Beginner’s Guide to Coaching Employees

In this article, we are going to review a common coaching framework and approach for people leaders to apply during coaching conversations with their team. Use this page as a guide to starting and executing a coaching conversation.

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What is coaching?

Coaching is about helping others help themselves. It is not about giving advice, instruction, or telling someone what to do. Coaching is about focusing on the future and identifying where the coachee wants to be and what they want to achieve. As a coach, your role is to clarify the pathway from the current state to the future. Coaches do this by enabling the coachee to make informed choices based on deeper insight.

Coaching conversations are fluid, dynamic acts of co-creation where the coach and the coachee are equal partners. The following coaching framework has both a coach and coachee side, and each side is a reflection of the other. Coaching is an important component of a 360 review process and for guidance on feedback. Coaching can occur during one-on-one meetings or at any time. It is an important component of career development, leading teams, building an inclusive culture, mentoring, and much more.

How coaches coach

Coaches help team members by focusing their attention on the future while recognizing their unique strengths and areas for development. A coach is there to help the coachee tap into their potential and to reflect and learn by identifying desired outcomes to achieve future goals.

Key attributes of a coach include some of the following:

• Ask powerful questions to deepen learning or insight.
• Help your coachee recognize their own strengths and untap their potential.
• Encourage your coachee to move to action on their choices.
• Hold your coachee accountable for the actions they have committed to.
• Fully focusing on the other person.
• Asking questions and listening deeply while offering support.

Different hats for different conversations

When we think about coaching as a mode of conversation, you may also be thinking about all the other modes of conversation you might use as a leader in multiple types of roles. You may be a team lead running an engineering program. You may be a mentor or a buddy. You are also most likely a direct report of someone else. Whatever it is, you need to flex your leadership style and adopt different approaches to engage in meaningful conversations. You can think of this as wearing “different hats.”

You may wear multiple hats in any given day:

• Boss Hat – Being directive and telling people what to do and how to do it.
• Teacher Hat – Passing on your knowledge and expertise to grow someone else’s skills.
• Mentor Hat – Sharing advice and giving guidance from your own experience.
• Coach Hat – Asking lots of questions and listening deeply to help people reach their own solutions.

GROW Model

The GROW Model is a four-step method to holding coaching conversations with a coachee. You can apply it during coaching sessions to guide the coachee through future-focused discussions.

G – Goals: Identify the inspirational goal to drive success and keep energy and motivation high.

R – Reality: Discuss the current situation and what barriers currently exist between and achievement of future goals

O – Options: Explore the options for moving forward

W – Way Forward: Agree on specific actions and timeframe to set accountability for the coachee

Essential coaching skills

Effective coaches use a defined set of skills to enable coaching conversations. Those skills include:

Attributes of a coachee

As a coach uses their core coaching skills, a coachee can access their own set of skills and actions to get the most out of the coaching conversation through the following:

• Be Present: Just as the coach is being present, a coachee needs to be present in the conversation, attentive, open to possibilities, and fully engaged.
• Reflect: A coachee is invited to reflect, wonder, ponder, and contemplate through a coaching conversation through powerful questions.
• Visualize: The coachee can harness the power of their imagination and paint a picture in their mind of the desired future outcomes to enhance their chances of success.
• Learn: Coaching conversations revolve around learning by discovering new perspectives by coming to a new understanding or realization.
• Transform: Change is a core attribute of coaching. Sometimes the transformation may be small when a coachee has increased clarity on appropriate action to move forward. At times the transformation may be more profound, as a coachee is able to shift their mindset in a way that there’s no going back.

Trust and Coaching

Building trust is an important ingredient in coaching and team dynamics. Trust lies at the heart of a functioning and cohesive team. There are five dysfunctions of a team according to Patrick Lencioni that can break down trust throughout the team:

1. Absence of Trust: Team members are reluctant to be vulnerable with one another and are unwilling to admit their mistakes, weaknesses, or need for help.
2. Fear of Conflict: Lack of trust prevents the flow of unfiltered, passionate debate about tasks, activities, and projects. These conversations are crucial to ensure all voices are heard and all options considered.
3. Lack of Commitment: Without some conflict it is difficult for team members to commit to decisions, fostering an environment where ambiguity prevails. A team with strong commitment is more likely to put in more effort.
4. Avoidance of Accountability: When teams do not commit to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven individuals are hesitant to call their peers on actions and behaviors that may seem counterproductive.
5. Inattention to Results: When no one is accountable, team members may naturally tend to put their own needs ahead of the collective goals; for example, career development and recognition.

