The Coaching Container
“Doesn’t that take more time?” Leaders and managers ask me when we’re exploring how to be coach-like.
Sure does.
But what’s the alternative?
People feeling like they’re not growing.
That you don’t think they can improve,
Bored and limited because you’re not investing in their development.
Your best talent are hungry to progress.
Your high potentials want to see a bigger future for themselves.
Those who are under-performing will either rise to the challenge or fall away because they’re no longer a match to your expectations.
Coach-like skills
flush out
under-performance.
Here’s how to apply coach-like skills today so you can partner your people to grow, we call it the Coaching Container:
Before communicating with your team member, be very clear on what you want first - the outcome, standard of performance, quality of work. When we haven’t taken the time to get clear, we half-communicate and it leaves people guessing what we want. Some will be confident enough to clarify with us, others will just get busy and head off in the wrong direction.
Communicate your expectations, flex how you say it and what you say so you are speaking their language. Then ask for them to share with you what they understand your expectations to be. We make so many assumptions which cause rework and revisiting the same problems.
Stay with the problem long enough…it’s going to get awkward when we’re taking time to clarify the issue and what’s really going on (which, by the way, is why we don’t do it). But we’re not helping anyone when we lower our expectations because we don’t want to have an uncomfortable conversation.
Being consistently coach-like means we’re doing more listening and asking better questions, uncovering what’s really going and solving the right problems.
Coach-like skills slow down the spin and speed up the right results in the right direction.
If you’re interested in developing your coach-like skills, register for our free Masterclass in May - YOU AS COACH.
(Photo used with permission. Incredibly inspired by these successful leaders and experts who are doing the work to grow their coach-like skills).