Coaching Skills that Elevate your Leadership Capabilities
Becoming a coach helped me elevate a subset of my skills that build client confidence and that help them achieve their goals. Being a coach allows me to guide coachees towards their objectives without pushing them past their limits. Because people being coached come to their own conclusions and set their own goals, they take ownership over their outcomes and it leads to lasting change. As a leader, having the ability to coach people is imperative to creating a successful team. While coaching isn’t the right tool for all situations, there are many situations where your ability to coach your direct reports will make a significant impact on the success of your team. Here are some coaching skills you can use in your everyday life as a leader that will elevate your leadership capabilities:
Create a Safe Space
One of the foundational skills of being a good coach is creating an environment of trust. This usually takes time but there are things you can do to promote an environment that has psychological safety. What does it mean to have psychological safety? It means that your team can feel comfortable asking questions, not knowing an answer, making a mistake or disagreeing with the status quo without fear of negative repercussions. You can drive towards accountability as a leader without making people feel inferior when things don’t go as planned. You do that by asking questions and being curious when things go wrong instead of rushing to criticize someone. Part of safety is fostering an environment of learning instead of blame. As a leader, the more you can exercise letting go of judgment, the more your team can feel comfortable opening up to you.
As a boss, it’s ok to be vulnerable, but if you are ever in a place where you don’t feel like you can respond in a healthy manner to your reports because of what is going on for you, take a break and postpone meetings until you can be a solid leader again. By demonstrating self-awareness you are also setting a great example for your team.
Listen
Once you have a foundation of psychological safety with your team, listening is a key skill. Be focused and present when others are talking so you can learn as much as you can from interactions. Don’t use meetings as an opportunity to dominate conversations, use them as a space to listen. Take the time to really hear what a person is saying, and pause before you respond. Having space in a conversation to consider what you heard before you speak can completely change an interaction.
For more tips on Active listening, see my blog post on that topic.
Ask Good Questions
By listening well, you will gain perspective and insight to be able to ask the right questions. Asking questions is extremely effective in instigating change because it allows people to come to their own conclusions and realizations instead of being told what to do or what to think. When people create their own insights they feel more in control of the situation and have more impetus to change because they really understand the problem. If you want outcomes to stick, letting people reach their own conclusions is key.
For example, at one of my jobs, there was a person on the team who was unkind to others, would lose his temper and was generally creating an uncomfortable environment on the team. When my manager talked to the person, instead of saying ‘when you get angry in meetings, people don’t feel safe’, my manager asked a series of questions:
What was going on for you in that meeting?
How did you react?
What were you feeling?
How do you think others felt when you lost your temper?
Do you feel communicating with a raised voice is effective?
What do you think you could do differently in that situation?
What action are you going to take to be accountable to doing things differently?
By asking questions, my manager was able to take a simple approach to get the person to own his inappropriate behavior and why it wasn’t beneficial not only to him but also to the team. That conversation made a substantial difference in getting the person’s behavior to change.
Give People Choices
Employees like having options. When you allow people to make a choice instead of telling them what to do, they feel more empowered and in control of their situation. Most people don’t like being told what to do so providing options to your direct reports gives them a sense of autonomy.
An example of this was when I was on a team that had a challenging deadline at work that would require extra hours to complete. Our boss wasn’t able to get the deadline changed though she tried but she did give us autonomy on how we wanted to complete the work. Being able to decide, as a team, how we would divide the work, when we would get the work done and details around how to accomplish it gave us a little bit of freedom in a difficult situation. Having the autonomy to decide the structure around completing the project motivated us all a little bit more and we were able to complete the work on time.
One of the biggest transitions from leaving the corporate world to becoming a full time coach is that now I can give people all the time they need to arrive at important conclusions that facilitate their growth. In the corporate world, when you are accountable for results as a leader, you might not always have the luxury of time when it comes to getting your direct reports to change. Though there may be instances where urgency necessitates a more directive approach, finding times when you can coach your direct reports and let them come to their own conclusions on their own timeline will serve you as a leader. Coaching not only creates lasting change, it allows people to feel empowered and take ownership of their choices and the consequences of those decisions.