Improve Your Coaching

Leadership Coaching Notes  APRIL 2011

Improve Your Coaching

Mitch’s organization announced that senior leaders would be assigned two high-potential staff from another function to coach. He learned that his coachees would rate the value of his coaching as part of his performance review.

Knowing that good intention wasn’t enough to produce good results, he asked me, “What can I do to create a positive environment for coaching conversations?”

Four Essentials for High-Value Coaching

Mitch learned to leverage his strong knowledge, leadership insights, and success strategies by adding the following essentials. They helped him create more open, meaningful and valuable conversations.

1. Presence:

Give your coachees the gift of your full interest, attention and authentic experience. If you want to create safety and invite rich conversations, set a space with privacy and no phones, computers, or interruptions. Get real. Forget spinning your experiences to make yourself look good.

Share your experiences when they help inform, encourage or inspire your coachees. When it will help them, share your tough times, your uncertainties, and the struggles that you had to master to advance. Exercise your Emotional Intelligence muscles.

2. Curiosity vs. Answers:

Hold your answers. In coaching conversations, your power and value live in the quality of your questions. Ask questions of discovery and let your coachees explore their own answers before you offer any of your own.

• What would make our time valuable today? What do you want to leave with?
• What are you thinking about X? What leads you to think or choose X? What other possibilities might you have overlooked?
• What must you say, face and/or change to achieve X? Will
•  What support do you need and how will you set it up to build more success?

3. Skillful Feedback:

Name what currently is working and the strengths others already have. Positive feedback invites connection. More than that, many of us overlook our strengths as “normal” and so miss opportunities to leverage them to build new successes. Naming strengths builds resources and also invites your coachees to feel more comfortable about raising their tough questions.

The art of coaching about problems starts with accurately naming the positive intentions coachees had when something unwanted occurred.Did they intend to add value, but did it unskillfully? Did they intend to do one thing well, but sacrificed another in the process? Did they intend to stay within their comfort zone so as not to risk mistakes? Name and show you appreciate their positive intention in a situation they found new or difficult. (It is always possible to find a positive intention.) You’ll open their ears and minds to the exploration and guidance you offer.

Once you have named a positive intention, explore how it was insufficient – outdated, ill-informed, not appropriate to meet their goals. Then, find options to improve. Sometimes your coachees will know alternatives and sometimes they will want to hear your suggestions. Whichever happens, ask coachees, “What will you do next time?” and wait for them to state their commitments for making future changes out loud.

4. Support:

Encourage specific commitments to ask specific people for specific help within a time frame. Without a powerful support network, most of us procrastinate, struggle and then achieve disappointing long-term results. Think New Year’s resolutions.

Offer and follow through on help you can give. Open doors. Make introductions. Provide opportunities to observe you in action. Suggest learning programs and new project opportunities that will support their career development. Knowing you believe in them and care enough to help creates off-the-charts, long-term value for your coachees.

What’s Next?

Becoming a skillful coach takes more than these four skills. Ideally, take a good coaching course and at a minimum read or listen to CDs on coaching. But fundamentally, structure a way to receive mentored practice, especially around the trickiest situations. There is no better way to learn.

If you or those you are developing want to accelerate your learning, I provide customized personal practice and masterful feedback that teaches and inspires comfort, competence and excellence as a high- value coach. Our first conversation is always free. Call today to explore how I can support your success.

Please send any feedback to mkimbell@corporateadventure.com.

All the best,

Meredith Kimbell
Executive Advisor,
Strategy Consultant Corporate Adventure

Leadership Coaching Notes uses real or composite client examples drawn from 25 years of coaching and consulting with leaders committed to solving their toughest personal, interpersonal and organizational issues.
Unless otherwise attributed, all material is copyrighted by Meredith Kimbell © 2011. All rights reserved. You may reprint any or all of this material if you include the following:
“Leadership Coaching Notes © 2011 Meredith Kimbell, Corporate Adventure, Reston, VA. Used with permission.”