You can do your job better by drawing out the best in others at work. Sometimes you can trigger others’ thoughts by supplying some ideas of your own. When used deliberately and sparingly, giving a PBC answers can actually help him or her move forward without hijacking the coaching conversation or turning it into a consulting conversation.

Definition

Hijacking is coaching jargon for turning the agenda from focusing on the PBC to focusing on you. In this case, the hijacking would focus on you as the expert. Once the conversation is hijacked, it is very hard to turn the focus back to the PBC.

When to Give Answers in Coaching

Sometimes you’ll need to provide answers in the middle of a coaching conversation. Here are some situations where it might be appropriate to give answers:

• You participate in brainstorming with the PBC.
• You know the PBC knows you have some ideas or opinions on the matter and you want to preserve his or her trust.
• You feel certain that the PBC will give your information the same weight as his or her own ideas and will take action on them with the same enthusiasm.

How to Give Answers in Coaching

Once you decide to give answers, do so sparingly. Offer your ideas with humility, making sure the PBC knows your ideas are just one opinion and not the fail-proof answer.

When you are in a brainstorming conversation with a PBC, make sure that you do not offer the first suggestion. Also make sure that you don’t offer most of the ideas. Hold back and let the PBC make the first–and most–contributions.

Of course, sometimes you have to give answers because of your role in the company–you may be the boss, for instance. In a couple of weeks we will talk about how to switch between coaching and other roles where giving answers is more appropriate than asking questions.

Encouraging is sometimes referred to as cheerleading, but that’s not a word adults respond well to. Instead, think of it as infusing courage.

Consider these tips for encouraging others at work:

• Genuinely acknowledge the ability, intelligence, and integrity of the PBC.
• Express admiration for the PBC’s fortitude to press forward on tough topics.
• Offer encouragement about the struggle you’ve watched in a coachable moment. For example, you might say, “The ‘aha’ you just had showed incredible insight in a complex situation, and that will serve you well as you take action.”

A word of caution:  You can negate encouragement with the use of the word “but.” If you say, “You did a nice job, but …,” the PBC won’t hear anything that precedes the word “but” and will instead focus only on the negative aspect of the statement.

Some of the best encouragement you can give a person is to believe she can succeed before she believes it. A way to communicate that belief is to challenge the PBC to go beyond the status quo in her thinking and actions.

Challenging others in a coaching conversation is tricky because your questions need to stretch beyond what the PBC currently thinks but not so far as to be unrealistic. It really requires using the knowledge you’ve gained in your connection with the PBC to calibrate how much of a stretch this challenge would be.

If the timing seems to be right for challenging, you might ask:

• What would it take to accomplish that in half the time or with half the resources?
• What would you need to do to significantly broaden the impact?
• What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

Powerful questions are often open-ended questions. Questions that can be answered with yes or no do not generate new ideas. Most open-ended questions begin with how or what. You might think why questions would fit this category, but often they lead to defensiveness so why questions are best avoided.

Coaching Caution

If you have an answer in mind, don’t try to put it in the form of a question. That’s a leading question, and it hampers the PBC’s thought process. Asking leading questions is more like manipulating than coaching.

Before you ask each question, ask yourself, Who will benefit most from it? The questions benefiting the PBC most are ones that spark new thinking and, therefore, new actions that can actually move the PBC forward.

Give the PBC time to answer. He or she may need time to think before responding. A great coaching question will get a response like, “I’ll have to think about that,” or, “Good question. I don’t know.” Either of these answers is your cue to be quiet and let the PBC’s think things through.

Consider these examples of average questions and powerful

Average vs. Powerful Questions

Average:  What does your to-do list look like today? (no new info for the PBC)

Powerful: What are the three to-do’s on your list that will have the greatest impact when completed? for the company? for yourself?

Average:  Can you do that? (closed question)

Powerful:  What will it take to do that?

Average:  Why did you do that?  (creates defensiveness)

Powerful:  What were your underlying assumptions? Which of those assumptions need challenging?

Average:  Have you tried this idea?   (your idea, not the PBC’s)

Powerful:  What can you try next?

