Unlocking Potential: 7 Coaching Skills That Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations

Simpson, Michael K.

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PART ONE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF COACHING 1. TRUST

1. TRUST

• All effective coaching is based on building trust, tapping potential, creating commitment, and actually executing goals.
• Simply being in a position of authority does not make you a trusted coach. Your concern for the person you are coaching must be based on genuine and good intent. Your integrity must be inviolable. Your determination to keep confidences must be unshakeable.
• Coaches ask insightful questions that help people gain greater awareness of their situation and help them reframe and creatively explore new and better ways to move forward.
• In the workplace, coaches rarely have that kind of time and awareness, but they can still show a high level of genuine concern, good intent, and ask great provocative questions. Your intent here matters. You have their best interests foremost in mind. You talk straight to them. You listen empathically, help them see and explore options forward, and show respect to them. These are issues of character—your character. If you can’t show genuine concern, if you’re distracted, or have other priorities on your mind—stop. Train yourself to stay in the moment with the person whom you are coaching, to keep your mind focused solely on that person’s, life, leadership, career, or performance agenda. Your goal is to be on their agenda, not your agenda.
• FranklinCovey has surveyed more than 54,000 people, asking them to identify the essential qualities of a great leader. Integrity is by far the number-one quality, according to the global respondents. Stephen M.R. Covey confirms what the survey found: “The ability to establish, extend, and restore trust with all key stakeholders—customers, business partners, investors, and coworkers—is the key leadership competency of the new global economy.”  Why is trust the most important of all leadership competencies? It drives and enables success with all other competencies.
• Those who worked with Stephen M.R. Covey knew of his genuine care, empathy, integrity, and his ability to act in win–win ways and to entrust those around him. He focused on leveraging, building, and uplifting team members strengths, seeing the good in others, and showing real value and rewards for their contribution. As a result, those who worked with him felt like a trusted and loyal partner and they were fully engaged and motivated to work hard and produce extraordinary results. The famous basketball coach John Wooden was famous for saying, “I’d rather be out in front leader with a banner, than as a leader behind with a whip.”
• Trust is hard to earn but easy to lose.

2. POTENTIAL

• A good coach starts with the individual’s own vision and then leads him or her to prioritize those things that are most important in achieving that vision.
• Coaching is about finding and growing the potential of individuals to achieve goals important to them and to their organization. Coaching is based on the assumption that everyone can grow and that everyone has the potential to become something better, regardless of the point of departure.
• Understanding the individual’s priorities, potential, and goals takes time and requires listening, observing, reflecting, and customizing your approach so that the person’s uniqueness can be leveraged. We do that by first understanding the individual’s story, context, and point of view. Then we can help reframe that point of view if necessary so the person’s own potential can be fulfilled.
• All people have stories: where they’ve been in life, where they are now, and where they want to be someday—in a week, a year, or five years from now. These stories tell you much of what you need to know about their potential. The stories reveal what’s important to them, what they hope and fear, what keeps them going.
• A good coach must set personal stories aside and invest fully into listening to, engaging with, and feeling the power and the potential of the individual’s story. As the relationship matures, the coach can reflect the person’s story back from a more objective, detached perspective, unobscured by layers of pain, disappointment, frustration, and misguided efforts.
• At the simplest level, coaching is a process of paying full attention to a person. When we pay attention to people, they light up. Even as a child, we have an instinctive response to personal attention, respect, and positive feedback.
• Thus, a great coach is an active listener, affirming the miracle of being human, addressing the potential, rather than the limits, of what each person can do. Coaches reflect, facilitate, and amplify. They partner with individuals to generate positive and uplifting strategies for future action. Coaches know that adhering to fundamental coaching principles and practices—“ coaching presence”—that is, being with the individual in the moment—matters more than technique and style. The coach offers a fine balance between inquiry and advocacy.
• You must learn to rely on all of your senses during coaching sessions.
• Try looking through a set of binoculars at some sporting event: immediately you will grasp the concept of “point of view.”
• Empathy is the ability to accurately reflect what the person is feeling, experiencing, and saying. Great coaches create a safe environment where people simply feel understood.

Challenge Paradigms 

• Deeply held views that color every aspect of a person’s thinking are called “paradigms.” A person’s paradigms may or may not correspond to reality. Our paradigms can help or hurt us. Our paradigms can limit us in achieving our potential, thus becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.
• A coach can help people shift people’s paradigms by challenging them. For someone who has struggled in the past, a coach can help them look back on hard times and reframe those experiences through a positive lens. The coach can help the individual ask, 
  • “How did that difficult experience benefit me? 
  • What was the growth or learning opportunity in it? 
  • If I could change this situation, what would my ideal situation look like in the future?”

As a coach, your task is to help individuals change paradigms that are holding them back from achieving their potential. When a coach helps a person challenge their paradigms, they can more readily take responsibility for their life or situation. When they learn to align their paradigms to reality, many of the barriers to realizing their potential begin to fall.

