Brilliant Coaching

Julie Starr: Coaching is a conversation. The thing that distinguishes coaching is the effect it has on the other person. It helps them to think through their situations, it helps them to get clear about their situations and ultimately it affects their thinking and their learning and their decision making processes in a situation, and ultimately, it helps somebody to act.

Female interviewer: How would you distinguish coaching from mentoring or counselling?

Julie Starr: Coaching is essentially about things getting better, about having a solution focus, about looking to what could be improved and sometimes that means looking at what is going on right now.

I think counselling tends to lean back a little bit more, to look more towards the past about why things are like they are and how things have been.

Now the mentor is interested more distinctly in the content of a conversation and a mentor is more likely to have relevant experience or skills or qualification in that regard. Now to be a really great mentor, it really helps if you have great listening skills, great questioning skills and understand the structure of a generative conversation.

So I would say a mentor would hopefully be a good coach. A good coach sometimes needs to be a little bit more directive in a conversation according to some boundaries, and so it is also useful for them to have a mentoring perspective.

Female interviewer: In what situations might coaching not be an appropriate form of development?

Julie Starr: Coaching rests on the coach’s ability to be less directive in a conversation. So to surface thoughts and ideas from the other person through a process of asking questions, giving summaries, making observations and perhaps giving feedback. What coaching cannot do, what a less directive posture in a conversation cannot do, is surface knowledge that isn’t there. If you don’t know how to operate a video recorder for example, it is pointless me asking you how you think you are going to approach, you know, operating that piece of equipment. However, if you are in a situation where, I don’t know, perhaps you are forming a project at work or you are thinking about approaching a difficult meeting, then I can coach you.

The other situations where it is less appropriate to coach somebody in a less directive way is when perhaps that individual is under extreme pressure or perhaps they are less confident around a situation. This isn’t always true but generally if somebody was stressed and upset, let’s say, around a situation, listening to them might be productive, putting what might be construed as additional pressure for them to think productively in a situation, again it might be less helpful when we are under stress, we tend to be able to think less clearly, make decisions less easily and generally, we need more support.

Female interviewer: For you Julie, what makes a good coach?

Julie Starr: The skills of coaching, building rapport and a relationship with individuals, understanding the structure and process of a generative conversation, understanding how to ask effective questions, understanding how to listen and different levels of listening, understanding how to give feedback in a constructive way and operating from these underlying beliefs and principles of a coach, those skills are probably always relevant in any form of developing people.

If somebody wants to go beyond an average level of competence, let’s say with his coaching behaviours, I think what you are engaging there is in your own self development, so your own self awareness, understanding what you typically bring to conversations and who you are in conversations and how a lot of the time it is appropriate to simply get yourself out of the way as coach in a conversation, to remember that you are a channel, a vessel, a conduit for the conversation, that the conversation comes through you. And that is what makes a good coach, somebody that is willing to take it on in terms of who they are being for people and recognising the service of being a coach.

Female interviewer: What steps can managers who coach take to develop their own coaching skills?

Julie Starr: I think it is very easy for managers to start coaching. I think what is unfortunate about coaching is that there is quite a lot of mysticism and mystique and models and techniques and theories that surround it, but actually, if managers simply started with the idea of how much do I tell people what to do, how often am I giving instruction and being directive in a conversation and how often do I sit back, do I listen, do I help people think for themselves in a conversation. Just that simple idea might bring about a self awareness that has them do something different in a conversation. It might be something really simple like not speaking as quickly or using more space between one person finishing what they are saying and them perhaps adding their own ideas.

From there, we can build these more, let’s say, sophisticated behaviours of asking open questions, asking simple open questions, being able to listen from nothing let’s say, so instead of listening with a hypothesis for a situation or listening for an opportunity to be able to fix what we are hearing, but more being able to listen with an attitude of how is the person in front of me able to sort this for themselves, how much can I coach the person in this conversation rather than coach this issue. That’s a more sophisticated level of skill and it demands more self awareness and it demands more experience and practice, but it is within reach of a busy manager.

Female interviewer: You have written about how a coach’s ego can affect the success of coaching – can you tell us a bit more about this?