Average:  How might changing your mind help you move forward? (leading question, maybe their mind doesn’t need to change)

Powerful:  How do you need to think about this to move forward?

Impact of Powerful Questions

For your questions to have the greatest impact, they should  meet the following criteria:

• Use questions that promote discovery for the PBC.
• Use questions that get the PBC to put together new ideas, using past experiences as a “database” from which to draw.
• Use questions to get the PBC to look at the situation from a different perspective.
• Use questions that are not tainted by your own premonition of an answer.

The more you use a coach approach, the more you’ll find that being able to ask powerful questions is critical to unlocking new insights and facilitating shifts for the people you coach. It is also one of the hardest things for new coaches to figure out how to do. Here are some common questions (for each phase of the coaching conversation) to get you started.

Focus Phase. Where are you now and where do you want to be? Where are you stuck? What is the most important thing you need to deal with today? How can you narrow your focus for greatest impact? What topic would give the biggest return for this investment of time?

Discover Phase. What have you tried already? What initial thoughts do you have about this challenge? What is another perspective on your situation? Who can you talk with to get another perspective? What is at the very root of this challenge? What are all the options for dealing with this situation? How will you determine between good and best options?

Act Phase. Of all the actions you have listed, which are the most feasible? What action do you plan to take by when? Who needs to be enlisted to help you? What resources are needed? What can you do to mitigate this risks involved with this action? How committed are you to prioritizing your day/week to take this action?

Evaluate Phase. What would be the consequences, both positive and negative, of taking that action? What would be the consequences of no action? What system do you need to put in place to hold yourself accountable? How will you evaluate the results of this action? What criteria will you use to evaluate your success?

You certainly will not use all these questions in every coaching interaction that you have. As you keep learning and actually start to coach, you will begin to get a sense of which questions are most appropriate for any given situation.

Coaching Caution:

Pay attention to the number of questions you are asking in a given conversation. If you ask too many questions to satisfy your own need for information, the PBC will feel like he or she is being interrogated rather than coached.

Powerful questions unlock new ideas in the PBC’s brain. For any given coachable moment, one powerful question might be all a good coach needs to contribute to the conversation. If your question causes the PBC to think out loud, to begin talking about possibilities, you’ll know you’ve asked a good question.

You can do your job better by listening like a coach. Coachlike listening is not just an auditory process; it’s also a mental process that involves listening more intently with the purpose of facilitating learning for the PBC (person being coached). Done well, you both benefit.

It may seem obvious that if you listen more closely, you can use what you hear to come up with new ideas and help the person you are coaching take new action. That might actually happen, and would be good. But listening intently to others can also help you interact with them in such a way that they come up with new ideas, and they take action. Now that’s a deal! Their action helps you do your job better, and they take personal responsibility for the consequences because they came up with the solution.

A New Way of Listening

To turn listening into a more powerful tool for you, you’ll have to stop listening the old way and start listening a new way. A first step in listening a new way is to quiet the thought processes going on in your head. Listen closely to what the other person is saying without trying to determine how to fix his or her problems. Don’t think about how you’ve solved this type of problem before. Don’t start brainstorming in your head about new solutions for the problem; all that is just noise. Get rid of any physical distractions that can get in the way of your really being able to listen.

New listening means you listen for the nuances of the PBC’s meaning and the importance the PBC attaches to what he or she says. Focus on what’s being said rather than how you’ll respond. Listen with the purpose of gathering information to guide the rest of the coaching conversation. Remember: you’re not just listening to be nice. You’re not waiting until the PBC finishes speaking so you can jump in with your own ideas. Rather, you are listening for information that might be pertinent to a coaching conversation.

Listen for Unspoken Messages

Pay attention to what’s not said. Listen to tone of voice, word choice, importance, motivation, and level of passion. What seemed obvious to you but was not expressed in words? What tone of voice did you hear that wasn’t supported by words? What seemed to be the next thing that would be said but was cut short?

For example if a PBC frequently uses “we” or “they” instead of “I” he or she may be less likely to personally take on an action.  A rising intonation in the voice may signal uncertainty, even if the sentence is worded as a statement.

