Knowing when to coach is just as important as knowing how 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 approach is called for. Coaching is a non-directive way to release potential, create positive relations and improve performance.

Being a leader who coaches involves having a certain mindset — open-minded, solution-focused, a positive outlook, and being well-inclined towards others — which underpins an 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.

In this article I'll first define what I mean by coaching, then we'll look at situations where a coaching approach is not necessary and the situations where it is very useful. Along the way, I'll give you a few tips on how to go about it.

What kind of coaching?

The words coaching or coach are used in different ways. Many people refer to a coach as someone who teaches practical skills, such as a vocal coach, or a fitness coach. In the workplace people might say that they coached a new employee on how to use a company software, meaning that they taught them something.

The kind of coaching I'm referring to is a mostly non-directive way of communicating where you refrain from giving advice, or teaching and instead you use techniques to prompt others to come up with their own ideas (which incidentally, might be better adapted to the situation than your ideas!). This is counter-intuitive because we are so used to giving advice, tips, and recommendations. Especially if we want to be helpful. The more we want to help, the more advice we give! But in certain situations, helpfulness lies in getting ourselves out of the way, sitting back and creating a space for the other person to think.

This kind of coaching is used by professional coaches and leaders and managers who have integrated coaching as a leadership style. It generates targeted conversations that respond to the actual needs of the moment, saving a lot of time caused by unnecessary meanderings. Adopting a non-directive stance requires practice, because it's just not what most of us are used to doing. Some form of training helps to acquire the skills more quickly.

When not to coach

Leaders who coach, don’t coach all the time; they have a situational kind of leadership. This means, they adapt their behavior and the way they speak to the context of the situation at hand and the needs of the people involved. Sometimes they might have to be firmly 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. It may not be appropriate to explore a topic for new perspectives, when a clear, fast, and helpful directive is urgently needed.

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 share your knowledge, give clear descriptions and explanations, and perhaps your advice as an expert.

When to coach

You can use coaching in situations where it's important to enable the other person (or group) to discover new perspectives, express their views, find their solutions, make a choice or take a decision, where creative thinking is called for or when you simply want to help someone reflect through a problem.

Here are examples of where coaching, rather than teaching or advising, would be useful:

• you want to do some strategy-building together with your team members, encouraging their input
• a colleague tells you they are in conflict with someone and they're unsure about what to do next
• 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 the transition
• you are faced with a new challenge and you must find the best way to deal with it (use open-ended questions for self-coaching!)

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

Integrate coaching into spontaneous conversations

Sometimes you might decide to set up a few formal coaching conversations with a colleague, for example if they're leading a new project, or have just joined the company. But as a leader who coaches, you rarely need to have a dedicated, formal coaching session like professional coaches do. Most of the time, opportunities for coaching present themselves in short, informal conversations.

Every day we encounter someone who is wondering about a project or hinting at an aspiration they have or mulling a problem. These are perfect occasions to seize the moment and use coaching skills that will facilitate the emergence of novel thinking, solutions and actions to take.

Spontaneous coaching conversations can be quite short, leading to new insights sometimes in a matter of minutes. It involves weaving coaching skills into your natural way of speaking, including being totally attentive and asking some open-ended thought-provoking questions.

The basic skills you need: Quality questions and quality listening

As a leader who coaches you will opt for an "ask rather than tell" approach enabling others to discover and formulate their own solutions. Coaching questions differ from other inquiry questions because the intention is not to gain information for the person asking them. Coaching questions have a special quality, they are designed to help think in different ways, to see things from a new perspective.

Questions exclusively oriented towards the past, looking for what happened, who was responsible and so on, are not very helpful to open new avenues of thought. Closed questions that result in a yes or no answer, are not useful either as they don't invite exploration. Lastly, questions that sound accusatory and questions that insinuate incompetence will put people on the defensive and will shut down creative thinking.

Here are some examples of coaching questions that might come up in a conversation with an individual or a group. You can change the pronoun to "we" if you're doing a team exercise and want to be a part of the reflection process.

• What do you want this to look like 5 years from now?
• How important is this?
• Which solutions do you think would help?
• What haven't you tried yet?
• What would make a real difference?
• What are the next steps you need to take?
• What help do you need?
• When are you going to start?

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. They have an intense quality of listening rather than being distracted by mentally imagining 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 factual details of the spoken word. You become tuned into the other person's view of things, 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 practice because it involves adopting new relational and conversational behaviors, but you start seeing improvements in the quality of your conversations immediately, so it’s very satisfying!

Deciding when to coach involves not only understanding the types of situation that are most conducive to coaching, but also developing an instinct for when to quickly adopt a non-directive mode that will create value in spontaneous conversations.

Once you've acquired a coaching mindset and the coaching skills, knowing when to coach is just as important as knowing how to coach.