You’re Coaching Someone, Whether You Know it or Not. Here’s How to Do it Well
Think of the first time you looked up to someone; a parent who taught you to fish, a sibling who you could share a hobby with, a friend that you could talk to for hours until you both lose track of the time. Though it might not always be apparent, coaching comes in various forms and is an integral part of our lives. We often focus on the merits of obtaining and reaching our goals, or hitting the next milestone.
Achieving our immediate goals is important (and fun), but the lessons we learn along the way pay off in dividends over time.
And whether you know it or not, you play a coaching role in somebody’s life. For example, it might be a formal role — like managing and leading a team at work. It might be an informal role — like checking in with a friend, who’s going through a transition period in their lives.
Coaching has always been a part of my life — from my Volleyball coach who would do every practice drill alongside our team (in contrast to the standard practice, coaching from the bench), to my relatives who have had profound success in their lives despite entering a new country with $40 between them and not knowing the language, to the people I found myself surrounded and humbled by at work.
In truth, anyone and everyone can be a coach. From the perspective of someone being coached (i.e., a coachee), it’s easy to recall what it’s like to receive great coaching. You’ve taken something valuable out of the conversation you just had, to the point where sometimes you may say, “Thanks Coach!”
Conversely, the difficulty comes when trying to research what it takes to be an effective coach. We know what we want in that person, yet we hit a wall when we try to articulate it. At best, we can jot down on a sheet of paper the traits we hope to find. Doing this as part of your profession does not make it any easier.
When we hiring new coaches, it’s difficult to measure potential success within an interview because it’s a skill that really needs to be observed day by day, week by week, over a sufficient duration (at least three months), in order to see the impact coaching has had on their respective coachees.
Why Every Team Needs a Coach
As a Team Lead, my primary responsibility is to ensure our team is healthy. This means encouraging your team to keep an open and frequent dialog, and making sure that we are all mindful of our cultural principles. In particular, I found that being cognizant of the team dysfunctions mentioned in Patrick Lencioni’s book, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” to be quite helpful.
For example, a common team dysfunction is fear of conflict, in which a team resolves to artificial harmony to end a heated debate. In doing so, a team risks encountering the same debate down the road because it was never resolved in the first place. Moreover, creating artificial “harmony” can lead to a lack of commitment because not everyone is genuinely bought into the original decision. Rather, they kept in silence for the sake of “keeping the peace.”
Additionally, I have worked with Tech Leads by fostering technical mentorship opportunities such as onboardings and weekly tech talks, and help them formalize development processes such as coding conventions. I worked alongside Product Owners who drive the business direction and business decision leadership for my teams. I have also work with Directors, “Team Lead of Team Leads” so to speak, who aim to replicate successful servant leadership across an entire organization.
I also regularly collect feedback from peers to figure out how someone is performing — if they’re on the right trajectory towards achieving their goals, and getting a general feeling of their mental and physical health. In addition to each individual, I also need to measure overall team health. I can also gauge this by asking myself some questions, “Is the team sitting together?”, “Are they having open discussions and proactively communicating to identify and remove potential blockers?”
It’s important to distinguish between focused time and banter time. During certain times of the day, some colleagues prefer to crank up their Spotify playlist and go heads down to focus on solving an issue. However, too much quiet time can be an issue. At daily scrums for example, are issues being brought up? Is information flowing well, or is it siloed?
Part of the coach’s role is to facilitate healthy discussions and navigate away from the blame game when discussions get heated. It’s about figuring out deeply rooted causes for unhealthy discussions and moving forward with an aligned team. The coach must observe and navigate team discussions to determine whether the team is in tune or starting to deviate from the organization’s cultural principles.
Throughout my journey of coaching, I have worked on defining the traits that make a great coach in hopes that great coaching can be taught and repeated with consistency. These traits and methodologies come from identifying the patterns from what has worked well but also following up with why some techniques didn’t work well…
The Three Habits of an Effective Coach
To be a coach does not mean prescribing advice. Rather, it starts with listening and understanding the person, building trust to allow them to be completely open in confidence, and uncovering the underlying goals that they actually want to receive help with.
