Coaching practice
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9 min read
Key findings
A manager as coach asks questions that let the person find the next step, and tells wherever a situation needs an answer.
A manager holds authority, a stake in the result and subject knowledge, so the conversation has to say which mode it is.
Coaching pays where quality, learning or commitment matters most, and telling suits a real crisis.
Escalation counts, decisions taken without referral and the ratio of asking to answering show whether managers have changed.
Telling saves time in the short term and, in the long term, creates dependency.
A manager as coach helps a direct report work out the next step by asking questions, and gives an answer only when the situation needs one.
The manager still sets the person's workload, rates their performance and has a stake in the result.
Coaching suits work where quality, learning or commitment matters most, and telling suits a crisis.
Coaching skills training for managers often leaves daily practice unchanged, because a manager who knows the answer gets the work done sooner by giving it.
The dual role accounts for part of the gap between a course and a changed practice.
Coaching As A Management Style
Whitmore places coaching on the spectrum of management styles that runs from telling to leaving people alone.
Each position has a cost, and he describes them in turn.
Dictating is quick and gives the manager a feeling of control, but people comply while watched and behave differently when the manager leaves
Persuading lays out the manager's idea and sells it, and people still carry out the manager's plan
Discussing pools views, and the manager may follow a path other than their own
Abdicating hands the task over, but responsibility stays with the manager and the person may lack awareness of parts of the task
Coaching sits on a different plane in his account.
Answering questions makes the person aware of every part of the task, and they choose to take responsibility for the result.
The manager hears the thinking behind the plan as well as the plan, so both sides understand the same thing.
Whitmore defines coaching as helping people learn, instead of teaching them, so that they raise their own performance.
He rests it on two ideas, awareness of what is happening and responsibility for what happens next.
Coaching Against Telling
Whitmore gives managers a direct test for choosing, and it has five conditions.
Time is the main constraint. In a crisis, telling is fastest
Quality of the result matters most. Coaching for awareness and responsibility delivers the most
Learning is the point. A first attempt at a task is the usual case
Commitment is needed. Telling tends to produce compliance, resistance and low ownership
Engagement and retention are at stake. High potentials are his example
Telling saves time only in the short term, and in the long term it creates dependency.
In most businesses, he observes, time takes precedence over quality and learning comes a poor third.
A manager under that pressure will choose speed unless the choice is made in advance.
The working rule is to coach on the work where quality, learning or commitment matters, and to tell on the rest.
The manager says which mode they are in, so the person knows whether the answer is theirs to find.
Authority And Stake
Rogers describes how management responsibility changes the way a manager can coach.
A manager is often part of the problem that the person brings, which is hard to see and harder to admit.
It is also harder to promise confidentiality, to expect complete disclosure or to set aside personal considerations.
The manager has a stake in the outcome, and a coach working for the person alone does not.
Her examples are plain.
A direct report is unlikely to tell a line manager about a drinking problem, and a manager who hears it may be obliged to report it.
Managers hesitate to explore personal matters because the conversation feels intrusive.
Managers with targets of their own find it hard to take a detached view of a report's performance.
The manager therefore holds three things that an outside coach does not.
Authority over the person's pay, progression and workload
A stake in the answer, because the outcome affects the manager's own results
Knowledge of the subject, which makes withholding advice feel negligent
None of these prevents coaching, and each one has to be said aloud at the start.
A manager might open with this: "I have a view, and I will give it at the end. For the first twenty minutes I want to hear how you are thinking about it."
The manager should also say what will reach the performance review and what will stay in the conversation.
Without that statement, the person has to guess what will be repeated.
Coaching Skills For Managers
The skill set is small, and it consists of a handful of questions and the discipline to wait for the answer.
Bungay Stanier built his approach for managers on seven questions, each with one job.
What is on your mind? starts the conversation without narrowing it too soon
And what else? draws out more options, and keeps the manager from answering early
What is the real challenge here for you? slows the rush to action so that the real problem is solved
What do you want? separates the person's goal from the manager's assumption about it
How can I help? makes the person state a direct request
If you are saying yes to this, what are you saying no to? exposes the trade-off in a commitment
What was most useful for you? ends the conversation by fixing what was learned
The second question has evidence behind it.
Paul Nutt reviewed 168 decisions made inside organisations, and in 71 per cent of them the choice before the decision was binary, to do something or not.
Decisions made from a binary choice failed more than half the time.
Adding one more option lowered the failure rate to about 30 per cent.
The obstacle to asking is the urge to advise, which Bungay Stanier calls the Advice Monster.
Giving advice feels more comfortable than the ambiguity of a question, and the advice is often wrong.
In a study he cites, doctors interrupted patients after an average of eighteen seconds, and he has seen plenty of managers do about the same.
The GROW Model For Managers
GROW stands for goal, reality, options and will, and it gives the conversation an order.
Goal establishes what the person wants from the conversation and from the situation.
Reality establishes what is happening now, in facts and not interpretation.
Options generates possibilities before any of them is judged.
Will turns one option into an action.
Whitmore splits that last stage in two.
The first part sets up accountability by defining the action, the timeframe and the measure of accomplishment.
The second part is follow-up, where gaps in expectations surface and learning happens.
Whitmore describes it as checking in on the person and warns against checking up on them.
He expects one of three outcomes: the person succeeded or partly succeeded, did not succeed, or did not do it.
Each outcome calls for a different question, and a conversation with no follow-up date has no consequence.
One question in his will-stage list belongs to the manager: "How will I know?"