3. COMMITMENT

• The only kind of commitment that lasts is internal commitment. But how does a coach create commitment in the individual? Of course, you can’t require commitment from others, but you can create the conditions where people commit to goals they themselves want to achieve. The principal skill for creating commitment is to ask powerful coaching questions.
• They must focus on helping individuals, teams, and organizations achieve strategies, prioritize goals, shift perspectives, and keep commitments.
• The powerful questions a coach asks may fall into three areas: Engaging with purpose (Opening) Advancing to commitment Obtaining commitment (Closing)

First: Engaging with purpose. Start by asking insightful questions that get the individual thinking about purpose, whether it’s the purpose of the whole coaching engagement, or the purpose of today’s meeting, including the desired benefits of it, that may include: 

• What specific needs, issues, or opportunities bring you to coaching? 
• What are the most important strategies, goals, or outcomes that you need to accomplish personally or professionally? 
• What do you want to accomplish as a result of our coaching relationship? 
• What legacy do you want to leave in your life/ your family/ your career? 
• What do you see as your “best self” five years from now? 
• What contribution can you make in your current role at work? 
• What do you need to achieve this year? 
• Can you make that goal more specific? 
• How will you know when you’ve achieved that goal? 
• How will you measure success? 
• What will be different as a result of the time we spend together today?

Once the individual has envisioned a goal, the challenge is to figure out how to achieve it. The individual isn’t likely to commit if the goal seems too lofty, vague, or difficult, whether the goal is to turn a profit, improve a relationship, better engage a team, or to lose weight.

Second: Advancing to commitment. Your questions should help the individual move towards both logical and emotional commitment. Your task here is to help the individual anticipate and take down barriers to achievement. 

• What are you currently doing that is working towards your goal? 
• What are the obstacles? 
• How have you addressed similar situations in the past? 
• If you had unlimited resources—time, money, people, information, technology—and knew you could not fail, what would you try? 
• What resources (including time, money, people, information, technology) do you have that you can call on? 
• What are the benefits of going after these anticipated goals and key outcomes? 
• What would be the costs or negative outcomes of not doing these things? 
• What is the single most important thing to do now to advance towards your goal? 
• If you went to your respected person or expert with your problem, what would this person suggest to you? 
• If you saw someone else in your situation, what would you recommend? 
• On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being highest), how motivated and likely are you to make your goal happen by that time frame you have committed to? 
• How might you alter the plan to move it closer to a 10? 8

Third: Obtaining commitment. Obtaining commitment involves summarizing, narrowing the focus, and selecting options and confirming next steps. These questions allow coaches to “circle the conversational wagons” and bring summary and clarity to all of the shared information and feelings. Closing the conversation requires that individuals have a clear and memorable summary of what they are committed to do next in pursuit of their personal goals and aspirations for change. This is what we call “confirming” the conversation.

• What are the two or three most important things for you to focus on before our next coaching session? 
• Based on what we have discussed, what seems most important for you to focus on now? 
• We have talked about a lot of important information today. If you were to put headlines on the key areas you want to focus on, what would they be? 
• What will you do in the next 24 hours (or week or month) to move forward towards your goal? 
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how motivated are you to take care of this commitment? 
• What will it take to turn that rating of a 6 into a 9? 
• Can you think of anything that might stop you from doing it? 
• How will you overcome that barrier? 
• Moving from vision and big picture, what actions would you like to focus on over the next 30, 60, or 90 days? 
• What do you need to do to help fulfill this commitment going forward? 
• How will you measure your success? 
• What milestones or key successes will be important for you to achieve with your game plan? 
• What do you see as the best way of holding you accountable?

Creating commitment is the essential closing stage in the coaching process. Commitment arises from inside out; any attempt to impose commitment means the individual will never truly take ownership of it. That’s why powerful questions are such important tools for the coach to gain buy-in from the performer.

A coach must never forget that individuals create their own stories—we can’t do it for them. Great coaches set the right high-trust environment and safe conditions for people to transform themselves by doing the necessary heavy thinking and lifting.

4. EXECUTION

• The principle here is obvious: unless there is execution and accountability, the coaching engagement becomes just a fruitless series of ongoing conversations. All successful coaching conversations need to link directly to actually meeting key performance indicators, measures, and objectives.

Coaching is working to discover the precise nature of an individual’s desired destination.

• The challenge for a coach is to help the individual find this desired destination without the coach imposing his or her own personal paradigm, vision, values, or passion.
• A coach’s duty is not to define the journey or push people along a path where they may not want to go. Rather, coaches help individuals keep their hands on the steering wheel so they can both drive and arrive. Foundational to helping people grow is to disengage them from the negative and the limiting, and to engage them in the positive and expanding. Inherent in the ideas of growth and achievement is the optimistic expectation that things can change, and will change for the better.
• Executing worthwhile goals usually requires continuous, often repeated efforts of accountability. However, a coach knows that repeated effort can also become easier over time. Repeated actions become habits. Moreover, the best coaches can actually help individuals get into a “flow” state that can be exhilarating for them.

Recall “Flow” Experiences 

• One way to help individuals get into the “flow” is to ask them: Think of a time when you were in a high performing “flow” state. 
  • When are you are your best? 
  • How did it feel? 
  • What kept you going? 
  • How do you think you could get into the flow state of high performance now?

Discover “Flow” Behaviors Another way to get individuals into the flow is to help them find some new activity to enjoy, something they are good at, that leads towards the goal.

