I ran my first coaching skills programme for leaders way back in 1992.
At that time the concept of leaders coaching was still new, the GROW Model was a bit ‘out there’ and I recall lively debates around whether or not coaching was ‘a good thing’.
In the intervening years, coaching has become a flourishing industry and leaders are expected to coach peers and bosses as well as team members. Sometimes, they’re even encouraged to coach themselves!
But you know what? In the intervening thirty-years since I ran those first coaching skills workshops, I think we’ve all got a bit carried away with the idea of ‘the leader as coach’. I am bemused when I see how complex we have made something that is really simple.
Sure, coaching is powerful, but when one type of conversation gets a special label, it becomes just another task for leaders to add to their already overcrowded to-do lists.
Seeing it as a separate task gets in the way of leaders having the good conversations they would otherwise have. Because they don’t have time to ‘coach’ someone, they don’t have any conversation at all.
This is such a shame.
Ultimately, when leaders coach, they are simply displaying good communication behaviours:
- Listening to understand rather than listening to judge
- Asking genuine questions to explore ideas, not simply as a problem-solving checklist
- Giving people time and space to think and share ideas
- Being open to different perspectives
- Sharing your ideas and setting boundaries in a way that focuses on engaging others, not imposing on them
If you, as a leader, build these behaviours into your everyday leadership style, you will become a leader who is naturally coaching others. You will have many coaching conversations, just not label them as such.
When you adopt these behaviours in your day-to-day approach in conversations with the people you lead, you will achieve the benefits of coaching without having to set aside time specially to coach.
And on top of that, you will become far better at having a myriad of other conversations too. You will become better at handling difficult conversations, you will become better at talking about performance and you will become more effective in giving feedback. Why? Because all of these conversations consist of the same core behaviours:
- Listening to understand rather than listening to judge
- Asking genuine questions to explore ideas, not simply as a problem-solving checklist
- Giving people time and space to think and share ideas
- Being open to different perspectives
- Sharing your ideas and setting boundaries in a way that focuses on engaging others, not imposing on them
That’s why, in my experience, leaders who focus on adopting good communication behaviours, rather than developing their coaching skills specifically, achieve more impactful results with far less effort. It’s behaviours, not how we label those behaviours, that matter.
If you’d like to discuss how you can achieve more in less time through developing your communication skills, I’d love to explore further. Send me an email and we can set up a time to speak.
And remember, observe with interest and learning, not with criticism and judgement.