 Developing coaching skills for leaders and managers in the workplace is fast becoming essential to succeed in our fast paced and changing world. Using coaching skills is a great way to unearth talents and skills in your team and drive accountability and ownership. Improved individual and team performance nearly always follows. Coaching skills, although related, are very different from training and mentoring skills. These differences make coaching skills so effective and require a different mindset from the more traditional management practices. As an introduction to coaching skills for leaders and managers, we are covering, firstly the importance of self-awareness, secondly, four behaviours to support coaching skills in the workplace, third, the power of asking questions, fourth, active listening, the underrated secret weapon, and fifth, coaching for performance, the grow model. The last skill, coaching for performance, provides you with a framework and tips to start putting coaching skills into practice in the workplace. My name is Jess Coles and I've had a 25 year management career in corporates and household names through to SMEs. As a line manager, I spent lots of time training, mentoring and coaching team members. I'm also an ICF trained coach and have coached many senior managers and directors in corporates through to SMEs. If you're new to this channel, enhance.training shares business and people management expertise to help you improve your performance and that of your team and business. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. The first of five coaching skills for leaders and managers is understanding the importance of self-awareness. Self-awareness is a starting point for coaching others. If you're not aware of your beliefs, your strengths, your limitations, your values, your emotions and your reactions, then how can you help others discover these very same things? Self-awareness begins with self-knowledge, i.e. knowing who we are and what we're about. Self-awareness is taking our self-knowledge and using it to monitor our thoughts, emotions and beliefs. Self-awareness is a skill you get better at with practice. Start by paying attention to how you feel and react in different situations. For example, if a colleague criticizes an idea of yours, what's your instant reaction? Anger, annoyance, retaliation even? Being self-aware, you might recognize these immediate emotional reactions and then understand that they are criticizing your idea and not you. This might reduce your emotional response and you might think that you know this person and they would only be criticizing if they could see a real problem with the idea and it might be a good idea to understand what this problem is. As we develop self-awareness, we become more confident and sure of who we are and more able to proactively manage our thoughts, behaviors and emotions rather than being held hostage by them or managing them reactively. Make the time to spend five to ten minutes thinking back on events of the morning or afternoon and how you reacted to those events. Consider what beliefs, assumptions or life experiences might be driving your specific reactions to those events. Listen to others properly, understand their perspective and their feedback on you are really useful in building your own self-awareness. Look into all the different personal discovery tools available to help build your own self-awareness. Your examples include the insights, strength finders, personality tests and similar. Once you become good at recognizing and understanding your own reactions to situations, you can then start working on your awareness of how your beliefs and reactions affect the behaviors and emotions of others. With better self-awareness you are in a good place to be able to start using coaching skills to successfully develop others. Next, to best support the use of coaching skills for leaders and managers, work on four behaviors to support coaching skills in the workplace. These four behaviors are firstly, demonstrate genuine concern and care for your team members. Second, play to the strengths of the people you are coaching. Third, don't punish failures, coach the person through their mistakes. And fourth, make the time to celebrate success. These are four behaviors that I've found to be really important. So tackling each in turn. I think it's obvious to your team members if you really care about them, their development and their well-being. You know, think back to all the managers that you've had, which ones you knew cared and which ones didn't care as much. I knew a manager cared when they really listened to me. They took my thoughts and ideas seriously. They considered my strengths and development areas in the advice they gave. They supported me. They fought for me and the team and so on. Work on your own mindset and the behaviors you demonstrate day in, day out. Doing so will make a big difference to how your team responds to you. Next, place your team members strengths more than trying to improve their weaknesses. You'll get further improving strengths than using the same amount of time and effort to improve weaknesses. Most people find it quicker and easier to learn and improve in areas they enjoy and are good at, i.e. their strengths. In today's world, specialism and having a few things you're very good at is better than being okay at many things. Next, punishing failure does not encourage learning. Punishing failure will also reduce risk taking and individual stepping outside of their comfort zones, both of which will reduce or stop any improvements. Instead of punishment, coach the individuals through what went wrong and how they would do it differently next time. This is much more useful for learning and you will see a lot more improvement in performance by taking this approach. Finally, take the time to celebrate success. Celebrating success is much more motivational to team members than listening to motivational speeches from you, pep talks and similar. Positive reinforcement works and everyone likes being complimented. Make the time to celebrate success privately and publicly. The third skill to develop when building coaching skills for leaders and managers is the power of asking questions. As a manager or leader, asking the right questions is a brilliant skill to develop. Questions require the other person to think so they can put together an answer and needing to speak their answer out loud further improves the thinking. Assuming you are listening properly, you can also learn a lot from those answers. So rather than tell your team members what you know or how you would solve the problem, ask them what they think or what they would do. Ask their opinion, ask them to tell you the options they can think of and their preferred solution to a given problem. Ask them why they think that it is the best solution. Ask them how they will implement it. I promise you, get good at asking the right questions and you will be bowled over by some of the answers you get. I continually am. There are lots of different types of questions. Understand and practice how to use each. Firstly, close questions typically have a yes or no answer. For example, is John your manager? Try to avoid using these questions in most situations as you and the other person learn less from them. The second type of questions, open questions, usually don't have a set or specific answer. You can't answer open questions with a yes or no. For example, what makes the option you have chosen the best? Try to use a lot of open questions when coaching. It can be really useful when starting to use coaching skills to plan out a range of open questions you can ask and then practice using them. Thirdly, generally avoid using leading questions such as, we know that option A is a poor choice. What do you think? Or don't you think, boom, boom, boom, boom? Leading questions restrict the person's thinking and limit ideas and are less useful in most stages of coaching. Finally, many people associate using why in a question with judgment. To avoid putting the other person on the defensive, minimize using why in your questions. For example, rather than asking, why do you think that? You could always ask, what makes you think that? You are likely to get a more positive response without using why. The fourth skill to develop when building coaching skills for leaders and managers is active listening. I've always thought listening is an underrated secret weapon for managers and leaders. All great managers I've ever had were great at listening. Active listening is a great skill to develop and I think too few leaders and managers work at developing good active listening skills. Active listening is not, for example, firstly nodding at the other person while thinking about what you're gonna say next. Nor is it being silent while thinking about the eight problems you have to solve by the end of the day. Nor is it hearing what is being said and then cutting the other person off to make a point or finishing their thoughts and sentences for them. If you're not able to repeat or summarize what the other person is talking about at any given point, you're probably not actively listening. Actively listening takes effort and concentration. Some of the common traits of active listening include, firstly, maintaining eye contact, secondly, following, taking in and understanding what is being said by the other person. Third, using a tentative body language to encourage the other person to continue talking. Fourth, at appropriate points, paraphrase or summarize what has been said back to the other person to demonstrate that you're taking in what they're saying. But actively listening to others, it encourages them to speak and it is amazing what they will tell you. Think about how many times a person truly listens to what you're saying in a given day. Probably not that many. Actively listening is also about being observant. You know, with the tone of voice, with the pace of the voice, with the body language and then using all the nonverbal clues to understand what the person really means with the words they say out loud. These clues are usually more important than the words themselves. For coaching, active listening is essential. If you don't understand what the person is saying or you've missed crucial points being made, how are you gonna truly support their learning? Listening is a great way to demonstrate that you are interested in the other person, which is also important in building relationships. Active listening is an essential skill in coaching so make the time to practice it. The fifth skills to develop when building coaching skills for leaders and managers is coaching for performance. In business, when investing in development in any form, there is an expectation that improved performance and better delivery of results is the outcome of that investment. Most coaching programs with external coaches will agree goals and measure progress against those goals to assess the effectiveness and value of the coaching program. Choosing goals and working to those goals provides the coaching program with direction and purpose. When you're using coaching skills as a manager or a leader, I suggest that you do so in relation to the goals to achieve. This might be something simple like solving an immediate problem or it might be much more complex like delivering a big project. A good framework to structure your coaching sessions with your team members is the GROW model. The GROW model consists of four stages, being firstly, goal setting, secondly, what is reality, thirdly, what options do you have, and fourth, what will you do. So running through each part of the GROW model quickly, keeping into context our need to coach to improve performance. The first step of the GROW model, setting goals or objectives is a very good place to start. Ask the person you're coaching, where do you want to get to? What does reaching your goal look like? How will you define your goal? What will it feel like to achieve this goal? And similar questions. Coach your team members so they are clear what goals they're aiming for. Make sure these goals tie in with the needs of the team and the business. And at times you may need to adapt the goals slightly as circumstances change. Coach the team member to reach the goals before setting new ones. The second step of the GROW model, what is reality, is an honest assessment of the current situation. Understanding where we are now is an important starting point. If we don't accept it or have blinkers on, the solutions we work on will not be as good. The most important criteria for assessing reality is objectivity. That is trying to set aside your assumptions, opinions, prejudice, hopes, fears, et cetera, all of which distort your perception of reality to some extent. Focus the team member on the facts and what is actually happening. You know, examples might include, you know, our revenue is down 29% or 23% of our products are loss making or we have a negative MPS score. All the lack of the right skills on the team means we are five weeks behind. Challenge your team member when they only state opinions. Asking for evidence to support their position is a good way of doing this. Don't allow your team members to sugarcoat the situation or present information that is not objective and reflective of reality. Coach them to be as honest about the situation and reality as possible. The third step of the GROW model, what options do you have is about asking your team member to generate options. You know, this sounds pretty easy. What limits these options is our assumptions, beliefs and our past experiences. The coach's role is to spot these limiting factors and highlight them to the team member. The goal is to get as many options as possible on the table, even the ones the team member feels are not likely or desirable. Challenge assumptions such as, you know, it can't be done or we don't have the budget or our competitors will stop that happening or it'll cost too much or take too much time. When you remove the limitations of a person's thinking, really good options can be found. When you have all the options, you can coach the team member through reducing these options down. Keep challenging them and look out for the assumptions and beliefs that appear to remove options without objective consideration. The fourth step of the GROW model, what will you do, gets the team member to start thinking in terms of actions. What will they agree to to do as the next steps? What actions are they gonna set themselves and be accountable for? It is important that they decide on the actions and that you, the coach are not telling them or deciding for them. When challenging the actions, tied into the goals agreed. For example, you could ask, what makes you think that this is the best route to achieving your XYZ goal? Subsequent coaching sessions should include a review of progress against each goal and coaching them through the obstacles that they need to overcome to reach each goal. Always leave a coaching session with a team member owning at least one action. So there you have a quick summary of the GROW model. It is a very useful framework to coach individuals to reach goals and in the process of doing so improve their performance and skills. Developing coaching skills for leaders and managers is a very important skill set to drive performance from your team and business. A supportive and development focused culture is needed to underpin a coaching approach for leaders and managers. Using questions rather than telling to drive learning and development while employing active listening skills is a huge step forward for most managers and leaders. Coaching is a bigger time investment in the early stages compared to mentoring and training. Coaching should produce bigger improvements over the medium to long term when compared to training and mentoring. A coaching approach and using coaching skills are not right for every situation. You must use your judgment as to whether you use training, mentoring or coaching skills for each situation. In many cases, you are likely to use a mix of these skills. As a reminder, we have gone through, firstly, the importance of self-awareness. Secondly, four behaviors to support coaching skills in the workplace. Third, the power of asking questions. Fourth, active listening, the underrated secret weapon and fifth, coaching for performance using the grow model. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comment section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.