• How can you help the people you are coaching find those new behaviors that will get them into the “flow”? Ask these questions: 
  • What are the most important unmet needs, challenges, difficulties, or opportunities that society is asking you to solve? 
  • What is the highest and best contribution you can make to humanity? 
  • What legacy do you want to leave? 
  • What difference do you want to make? 
  • What have you always loved doing? 
  • What are you really good at? 
  • What are you most passionate about? 
  • What professional or career-related opportunities are you most excited to pursue? 
  • What unique talents or abilities can you bring to the goal? 
  • What do you do best? 
  • What have others told you you’re good at? 
  • Where have you received acknowledgment? 
  • What feels like play to you—meaning that when you engage in that activity, time seems to fly by, and you feel happier and lifted up?

Persist in Practicing “Flow” A habit is simply a groove or a pathway in the brain. Repeated activity of any kind eventually creates such a groove, and you are able to do the activity without thinking about it, almost subconsciously or effortlessly. The execution of goals often requires routine, habitual work.

• Flow becomes habitual, and habits in turn sustain flow. Ask the individual you are coaching: 
  • How much time and effort will you need to commit to pursue this opportunity? 
  • What one thing could you do each day that would get you closer to the goal? 
  • What habits do you need to form? 
  • What habits do you need to change or eliminate?

Sir Richard Branson

• How does he keep it all going? He is in flow with people and ideas. He exudes a high degree of appreciation, optimism, and trust in others, reframing negatives into positives, and inspiring those around him to join the flow of innovation and new ideas. He’s always ready to step into the river and be flooded with energy and new ideas. Even when he’s in a meeting, he may lie down on a couch to ease brainstorming with his guests. If he hears a great idea and doesn’t have a notebook handy, he’ll jot it down on the back of his hand. What matters to him is the free flow of ideas, and he does whatever it takes to keep that tap flowing.

PART TWO SEVEN COACHING SKILLS

Build Trust 

• This is the foundational competency and skill of all great coaching—without it, individuals will suspect you, question your agenda, slow you down, and possibly reject you as a coach.

Challenge Paradigms

• A paradigm is the way we think. An individual who believes they can’t improve is not coachable—until that paradigm changes, you’ll go nowhere. Your individual’s paradigms might become barriers to achievement, and as a coach, your task is to challenge them firmly and gently.

Seek Strategic Clarity

• With the coach’s help, the individual should choose personal goals and be completely clear about them with measurable endpoints. Without strategic clarity, coaching becomes aimless and endless. 

Execute Flawlessly 

• Execution might be the toughest challenge of all—the coach can help individuals actually to set, prioritize, and achieve their goals and help to hold them accountable. 

Give Effective Feedback 

• All coaches give feedback. Some of it is effective. Give feedback that helps create awareness, focus on actions, and achieve the results that people want with whom you’re coaching. 

Tap into Talent

• Most people underestimate their own talents. “most people have far more talent than they ever use.” As a coach you need to know how to help people tap into the unique and vast reserve of talents they already have.

Move the Middle 

• Coaches are usually focused on helping high performers get even better. It is essential to reward and promote top talent. However, the biggest opportunity for performance improvement in any organization is to help to “move the middle,” among those performers who are good, but not yet great. 

In life, as in work, one of our key leadership responsibilities is to help people gain vision and strategic clarity in their jobs, careers, and in their business. Never forget your role as a leader is to help people through uncertainty, darkness, and the fog, so they get to their ultimate destination and achieve success.

5. BUILD TRUST

• Great coaches place a premium on establishing, developing, extending, or restoring trust with the people whom they are coaching. Often trust is overlooked as a hidden variable.
• The role of a coach is twofold: 
  • (1) to help the individuals themselves become more trustworthy and 
  • (2) to establish a trusting relationship with individuals and key stakeholders.
    • In your first role, you earn trust by being a model of character and competence. In your second role, you know you’re being effective when your individuals and key stakeholders consistently attract loyal people to themselves—people whom they position, empower, and reward—successors who are prepared to lead even better than they themselves do. You know when there is trust in the organization when leaders actively get others promoted, build a pipeline of talent, and try to create leaders to replace themselves.

Because trust translates into individual credibility. Each individual leader, manager, or coach has a personal brand of trust or distrust. Credibility comes from the Latin root credere, which means “to believe.” Anyone you expect to successfully coach others must first believe in you.

• In his best-selling book The Speed of Trust, 15 Stephen M.R. Covey describes two sources of trustworthiness: character and competence. 
• Character is who you are—your personal maturity, integrity, and commitment to principles. An immature, unprincipled person cannot be trusted regardless of his or her skills. 
• Competence is what you do—your talents, skills, and capabilities. Even a person of high character cannot be trusted if they lack the skills to do the job in a high quality way. Both character and competence are essential to have trust and credibility.

Diagnose Character 

• What is the individual’s intent—that is, their motives and agenda? No one is willing to follow a leader whose motives are suspect. Motives must be open, transparent, and mutually beneficial.

How do you help an individual become more trustworthy? This is accomplished not through lectures so much as through asking the right questions: 

• Whom do you trust and why? 
• Whom do you mistrust and why? 
• Who trusts you as a coach or leader? 
• What are you doing to earn the trust of others? 
• What kind of relationship do you want with your boss [your coworkers, your spouse, your kids, your market, your customers, your employees]? 
• What’s your motive? 
• If you act on that motive, what kind of results do you think you’ll get? 
• In the short term? 
• In the long term?

