Leaders and Managers as Coaches

Transcript

Julie Drybrough: Part of my response to the question, "Why should leaders and managers make an effort "to have coaching conversations?" is just, why wouldn't you?

Coaching conversations, for me, are hugely powerful. It's a specific mode of conversation. So it's a conversation that you will use at a specific time for a specific purpose and goal. It's not just having a conversation and chatting away. There's a purpose behind it and there is some skill required to it.

Sometimes it would be a direct report coming to the manager saying, "I'm stuck. I don't really know what to do with this. I have an idea, I can't take it forward." And in that case, the manager would ask them some questions. "What have you done?" "What's worked for you so far?" "Who have you spoken to?" "What have you not done?" "What are the barriers?" And through those sorts of questions, they can begin to unpick that kind of stuckness.

The alternative would be for a line manager to identify stuckness. So this might be somebody who has loads of potential but, for whatever reason, it might be confidence. It may even be competence, they're not really feeling that they can step into the next level. In that case, the manager may sit down with them and say, "Right, what do you see yourself doing next?" "What are you doing well?"

These are some of the things that I see. Both of those conversations, for me, are about asking good questions and really kind of moving the person from here up to here. When a direct report comes to the manager and says, "What do you think I should do about this?" "You tell me what to do." "You direct me to a course of action." And instead of the manager saying, "Well, I think you should do... ," the manager simply asks the question, "Well, what's on your mind?" or "What do you think you could do?" And that is, again, about empowering the person who's coming to you as a manager to think for themselves.

You can't just come along and say to somebody, "I'm going to coach you." They need to give you permission to ask questions and they need to be willing to answer. So that's the relationship part. It's mutual.

Equally, you can't just decide that you're gonna ask people questions and not hang around for the answer. You have to listen. And then you have responsibility to build on what somebody else thinks. And that's where coaching conversations are co-creational. It's about mutuality, and it's about making sure that new ideas and new possibilities are brought into being. But again, you need that purpose attached to it at the same time.

One thing to bear in mind about a healthy coaching culture is you will notice that it's not just top-down. It's not just leaders and managers asking questions of the people who they're working with. It's peer-to-peer. And it's also about the team asking questions of the manager. So, "Why are we doing this over that?" "If we did this, would that not work a bit better, boss?" Or however you want to frame it. That becomes the type of coaching culture which I see as being most effective.

If I'm in a meeting and somebody says, "Oh, we've got a problem. "This is going wrong." Sometimes my reaction might be, "I've got to fix it!" This is what I think straight away. And it's that sort of jump to action. And what I've learned to do is kinda take a breath and say, "Okay, tell me more about what's going on around that. "What's the context of it? "How bad is it?" "On a scale of one to 10, how likely are we to get into trouble for this?" Or "How likely is this to be successful?" The team sees somebody who doesn't just lurch and respond. They see somebody who's kind of sitting and being fairly steady, fairly kind of objective, who is asking questions not to kind of fix and sort it, but asking questions around, "Okay, how do we make sure that this goes in a particular direction?"

There are going to be times when you need to direct, where you need to push people towards the answers or share your experiences or your knowledge with your team. And there are other times when you have to step back and ask some questions. What I would say is try it. Have a day, for instance, where you decide that you're gonna wander around without knowing a huge amount, and just ask lots and lots of questions and see where that takes you. Try to operate at least two or three times a day from a space of just not knowing, looking at a situation with fresh eyes and asking questions accordingly, and see where that takes you. And I think you'd be really surprised at what you have been missing. You may be really surprised at what you know and what you see.