Powerful Coaching Skills for Managers

As managers and leaders, you’re asked to wear your “coach hats”to support team members’ development. 

The expectation is not that you become professional coaches, but rather that you sharpen your coaching skills by expanding your toolboxes, so you can help build organizations in which team members thrive.

Professionally certified life, career, business, and executive coaches are required to adhere to strict professional standards and are evaluated on how well they demonstrate 11 core competencies, which are organized into four major groups.

In this post, we will dive into these four groupings, exploring how you can use specific open-ended questions to coach your team members in two main areas: professional development and career aspirations. If you need help holding performance conversations, read these posts: Performance-Feedback Conversations Employees Love; The 3+1 Performance-Feedback Formula; Let’s Talk About Your Performance; and Tough Love: How to Give Critical Performance Feedback.

The Four Coaching Categories and Competencies

To effectively use coaching skills as a manager, you’ll need to explore and develop competencies for these four categories:

    1. Setting upfront agreements for the coaching conversation (including applying the coachability index).
    2. Co-creating the relationship:
      • Establishing trust.
      • Staying present.
    3. Communicating effectively:
      • Actively listening (asking yourself Why Am I Talking or WAIT).
      • Asking open-ended questions.
      • Being clear and direct.
    4. Facilitating learning and action:
      • Creating awareness.
      • Designing actions.
      • Planning and goal-setting.
      • Managing progress and accountability.

Two Ideal Opportunities to Use the Coaching Hat

The coaching hat is ideal when helping employees develop long-term personal or professional goals or explore career aspirations. Both are essential to retaining top performers and ensuring job satisfaction. Coaching conversations are reserved for these types of topics. If you need to have a corrective-performance conversation, use the appropriate strategies and do so in separate sessions. It’s important to make a distinction to allow each session to work its magic.

Examples of long-term personal or professional-career aspiration goals include: (1) expand a skill set or reach the next level of performance; (2) explore lateral or upward career moves; (3) dive deeper into areas that are currently unexplored; and (4) move from individual contributor to manager. The difference between coaching conversations and performance conversations is that the former usually goes deeper and wider, and the latter is more tactical.

Questions to ask during coaching conversations (personal development and career aspirations):

1)  Setting upfront agreements for career-coaching conversations:

a)  Coachability Index: On a scale of 1-10, how open are you today to new information? How willing are you to move into action?

b)  What type of coaching do you seek related to your goals or career aspirations?

c)  What do you not want me to coach you on?

d)  What would you like to focus on today?

e)  What do you want to leave this session having accomplished/figured out?

2)  Co-creating the relationship:

a)  How can I best support you today?

b)  How are you feeling? What’s on your mind?

c)  What’s most important to you right now, as it relates to your goals or career aspirations?

3)  Communicating effectively:

a)  Tell me about your goals and career aspirations. What does accomplishing them mean to you? What do you hope they will add to your life/career path?

b)  If you couldn’t accomplish that right now, what would you do?

c)  What lateral career opportunities might get you where you want to go faster?

d)  What skills, tools, and strategies do you currently possess that can help you achieve your immediate goals? What new skills do you need to add?

e)  I’ve noticed that you______. How is that helping (or hurting) your ability to accomplish your goals?

f)  You mentioned that you wanted to accomplish _____. What do you need to do today to move closer to that goal?

g)  What strengths will help you accomplish that? What weaknesses hold you back?

h)  What are you willing to do to get what you want?

i)  What limits might you be imposing on yourself?

 

4)  Facilitating learning and action:

a)  What other options might you be overlooking that could help you reach your goals?

b)  What could you do differently to get the outcome you want?

c)  What one small action step can you take today?

d)  What action step challenges you the most? Which might propel you toward your goals more quickly or efficiently?

e)  When do you hope to accomplish your goal?

f)  How do you want me to hold you accountable?

g)  How can I help?

h)  How should I address excuse-making with you?

We explore how to conduct powerful coaching conversations in the post Ready to GROW? Specifically, we dive deeper into open-ended questions.

Practice using the four steps to increase your confidence when holding powerful coaching conversations.

 

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