Diagnose Competence

• To diagnose the competence of the people you are coaching, ask questions: 
  • What is your track record? 
  • What would others say about your ability to do the job and consistently get results? 
  • What do you think about your ability to do the job and consistently get results? 
  • Where do you need to improve your abilities? 
  • What can your team realistically do? 
  • Where does your team need to improve?

The purpose of these questions is to bring to the surface strengths to capitalize on and weaknesses to work on. The idea is to help the individual identify areas where trust might be enhanced.

6. CHALLENGE PARADIGMS

Let’s look at five categories of questions he used to challenge paradigms, thinking, and assumptions

1. Explore Assumptions

• Your job is to shake the deep bedrock of their thinking and help them go to even deeper levels of reasoning. Here are examples of such questions: 
  • You seem to be assuming that such and such is the case. Why is this the case? 
  • What underlying values or perceptions seem to be driving these actions? 
  • How did you choose those assumptions? 
  • Please explain why or how you’re thinking this . . . How can you verify or disprove that assumption? 
  • If you were to share the facts or the data on this situation, what would they be? 
  • What could we assume instead?

2. Probe Rationale 

• When an individual gives a rationale for opinions and assumptions, dig into that reasoning rather than assume it as a given fact. People often use weak logic, reasoning, or support for their arguments. The following questions help them examine the evidence behind their beliefs: 
  • Why is this happening? 
  • How do you know this is the case? 
  • Can you explain to me or give a rationale of what is going on? 
  • Can you give me an example of that? 
  • What are the impacts of this situation? 
  • What data, facts, or evidence would give you reason to believe that?

3. Question Viewpoints and Perspectives 

• Most arguments are given from a particular position. You should feel free to question the positions. Show that there may be other, equally valid, or alternative viewpoints. 
  • What is another way of looking at this? 
  • Does this seem reasonable? 
  • What are your alternatives? 
  • That’s an interesting theory. Is there another approach you should consider? 
  • What are the strengths of your argument? 
  • What are the weaknesses? 
  • Who benefits from this? 
  • What would someone with the opposite viewpoint say? 
  • What is the difference between this scenario and that scenario?

4. Examine Implications and Consequences 

• Often people have not thought through all the possible outcomes of a proposition. Encourage a complete exploration of all the possibilities by asking the following: 
  • Do the intended consequences or outcomes make sense? 
  • What are the desirable outcomes and benefits? 
  • Is there a clear and logical business case for action? 
  • If you achieve the desired outcome, then what would happen? 
  • What are the positive and/ or negative consequences of that assumption? 
  • What are the risks or the costs/ benefits? 
  • What is the overall economic value of doing that? 
  • What are the risks or the costs of not doing that? 
  • What might possibly happen that you haven’t thought about yet?

5. Question the Question 

• You can help individuals examine their paradigms by turning the question in on itself. In a sense, you are making the individual do the heavy lifting. 
  • Why would I ask you that question? 
  • What was the point? 
  • Why do you think you are asking yourself this question? 
  • Is this question important? 
  • Why or why not? 
  • What assumptions are behind the question?

7. SEEK STRATEGIC CLARITY

• A key coaching skill is to help individuals find their destination on their own—without forcing on them the coach’s own vision, values, or passions. No coach has the right to force change, to impel momentum, or to prescribe or demand a particular destination. But both the coach and individual need a destination, and fundamental to that destination is a self-chosen personal mission that is ignited by what Dr. Stephen R. Covey calls “the burning yes inside.”
• The coach’s task is to help individuals come up with a concrete mission statement and a strategy for carrying it out. Helping people find their mission—the life purpose they are burning to say yes to—is essential to defining the new direction they wish to take. A mission not only gives purpose to life but also can unleash the power to re-focus, repurpose, and re-energize that life of meaning and passion.

A mission statement accomplishes the following purposes: 

• Clarifies what is most important to the individual 
• Provides focus and clarity 
• Helps the individual design their own life instead of having it designed by external forces 
• Guides day-to-day decisions about how to spend time and energy 
• Gives a greater sense of meaning and purpose

Short-Term Noise 

• Much of life can be driven by urgent short-term noise but relatively meaningless demands. By contrast, a successful career requires a clear vision, careful planning, analysis, and strategy formulation all along the way. The same is true of any effort you lead—whether it’s strategic goals, a project, a team, a division, a family, or a whole organization.
  • What kind of life and what kind of career would you like to have? 
  • How will you measure the success of your life and career? 
  • What would be a successful life or contribution by your definition? 
  • What aspects of your contribution do you want to keep in balance? 
  • What are your most important relationships? 
  • What are you doing to keep them close, intimate, happy, and functional? 
  • What would compel you to get out of bed every morning, passionate to get going with your day? 
  • What important and meaningful things would you want these people to say about you at your funeral: A spouse, a partner, or a family member? A colleague at work? A friend? 
  • Why does your team exist? 
  • What purpose does it serve? 
  • What does team success look like? 
  • Why does your job exist? 
  • Who and what purpose do you serve? 
  • Are you sure it is the right purpose? 
  • How will you know whether you’ve achieved it?

