Coaching And Empowering Your Team.
How do you coach your team for high performance?
Know what ‘stage’ of mentorship they need.
Many senior roles require leaders to coach teams. Yet the minority of leaders know how to intuitively coach others.
As a leader, you always want to be thinking, ‘what can I do today, that means they’ll be able to do this in the future for themselves?’
To have a high performing team, you need to help every team member come up to your level of performance.
Using different leadership tools (coaching, mentoring, teaching) helps you achieve that.
Junior team members benefit more from teaching, than coaching.
Coaching (which is helping someone solve their own problems and not telling them what to do) will be too overwhelming.
Instead, they need specific tools, strategies and context.
To teach them, you can either do it yourself, partner with us to skill them, or partner with your HR team to organise a thorough onboarding. When they know the lay of the land, they can get more done.
Competent team members without context benefit more from mentoring than coaching.
Mentoring is sharing what you’d do in their situation.
When you mentor someone, you give context-specific advice and strategies on interpersonal relationships and how your workplace operates.
If your team member is a pro at the job but needs some reassurance and guidance to grow, coaching is a great fit.
Competent team members with context benefit most from coaching.
Coaching helps someone decide what step to take for themselves.
This means they need a foundational knowledge of their role and to know what they’re doing.
What is a ‘coach’ in a workplace context?
A coach gives you the tools to solve your own problems.
As a leader, you can act as a coach, where you don’t tell your team what to do.
Instead you ask them what they would like to do and help them come up with a solid game plan.
By doing so, you improve your team's ability to solve problems, increasing performance.
What does coaching ‘look’ like?
When someone coaches you, instead of telling you what to do, they ask you
questions to help you solve problems.
A ‘coach’ asks questions (this is you as the leader). A ‘coachee’ takes the action (this is your team member).
The goal for the coachee is to have the confidence to take positive action.
The goal of you as the coach is that you become redundant. That they get so much value from problem solving with your thoughtful questions they can eventually fly on their own.
You’re really there to remind them that they can figure out the answer themselves.
Remember, when you save the day, they think less. When you coach (e.g. ask them what they want to do), they think more.
Six useful questions to ask in a coaching conversation.
Your job is to ask the questions to help them find their answer (vs. ‘save the day’ or ‘fix it’). Your aim is to talk 20% of the time.
Here are six useful questions:
What’s the goal?
What’s the context?
What ideas do you have so far?
What are you most uncertain about?
What could get in your way?
What happens if it goes well?
Coaching vs ‘fixing’.
When someone comes to you with a scenario they want help with, it sure can be tempting to tell them exactly what to do. But if you’re with a competent team member, flip the switch.
Instead of telling them what to do (fixing), ask them how they could problem solve it for themselves (coaching).
This trains them to start problem solving these scenarios, using you as a soundboard board instead of a fixer.
A sounding board is more empowering than a fixer and it uses up less of your time.
By doing so, you’re switching from ‘fixing’ mode (where they rely on you for perpetuity and you enable them to become high performers dependent on you being online) to coaching (where they rely on themselves, becoming high performers independent of whether you’re in the office).
Doesn’t the latter sound more appealing to you?
Not sure what to use?
Try these useful questions to lean on someone's own experience and wisdom.
What’s worked well for you in the past?
What is the biggest challenge in your mind?
What’s a good outcome look like?
What can you solve yourself and what do you need me to support you with?
We teach this as a workshop for established leaders.
Download our info pack to learn more about our leadership programme for established leaders.