It sits beside "How will you know it has worked?"
Two misuses are common.
GROW run as a form turns the conversation into an interrogation with four sections.
Reality skipped because the manager believes they already know it removes most of the value, because the person's account is what the manager came to hear.
Count escalations in the four weeks before the training and again after two quarters.
The Manager's Own Answer
A manager who holds the answer and is told not to give it produces the fake question, such as "Have you thought about trying this?"
Three routes are honest.
Give the answer early and coach on carrying it out, where the decision is genuinely the manager's
Give it late and label it, after the person has formed a view of their own
Withhold it and say so, where the person's development counts for more than this outcome
Each of the three is defensible.
Pretending to have no view turns the questions into a guessing game for the person.
When Coaching Stops
Some conversations need a different kind of talk, and continuing in a coaching style damages both people.
Three situations call for it.
Performance below standard. The manager states the standard, the gap and a plan, as set out in feedback that changes behaviour
Personal distress. The manager refers the person to support and sets a boundary, because questions from a line manager can intrude
A decision already taken. Coaching someone toward a conclusion that is not open to them is manipulation
The skill at each of these points is to say aloud that the conversation has changed.
A manager might say: "I am moving from coaching to telling, and this is what I need from you."
The same boundary applies to whether coaching is the right response in the first place, which when coaching is the wrong answer sets out from the practitioner's side.
Coaching And Mentoring
Whitmore separates the two in a way that affects managers more than most.
Mentoring depends on a more experienced person passing down what they know.
Coaching does not depend on that, and in his account passing down answers undermines the self-belief that sustains performance.
He adds that coaching needs expertise in coaching and not in the subject, and that coaching leaders struggle most with when to share what they know.
A manager who holds both the expertise and the authority does both jobs, and mentoring beyond matching covers the mentor's side.
The manager names which job is being done in each conversation.
Advising The Sponsoring Director
An internal consultant who is asked for coaching skills training meets a director with a specific complaint, usually that managers escalate too much.
The first conversation with the director should agree what will change in the team's work, and the training comes second.
Three conditions decide whether the training turns into practice.
A regular slot in which the conversation happens, because coaching does not fit inside a status update
A senior layer that is coached itself, since managers copy how their own manager handles a question
Time to coach, which means the managers' objectives account for it
Managers copy the director's own habit.
Where the director answers every question put to them in the weekly meeting, the managers learn to answer every question put to them.
The consultant should say this to the director before the programme is scoped.
Measuring Coaching
Coaching programmes are usually evaluated by satisfaction, which measures rapport and says little about change.
Three measures say more.
Goals agreed at the start of the conversation and reviewed at the end
Decisions the person took without escalating
The manager's time spent asking against time spent answering
The second is the measure a director will recognise from their own week.
Count escalations in the four weeks before the training and again after two quarters.
A sustained fall in that count shows the team has changed how it works.
Signs Coaching Has Stalled
Questions end in a suggestion, such as "Have you thought about..."
The reality stage is skipped
Conversations close without a follow-up date
Escalations to the director are unchanged after two quarters
Direct reports cannot name a decision they took themselves in the last month
When External Coaching Fits
Internal capability narrows the case for external coaches and does not remove it.
Three situations justify the cost.
A senior person whose issue cannot be discussed inside the reporting line
A move into a materially larger role, where the person needs a conversation with no stake in the outcome
A pattern that has survived internal feedback, where an outsider's evidence carries differently
Contract each engagement with a goal agreed between coach, client and sponsor, and review against that goal.
The organisation's own coaches are a separate option, and building an internal coaching pool sets out how to choose and support them.
Where The Tools Sit
Trusted Talent Advisor includes a conversation preparation and reflection canvas in its stakeholder conversation toolkit, completed before a difficult conversation and again within a day afterwards.
Its evidence and impact component covers how to choose a measure and record a baseline before a programme starts.
Sources
1. Whitmore, J. Coaching for Performance: The Principles and Practices of Coaching and Leadership. Nicholas Brealey.
2. Rogers, J. Coaching Skills: A Handbook. Open University Press.
3. Bungay Stanier, M. The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More and Change the Way You Lead Forever. Box of Crayons Press.
From the system
Trusted Talent Advisor sets out the full method: seven components, 51 tools, The Talent Template Pack and The Prompt Library.
See the system
Questions this answers
What does manager as coach mean?
A manager as coach uses questions to help a direct report find their own answer, and keeps authority over decisions and performance. The manager tells wherever the situation needs an answer, and says which mode the conversation is in.
Can a manager coach their own team?
Yes, if the conversation names the dual role. The manager sets pay, workload and ratings, has a stake in the outcome and knows the subject, so the start of each conversation says what will be kept private and when a view will be given.
When should a manager coach and when should they tell?
Coach where quality, learning, commitment or retention matters most. Tell in a crisis, where speed is the main constraint. Telling saves time in the short term and creates dependency in the long term.
How do you use the GROW model as a manager?
Ask about the goal, then the reality in facts, then the options before judging any, then the will. Set the action, date and measure, and put a follow-up conversation in the diary, to check in on what happened.
What coaching skills do managers need?
A small set of open questions, the discipline to ask "And what else?" before giving advice, and the judgement to tell when a conversation needs a direct answer. Listening to the whole answer matters more than the wording of any question.
How do you measure whether managers are coaching?
Count escalations before and after training, track decisions taken without referral, and compare the manager's time spent asking with time spent answering. Satisfaction scores from the course measure rapport and say little about change.
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