• As Peter Drucker states, “All grand strategies eventually boil down to work.” To fulfill an organizational vision and mission, the strategy defines the path and the plans in how to leverage its core capabilities and resources to best satisfy its market, customer, and organizational needs. Strategy is also about how you will differentiate your value with your products, services, or technology in the marketplace. It defines a company’s uniqueness and competitive advantage and consists of how to leverage your operational plans, budgets, and core resources to compete and win. And, of course, strategy defines what drives the money-making model to drive increased cash, profit, margin, growth, and additional resources.

Strategy

• In general at the team and organizational level, there are two types of strategies:
• Competitive Strategy that defines why, what, where, and with whom you will compete with your products and services;
• Operational Strategy that defines how you will prioritize and leverage your core operational capabilities, strengths, unique know-how, intellectual property, processes, partnerships, distribution, people, and alliances. 
• In helping leaders develop strategy, coaches should ask the following strategic questions: 
  • Who are your key customers? 
  • What are their needs? 
  • How can you best add value to satisfy their needs better than your competitors? 
  • Where will you compete? 
  • What is your distinctive competitive advantage? 
  • What products or services will you provide or not provide? 
  • How can you best leverage your relationships among partners, customers, suppliers, and distributors? 
  • How can your resources best be deployed across multiple business units, geographies, and channels to support your core competitive work? 
  • How will you differentiate yourself operationally from your competitors? 
  • What capabilities should you invest in? 
  • What will you not invest in?

First, start by defining the “strategic context,” the important industry forces and issues that need to be taken into account before you define your strategy. 

• To define the strategic context, ask this question: 
  • What are the external forces that are changing your business environment?

Second, define your “job to be done,” that is, the unique value you bring to the marketplace, the customers, and the purpose your business serves: 

• Who are your customers (internal and external)? 
• What do your customers hire you to do for them? 
• How well are you doing that job?

Third, define your business unit’s money-making model. 

• How much cash do you need? 
• What profit margin do you need to get? 
• What is the velocity you need (speed of productivity of inventory, production, or services)? 
• What revenue growth do you need? 
• How can you maintain profitable and sustainable growth?

Fourth, define your core capabilities. 

• What do you do better than anyone else? 
• What are the one or two core capabilities you need to obtain or improve to do your job better for the customer?

Fifth, define your few “strategic bets”: 

• What competitive moves can you make that could dramatically improve your business results over the next two to five years? 
• How will your key strategic bets help you achieve the right milestones and targets to help achieve your five to ten year vision?

Goals

“it is not hard work that causes a person or a team to become tired; it’s the fog or the lack of clarity.”

• People need clarity about what is expected, defined targets, how to accomplish the goals, and when they need to be achieved; and that means creating concrete, realistic, and measurable goals.
• A great goal must be clear, specific, achievable, and measurable. General statements such as “decrease debt” would be far less actionable.
• With goals, less is more. In our professional and personal lives, we can always find an abundance of good things to pursue. But if everything is important, then nothing is important. When it comes to goal setting, less is more.
• Coaches can help people gain tremendous clarity by posing these questions: 
  • What is the one goal (the WIG) that you must achieve or the strategy fails? 
  • What is the organization’s or team’s highest priority? 
  • What is the activity or objective without which nothing else is worth doing? 
  • Given the various key priorities, what can you say no to?

The following are a series of coaching questions that will help any leader or manager engage in a successful goal-setting process. 

• What is your role in relation to the company’s vision and strategy? 
• Does your team have a sense of its most critical business gaps or business opportunities to be achieved within the next one to three years? 
• Do these gaps or opportunities directly connect with the organization’s desired future vision, mission, and strategy? 
• What are the two or three most important goals that your business unit or team must achieve if you’re going to fulfill your vision, mission, and strategy? 
• What are the benefits or value of achieving these goals? 
• What are the costs if you do not achieve these goals? 
• Does a clear line of sight exist between your key goals and the goals one level up? 
• Does a clear line of sight exist between your key goals and the goals one level down? 
• Does every team member know the goals, the business case, and the importance of achieving them? 
• Is every team member committed and aligned to achieve the goals? 
• Do your key goals have a valid, reliable measure that demonstrates success, and can the goal be easily tracked and measured each month? 
• Are your goals and measures truly achievable/ winnable? 
• Are each of your goals written in a format, from “X to Y by when”? 
• Do we have all the right team members and resources assigned to accomplish the goals?

9. GIVE EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK

• It starts with offering feedback in a balanced way that helps people become better and focusing on their strengths, while helping to target a few key areas for improvement. The spirit of feedback should help to improve, motivate, and build hope—not injure, demoralize, or demotivate.
• We ask people to give themselves feedback first. Questions to ask people may include these: 
  • What do you like about what you’ve done? 
  • What seems to be working well? 
  • What would you have done differently? 
  • What are a few areas you can improve? 
  • What have you learned? 
  • How will you use your new learning? 
  • What will you do differently in the future? 
  • What are the benefits of doing things differently?

Only then should you offer, May I make a few observations and suggestions?

