What is coaching?

Coaching is helping someone get to their goals through guidance and feedback. What it isn’t is bulldozing through a situation to remove all possible difficulties for someone on your team. You’re not going to give the answers, you’re going to help someone get to the answers themselves.

What’s the value in coaching?

The value in coaching is that it’s a little investment now, in order to make your life a lot easier later. Through coaching, you’re training your team how to think about problems at a higher level. They can build on the practice they get in coaching, to get used to talking themselves through problems and unlocking solutions.

If you’re coaching your team, you’re not giving them answers. You’re asking clarifying questions to get them to realize the answer. Through this practice, they get more comfortable coming to their own conclusions, Actively Committing by stating it out loud, and making their own decisions (under supervision). This will help develop employees to a point where they can make bigger and bigger decisions without supervision.

Why can’t I just give them the answer?

If you just give you team the answers, you’ll be able to move faster in any individual situation, but if you assume that you’re going to be working with these people for longer than 6 months, you should invest a little more in their development so that, over the long term you achieve more and progress faster.

By just giving out the answers, you’re robbing your team of the opportunity to develop. Over the long term this will create more work for you.

If it’s crunch time, you might need to give some answers quickly, but when things eventually calm down, return to the coaching skills, and keep setting your team up for success.