Knowing when to Coach

Coaching is a leadership style

Coaching is not only a skill-set, it’s a leadership style. It’s a hat you can put on when needed and take off when a different leadership approach is needed. It's a non-directive way to release potential, create positive relations and improve performance.

Being a leader coach involves having a certain mindset - open-minded, solution-focused, a positive outlook, and being well-inclined towards others - which underpins their overall attitude at work. Leaders who coach have many hard and soft skills, including the ability to engage in conversations with a coaching style, which is fundamental to energizing for results.

When not to coach

Nonetheless, leaders who coach, don’t coach all the time; they have a situational style of leadership. This means, they adapt their behavior and the way they speak according to the context of the situation at hand and the needs of the people who are involved. Sometimes they might need to be directive, or they might have to teach something, or they might act as a mentor to a colleague. 

For example, if you’re a leader who coaches and there is an emergency in your office, you won’t be coaching, you’ll be giving instructions. There’s no need for in-depth exploration of a topic when a clear, fast and helpful directive would be more appropriate.

You also won’t be coaching if your technical expertise is required or when someone needs to understand a process or policy of the company. In this case, it would be a teaching or consulting moment. You would give clear descriptions, explanations and perhaps your advice as an expert.

When to coach

You will, however, use coaching when you want to invite new perspectives, when you want to open a space for team members to discover solutions and make their own proposals, or simply when you want to help someone think through a problem.  In these situations it is sufficient to use the basic coaching skills of listening attentively, and asking open-ended, thought-provoking questions to advance the inquiry on the important issue at hand.  These skills can be incorporated in your natural behavior,  you don't need to have a dedicated, formal coaching session like professional coaches do.

Some examples of when coaching, rather than teaching or advising, would be useful are:

• you want to do some strategy-building together with your team members
• a colleague is in conflict with someone and they don't know what to do
• a team member has a  good but vague idea on how to tackle a problem and you want to help them develop it
• one of your team has been promoted and they want to adopt a more strategic outlook
• your team is stressed by a recent organizational change and you want to help them manage it
• you are faced with a new challenge and you have to find the best way to deal with it (use open-ended questions for self-coaching!)

Weaving coaching skills into normal conversations

Leaders sometimes feel obliged to always be the problem-solver and they are tempted to put forth their own ideas as the only way forward.   But, as a leader coach, you trust your colleagues' competencies, so you empower them to elaborate their own solutions to problems.  This is also a way of encouraging autonomy and creativity, which are both key determinants of motivation. 

In practice, leaders who coach assess situations and decide when using a coaching approach would be most productive. This may involve a little bit of planning ahead, but most often a coaching opportunity occurs on the spot, in impromptu conversations with colleagues at work.  That's why it's important to develop an instinct for when to use coaching skills naturally, in a way that will be helpful and insightful for your colleagues.

Coaching involves weaving open-ended questions into a natural conversation, to help colleagues explore topics from several vantage points. This can be done in any informal or formal conversational setting. Then you give space to the person or the team to elaborate, to come up with new ideas and an action plan to make the desired changes or improvements. 

Here are some examples of coaching questions that might come up in a conversation with a group or an individual:

• What’s your / our biggest challenge with this situation?
• What do you / we want this to look like 5 years from now?
• How important is this?
• Which solutions do you think would help?
• What haven't you / we tried yet?
• What would make a real difference?
• What are the next steps you / we need to take?
• How can other team members be of help to you?

Quality questions and quality listening

Coaching questions differ from other inquiry questions because the intention is not to get information.  Coaching questions have a special quality, they are  designed to help a person thinking in different ways, to explore more deeply and find new perspectives. 

That's why backward looking questions, looking for what happened, who was responsible and so on,  or closed questions that result in a yes or no answer, are not really useful, nor are questions that sound accusatory, and questions that insinuate incompetence. 

Leaders who coach don’t just ask effective, mind-opening questions, they are fully present in the conversation and focused on what the other person is saying, rather than being distracted by mentally starting to formulate how they will answer before the person has even finished speaking. Lack of focus and inattentive listening is the source of many misunderstandings and missed opportunities to tap new ideas that may simply have not been noticed.  When you have a strong intention of being fully present, you naturally develop a higher quality of listening which goes beyond hearing the details of the spoken word. You become tuned into the other person's intentions, their feelings and the deeper implications of what they are saying.

Conclusion

Developing a coaching mindset can be relatively easy, especially if you are already inclined to being generally positive, empathetic and solution-focused.  Learning coaching skills takes determination and consistent practice because it involves adopting new relational and conversational behaviors.  Once you've acquired the mindset and the skills, knowing when to coach is just as important as knowing how to coach.

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