• The coach can remind people that feedback is any organization’s life-support system and that no organization, team, or individual can effectively improve without it.
• When looking at areas targeted for improvement, it is critical to keep a balance between strengths and weaknesses. Remember to spend time upfront, preparing the performer to have a mindset of continuous improvement. Don’t try to do too much. Break down the data, prioritize it, and solicit from the individual the “vital few” areas for which they have energy, interest, and motivation to focus. The key to success is narrowing the focus, keeping it balanced, and not trying to focus on too much change all at once.
• Good coaches give feedback that is a balance of courage and consideration. Courage is willingness and ability to speak honest thoughts and feelings. Consideration is doing so with respect. Great coaches show genuine interest in other people’s development, seeing people in terms of their future potential, not just their past performance.
• Focus on the Positive People get energized if they can approach the feedback process openly and positively.
• “Leaders must develop a systematic process to help people find out and clarify what their strengths are and how to capitalize on them . . .”
• It is important for a coach to prepare people for difficult feedback. Some suggestions follow: Give people ample time in a private and quiet space to absorb any difficult data. Remind them to retain a vision going forward of who they want to be. Remind them to keep a balanced perspective. Help them consider gaps, issues, common themes before jumping to hasty generalizations or drastic conclusions. Help them see the feedback as a gift—use the proactive muscle of choice and responsibility. Help them see how general themes, the rankings and frequencies, the high-end and the low-end scores and comments, can help frame the gaps and opportunities. Help them stay away from isolated “left field” or outlier comments.
• When receiving difficult feedback, people may go through certain distinct responses or stages. This is called the SARAH feedback model:
  • S = Shock. This feedback doesn’t represent me. People may know subconsciously that some of the feedback is true, but now that facts have been brought to a conscious level, they may dismiss them or react negatively or defensively.
  • A = Anger. The performer might feel attacked, be mad, closed, withdrawn, annoyed, and/ or visibly upset.
  • R = Rejection. The performer may attribute negative feedback or problems to other places, circumstances, people, and things. As blind spots get revealed, there can be negative attribution towards people, opinions, and circumstances.
  • A = Acceptance. 
  • H = Humility/ Help. In this stage, feedback is seen as a real gift and opportunity. The performer recognizes the feedback as accurate, motivating this person not only to improve but to seek continuous improvement, to use the data to proactively improve, none of which can happen without ongoing feedback.

10. TAP INTO TALENT

Great coaches help to create a culture that unleashes the highest talents and diverse skills and contributions of people. The mindset of a mediocre leader is “My job is to micromanage and control my people to get results.” The mindset of a great leader is “My job is to release the talent, passion, and ingenuity of all our people.”

• To do these things, I recommend that coaches engage in three types of conversations: 

1. The performance conversation 

2. The “clear the path” conversation

3. The improvement conversation to influence the right focus and behaviors

Performance Conversation

• Here is the agenda I recommend to my clients: List the desired results: 
  • List desired results, outlining each goal, measure, deadline, and weight of importance by percentage of time spent on each performance objective. 
  • Guidelines: Set guidelines for key criteria, dos and don’ts, and policies or procedures to be followed. 
  • Resources: Define the resources needed (people, budgets, technology, facilities, and materials). 
  • Accountability: Decide on a cadence of accountability—meeting daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly for performance reviews. 
  • Consequences: Clarify how the team or individual will benefit from fulfilling the agreement and what the fallout or consequences might be if the agreement is not fulfilled. Make sure the Performance Conversation is couched in terms of wins for the organization first rather than just identifying personal wins for individual or team members. Although each contribution is valuable, the overall goal is to achieve the organization’s goals and objectives, which, in turn, supports the people who work there.

Improvement Conversation The Japanese word for continuous improvement is kaizen. Coaching requires a focus on kaizen, and kaizen means being willing to confront weaknesses. Part of the coaching process is to discuss how to improve performance. It must be done in such a way as to increase trust and overcome avoidance and fear. You do this by being respectful as well as honest.

“Clear the Path” Conversation

• “Clearing the path” requires leaders or managers-as-coaches to continually ask the team, 
  • “What issues or challenge can I help remove? 
  • What barriers are getting in the way? 
  • How can we help remove obstacles for each other? 
  • Who can I talk with to make your job easier?”

11. MOVE THE MIDDLE

Talent as Asset 

• In a strengths-based organization, the leader-as-coach should view talent as the greatest asset to acquire, develop and leverage, bar none.
• Often, unleashing talent means not only moving the middle performers towards the top but also taking steps to either fix, transition, or eliminate the drag that low performers create on any organization.
• The leader-as-coach needs to effectively create a talent management system that helps balance conceptual learning with practical, hands-on experience.