The Trust Equation™ is a concept to help increase trustworthiness with your team. The more trust you have with team members, the easier it will be to have coaching conversations.

The trust equation uses four objective variables to measure trustworthiness:

1. Credibility: My word is believable
2. Reliability: I do what I say I will do
3. Intimacy: I empathize with others
4. Self-Orientation: My focus is on my team, not personal gain

The trust equation has one variable in the denominator (self-orientation) and three in the numerator (credibility, reliability, intimacy). Increasing the value of the factors in the numerator increases the value of trust. Increasing the denominator (self-orientation) decreases the value of trust.

Neuroscience of Trust

Studies have shown that building trust has an impact on the brain. The neuroscience shows that recognition has the largest effect on trust when it occurs after a goal has been met. The neuroscience of trust can help team members and managers in the following ways:

• Important for being empathetic, relating to others needs
• Enables planning, making quality decisions, and being creative
• Helps the process of learning and memory
• Decreases threat and fear responses
• Decreases cortisol and blood pressure levels

Eight management behaviors that foster trust:

1. Recognize excellence
2. Induce “challenge stress”
3. Give people discretion in how they work
4. Enable job crafting
5. Share information broadly
6. Intentionally build relationships
7. Facilitate whole-person growth
8. Show vulnerability

Planning for action

The planning for the action phase is about enabling the coachee to make a plan with action steps that support their goals.

How to plan for action:

• The coachee commits to and is accountable for actions that they design for themselves.
• The coach may brainstorm, probe, request, challenge, or raise the bar but the coachee is ultimately responsible for designing the action steps.
• The coach’s actions for the coachee are in service of the coachee’s agenda.
• Coaches may not necessarily be attached to the results of a coachee achieves.
• Actions are anchored in what is important to the coachee, what changes they want to achieve. Coaches should hold their coachee accountable for performance on action steps and their overall change agenda.

When you are planning for action while wearing your coaching hat, you are not evaluating or judging or driving your own agenda. The coachee should ultimately decide the action steps, committing to their own path forward. As a coach, you are curious and non-judgemental while living up to your organization’s values.

Sample planning for action questions:

• “What might be three next steps that you can take in order to….?”
• “What are you going to do? When are going to do it? How will you know?”
• “What do you need/want to find more about…?”
• “What kind of support do you need? From whom?”
• “My request is that this week you… Will that work for you?”
• “I challenge you to…What do you think?”
• “In what way do you want me to follow up with you?”

Ending the coaching conversation

When a coaching session is completed, it is essential to review the goal of the conversation with the outcome by asking:

• “So you wanted to talk about _____, in what way has this conversation been useful for you?”
• “What do you want to take away from this conversation?”

The coach might also want to end the conversation with a few statements about what this session has reminded them of and what they truly appreciate in the coachee. Coaching is about empowering. They are helping team members to increase and balance their self-confidence and self-worth:

• “What I truly appreciate from our conversation was…”
• “What I admire you for is…”
• “What you have helped me realize, learn or reminded me about is…”

Additional coaching skills

• Offering a big picture perspective
• Use of metaphors
• Brainstorming
• Creating a compelling picture of what could be
• Championing
• Challenging
• Identifying underlying limiting beliefs, assumptions, and mindset

Coaching Manager Competency

Coaching is a critical skill for managers to develop and improve upon as they progress in their careers. Coaching helps to facilitate the career development of team members through regular coaching conversations. Coaching helps team members change behavior, improve performance, and sustain commitment through encouragement, support, collaborative problem-solving, goal setting, and feedback.

Skills and behavior of the coaching competency for managers:

• Facilitates job performance growth of team members by providing regular coaching sessions
• Understands team members’ long-term career goals and acts as a mentor and guide to achieving them.
• Conducts development and career planning dialogues with team members continuously
• Reflects on their leadership style and impact on the team and team situation
• Seeks new coaching approaches and techniques and exemplifies what it means to continuously develop their skills
• Delivers effective strategies for dealing with cases of underperformance and instills that in other leaders across the organization

Additional coaching resources

• The Leader as Coach – Harvard Business Review Article
• What Can Coaches Do for You? – Harvard Business Review Article
• Four Tips for Coaching Remote Employees

This article was originally posted at about.gitlab.com under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 4.0