Tag: Mentoring

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Coaching: A Manager’s Best Tool

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.

Your job, as a manager, is to coordinate people and resources to get work done. Important parts of that are:

  • getting the most from your people
  • getting things done ever-more effectively and efficiently
  • developing your team’s capacity and capabilities
  • motivating people to work at their best

and so on…

One management skill has emerged as the solution to all of this. It does not stand alone, but over the last thirty years we have learned its power to enhance individual and organisational performance. That skill is coaching.

Coaching is not new

The best managers, leaders, and teachers have been doing coaching for years – hundreds and thousands of years. What is new, is that the process and techniques have been studied, systematised and turned into a thousand books, articles and training courses. This means that coaching is no longer the preserve of the few who figure it out for themselves and have a natural talent: anyone can learn it, practise it and master the skills.

At its best, coaching is a valuable conversation that lets one person figure out what they need to do to get the results they need.

The Principles of Coaching

The core principle of coaching is respect for the person you are coaching. As a coach, you need to assume that the other person can find the solution to the challenge they are working on, whether it is a workplace problem, improving under-performance, or preparing themselves for a promotion.

To support this, the fundamental skills are

Questioning – asking good questions that increase the other person’s awareness of their situation and help them perceive things in a new way

Listening – so that you can ask questions founded on exactly what they say

Patience – giving time for the other person to work out solutions for themselves

Trust – recognising that they will make mistakes, but that is a valuable part of learning

As a manager, you need to balance opportunities to learn (sometimes by making mistakes) with the need to manage risk. But the thing that surprises most new coaches is how often the coaching process finds a good solution first time – and often a better solution than the coach themself would have thought of.

The Process of Coaching

There are a lot of methodologies for coaching – many of them proprietary. Most of them offer an acronym to help remember the areas for questioning and exploration. These are:

Coaching Process

One acronym is, in some ways, the obvious one: COACH

The COACH Coaching Process

Further Reading

Coaching is one of the most discussed topics on the Pocketblog. You may also like the following Pocketblogs:

An Infinite Number of Coaching Acronyms
So you can see how different models follow the process above – and find the acronym you like best.

Keep it SIMPLE
A look at the Solution Focus approach to coaching.

Who is getting in your way?
The ideas of Timothy Gallwey who many regard as the originator of modern coaching as used in the business and management world.

Let’s sort out poor performance, Part 2: Turnaround
An example of how coaching fits into the pragmatic world of management.

The Awesome Power of Mentoring
Mentoring is often discussed in the same sentence as coaching. Find out what it is and how it can work for you, as a new manager.

Questions, Questions, Questions
…is about the art of – questions!

and

Listening
is about listening

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Heron and Helping

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John Heron has been one of the most active and insightful leaders in the world of helping and counselling, yet relatively few coaches and mentors have heard of him.

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‘I don’t know how to Handle my Boss’s Hostility toward me’

This is a typical problem that you may hear from a colleague or client and, if you want to help, there are a number of ways that you could do so.

“What you should do is …”

“Let’s look at some of the things you could do …”

“What behaviours seem hostile to you?”

“How do you feel about this?”

“What’s going on when your boss seems hostile?”

“No-one should feel hostility from their boss …”

These are six examples of a response you could give and, working originally with the medical profession, John Heron identified six categories of intervention in 1974, which are equally helpful to teachers, managers, advisers, counsellors, and consultants.

They help us to understand the relationships between counselling and coaching, or between coaching and mentoring.

Six Category Intervention Analysis

John Heron’s model of six different ways we can intervene to help first divides interventions into Authoritative and Facilitative Interventions.  These each have three styles of intervention within them.

Authoritative Interventions

These interventions are clearly led by the helper, who takes on some of the responsibility for the client.  Here, the helper will guide, raise awareness, and even give instruction or hold the client to account.

  1. Prescriptive
    Giving advice and direction to the client
  2. Informative
    Focusing on giving information the client information and ideas that will help them generate solutions
  3. Confronting
    Focusing on the problem and challenging the client in a supportive way

Facilitative Interventions

These interventions are ‘client-centred’ in the sense that the client must take complete responsibility for themselves and the direction of their support.

  1. Cathartic
    Focused on helping the client to gain insights into their emotional response by expressing their emotions
  2. Catalytic
    Helping the client to learn and solve problems for themself, drawing upon the client’s own resources
  3. Supportive
    Focused on the emotional and confidence needs of the client, by encouraging them and affirming their worth
The ancient Sumerian god Ningishzida, the patr...
Image via Wikipedia
 The depiction of the Sumerian serpent god Ningizzida, the patron of medicine, dating from before 2000 BCE, gives us our modern Caduceus symbol for the healing arts and sciences.The god itself is the two (copulating) snakes entwined around an axial rod. It is accompanied by two gryphons.

Misleading Labels

The labels ‘authoritative’ and ‘facilitative’ are, perhaps, misleading.  Each of the six categories of intervention could be led in an authoritative ‘I will take control’ manner, or a facilitative ‘you tell me where to explore next’ manner. Indeed, in his later work, in ‘The Complete Facilitator’s Handbook’, Heron identified three modes of facilitation, which he called:

  1. Hierarchical
    Facilitator directs the process
  2. Co-operative
    Facilitator and client or group share responsibility for the process, the facilitator offering ideas and listening to suggestions to achieve a consensus
  3. Autonomous
    Client or group dictates the process

So here’s the deal

Why do we spend so much time worrying over precise definitions of coaching, mentoring, counselling, advising, consulting and the myriad of supportive help we offer one-another.  John Heron showed us at least three times six = eighteen different ways to help each other and there are doubtless many more.

Coming in future blogs will be insights into resolving conflict, coaching, and, later this week, mentoring.

Management Pocketbooks on these topics

And, in the Teachers’ Pocketbooks series:

And look out for The Cognitive Behavioural Coaching Pocketbook later this year.

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