So you’re Thinking about Coaching?
So you’re Thinking
about Coaching?
A PROSPECTUS
…So You’re Thinking about Coaching?
Coaching is a powerful, personalised way to build leadership capability and ensure learning is applied in real work-time to achieve long-lasting development outcomes that really matter to you.
If you’re reading this you must have asked about leadership coaching services The Change Forum provides.
Forward-thinking leaders increasingly see coaching as an essential adjunct for building their leadership capability and achieving long-lasting development outcomes. Everyone can benefit from some coaching from time-to-time – having a supportive, sounding board to help you help yourself learn to lead more effectively – with calm, poise, balance, judgement and integrity.
Maybe you just want to find out what “all this coaching stuff is about”. Or perhaps, you’ve already decided you want to do some coaching and you’re looking to see who might be the best choice to help you. Either way, you’re probably wondering about things like:
s What is coaching and why do it?
s What can coaching help me with?
s What is your coaching approach like – and will it suit me?
s What happens inside a typical coaching session?
s What do I need to do to make coaching work?
s How can I tell if coaching is working for me?
We hope this ‘coaching prospectus’ will give you some simple, straightforward answers to questions like these. After all, if you’re going to invest time and money in personalised leadership coaching, you want to make sure you’re clear on the reasons for doing it, the results you might get and the benefits you and your organisation might expect.
Whether its one-on-one or group-based, coaching is a series of conversations that help you to get clear about challenges you face in various facets of your leadership role – and then help you formulate improvement goals and try-out actions for yourself or your team that move you closer towards where you imagine being.
You probably have a pretty good idea of what kind of coaching help you need already – though maybe you haven’t exactly sat down and translated it into specific goals and actions plans. So we’ve included some useful checklists to help you make up your mind and think more carefully about you want coaching to help you achieve.
We’ve also given you (we hope) extensive insights into our coaching approach so you can decide whether it might suit you. All coaches have different approaches, use different frameworks, tools and techniques and have a different personal flavour. What suits one person just won’t suit someone else. The fit between you, your coach and the coaching approach is critical for your learning comfort and success.
We hope you find it useful in making up your mind – and good luck with you coaching journey!
Contents
Page…So You’re Thinking about Coaching? 2
1. Why Do Coaching? 4
2. What can Coaching Help me with? 5
3. The Coaching Challenges Checklist 5
4. What is Coaching all About? 7
5. The Coach and the Window-Cleaner 8
6. Coaching in Action – What are the Key Elements? 10
7. The Personal Side of Coaching 11
8. The Emotional Side of Coaching 12
9. Conversational Coaching 14
10. What’s our Coaching Approach? 15
11. Our 5-Stage Coaching Process 18
12. What happens in a Typical Coaching Session? 20
13. What will our First Meeting be like? 21
14. Coaching for Personal Change 22
15. What do I need to Do to make Coaching Work? 24
16. How can I Help Me Help Myself? 25
17. How can I tell if Coaching’s Working? 29
18. What do you Cover in Team Coaching? 32
19. How can I Become more of a Coaching Leader? 33
20. What does our Coaching cost? 34
21. About your Coach… 35
Contact…
Bill CropperDirector & Principal Coach
Team Technologies Forum Pty Ltd
Trading as
The Change Forum
ABN 52 074 816 470
Tel: 07-4068 7591 Mob: 0429–687 513
Fax: 07-4068 7555
P.O. Box 136, Mission Beach Qld 4852
1. Why Do Coaching?
This is the first question you’ll probably ask. After all, if you’re going to invest time and money in personalised leadership coaching, you want to make sure you’re clear on the reasons for doing it, the results you might get and the benefits you and your organisation might expect.
So here’s our take on the answer to your first question...
No-onemanages on their own anymore. Organisations are too complex, too fast and too changeable for any single person to manage effectively all by themselves.
Whatever changes you’re dealing with – big or small, individual or team-based – most people find it hard to change on their own. They need to be supported, guided and facilitated through the change. In other words, they need to be coached.
q Forward-thinking leaders increasingly see coaching as an essential adjunct for building their leadership capability and achieving long-lasting development outcomes.
q Everyone can benefit from having a coach – asupportive, sounding board to help you help yourselflearn to lead more effectively – with calm, poise, balance, judgement and integrity.
q Coaching is a powerful, personalised way to ensure learning is retained, acted on and applied in real work-time. Numerous studies substantiate its superiority over traditional training strategies to help you get long-lasting results that matter.
