One of the most powerful skills I’ve learned in both my workplace experience as manager, HR, and now as CEO–is how to coach to encourage and empower. Not so coincidentally, coaching skills are one of my favorites to teach! While there are many important leadership skills and competencies, coaching is central to improving the performance of entire teams.

However, many leaders confuse coaching with the need to have all of the answers. Today, I want to explore this misconception, as well as provide a few tips on how to approach coaching in a way that truly facilitates the life-changing success and development you desire for your team.

“When people make coaching an everyday way of working, they create more focus, more courage, and more resilience.” – Michael Bungay Stanier

The difference between manager and coach

In business, we have to be both coaches and managers. To lead effectively, we need to know when to wear which hat. While managing involves more direct, task-oriented advice, coaching works best for developmental purposes when you’re hoping to help those around you reach their full potential. Great coaches see their job as helping others through a process. This means focusing on asking open-ended questions, listening intently, and exploring a person’s individual vision with compassion and curiosity in order to help them pull out the best results.

So why do so many great leaders struggle to coach? According to this blog article:
“People have spent a lifetime being rewarded for not asking questions, and for instead focusing on having the answers. At all levels of school, it’s all about getting the A. In your first years of your career, it’s about building up the knowledge to become a SME and knowing your stuff. Then, once you gain seniority in an organization, well, now you’re really expected to know your stuff — how else could you hold that particular rank? This deeply ingrained habit to respond to situations with advice, solutions and suggestions is driven by what we call the advice monster.” 

The article identifies not one, but three types of common advice monsters, including the need to know the answers, the need to save others, and the desire to maintain control. The good news? Once you recognize that your advice monster might be acting up, you can begin focusing on asking open-ended questions designed to help those around you really tease out their personal vision.

Here are a few of Leadology’s favorite questions for coaching employees towards solving problems, or achieving a goal:

• What are the possibilities for achieving this goal?

• If you had your choice, no limits, what would you do?

• What are the possible solutions?

• What will success look like?  

• What will happen when this is successful?

• What will happen if this is not successful?

• What options can you create?

• What is your 1 most important next step?

This type of compassionate inquiry is what truly empowers others to arrive at their own answers, catapults them to a place of buy-in, and increases their chances of achieving their goals.

When manager coaching skills are most useful

Coaching is actually most effective when an individual has a high level of untapped potential, and a coach wants to help them deepen their strengths and leverage their talents. After coaching 1000s of individuals, I’ve learned that at its core, great manager coaching skills are about building a relationship and drawing out the best your employee has to offer. 

Although often an abstract concept, coaching in the workplace is about more than “fixing” the problems of an employee. Remember, coaching is about having a conversation and asking good, open-ended questions that allow the people you are coaching to reflect on what they are doing, and how they can do things differently in the future to improve performance. This approach can and should be used with all employees, regardless of competency or output. And, as mental health in the workplace becomes more important, coaching in the workplace should be used as a proactive strategy to combat burnout before it happens.

Learn more about how to coach in the workplace with Leadology

It’s crucial to create opportunities for becoming a great coach for your team and introducing coaching in the workplace. One of our favorite techniques is taking a strengths-based approach, which allows managers to discover their natural talents as well as the talents of their team in order to obtain peak performance. 

Combined with strengths-based development, our group coaching program for influential managers contains workshops on growth mindset, coaching your employees, difficult conversations, and navigating the many facets of feedback (both good and bad). Learn more about Activate and whether it’s right for you and your team’s unique needs.