Coach to Create Great Performing Teams

• The key differentiators boil down to two things great performers have been coached to do: execute well and concentrate on reducing inconsistency in bad behavior.
• The best predictor of future performance is mostly determined by past performance. Identify the existing islands or pockets of excellence within an organization. To leverage top performance, leaders should find out what the top performers or high-performing teams are doing to produce high-quality results. Leaders must not only capture their strategies but uncover the key competencies, the new and better behaviors, and the attitudes of those who are fully engaged. Using examples and stories of what excellence looks like can inspire and educate others. Ask team members how they can improve their strategic performance, and then provide feedback and support. Establish an environment in which leaders are trained to coach individuals and teams in ways that build upon their strengths and passions. If an individual or a team is stuck, talk about the problems, give appropriate feedback, and address options and opportunities, rather than allow the issues to fly under the radar. The way forward is to name it, reframe it, and provide support to improve it.
• Great leaders and coaches should place much of their highest value work on selecting, developing, positioning, and rewarding high-performing talent.
• The following coaching questions can help leaders and managers do this: 
• Attract 
  • How will you attract the right people that are excited to contribute in their roles and grow within their careers? 
  • How will you establish the right value-based culture by aligning good HR recruiting processes, rewards and compensation packages, and career-path opportunities to bring in the right talent?
• Position 
  • Do you have the right players in the right positions? 
  • Have you clearly identified the right knowledge, skills, and competencies needed for job-specific roles? 
  • How do you ensure the employees, supervisors, and managers are growing and developing in their roles? 
  • Have you identified the right competencies and critical skills in order for people to perform their jobs with excellence? 
  • Do you provide the necessary training, mentoring, and development for people to perform and be successful in their jobs?
• Reward 
  • How do you recognize and/ or reward great performance? 
  • How do you use monetary rewards and non-monetary rewards to drive the right performance and the right behaviors/ values?
  • Coaches can help leaders and managers tremendously by helping them assess their team talent and bench strength. 

• To find out whether you have “the right players on the bus and in the right seats on the bus,” answer the following coaching questions: 
  • List the people on your team. Would you hire all of these people again? 
  • Are these people in the right positions? 
  • Write the names of those who are stagnating in their roles—who are not being stretched, challenged, developed, or fully utilized.

12. COACHING: A FINAL WORD

As I work with leaders all around the world, I am amazed by how many attribute their success to someone who believed in them when they didn’t believe in themselves.—Dr. Stephen R. Covey

EPILOGUE: COACHING THE ORGANIZATION

• All organizations are a series of complex, interdependent systems that consist of a set of subsystems. To coach the organization, leaders must look beyond superficial acute symptoms and cosmetic causes and understand the “root cause-and-effect” relationships of the entire organizational ecosystem. Leaders should also be aware of the opportunities for improving the whole system, from a wellness and a preventative viewpoint, even if it’s not “sick.”
• “Good enough” is not good enough when the goal is to take the business to the next level. Organizational leaders need to understand the whole system—the pains and the opportunity gaps—in order to change, innovate, and grow, just as they need to understand the whole person in order to coach an individual.

• Leaders need to be able to see the real problem, not just surface symptoms. The coach’s job is to help leaders see—to identify and understand the roots of their problems or the strength of their opportunities. The coach empowers them to resolve their own issues, not to depend on others to do it for them.
• The OE Cycle enables a coach to achieve these purposes: 
  • Analyze and agree on the root causes of best and worst results. 
  • Identify current performance gaps and share a vision of better results. 
  • Identify high-leverage organizational misalignments that prevent better results. 
  • Correct misalignments and create new cultural behaviors. 
  • Share a “holistic” action plan for change. 
  • Measure and evaluate the impact of the implemented changes. 
  • To help organizations stay focused on satisfying the needs and the results required by key customers, stakeholders, and the marketplace.
• Business results are the product of the operating principles, paradigms, and assumptions you have about serving your customers, your vision and mission, your core systems and processes, your cultural value and behaviors, and your people. Your effectiveness as an organization depends on the mindset and operating principle you have about aligning each of these things.

Vision, Mission, and Values

Mission

• Do you have a clear vision and mission? 
• Why do you exist as a company/ team? 
• Who do you serve? 
• What unique value do you provide to those you serve? 
• How do you see yourself as an organization in a year? 
• Five years? Ten years? 
• What are the key principles and values that guide how you act and behave as an organization? 
• How do you reconnect and recommit your people to your vision, mission, and values in an ongoing way?

Vision 

• Vision differs from mission in that the organization is trying to see itself “down the road.” It’s about where you will be and what success will look like as an organization in the future. 
• To get at vision, coaches can ask: 
  • What do you truly want to become in a year? Five years? Ten years? 
  • What is your potential as an organization? 
  • What will success look like when you have achieved your future state? 
  • Is this vision one that is shared with others? 
  • Will it inspire them? 
  • What kind of inspired effort are you prepared to put in to achieve such a vision? 
  • What measures need to be in place so you can tell whether you’re achieving your vision?

An organizational vision statement is made up of two elements: a compelling description of a future state and a “stretch goal.”

• What is or could be the unique contribution this organization makes—a contribution nobody else can make? 
• Who are you really? 
• What is the nature of your relationship to the marketplace or those you serve? 
• Who are the key markets and customers you choose to serve? 
• What are you the best at? 
• What are you not best at? 
• Is your mission truly inspiring, challenging, or motivating? 
• Can you really live by the mission you have in mind for yourselves?

Mission

• Even if the organization is already satisfied with the mission, here are some diagnostic questions that should be asked: 
  • Are you living up to your mission? 
  • How do you know? 
  • Does your mission pertain to everyone in the organization? 
  • Are some ignoring it or acting outside of it? 
  • Does everyone know the mission? 
  • Do all believe in it, live by it, and model it? 
  • Does the mission reflect who we are and who we serve? 
  • What symbols or examples do we have of people actually living our mission? 
  • Does the mission need adjusting or amending in any way?

