Coaching- Effective questioning
With the rise of uncertainty, coaching has become a must to advance one’s career. Everyone seems to be a coach nowadays. But what is exactly coaching and why does it matter to businesses?
Coaching is more about asking the right questions than providing the right answers. Coaching is essentially about using effective questioning to help individuals explore and understand themselves and situations. It is a form of learning, where the coach supports the coachee to create learning and self-development in a way that benefits them and their organization. Coaching is forward-looking, focusing on outcomes and how to get there.
Coaching is not structured learning, therapy or the expert providing answers. This is one sense in which coaching stands apart from mentoring. Instead, coaching places the responsibility for learning on the coachee, with the coach helping the individual use his/her resources to find the answers from within.
A skilled coach will use a combination of techniques including observation, active listening, exploratory questioning and challenge.
Overall the coaching experience should be a positive one although coaches should prepare themselves to be challenged as it is only through recognizing the need to change, and setting about addressing this needs will the coachee actually develop and move forward.
Coaching vs mentoring vs counselling
Often coaching and mentoring are used interchangeably, and while there are some commonalities, it is important to recognize the key differences. Both are defined as a two-way process that involves building a relationship based on trust. However, a mentor would be expected to pass on their expertise to their mentee, describing or modeling a way which has previously been effective, rather than encouraging new ways of doing things. In contrast, a coach does not necessarily have to be an expert in the coachee’s field, and often isn’t. Coaching is about empowering and motivating individuals to find the solutions within themselves.
Coaching should also be distinguished from counselling. But let’s start with what they have in common: each utilises a similar set of skills (listening, questioning, probing etc); each puts the relationship at the heart of the work; each recognizes the importance of agreeing boundaries. However, a key difference is that coaching assumes that the coachee, whilst recognizing the need to develop themselves, is essentially able to function in the workplace. Coaching too is more outcome focused, whilst counseling is more typically more focused on process. This translates into different boundaries being set for counseling vs. coaching.
Why is it important to bring coaching in to the workplace?
Coaching is best viewed as a complement to other L&D solutions. Some of the benefits associated with coaching extend to:
• Empowers individuals and encourages them to take responsibility • Provides them with a tool kit to make own decisions, and take action • Leads to improved job performance, motivation and job satisfaction • Provides business results
Exposure to coaching encourages coachee to adopt this approach when they themselves are working with others. This, in turn, helps to build a coaching culture within organizations.
How effective is coaching?
There is some research available that supports that coaching does provide good ROI. However this is piecemeal and there is still a lack of coherence about why coaching is effective, what aspects of coaching contribute to this effectiveness, and how long lasting the benefits are once formal coaching ceases.
The real challenge is how to measure ROI, and how to pin any potential performance improvements on coaching activity. Part of the challenge is ensuring that there is some common understanding of what success actually looks like to help align research efforts.
Internal coaching: coaching as a set of skills
It is our belief that not enough is being done to exploit line managers as coaches. Organizations are too ready to outsource coaching. Difficulties arise from the tension between performance management and development, and it may be the case that managers are less able to start from a neutral point as they carry certain assumptions about the individual. However, they also have a better feel for the individual, and what the organization needs from the individual.
As indicated earlier, identifying when coaching is an appropriate intervention is particularly important. Our view is that if an individual is consistently underperforming, coaching would not be an appropriate intervention to use to get across the strong message that performance is not at an acceptable level. In essence, coaching should be about performance improvement not performance management.
When considering the use of coaching internally, it is useful to think of coaching as a set of skills. A skilled coach will use a combination of techniques including observation, listening, questioning, providing information and giving feedback to create a conversation rich in insight and learning. Line managers are unlikely to have the time to dedicate to becoming an expert coach, but they can be trained in coaching skills which they can then use with their staff. An effective manager is likely to be one who adopts a coaching approach, while recognizing when a different approach is required to tackle performance issues.
External coaching: a unique relationship
The benefits of an external coach include some clarity regarding the relationship. Specifically, the focus of the relationship is clear: the coach’s role is one of helping individuals develop and reach their full potential, and there aren’t (or at least shouldn’t be) any potential tensions with management of performance. External coaches can make an independent assessment of an individual, without any preconceptions of that individual.
The role of the external coach provides a kind of support that is distinct from any other. The coach will focus solely on an individual’s situation and experiences with the kind of attention and commitment they will rarely experience elsewhere. The coach will listen with a genuine curiosity to understand who they are, what they are thinking, and how they experience the world. The coach will reflect back to the individual with the kind of objective assessment that creates real clarity. The individual will be encouraged to rise to challenges, overcome self-limiting beliefs and other obstacles, and take action. A coaching relationship is like no other, simply because of its combination of objective detachment and commitment to an individual’s goals.
The nature of the relationship is such that it is not just about outcomes, but about helping an individual to better understand themselves and from this to grow and change as an individual. The strength and power of coaching relates strongly to the level of openness and trust between the coach and coachee.
At senior levels coaches serve a particularly important function as an independent sounding board.
Marielke Pritchard, Mendas Ltd