Unspoken messages can sometimes have as much meaning as the words that are spoken. But be careful not to assume that you know what was not said, just notice that it was not said. You may later have a chance to explore those unspoken messages in the course of the conversation.

Tips & Tools

While you listen, try following along in your head by silently repeating the words the person is saying as they are being said. This helps some people focus; for others it is a distraction. See if it helps you.

You can train yourself to listen for several things at once; literal words the PBC is saying, how you both interpret those words, and how the PBC responds to your questions.  Is the PBC responding in a way that says he’s interested, engaged in the conversation, and wanting to learn? If not, listen to that, too.

Try this: for one day, Listen for at least three minutes without saying a word to everyone you come in contact with. Notice their responses to you. Many people will come up with new ideas just by being listened to–and you haven’t even said anything yet! If someone is suspicious of your new behavior, it is an indicator that you were not listening well before. Three minutes isn’t really that long.

Coaching honors the expertise of others and has them walk away from your coaching conversation resolved to take action and fully own the consequences of that action. Your first successes will have you anticipating the next unique way you can put the nuts and bolts together.

Timing Is Everything

You can’t just walk up to a colleague and start coaching them whenever you feel like it. Instead, you need to wait until an appropriate opportunity arises. This opportunity is called a coachable moment.

A coachable moment is when a person is ready to benefit from learning something new related to a specific focus area and is ready to take action on it.

As a coach, you must learn to recognize coachable moments when they present themselves to you. Then you need to know the skills you can use to bring about new learning and subsequent action. Consider these examples of coachable moments:

• A co-worker is stuck on a problem that is holding up everyone else on the team, including you.
• Your employee needs to come up with some new ideas for a new assignment you have given him or her.
• Your customer is interested in your product but not sure if he or she wants to buy it.
• You are in HR and responsible for helping a new employee on board.
• Your peer needs to have a difficult conversation with your boss, the outcome of which will impact everyone in the organization.

When you think you’ve identified a coachable moment, ask yourself these questions: Is the person ready to look for new insights? Is this a situation the person can control, decide what to do, and take actions? Is the person searching for answers but not in deep distress or worry over the issue? Do I have a good relationship with the person so my questions won’t be viewed with suspicion or as a trap? If you can answer yes to most of these questions, it’s a coachable moment.

Successful coaching culture initiatives roughly follow three phases of development: the people phase, the culture phase, and the process phase. One phase does not have to be complete before you begin the next one.  The past two blogs have discussed the people phase and the culture.  Today we will focus on the process phase.

People processes–things such as employee performance evaluations, career development, succession planning, recruiting, and retention–tend to sabotage attempts to leverage the strengths of an organization’s culture. This phase is about taking the strengths identified in the culture phase and evaluating people processes to make sure each one is leveraging and developing those strengths.

One organization that went through these phases identified that “assuming untapped potential in everyone” was a strength of its culture. In the process phase they evaluated their people processes to see if “assuming untapped potential in everyone” was being strengthened or leveraged. Here’s what they found about assuming untapped potential in various people processes:

Employee Performance Evaluations.  Although evaluation forms listed both the strengths and weaknesses of each employee, the bulk of the annual evaluation conversation addressed action plans for the employee’s weaknesses.

To leverage the untapped potential in the people process, supervisors still filled out the form in the same way, but they changed the evaluation conversation to focus on the employee’s untapped potential and how it could be used. In most cases employees had strengths that weren’t listed on the annual objectives and weren’t being evaluated at all.

Career Development.  In terms of career development, in the past supervisors simply pointed employees to career advancement information within the company.

The company tweaked the process by first pointing out employee strengths and untapped potential before bringing up career advancement opportunities. The rest of the process stayed the same, but the conversation with the manager about possible advancement was very different due to the new way of starting the process.

Succession Planning.  Before the company starting leveraging untapped potential of employees, it wasn’t doing any succession planning.

The company designed a succession planning process that focused on leveraging untapped potential.

Recruiting.  Under the old system, application forms, requested resume format, and onsite interviews focused on historical performance, not on untapped potential.

