 I'm Geoff Watts and welcome to another of my top 10 tips videos. In this video we're going to look at some tips for helping you coach as a leader. So in this video we'll look at what coaching is, why it's important for leadership, and some tips on how you can get better at coaching in your leadership role. There are a number of different leadership styles and stances that you can adopt depending on the results that you're looking to achieve and the environment that you find yourself in. If you're looking to create a more self-organising, resilient and proactive culture, then a coaching approach could be a helpful, useful tool for you. But if you're looking to develop self-sustaining teams, self-organisation, resilience, proactivity, creativity, then coaching could be something that would be helpful to you in creating that kind of culture. So if you're looking for some quick results where there is a right answer, you know the right answer and you just want immediate compliance, then coaching might not be the most appropriate tool in your toolbox. So what is coaching? Well, coaching is about helping other people find their solution based on a getting a better understanding of their situation. It's not about trying to work out how to weedle your solution into other people's minds so that they say what you want them to say. As a coach, my role is to try and help the people that I'm coaching get a greater insight and awareness as to what's going on, both in the situation and for themselves, so that they can make a much more informed decision about what they want to do to achieve their goals. And from a leader's perspective, that can be quite a challenge. Most people have got to their position in leadership because of their expertise, their ability to solve problems, their ability to analyze and find the right solution. A coaching leader will put their need to solve the problem to one side and focus on what the person or the people they're coaching think they need to solve and help them solve their problem. Coaching is really about building self-sufficiency within the people you're coaching rather than being the bottleneck as a leader, so that every time there's a problem, they come to you for a solution. Successful coaching builds that self-reliance and people know that they can solve their own problems. Coaching is different to mentoring because mentoring is really about providing or passing on expertise or experience or know-how. So mentoring you could say is about having the right answer or as coaching is about finding the right question because the right question will unlock the right thought process for the person you're coaching and allow them to find their own path rather than just follow yours. Coaching isn't management either because a coach doesn't hold the agenda. They don't hold the power in their relationship. So the person you're coaching is in charge of what they want to focus on and how they want to go about solving it. Coaching isn't about people learning from your mistakes. If anything, it's about helping them make their own mistakes in a safe environment and learning from them. So when is coaching appropriate for a leader? Well if you're looking to get engagement and buy in, then helping people find their own solutions is going to help with that. If you're looking to create self-sufficiency, proactivity, again coaching is going to help with that because you're helping people find their own solutions. If you were looking to focus your time somewhere else and need to get away from being the bottleneck or the dependency within a team, then again a coaching approach will help you achieve that. So what can you do? Well here's some tips. Tip 10 is to agree what coaching is. Now that might sound strange because I've just kind of given you a definition of what coaching is but not everyone has the same interpretation or expectations of coaching. Not every coach has the same coaching style. So the first thing is to get some kind of common agreement about the expectations of what coaching is expected to provide and how we're going to go about doing that, what our roles, our responsibilities, our expectations of one another are. If one person's expecting one thing and somebody else expecting another, it's not going to be particularly effective. This can be as simple as both parties writing out what they believe their definition of coaching is and their expectations. Comparing and contrasting and then coming to a common agreement about what we both expect coaching is. This is often called a coaching contract but it doesn't have to be the right definition. The most important thing is that we have our definition and we agree on it. It might change over time but it's good enough for now. Tip 9 is to create some safety and I'm talking psychological safety here. Create the conditions for the person or the people that are coaching to feel comfortable with you and with the process. Create an environment where people feel able to be open, to be vulnerable, to share their concerns, their hopes, their aspirations, their anxieties because the more open people can be in coaching the more benefit they get from it. They have to be sure that what they're saying to you in this conversation, in this coaching relationship is not going to come back to haunt them, that you have no ulterior motive that is not going to be used in their performance appraisals without them knowing or shared with anybody else. Whatever it is that they need to feel comfortable, do whatever you can to give it to them. The first step is usually around confidentiality. This idea that clarifying that there is no ulterior motive, that what's said here is safe and secure. If you're coaching from a position of line manager then that can obviously be quite tough because there's often this view that