Julie Starr: We all have ego. It is a human thing. It is our sense of who we are, how we are, what we are like, what we are not like. It is those labels that we attach to ourselves that give us a sense of identity. You can imagine if a manager is used to being the person who has all the solutions, has the answers, is able to make the decisions and that’s how they are valued and that’s how they think they are successful and what they are recognised for, then if we ask them to sit on their hands a little bit in conversation and ask people what they think, ask them for their thoughts about what is important, then that might start to challenge them at this more identity level of well what value am I adding and that’s how we start to get these false barriers and these false limits to a manager or a coach’s ability to adopt the appropriate posture and perspective and behaviours during a coaching conversation.

Female interviewer: So what can managers do to overcome these barriers and become less directive in a coaching conversation?

Julie Starr: A manager must first start to develop a level of self awareness to understand, what’s my typical posture in a situation and what do I need to stop doing or do less of in order to allow these other postures of allowing people to decide and think for themselves? And it might be something really simple like speak less, listen more. It might be, don’t automatically speak into silence. It might be, allow somebody to continue talking before perhaps interrupting them. Or, write down five really great simple open questions and be determined to use them in the meetings that, you know, that they attend that day.

Female interviewer: Do you think managers should ever coach their direct reports?

Julie Starr: It rests on the self awareness and self management of the individual. So how much can I take off my manager’s hat and simply listen to you without having an agenda for what you say or how you say it. I think it also depends on what we are talking about. So if we are talking about a task, a project, work that you have going on, then that might be something that I have got more investment in, in terms of my agenda, my strategy, what I want to happen.

Now typically, the type of coaching conversations that a manager would be having with a subordinate or a colleague would be the kind that relates to an individual’s performance, but I think if we can encourage a manager to focus away from their own agenda in a situation and more onto the agenda of the other person, even in a work related conversation, then those conversations can be more effective and more productive than if they had asked questions and listened from the manager’s agenda perhaps.

Female interviewer: What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about coaching today?

Julie Starr: I think there are lots of misconceptions about coaching. The most unfortunate one is that coaching is tea and sympathy or it is cosy chats and I think none of those has to be true. If you remember what we distinguished as a coaching conversation, it is a conversation that affects the learning, the thoughts and the behaviour of another person. Now having a cup of tea and a cosy chat for an hour might do that and so could a bite size conversation in the corridor where somebody just asks you one great question that makes you think and reflect differently on a situation.

So in my experience, coaching can be the toughest conversation that somebody has with either a colleague or a client and the effect those conversations have on an individual can be significant.

One of the beliefs and principles that coaching rests on is that the individual is responsible for the results they are generating. Now sometimes a directive manager, for example, will act from a different posture which is they are responsible for what is happening with an individual and they need to fix and sort, but when a manager starts to say to somebody, ‘okay, what are you going to have to do to tackle this, what needs to happen and what might stop you from doing that?’, that’s a deeper, more rigorous level of conversation to have with an individual that can actually be the opposite of a nice cosy therapeutic type chat.

Female interviewer: What three key pieces of advice would you offer to managers who are being asked to coach for the first time?

Julie Starr: For any manager who is being asked to coach for the first time, I would say let go of any thought of, you know, there always has to be some eureka impact in a conversation, so that there always has to be some amazing coaching effect that they have on people. Start simply. Start by listening. Begin by asking some simple open questions that help get the other person off the stands and on the pitch in the conversation. Try the simple perspectives and behaviours that are going to have a coaching effect and then work up from there.

So the more advanced perspectives of understanding the structure of a complete coaching conversation, understanding a sequence of activities during a conversation, understanding, I don’t know, perceptual positions or certain types of purpose based questioning, you know, relax on all of those because that can come in time and it can come once we have build the foundation for coaching to take place. And the foundation for coaching to take place is awareness of the key principles of allowing people to think and act for themselves, being better at listening, relaxing more in the conversation, having somebody else to do more of the work in the conversation and then starting to layer in some of these open questions, summaries, making observations, rather than giving instruction and understanding the different ways that they influence during the conversation.

Female interviewer: Thank you for listening to our interview on coaching with Julie Starr.