DMS Blog

Coaching others isn’t always easy. Daily pressures and demands often overtake our work, leaving limited time and energy to focus on coaching direct reports.

While formal coaching sessions may be few, you can fit in coaching conversations and coaching moments. CCL defines coaching as “formal or informal conversations between a leader coach (you) and a learner (someone else) intended to produce positive changes in workplace behaviors.”

To increase your opportunities for coaching, pay attention to the cues others are sending. If someone is upset, not ready to talk or needing to vent, then just hear them out. They need a safe place to air thoughts and emotions but aren’t ready for a coaching conversation.

Coaches use active listening techniques when people are ready to identify problems and find solutions. Cues that someone is open to coaching include, “Can you help me think things through?” “I’d like to bounce some ideas off of you.” “Could you give me a reality check?” “I need some help.”

In these moments, seven active listening skills can help turn a typical conversation into a coaching opportunity.

1. Be attentive. Convey a positive attitude to the learner (the “coachee”) and a willingness to talk through the situation. If timing is a problem, let the other person know you are interested and commit to a time for the two of you to have a focused conversation. During the conversation, remind yourself that your role is not to interrogate the coachee, jump to advice-giving or solve the problem yourself. Listen. Near the end of the conversation, you need to be able to accurately summarize the coachee’s main ideas, concerns and feelings. Allow “wait time” before responding. Don’t cut the coachee off, finish his or her sentences or start formulating your answer before he/she has finished. Be conscious of your body language.
2. Ask open-ended questions. These encourage the coachee to do the work of self-reflection and problem-solving, rather than justifying or defending a position, or trying to guess the “right answer.” Examples include: What do you think about …? Tell me about …? Please further explain/describe …?
3. Ask probing questions. Again, the emphasis is on asking, rather than telling. It invites a thoughtful response by the coachee and maintains the spirit of collaboration. You might say:”What are some of the specific things you’ve tried?” “Have you asked the team what their main concerns are?” “Does Emma agree that there are performance problems?” “Are there any issues in your own leadership style that might be contributing to the situation?” “How certain are you that you have the full picture of what’s going on?”
4. Request clarification. Double check any issues that are ambiguous or unclear to you. Say something like, ”Let me see if I’m clear. Are you talking about …?” or “Wait a minute. Try that again. I didn’t follow you.” if you have any doubt or confusion about what the coachee has said.
5. Paraphrase. Recap the coachee’s key points periodically. Don’t assume that you understand correctly, or that the coachee knows you’ve heard. For example, your coachee might tell you,”Emma is so loyal and supportive of her people – they’d walk through fire for her. But, no matter how much I push, her team keeps missing deadlines.” To paraphrase, you could say, ”So Emma’s people skills are great, but accountability is a problem.”
6. Be attuned to and reflect feelings. Identify the feeling message that accompanies the content. This is an effective way to get to the core of the issue. When you hear, ”I don’t know what else to do!” or ”I’m tired of bailing the team out at the last minute,” try to help the coachee label his or her feelings: ”Sounds like you’re feeling pretty frustrated and stuck.”
7. Summarize. Give a brief restatement of core themes raised by the coachee: ”Let me summarize to check my understanding. Emma was promoted to manager and her team loves her. But you don’t believe she holds them accountable, so mistakes are accepted and keep happening. You’ve tried everything you can think of and there’s no apparent impact. Did I get that right?”

Once the situation has been talked through in this way, both you and the coachee have a good picture of where things stand. From this point, the conversation can shift into problem-solving. What hasn’t been tried? What don’t we know? What new approaches could be taken?

As the coach, continue to query, guide and offer, but don’t dictate a solution. Your coachee will feel more confident and eager if he or she thinks through the options and owns the solution.

It’s easy to be impressed by the natural leader, the brainy student, the gifted musician or the star athlete. “What talent!” we think. But talent alone doesn’t lead to success, says Carol Dweck, noted psychologist and author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. “Success comes with a growth mindset.”

People with a “growth mindset” believe that ability or talent can be developed, says Dweck. In contrast, people with a “fixed mindset” see ability as built-in: “You either have it or you don’t.”

Dweck’s research has shown that our beliefs about innate talent can either support or stifle success. If you have a growth mindset, you are willing to take risks, accept mistakes and seek out chances to learn. You become resilient and view setbacks and challenges as learning opportunities.

The belief that you can’t improve your ability actually stunts achievement. If you have a fixed mindset, you feel the pressure to repeatedly prove yourself in areas of “strength” and you avoid activities and experiences that may reveal weaknesses. As a result, you don’t gain the experiences, perspectives or skills that are needed to succeed at work or adapt to change. A fixed mindset also makes it hard to admit to or correct mistakes.

Dweck has also challenged the view that innate ability fuels self-confidence. In the short-term, people feel good and confident because of their natural abilities – until setbacks or challenges cause them to question themselves. People with a growth mindset derive self-confidence from the very act of taking on challenges and pursuing them with vigor.

What are the implications of Dweck’s work for leaders? “To succeed in a world where our work is always changing, where challenges are unpredictable and competition abounds, we need to be agile learners,” says CCL’s President and CEO, John Ryan. “We need to apply our new knowledge. Perhaps most of all, we need to believe we can rise to the challenge.”

“By taking on a growth mindset, we can learn new behaviors and modify deep-set behaviors at any age,” Ryan continues. “It takes hard work and real focus, but all of us really can learn new and effective behaviors – and help take our organizations to new levels of performance.”

Dweck agrees. “If an organization believes in natural talent, they are not developing the potential talent,” she says. “Not only are these organizations missing out on a big pool of possible leaders, but their belief in natural talent might actually squash the very people they think are the naturals, making them into defensive nonlearners. The lesson is: Create an organization that prizes the development of ability – and watch the leaders emerge.”

Adapted from Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck.