What skills do you need to be a strong coach? We have already developed some of these in previous lessons, especially the criticality of listening and actively listening without evaluating. When you're coaching, you must turn off all technology and stray thoughts, be fully present for the person you're coaching. In Wendy Moffat's biography of the novelist EM Forster, she writes, "To speak to him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self". When coaching, listen with inverse charisma. The next skill is interviewing, asking both open and closed questions to get all the information available. Many new managers ask lots of closed questions because that's what they're comfortable with: how much will it cost, who did you speak to, what are the next steps. These are fine, we do need data. But if asked too many closed questions in rapid succession, the coachee will feel they're being interrogated. Most importantly, though, coaching is ultimately about developing another person's capabilities and closed questions do not invite the other person to think. Open questions allow for discovery, pulling out privately held information : what have you done so far to solve the problem, what ideas have you come up with, what else do you think we should do. Open queries allow you to develop and build on new information. Don't ask questions just to ask a question, that's not really coaching. Ask a question because you want to understand, no more, or help the other person think more deeply, rigorously, or broadly. Reflecting means that you're stating in your own words what you heard the other person say. So what I understood you to say is, is that accurate? What I'm hearing is, did I miss anything? You're testing to ensure you understood and providing an opportunity for the person being coached to clarify, if needed. I asked a client for whom I was preparing a competitive analysis to provide me a list of all of her startup businesses offerings. A couple of weeks later after I had analyzed numerous competitors, I began to think her startup was missing many critical offerings. In our next meeting, I said, "Here's the list of offerings. Could you look through it and tell me if I missed any?" Sure enough, she began adding to it. Yes, you heard that right. I asked what I missed when the list came from her. I have found that bosses and clients will nearly always say something they provided is complete. It's just not worth my pride to frame the question that way. Respect is a characteristic of a coaching conversation, and demonstrating that respect genuinely is also a coaching skill. Avoid using any behaviors that generalize, diminish, or judge the other person. We put up a wall between us and the other person when we say we all have that problem, or you just misunderstood, or you just haven't tried hard enough. These do not lead to open discussions and new information and learning. They put the other person in a one-down position. Authentically self-disclosing is when you share in a short statement that you have had a similar experience to the coachee's story. Oh, I've been there. I've experienced this. Maybe something I learned from that experience could be helpful. Keep telling me more, I'll see if anything's applicable. If the other person responds with, "Oh, tell me your story," don't do it. You can say I would love to tell you my story later or if we hit a roadblock. I want to make sure we work through your challenge. Avoid using the coaching time to tell your story. Coaching is about the other person, but tell the story if it helps move the conversation forward and do not self-disclose if it is not true. Yes, shared stories build connection and they help people feel comfortable that their problems are not so different from others, but it can break down trust if you see something happened when it really didn't. Whatever you're working on, at a minimum, be genuine. Recognizing other's stress means that something seems to be happening that is interfering with the mutuality of the conversation, but it is not being stated. The other person seems irritated, isn't treating you with respect or seems distracted, or you feel like you're talking in circles. These usually indicate there's something happening underneath the conversation that is preventing the coachee from being fully involved. Bringing it to the surface will prevent the coaching conversation from being a waste of time. You might say, "You seem distracted. Is there something going on that's making it harder for you to have this conversation?" The person can then say what's happening for them. As the coach, you have two choices. You can say that does sound really upsetting or that does sound really distracting. Maybe we should have our meeting another time. Or you as the coach have the right to say that doesn't really distracting and difficult to deal with. We have to have this meeting at this time. Can you let that concern go from your mind for now and focus on what we're discussing now if we make an appointment to meet at 3 o'clock to discuss it? Sometimes when people see that you have it on your calendar, they know they're going to be heard. They can let go of whatever it is it's pulling them away and they can be fully engaged in the conversation. Again, it is not coaching if it's not interactive. I was once delivering training to a large group of people and the entire room from the moment I walked in had their arms crossed and we're looking very angry at me, but I hadn't done anything, I couldn't figure out what they were so angry about. At one point, I stopped and said, "I'm getting the sense that a lot of people in the room are upset about something. Is that accurate?" Someone in the room said, "No, no, it's fine. Keep going," but they all still sat there leaning back in their chairs with their arms folded across their chests and scowling. I said, "No, really, I get the sense there's something going on," and someone said, "We know why you're really here." I said, "Tell me." "Because the president thinks we're all a bunch of idiots, so he brought you here to fix us." It happened that the day before the company had lost a massive client and the president was infuriated, called the entire company in for an all-hands meeting and yelled at them for some amount of time, during which he told them he thought they were all idiots. Now, there was no point in explaining that I had been contracted for this training program six months prior. It had nothing to do with what the president said. What really mattered at that moment was whether or not these folks could let go of that anger from the day before and focus on what we were training on. I said, "Tell me a little bit more, what led to losing the client?" Out of that discussion, we discovered that the company had silos, that the directors at the top of different departments were in constant conflict and they could not work together and because of that, there was a massive mistake that led to the loss of the client. That enabled us to have a very productive conversation about working across departments and divisions, and we ended up having a good six or eight months worth of coaching on that specific issue. If you see something is happening, if you get the sense that something is happening underneath the conversation, you're better off bringing it up than trying to pretend nothing's going on and hope it goes away. It's not coaching if it's not interactive. Lastly, summarize. Summarize, summarize, pause a couple of times in the conversation as well as at the end to summarize key points, decisions, discoveries, action plans. This helps everyone move from one stage to another. For example, it sounds like we both agree that the biggest thing in the way of keeping customers is that a response time to their help desk request is slower than they would like. Let's dig into what might be underlying that. I'm not sure whether our response time is slower than it could be or if customers perceive it to be slower than it should be. The first sentence of that paragraph summarizes what the conversation has accomplished, and the next expresses where the conversation is going. When we learn about the stages, the need to summarize each before moving to the next will be clearer. These are the seven skills needed to coach successfully. When you're coaching, you're clarifying the outcome you seek and guiding a process that will enable your employees to achieve that outcome and become more self-directed in the future.