appearances need to be kept up. The appearance of strength that we can't really risk showing our weaknesses to our line managers for fear that we'll come back and haunt or hamper our career progression. So making clear that that's not what's going to happen here is really important and not just saying it, proving it. And one way you can prove it is by demonstrating vulnerability yourself. If you are prepared to make yourself vulnerable you're not only an increased empathy and trust in the process but you demonstrate that nothing really bad is going to happen as a result. Tip 8 is to get permission. That might sound strange because we've already got an agreement as to what coaching is. Almost a coaching contract but we still need explicit permission to be that person or that team's coach. Coaching really should be pulled as a service. That's the derby used phrase that I really like which is don't go around inflicting your help on people. You're not going to be an effective coach if you come along and say right I'm going to coach you on this. Tip 7 is to meet them where they are. Now what does that mean? Well really it means don't make any assumptions about what their concerns are, their anxieties, their hopes, their goals, their objectives to what coaching is for them. This is about what they think they should be doing and why. So ask, find out and really listen to what's being said. Once you understand where they are, where they're coming from or their current situation is, only then can you really start working with them to help them find some form of momentum towards whatever their goal is. Tip 6 is ask to help them understand. Now that can be quite tricky. As human beings we're naturally curious, we want to know stuff, we want to find stuff out. Part of that is so that we can draw connections, identify patterns, solve problems but part of it is also because we're just nosy. And as I mentioned earlier on the best leaders, the best coach leaders don't necessarily worry about having the right answer. Their primary concern instead is to have the right question because the right question will force the right thought process for the person, the team that you're coaching. And ultimately that will be what helps them gain forward momentum. I say this can be tricky partly because of our curiosity but also partly because well we don't like silence. Our natural tendency will be to fill that silence and rescue that person by offering a suggestion of our own. Now that's good, it's nice, it's helpful in a way but that teaches us and it teaches them that when times get tough and we're struggling then they can rather ask to come up with a solution. And when we're coaching that's not our aim. Our aim is to try and create that self-sufficiency and that ability to solve their own problems. When we're in coaching mode the goal is to help them find their answer, not to satisfy our curiosity. Now this is just something you're going to have to practice, reflect on, get some feedback on perhaps. Tip five is once we've asked to help them understand is to listen actively. Active listening is more than just hearing the words, it's listening for the intention behind the words, it's listening for inconsistencies. And a big part of active listening is to play back what we've heard, just to check we've heard it correctly and then we're not passing it through our own filters and hearing what we expect to hear or want to hear. So something as simple as can I just check I've heard that correctly, what I heard you saying was this. That kind of playing things back and just checking in, we'll just ensure we're staying on the same page, not diverting in our understanding of things. And also it increases a bit of empathy. People like to be listened to, they like to be heard and it proves that you're staying with them, that you're staying with the conversation. Tip four is have belief. One of my favorite quotes is from Goverland and he said, When we treat a man as he is, we make him worse than he is. But when we treat a man as if he already were what he could be, we make him what he should be. One of the principles of effective coaching for me is the idea of unconditional positive regard. And that means we have a view that the people we're coaching have the potential to become what they want or need to be. And whether or not that's true is secondary to whether or not it's helpful, which might sound like a strange thing to say. But if you believe it's true and you act as if you believe it's true, then you're more likely to make it true. Not least of all because you're going to pass on that feeling that it's possible or even inevitable to the person you're coaching. If you don't believe in them, that will also transmit to them and they'll lose faith in your integrity, your relationship as a coach, as a leader, and they'll lose faith in themselves as well as the process. To be honest, I'd much rather be proven wrong having a positive view of somebody than proven wrong when having a negative view of somebody. Tip three is to help the people you're coaching increase the benefit. Hopefully once we've worked out what their goal is, what they would like to achieve, we can deduce that it's beneficial for them to do so. If it isn't valuable to them, why would they even bother doing it? Clarifying what that benefit is, really drilling down into what it can do for them in the long term in terms of their objectives, their career goals, but also their values and their principles. Sometimes helping them imagine a future where what they're aiming for, whether it's learning a new skill or making a change at work or whatever, imagining that that's already happened has become a reality can help make it more real, more inspiring and increase their motivation to actually give it a go and go for it. By talking through the