Ra Ra Ra! Channel Your Inner Coach

As I mentioned in my previous post, an essential framework to have in your toolkit is Coaching Conversations.  In Collaborative Workplaces, Coaching Conversations happen every day.

Let’s take the most basic example. At work, especially when you’re a manager, people might often come to you with their concerns, complaints, and problems. They expect you to solve problems for them because you’re good at it. But if you don’t respond with a good Coaching Conversation, you run the risk of becoming trapped in the troubleshooter role. Some managers even start to feel resentment when it seems that their team members have quit thinking for themselves.

The flip side is the employee who, whenever he asks his manager for advice is simply told what to do and then dismissed to go do it. It’s as if the manager is listening only with the intent to reply rather than the intent to understand. There’s nothing collaborative about that.

Most of us don’t want somebody else to solve our problems for us. We want the satisfaction of finding our own solutions. You can help your teammates feel that same sense of satisfaction by having Coaching Conversations with them.

The Coaching Conversation has three parts which I’ll cover in more detail in my next post.  They are:

• “Tell me about…”
• “What…”
• “How….”

Stay tuned for my next post where we’ll walk through these parts more specifically and give you examples of how to utilize them in your next coaching conversation.