Is Coaching Just "Nice to Do?"

Jack Zenger and I have recently led some webinars regarding how to build a coaching culture within organizations. On one of these recent webinars, we had over 300 leaders and learning development professionals join us. In the course of the webinar, we asked several “poll” questions to assess what was currently happening in their organizations related to leaders providing coaching to their employees.

One of the questions we asked was, “What grade would you give the managers in your organization?” Here was the response rate to the answers:

“A”: Extraordinary coaching—making a significant difference 2%

“B”: Good coaching—having a positive impact 16%

“C”: Average coaching—helpful 43%

“D or F”: They do it so poorly it hurts more than helps 17%

“I”: Incomplete—they just don’t do it! 21%

We were frankly surprised by how few respondents believed that their leaders were actually providing helpful coaching, and shocked by how many leaders weren’t coaching or were perceived as actually doing damage in the process of coaching employees.

When we asked whether these organizations were helping equip managers with the necessary coaching skills to be effective, we received the following responses:

1. We have not done any training on this topic 16%

2. We teach some awareness but don’t attempt to build skills 30%

3. New managers get training on coaching skills 12%

4. Only select populations of managers get training on coaching skills 24%

5. Every leader in the organization is being trained to be more skillful 18%

A full 46% of respondents are not building skills within their leader populations. It is no wonder that managers are therefore not providing coaching, or the coaching they are providing is not perceived as helpful.

You might be wondering if there is anything wrong with this picture. From original work conducted by Zenger and Folkman, we know that leaders who excel at “Driving for Results” have a less than 10% probability of being a great leader. However, when leaders are highly effective at driving for results and highly effective at coaching and developing others, they have almost a 90% probability of being an exceptional leader. And, we know that exceptional leaders create breakaway results that are far superior than merely “good” leaders.

Leaders who are more effective at coaching have employees who:

• Express higher engagement and commitment
• Are more willing to go the extra mile
• Are more willing to put in extra effort
• Are less likely to think about quitting

Coaching is a very powerful lever to increase organizational effectiveness. Instead of viewing coaching as “nice to do” when the business gets taken care of, consider reversing the order of priority. Focus on coaching as the way to enable superior results and foster engaged employees. The payoff will be there at the bottom line!

For more information about coaching training for managers, contact me!

Three Choices When Faced with Change

In the last few weeks, I have found myself embroiled in a situation that I don’t want to be in. A major client of mine changed their business model, which triggered a series of changes, which ultimately affected me. The client’s changes forced me to change. After being upset about some of these changes, and secretly hoping that life would go back to a previous time, I stumbled upon a DVD of a talk given by David Whyte. For those of you not familiar with David Whyte, he is a wonderfully eloquent Irish poet who interprets poetry for soulful people living and working and struggling in the real world.

In “Live in San Francisco” David reminds us to “look the present straight in the eyes.” He describes the three possibilities and choices we have when life “gently and not so gently pulls the rug from under us”:

1. Pretend it never happened, and make people go along with you regarding the version of reality you are holding, which is a representation of something that at one time was real.
2. Accept that it is happened, but “create a characterization of victimhood about yourself, so that you can bank down into a lovely downward spiral of self-pity.”
3. Look it straight in the eye, and face both the bitter and the sweet of existence. Stop telling yourself all of the stories you tell yourself that aren’t real. Take the next step into the actual reality that surrounds you, instead of trying to find what is more comfortable for you.

I realized that I had been primarily vacillating between 1 and 2 above, neither of which was working for me. Without accepting fully that the situation I was in has indeed changed, I would not be able to make peace with it and intentional choose how to move on. I realized that I must choose the third path: taking the bitter and sweet of change, and being gentle with myself as I process through the loss of what was and what has changed.

Smarter than I was Yesterday

It’s official. The Extraordinary Coach book is out. I co-authored this book with my good colleague Jack Zenger to help managers be better at coaching their employees. McGraw Hill published the book, and it was officially “out” on June 4^th. Now, if you were fortunate to pre-order the book from Amazon, you probably got it weeks ago.

Publishing a book is a lot like being an external consultant. People perceive that you are smarter. I routinely consult with bright clients, but because I walked in from the outside, they think somehow I am smarter than their internal organizational development team members. (Often, this is just not the case.) I was as knowledgeable on the topic of coaching before I wrote the book, but now that I have published my thinking, I got even smarter.

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of being with an executive team at a very respectable organization, who had managed to pre-order the book and get early copies. I must say that it was humbling to autograph the books for the CEO and several board of director members. One book even made it to a highly-decorated, 4-star general. I certainly smiled internally as I personalized the general’s copy, as I wondered how many years and miles of leadership and coaching he obviously had under his belt. Still, the group was delighted to have me sign his book. I was delighted to do so.

I’m still getting used to this new role, and I will do my best to live up to all of those expectations. J

Coaches - do you know where you are going?

You can't coach without a contract. What is a coaching contract? The agreement that you make with your coachee (your coaching client, the person you are coaching) regarding what you are both trying to accomplish in your conversation.

Getting a contract is not difficult. It just requires a few steps.

1. Ask the coachee what she wants to focus on. Examples of good questions to elicit this information:

"What is most important for us to focus on?"

"At the end of the conversation, what do you want to leave with?"

"How can I best help you with this issue?"

2. Listen carefully for a defined topic or outcome. Will you know when you've accomplished the objective? If not...

3. Clarify as needed.

Now you are both aligned regarding where you are going. Keep this as your target for the rest of the conversation!

Happy contracting!

A Coaching Conundrum

I have a coaching client who is trying to improve his coaching skills. He asked me a very good question via email, and I answered him. I believe this content would be useful for many of us who are trying to improve our coaching effectiveness. Here was our electronic dialogue:

Client Question:

We talked about “powerful questions” and about “awareness” quite a bit yesterday, and you once again commented on how awareness connects back to powerful questioning.

Here is my issue: We use these terms so much that they have become coaching jargon and I am afraid that I don’t really get the clear meaning of these very critical terms. What is a powerful question in this context? Also, I have some confusion about awareness. Awareness of what? If I could better relate to just what this awareness looks like it would be very helpful. Sometimes I feel like we are hiding behind these terms like “powerful questions” and “awareness” and they feel very vague to me. I hope this doesn’t sound stupid or crazy to you and I just know that more clarity on this would be a huge stepping stone toward my progression as a coach.

My Answer:

I can appreciate the importance of wanting to "get" powerful questioning and awareness. Here's the deal...if you can ask questions that lead the client to greater awareness about their situation (stuff they hadn't thought of or seen before themselves), you are helping to create greater awareness for the client into his/her issue. Almost by definition, we would say that the questions you used were therefore powerful. Powerful questions might:

• Invite insight into a situation
• Help the client discover new connections or a different angle on their situation
• Connect dots together where there weren't any before
• Explore the emotional landscape for the client
• Create cognitive dissonance which fuels the client to take action

Usually powerful questions are open-ended. However, sometimes scaling questions can be powerful for the client: "On a 1 - 10 scale, how important is this for you?" (Sometimes clients will say, probably only a 4, when before that it sounded like it was a 10. Just having to name the importance often creates awareness and clarity for the client.)

Here's another powerful question: when a client is saying "my boss has it in for me," try asking, "how would your boss describe what is happening?" This helps the client see the situation from the boss's point of view, and this usually creates greater awareness that had not been there before.

Some other powerful questions might be:

• “What would you be willing to do to change this situation?"
• "How motivated are you to change this?"
• “What is the cost of not changing?"

Almost any of these would all likely be questions that the client had not yet asked himself.