benefits with a coach, sometimes they can also identify benefits that they weren't even aware of or just haven't really given a lot of thought to. All of these extra benefits and the weight and the perception of these benefits can just give them that sense of, yeah, this is worth investing more time in. This is worth doing. I want this. Tip two is to reduce the cost. So on the flip side of that cost benefit equation, if you like, there are some costs associated with making it happen. These could be financial costs, time costs, emotional costs, mental costs, physical costs, opportunity costs or just fears, fear of failure, for example, and you as a coach can help reduce them or mitigate them. Some of those costs will be real. Okay, they will actually be something that they need to do in order to get some benefit. And by listing them out, we can create an action plan for mitigating those costs, making things a little bit easier. Perhaps even you as a coach or a leader can do something to help reduce those costs. Maybe some of those costs might not actually be real. Quite often, people will imagine costs or barriers or problems that in all probability won't happen. So just getting them out of your head, verbalizing them or putting them on paper can help us just critically evaluate their likelihood. And if they are unlikely, then we can just make a conscious decision to not include them in our decision making process of whether to go ahead with this or not, which increases the chances of it happening. And my number one tip for increasing your coaching ability as a leader is to let go of the solution. Now, I know I'm running the risk of repeating myself here, but it's so important it's worth saying again. This is one of the problems that we're mostly unaware of. As a leader, we have a history of expecting to solve problems, of being expected to solve problems, of having problems escalated to us to for us to do something about being the problem solver has helped us to get where we are. But it won't help our people get to where they need to be. So letting go of your idea of the solution is the number one thing that you can do to increase your effectiveness as a coaching leader. One thing you can do to help you with this is just to remind yourself that even if you know the answer, your solution is never going to be as likely to be successful as a solution you can help somebody else come up with. And the main reason for that is ownership, because their idea is their idea. They're much more invested in their idea being a success than my idea being a success. Even if you're not intending for them to take your solution on, it's much harder for them to get rid of that thought out of their heads once he's in there than if they've got a blank canvas to start from. If they're struggling to come up with a solution or an idea, it can be overly tempting to offer yours. It's natural to want to rescue them with your idea, your solution, your suggestion. And having an idea in your head can stop you thinking about anything else, stop you being present. But if you're in that kind of situation and you do offer something, even with good intentions, you're going to be overly influencing the situation. So if you find yourself in a situation where the person you're coaching is struggling to come up with our own idea, try coming back to something they've done in the past. Ask them, when have they been successful? When have they tried something and it worked, even if it's not directly related to the situation at hand. Looking back at their past strengths, their past successes and seeing if anything can be pulled from those situations and applied to the present to help them in this situation. Another strategy that could be useful for you as a coach here is to help them think about how to make the situation worse. We often call this the psychopath approach. And people often find it easier to be destructive and constructive. But once you've thought of all the ways of making it worse, you can flip them to think how we can make it better in the alternative. Or at least stop it from getting worse. But whatever you do, try really hard to keep your solution and your suggestions out of this conversation. So those are the top 10 tips. Just a quick recap. Agree what coaching is between yourself and the person you're coaching. Create a sense of psychological safety. Get permission to be their coach. Meet them where they are. Ask questions to help them understand, not you to understand. Listen actively. Have belief in them. Help them increase the benefit of what they're trying to do. Help them reduce the cost and the concerns with what they're looking to do. And let go of the solution yourself. I hope those tips were useful and you can go up at some of them into practice in your leadership style when coaching your people and your teams. So if you've got anything that you would like some tips on in the future, all you need to do is like the video, subscribe to the channel and leave a comment naming the topic that you're looking for some help in. And you never know, the next video could be for you. Also, if you're looking to help yourself develop as a coach and a leader, then why not try some of our training courses? Just check out inspectandadapt.com and look at the Certified Agile Leadership Course or the Advanced Certified Scrum Master Course or the Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner Course or you can get some one-to-one coaching sessions with me. Sometimes having some one-to-one coaching yourself provides a great insight into your coaching style and your coaching approaches. There's even a discounted Taster Session available. Just look on inspectandadapt.com and go to coaching. Okay, well that's the end of the video. I hope it was useful and until next time, I'll see you soon.