Values 

• Values should be explicitly expressed in both the mission and the culture. Values are the organization’s internal code of conduct. They apply to everyone personally and professionally.
  • What values do you need to live by to ensure that you fulfill your vision and mission? 
  • If you were to start a new company tomorrow, what values would you build into your organization? 
  • What values excite you? 
  • What values are distinctive to your organization and its culture? 
  • Can you envision yourself living by those organizational values? 
  • How will you know whether you are living by these values? 
  • What measures and processes will you put in place to assess whether people are living up to your values? 
  • How will you avoid cynicism about your values? 
  • How will you socialize or institutionalize your core values? 
  • What consequences are you willing to live with if people do not live up to or seek to model your organizational values?

Strategy

• What strategy would completely fulfill the mission, vision, and values of the organization? 
• How does your current strategy advance your mission? Your vision? Your values? 
• How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
•  In what ways do your customers see you as distinctive? 
• Why do they buy from you and how can you sustain a competitive advantage with the products and services you offer? 
• What is your strongest competitive advantage? 
• What is exciting about this strategy? 
• Are people motivated by it? Inspired? 
• What is your current business situation? 
• How will your strategy help close the gap between your current state and your vision of where you want to be? 
• What core resources do you need to have in order to compete and close that gap?

The Strategic Narrative 

• The Strategic Narrative helps leaders, managers, and teams develop and communicate the complexities and aspects of their overall strategy into a clear, practical, and focused “one-page storyline” to achieve the future strategy and goals over a two-to five-year period. 
  • What is your strategic context? 
  • What are the key external forces impacting your business to change? 
  • What is your job to be done as defined by your customers and stakeholder needs? 
  • What is your money-making model (for profit)? Or, what is your resource generation model (non-profit)? 
  • What are your core capabilities? 
  • What are your strategic bets or strategic goals and objectives that will help you deliver your vision over the next two to five years (list key targets and measures)? 
  • Do you have a clear one-page strategic narrative that you can clearly communicate to your business unit or team that showcases your vision, purpose, strategies, and goals to win and compete in the marketplace over the next two to five years? 
  • How will you know the strategy is working? 
  • Is your strategic narrative concise, easy to understand, compelling, motivating, and realistic?

Strategic Goals (WIGS)

• What must you do and what are the measurable outcomes to make your strategy successful? W
• hat goals are primary—absolutely must-haves—as opposed to secondary goals—nice to have? 
• Can you get your primary wildly important goals down to a manageable number? No more than one to three? 
• How will you measure success on each goal? What is your “X” (current state)? What is your “Y” (desired state)? 
• By when must you close the gap between X and Y? 
• What exactly will you and others do to achieve the goal? 
• What actions are in your control? 
• What can you influence at least 80 percent of the time? 
• Are scoreboards clear and easily accessible to everyone involved in reaching the goals? 
• Can you measure and see if you are winning or losing on the goals? 
• How often will you meet to assess progress and accountability on the goals? 
• Are your team goals aligned to achieve organizational goals? 
• Do you have the necessary resources to accomplish your goals?

Systems, Structures, and Processes (The Six Rights) 

• Every team has a core work process or system. Some teams sell, some create products, some regulate or audit, some pay bills, some directly serve customers, and so forth. The coach’s task is to challenge leaders on whether the systems, structure, and core processes actually support the strategy.
  • What is your core work process? 
  • Can you accurately describe the workflow? 
  • Can team members describe it? 
  • Is there physical evidence of the process, for example, a document that describes it in step by step detail? 
  • Who is served by the process? 
  • Are these people happy with the service they are getting? 
  • Does the current process adequately support the organization’s mission, vision, values, and strategy? 
  • Why or why not? 
  • Is there an ongoing feedback loop so that you can tell whether the process is working well? 
  • Does the process align with other processes in the organization? 
  • Do you have a process for continually improving the core process? 
  • Is the core process independent of the leader? 
  • Will it outlast the leader?

Talent, Culture, and High-Trust Behaviors

• Talent How do you attract and select the best people to work on your team? 
• What can you do to become more attractive to recruit and retain top talent? 
• Do you have the right people in the right positions? 
• How do you know? 
• Does your team have the key capabilities to drive the strategy? If not, how will you fill that need? 
• Who are your key people? 
• What are you doing to develop them into the next generation of leaders? 
• Do you have a system for discovering and leveraging the talents of your people? 
• Does each of your key people have a clear development plan? 
• Do you have the right internal or external training opportunities available for people to improve their capabilities? Why or why not?

Culture 

• Culture is defined as the common attitudes and behavior characteristic that are displayed by the majority of a group or organization, the majority of the time. Developing a culture where employees feel valued, respected, and recognized as important and trusted individuals helps move away from the industrial model with its micromanagement approach to one of a self-directed, high-performance company. Great leaders know how to build the right culture of performance by providing the right rewards and recognition, so they do it consistently. The following coaching questions will help leaders build an aligned culture:
  • How do you recognize and reward your best talent and great performance? 
  • Is your compensation system aligned with the mission, vision, values, and strategy? 
  • Are people actually rewarded for doing the right things? 
  • How simple and transparent is your “total reward program”? 
  • Do your people at all levels feel they are paid equitably based on fair market, industry, and individual contribution measures? 
  • Would people generally feel that rewards and recognition programs are based on fair, rational, and objective criteria as measured by high performance results and adherence to great values? 
  • What a difference it makes to have what are the most important goals of the organization translated down to what is most important to the individual. There should be no guessing about where the organization is going and how success will be measured, even at the individual level.