about the situation in which the coachee finds themselves. Without a good awareness of their situation, they can't develop the right solutions. Second is the need to take a goal oriented approach to focus on what you want to achieve and to base the whole coaching conversation around delivering that. Next is a focus on finding solutions rather than dwelling on the problems and any blame that might attach to them. And then fourth, linking closely to that, is the need to evoke a sense of responsibility in the person who is being coached, a sense of responsibility for their own actions and the choices that they make. Coaching is a collaborative relationship. Experienced coaches may not appear to follow a particular process, but almost certainly they have one in mind. And there are a number of proprietary coaching processes, which I can talk about in a minute. But there is a general underlying principle of the kind of process that most workplace coaching will follow. But of course, no collaborative process can be effective without first establishing a sense of trust between the two people, the coach and the coachee or the person who's being coached, and also a rapport, a sense that we understand one another. And for this to work, it's often very important to choose a conducive environment in which to carry out the coaching. If either party feels they're being observed, or they don't feel comfortable, then that relationship just isn't going to work. So what are the broad steps, the overall process we can expect to see in a coaching conversation? It will often start with a discussion about the coachee's goals, what it is they want to achieve. The coach will help them to set clear objectives, objectives that are both clearly expressed, but also reasonable for the time span of the conversation and the time over which the conversation will apply. Next, the coach will help their coachee to explore the situation, the reality that they are facing, what exactly the challenge is that they want to overcome, and the relevant facts around that. They will draw upon experience and observation, and sometimes offer feedback to make sure that there is a clear understanding and a realistic assessment of what is going on. Next, the conversation will move to finding solutions for either solving the problem or improving the performance as required. The best coaches will draw out a large number of options, different approaches to solving the problem or improving their performance, because the more options you have, the more likely you are to find one or two that work really well. Next, the coach will help the coachee to sift through those options to evaluate them honestly and effectively, and choose which ones are most likely to work for them, and to address the problem or the challenge they face most effectively. This will lead to a session around action planning, deciding what the coachee will do, when they will do it, and really evoking that responsibility I spoke of. The coach will also suggest how they would like to follow up to help the coachee to feel supported, and also in an appropriate way to keep them to account. The next stage will be another conversation, but this will be one where the coach may seek feedback from the coachee on how they performed, and perhaps offer their own observations as well, and encourage the coachee to reflect on what they've observed, what they've achieved, and what they've learned. This kind of ongoing support and guidance is critical to a long-term coaching relationship. To make all of this work, a coach needs to develop a wide range of skills to support their coaching. They need some emotional intelligence. They need to become aware of other people's emotional states, and to be able to empathise with them. But at the same time, they also need to be able to control themselves, and that gives them the ability to detach from highly charged emotional states. To support this empathy, they need to develop skills in active listening, in being able to concentrate hard on what they're hearing, and silence that voice in their head that's trying to think what they should be saying. Concentrate instead on what it is that they're hearing. They need to learn to trust that when they have heard someone properly, they can take a moment to think, but the right next question or the right observation will come to them. But powerful questioning and the ability to ask deeper and deeper probing questions is a skill, and coaches need to develop that too. Next, they need to develop skills in providing impactful feedback, knowing where to put the focus to give the most impact and what not to concentrate on, and also how to express that feedback in a way that is motivating but challenging. And finally, because coaching needs to be goal oriented, it's also an important skill to be able to elicit an effective goal and to help the coachee to structure that goal so that it is both specific and measurable, as you might expect, but also actionable and realistic and has an appropriate time frame. There are a huge number of popular models which have been developed to help coaches to frame the process, and most of these take the form of acronyms. Here, for example, are three that I particularly like. The first is called the GROW model, which actually stands for Goal, Reality, Options and Will, and then Monitor and Evaluate, Grow Me. The next is the CLEAR model, Contracting, Listening, Exploring, Action and Review. And my final example is the OSCA model, Outcome, Scaling, which is all about assessing how important the outcome is, Know How, Action and Affirmation, and Review. Introducing coaching into the workplace can be a very simple thing. Managers and leaders taking a little bit of time to talk to, ask questions of and listen to the people they work with. But any structured training and allowing time within the workplace for substantial coaching is a big investment for an organisation, and while I am convinced that it will be a good investment that will bring huge dividends if done well, it's still important that organisations are able to measure the effectiveness of any coaching initiative and therefore to evaluate whether it's a wise choice before perhaps rolling it out to a wider group of people. There are many ways that we can measure that performance. Metrics and other methods for measuring impact include performance improvements, feedback surveys, 360 degree feedback, setting up and tracking of key performance indicators, measuring a financial ROI or return on investment, and getting feedback from the coaches and from other stakeholders in the work of the team. Coaching is still fairly new in the workplace, it's probably been common for no more than 20 or possibly 30 years, so as you'd expect it is still evolving and we are seeing an increasing use now of AI platforms for supporting coaching initiatives, but what I predict is that it won't be very long before people regularly use large language model AIs, generative AIs to coach them, because AIs can ask questions and they can evaluate answers and ask appropriate questions in return. It may be that we start to see more and more workplace coaching because the cost of doing it becomes almost negligible using AI tools. The other important trend that I'm aware of is an increasing emphasis on the importance of resilience and coaching people to help them to cope under challenging times. Now I hope we will see very soon a peak and then falling away of the amount of pressure people are on at work, but it does seem to me that people are under more and more pressure at work and coaching is one of the solutions that organisations are finding to try to ameliorate that. My preference would be that we keep coaching for helping people to perform at higher and higher levels, whilst reducing the pressure on them, giving them the time and resources to do their so that they can thrive and perform well. I have a course on development that you can dip into or watch the whole course on this platform. However, whether you choose to do that or not, I do encourage you to reflect on how coaching could help you in your career, your team in the work that you're doing with them and your organisation as a whole. Think about the that I've discussed in this video and how you can apply them in your workplace. Please do give this video a like if you've enjoyed it or learn from it. I'll be making loads more great management courses videos for you, so please do subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell so you don't miss any of those new videos. I look forward to seeing you in the next one and in the meantime, keep learning.