There are three habits that coaches need to be mindful of in order to be effective at coaching, and to build that foundation of trust:
1. Empathize with their coachees — In order to truly understand the person they’re coaching, they must first understand who they’re coaching and what it’s like to live in their shoes.
2. Drive a continuous feedback loop — This means encouraging a healthy and constructive dialogue around giving feedback to coachees but also receiving the same quality level of feedback from the coachees about what has worked and what has not from coaching.
3. Give them the experiences they need to succeed — Coaches are servant leaders. Their utmost responsibility is to provide for their coachees. This does not necessarily mean having all the right answers, but rather getting them access to resources they need to help them with their needs. For example, a coach sets up a conversation with someone who is an expert at React-Redux as opposed to trying to reiterate what you read from your findings on the subject.
The order of the three items for effective coaching is important as well. Without first empathizing, you cannot truly understand how to help your coachees.
Empathy starts with building rapport with your coachees — providing a safe space for them, and constructing key indicators to help identify when a coaching technique is working or not working.
One of the toughest challenges for the coach is balancing reading the situation and asking for information. This means gauging the feeling the level of comfort in the room, reading facial expressions, observing their speaking style, and feeling for authenticity.
In prodding too much, a coach starts becoming more of a health check survey than an actual human that someone can talk to. In gauging speaking style and comfort in the room, you can gauge the amount of rapport you have with your coachee. This determines how open they may feel about being able to speak wholeheartedly and be their authentic self.
There is also mutual trust, or a lack thereof, that leads to them expressing their thoughts and fully disclosing honest, candid, feedback. This foundation is crucial to encourage them to maintain an authentic feedback cadence. It takes courage for a fellow peer to open themselves up and to be vulnerable. In doing so, that feeling of mutual trust is an indication that they trust you, and you will always have their back.
Without maintaining an active dialog, or an active feedback loop, you cannot verify whether or not your coaching is effective.
You also need to ensure the feedback you receive from your peers during annual or quarterly performance reports stays the same as the feedback you should hear week-to-week. If it’s different, you won’t know what experiences they will need to help them succeed.
And in not being able to provide them with said experiences, you will not be able to foster their growth and thus compromise the possibility of you being someone they can look to for help and mentorship.
Here are a few indicators that help determine the level of rapport established between yourself and your coachee:
- Has the conversation been about anything other than the immediate work that they’re doing?
- Is the conversation organically driven? Or does it follow the format of a question and a closed answer. For example, “How’s it going?”, “Fine” versus “How’s it going”, “Pretty good. I’ve been listening to this new podcast on my commute to work” and then talking about the podcast.
- Most importantly, if a coaching session has to be rescheduled or cancelled, how do they feel? Do they feel that they’re going to miss out, or do they even care?
Unpack the Coach’s Feedback Loop
In driving a continuous feedback loop, it’s not only above monitoring your coachee’s progress towards their goals, but it’s also a great indicator for you and seeing how well you’re doing as a coach.
As important as the quality of the feedback is, the cadence is equally important as it helps establish the follow-through aspect of tracking goals and other actionable items. The follow-through serves as a way to monitor the progress on an item over time and makes both parties accountable for those items.
Think of a time when you told a friend about something you wanted to do, or a place you wanted to visit, and how you felt when they asked you about it the next time you caught up with them. Whether you did it or not, that accountability gives those items significant meaning and reiterates the value of the items and the coachee that the items belong to.
Giving them the experiences they need to succeed is imperative as part of being a servant leader. But, it does not mean necessarily being a resource depot either. I challenge coaches to bring the mindset by visualizing the raw talent embedded within their coachees and helping them to unlock it.
The idea that a coachee may have in their mind may be illustrated differently when trying to explain it. And thus, the raw idea gets lost in the communication gap. If a person was able to perceive a new colour on the existing colour spectrum, how could they describe it to someone else?
In providing resources and experiences, what a coach should aim to achieve is to help their coachees expand their “vocabulary” to articulate their ideas. In doing so, they are able to define what success to them looks like and how a coach and their team can help them achieve it.
These coaching techniques can be as simple or as difficult as you want them to be. As you spend more time with your coachee(s), the fun is in journey and watching these skills organically grow within yourself and within others. It drives additional meaning to your day-to-day conversations and produces a more fruitful experience when they hit their milestones.
