Introduction
Over recent years I have alternated between delivery leadership roles and agile coaching, but it was my work as an agile coach which drew me deeper into professional coaching. This has influenced my approach and thinking; I have found the skills are transferable and reach beyond work.
Background
Last year I qualified from an ICAgile Expert Agile Coach program, which included a professional coaching module. In order to pass the module, one of my professional coaching sessions was observed and rigorously assessed against a set of criteria.
I needed to demonstrate a full ‘coaching arc’, showing the appropriate skills throughout, such as global listening and asking powerful questions to generate deep new insights from the client. The quickest way to fail would have been to offer advice, or otherwise pollute the conversation with personal bias or judgement.
I benefited from practice with experienced professional coaches who helped raise my techniques to the appropriate standard.
Learning from failure
After one particular practice, I’d completed a ‘coaching arc’, from initial exploration to outcome. I’d asked open questions and had not offered advice. Then came some important feedback.
‘coach the person, not the problem’
Too many of my questions were around the problem the client faced, and not the client’s thoughts and feelings. I was helping my own understanding of the problem, rather than assisting the client explore, generate new insights, and find a root cause for what’s driving their thoughts or feelings. Because of this, my coaching had reached an outcome, but it was surface level. There were no new, deep or meaningful insights for the client.
I realised this could go beyond coaching. In leadership, powerful outcomes occur when we place ourselves in the service of those we lead. I asked myself, how often was I unknowingly serving myself when I could be serving others? I didn’t know the answer.
Now, before I ask a question, I find it useful to stop for a second and think, ‘who is this question serving?’.
Developing a style
Coaching is a stance taken when the time is right. Many other stances exist, and are appropriate in different situations. For example: facilitation, teaching, mentoring, observing, listening, giving feedback, encouraging, unblocking, being a change agent, and, (one of my favourite and most powerful), the simple act of waiting. Sometimes the most important steps forward happen in the time between my inputs and interactions. Giving space and being patient can be important skills.
While I take all these approaches at different times, I believe what I have developed is an overarching style that borrows a great deal from coaching. That style now permeates how I work.
My default is a coaching stance, until I have enough information to make a deliberate decision to continue coaching, or take up another stance. Even in another stance, I will still bring many coaching skills to the table.
Here are some examples:
Managing a Team or Organisational Coaching Engagement
It’s possible to take a coaching arc and stance, and build that into a model of how to work with teams and organisations.
I recall working with an internal team of agile coaches. We created an engagement model based on a coaching arc. This helped build finite, outcome based coaching engagements.
Initial conversations with a team explored what coaching was, and if they were interested in engaging with a coach. If so, a workshop would explore what the team might want to work on with their coach, and define outcomes the team would like to achieve. This may open the door to specific mentoring or training opportunities, with a coaching stance as the starting point and an arc as a wrapper for the team engagement.
The model built in a cadence around coaching so the team could check in with their coach, get feedback and look at different things to try out.
Once a team achieved their identified outcome, they could decide on something further to work on with their coach. Alternatively, the coach could be freed up to work with another team.
Listening
In everyday life, we listen in order to respond. On a deeper level of listening, we focus on the speaker’s words and tone, removing distractions from our own thoughts or feelings.
Imagine a level of listening deeper still, using everything available as a listener: picking up on different cues, a change in emotional energy, a gesture, or a shift in how the speaker is sitting.
To pass the coaching module, I had to tune into these elements, and use them to influence my next, powerful question.
The rigors and stresses of life make it easy to default to low level listening. A pause and consideration about listening level can be useful in many different situations.
Deep listening opens up new opportunities and relationships.
Mentoring
While coaching is not offering advice. A mentor on the other hand, is there to provide the benefit of their experience.
Most people I’ve worked with have a natural resistance to receiving advice. (Especially if they haven’t asked for it!) Giving out advice can be a trap, reducing buy in and ownership.
As I mentor, I have been able to borrow techniques from professional coaching to avoid this. Building agreement around how the mentoring relationship works, as we would with a coaching relationship, can build trust and avoid resistance.
Working through an arc creates an opportunity to shift into mentoring when there is a clear and relevant scenario, and offering options to choose or reject, keeps the commitment and accountability with the mentee.
Giving Feedback
When coaching we must be aware of the impact of our language. During my coaching conversations I will often use Clean language questions, which separates what belongs to the coach, from what belongs to the client.
Awareness of language is also important when giving feedback. Language can turn feedback into something that feels like personal criticism. The substance of the feedback can get lost in a fight or flight response.
Clean feedback is a related, simple but powerful technique that helps to avoid this, and I use it all the time, approaching feedback like this.
Evidence (What did I see or hear?)
Inference (What was the story in my head)
Impact (What is the effect of that)
For example:
I notice there are 6 items of work in progress at the same time.
The story in my head is, 6 items may be juggling too much at once.
The impact is, I feel worried, because too much work in progress reduces effectiveness.
This separated what I had seen and what I thought about it; which belongs to me, from action arising from the feedback; which belongs to the person or people receiving the feedback.
Rather than it feeling like criticism, I’d hope to have created curiosity. Curiosity is a launchpad, inviting exploration and action from the team.
Training
If the decision is to start with training, you must already deeply understand both the problem and the solution.
In a coaching stance, we seek to help explore problems and solutions. Starting with a big roll out of training robs us of that chance, and therefore also the chance of building a way forward that people feel committed to and responsible for.
If, through exploring a problem, a method/framework/tool is identified as a solution, training can fit in as an option that helps towards an outcome, and is more likely to be worthwhile.
I have found this often leads to small, focused training around a specific problem, rather than looking at big frameworks.
To continue the previous example, if a team was curious about how to manage work in progress, a short focused session on WIP limits might be something they are interested in.
Facilitation
Facilitation helps people through some form of participatory activity or conversation, towards a group decision or outcome.
As a neutral, a facilitator helps a group achieve that together. Facilitation benefits from an arc in a similar way to coaching. Practicing professional coaching forms a habit around listening and open questions. It becomes easier to find that next, powerful question that creates insights that move the conversation on.
In Conclusion
Practicing the discipline to stay in a coaching stance has pushed me to develop skills that influenced me in ways I couldn’t have predicted. It helped me develop my overall style to fit well with the spirit of coaching, even though I’m often taking up other stances.
Starting with exploring problems, working in partnership, building buy in, working towards outcomes, being aware of language and serving others have become almost habitual in nature.
I believe our industry as a whole can learn a lot from professional coaching. Approaching ways of working with a coaching stance places the emphasis on a partnership that involves people in finding and trying out their own solutions.
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