They modified the application forms to add an essay question about untapped potential; requested resumes include a list of the applicant’s core strengths and a brief explanation of how potential could be tapped in new ways; and during interviews included discussion of potential and peer reviews that would be a reality check of that potential.

Retention.  In the past, a process to retain employees was implemented only if an employee who had special strengths threatened to leave.

Under the new system, an annual review of untapped potential was added to the retention process as a mean of being proactive in retaining key employees.

By tweaking their people processes, the company was able to boost the momentum that was building in the people phase while more and more people were benefiting from coaching.

This is just one example of an organization addressing one of its strengths. It only takes looking at a handful of strengths for coaching to make a big difference in the life of the organization and for a coaching culture to take hold.

Successful coaching culture initiatives roughly follow three phases of development: the people phase, the culture phase, and the process phase. One phase does not have to be complete before you begin the next one.  In the last blog we discussed the people phase.  Today we will focus on the culture phase.

Phase 2: Culture Phase

Get acquainted with your organization’s culture.

Some would say that you should start with the picture of what your culture is, then describe what your ideal desired culture would look like. Next lead a brainstorming session to identify the actions needed to move the organization to that ideal culture.

This sounds like a good plan, but it doesn’t really work. Using this plan is like saying: Who are you now? Who would you rather be? You might say you want to be Tom Hanks or Oprah Winfrey. Now let’s brainstorm about how you can become Oprah Winfrey. What a silly exercise! There’s only one Oprah–and it’s not you.

Of course, you are not any more likely to be able to create a totally new culture in your organization than you can become Oprah. The missing step in this process is acknowledging who you are at the core–not your history, not your education, but at the core. You were born with a certain personality style, cognitive preferences, and strengths. When you want to make adjustments, you make them within the context of what you were born with. Some of those strengths at the core are hidden.

When it comes to an organization’s culture, its core traits are here to stay. These are the culture elements you want to focus on when creating a coaching culture.

The first step of this phase is to identify the core of the organization’s culture. Then focus on the strengths that make the organization successful, productive, and profitable. When creating a coaching culture, any existing elements of the culture that are congruent with a coach approach are automatically strengths. You’ll want to orient any new initiatives around leveraging and developing those strengths.

Another Perspective

In his book Organizational Culture and Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 1992), Edgar Schein wrote: “… culture is to a group what personality or character is to an individual. We can see the behavior that results, but often we cannot see the forces underneath that cause certain kinds of behavior.”

Successful coaching culture initiatives roughly follow three phases of development: the people phase, the culture phase, and the process phase. One phase does not have to be complete before you begin the next one.  Today we will focus on the people phase.

Phase 1: People Phase

Focus on getting more people in the organization to experience the benefits of coaching.

The momentum will build. Sometimes it will build quickly enough that you are ready to move to the next phase in six months, but don’t be surprised if it takes longer.

Try to expose people at all levels to coaching during this phase. People phases that are top heavy (only executives being coached) or bottom heavy (only nonmanagement being coached) tend to take longer to build momentum toward an organization-wide coaching culture.

Next time…Phase 2:  The culture phase

1.   Identify the participants, including PBCs and coaches. This may be easier if potential participants take a coachability assessment. (More info on this later).

2.   Identify training needs. Training for someone who is going to use coaching in his or her regular job doesn’t have to be comprehensive. Even a few days of introductory training can build the groundwork for a successful pilot.

3.   Set clear goals for the pilot. The goals should be concrete and reasonable, based on the expected time frame, level of participation, and scope of the project.

4.   Determine in advance how long the pilot will last and how results of the pilot will be evaluated.

5.   Stick to the evaluation criteria. Changing the way the project is evaluated after completion or in midstream will likely invalidate the results you are seeking to support a larger initiative.

If your pilot is successful, begin to expand its scope. If your pilot does not produce the results you desired, consider changing the parameters of the pilot before expanding the scope.

 Coaching Caution:  Don’t make up new metrics to look at the success of coaching. Use the ones you already have in place to monitor the success of your business: revenue, ROI, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction.