The Elements of Coaching
Coaching is one of those activities that lends itself to a similar approach: State the principles and let people apply them because there is no way you could anticipate all the variations that might arise.
Coaching is one area that receives more recognition in the breach than in the honoring. It's entirely too easy for someone to say, “I'm coaching now,” and yet behave in an entirely autocratic and controlling manner — the antithesis of what it means to coach.
It's helpful to mention some principles of coaching before getting more into what it can do, what it shouldn't do, and how to offer it.
Someone Needs Help
Coaching isn't something you do to occupy your spare time or because you want to put on a show that others expect. Although there are general principles, coaching is always specific in nature. Someone on your team has a problem and needs help sorting it out. When you coach, it is for a particular reason. You're trying to help someone find a way to a defined result.
That means you can't just start coaching at any time. This is a tool meant as a response to a problematic situation or to a weakness of a certain team member. You must use it as such. Overuse will dilute its effectiveness and result in people thinking upon seeing you, “Oh, here we go again.”
No One Has All the Answers
No matter how much we'd all like to think that we have all the answers, a little logic shows this to be impossible. All the answers means never making a mistake, being able to anticipate all oncoming problems, and generally being disgustingly perfect. That doesn't happen because it's not possible short of divine intervention.
Not being perfect, everyone has plenty of weaknesses. In the best of all possible worlds, people would learn to examine where they come short and work out ways to bridge the gaps as they see them. In coaching, you're helping someone else find new ways to bridge their own gaps — just remember that you have them as well.
Coaching is about helping your team members sharpen skills so they can cope with their tasks and goals. To that end, you can't be Answer Person, the super hero for the team. You don't have all the answers. Even if you have a lot of them, what good does it do to give people a shortcut? It might be efficient in the short term, but in the long run you build a culture of dependency. When everyone develops the habit of going to you for everything, you spend your time getting their jobs done and not your own. Besides, would you really look that good in a cape and Spandex?
An Exercise in Restraint
Coaching is an indirect and subtle activity. In a leader, much of it consists of listening, reflecting, and putting yourself into the shoes of the team member. Coaching is always individual — never a group activity — and its primary requirement is understanding the person you are coaching. Remember that all of us are imperfect mortals, and the coaching process has no room for a sense of superiority. You must always be truthful but kind as well.
Moving Beyond Comfort
When you are stopped by something within or outside yourself, you are not in your comfort zone. That is good. You don't grow when you are too secure in what you do. Coaching keeps team members outside the comfort zone so they have the psychological space to find new answers. So long as the risks are reasonable and the objectives within reach, people feel better about themselves and what they can accomplish.
Coaching Must Be Practical
Pointing out someone's flaws doesn't work. Honest and accurate critique is useless unless it's combined with functional suggestions on how the team member can get past an impasse. Otherwise, it's ineffectual, like telling a drowning man who never learned how to swim that he should do the Australian crawl to a life raft. Any advice must be adapted to the situation of the person (a dog paddle is a better first step toward staying afloat) and framed in a way that the person can actually accomplish. Refrain from judging people and focus instead on how to help someone change a given attitude, habit, or situation.