Æ Here are some of the benefits people tell us they derive from coaching...
q Coaching helped me clarify the vision of what I really want
q Gives me a quiet space to reflect – free from the pressure of work
q I get to work on what I want to work on – the things that matter to me.
q You can be more open and honest about issues that worry you
q It’s something I’m doing for my self first – and it also benefits the organisation
q You get to work at your own pace – and set your own goals
q You feel safer talking about touchy issues – and know you’re not being judged
q It’s a time when I can slow down – and really think deeply about stuff
q It helps keep me motivated and focused – and gets me to take action
q I see situations and myself more clearly – and what I can do differently
q I’m more aware and understand my emotional patterns better
q Opened up possibilities – to look at what I could be doing not just what I’m not
Essentially, coaching – either individually or as part of a small group – provides an opportunity for you to engage in a series of in-depth conversations that explore challenges you face in your leadership role and aim to establish some personal improvement goals and try-out actions to help you move closer towards where you imagine yourself being.
2. What can Coaching Help me with?
You probably have a pretty good idea of what kind of coaching help you need already – though maybe you haven’t exactly sat down and translated it into specific goals and actions plans.
That’s OK. Coaching can do that for you....
Part of what coaches do is help people get in touch with their gifts, talents, wants, values, needs and dreams, as well as help them come to understand themselves and what motivates, drives or inspires them.
As we often say, coaches help people reveal themselves to themselves...
Æ Here are some challenges we’ve helped people work on over the years...
q How can I get more adept at leading change and get others on-board with it?
q How can I improve the way I get on with other managers and leaders?
q How can I build a more cohesive team that works well together?
q How can I grow my leadership role to meet new work challenges?
q How can I adapt to new roles and relationships emerging in my organisation?
q How can I handle work-stress and tension in a more balanced way?
q How can I go about creating a more productive work culture?
q How can I handle difficult situations in more emotionally intelligent ways?
q How can I improve the work behaviours or general culture in my team?
q How can I work on my own management practices to get better results?
q How can I personally take a more coaching approach to leadership?
3. The Coaching Challenges Checklist
s What challenges do you face at work where you think coaching can help?
We hope this checklist will help you think about and refine your specific coaching goals and challenges. There are 2 steps we suggest to using the checklist.
1. Go through the left-hand column first. Think about things that keep coming up in your leadership role that make you feel uneasy, uncomfortable, challenged, incompetent, etc. Do these correlate with any of the challenges we’ve listed?
2. Then go through the right-hand column. For each item you checked in the L-H Column, contextualise your particular coaching challenge by framing it as a “How Can I....?” statement. This usually helps you to turn a general situation into a more specific goal.
Think about the things that make you feel uneasy or uncomfortable in your current leadership role... Do you need to.....? / Contextualise your coaching challenge… Frame it as a “How Can I...?” statement /£ Overcome a specific performance difficulty you’ve become aware of?
£ Handle specific behavioural problems you encounter with difficult people?
£ Help hone specific leadership skills or develop new roles and capabilities?
£ Work on a specific change agenda you have or learn handle change better?
£ Is there a specific strategic or business development issue that’s bugging you?
£ Develop more personal mastery to promote personal growth and awareness?
£ Explore how your personal behaviour style impacts on your performance ability?
£ Increase your level of personal mastery, self-awareness or emotional intelligence?
£ More effectively manage priorities or handle complexity more confidently?
£ Have better conversations to persuade, influence or connect better with others?
£ Understand more about yourself, your blindspots defences and self-limiting beliefs that may be holding you back from reaching your full potential?
£ Forge more effective teamworking relationships, rethink team workroles or develop more high- performing, cohesive or flexible teams?
£ Handle conflict and deal with difficult discussions with less stress and more positive outcomes?
£ Learn how to adopt a more coaching style of leadership and facilitate others?
£ Rethink your mental models of managing and leading to get more satisfying results?
£ Develop fresh approaches to organisation design or business improvement?
£ Develop new strategic improvement or change initiatives and need help to design/implement these?
s Are there any other challenges or goals you’ve thought of that weren’t listed above?
4. What is Coaching all About?
Put simply, coaching is an extended conversation.
It’s about guiding you through a process of self-change and improvement to identify critical challenges and areas for improvement, set yourself goals and strategies to reach them, and overcome the inevitable obstacles that get in the way...
Whether its one-one-one or group-based, coaching is actually an extended conversation. While the conversations are different for different people and situations, they almost always have a common thread. They’re about:
q Identifying the challenges you face in various facets of your leadership role – personally, professionally and operationally - and then...
q Helping you formulate improvement goals and try-out actions for yourself (and for your team) that moves you closer towards where you imagine yourself being.
We think having a personal vision of what can be better or different is absolutely fundamental – as is the concept of voluntarism.
You can’t forge a very productive coaching relationship with someone who doesn’t want to be coached. If you think we can use coaching to ‘fix’ you, think again. Coaching only works when you’re willing to fix yourself!
While we have in-depth experience in many different coaching contexts, coaching doesn’t fit into neat categories – and we always coach for both performance and personal growth....
Æ We usually find leaders want to address a combination of these...
q Coaching for Personal Mastery: Increases your level of personal mastery and promotes personal growth and self-awareness. This includes emotional coaching – understanding and dealing better with feelings, both your’s and others.
q Executive & Leadership Coaching: Reflecting on your role as a manager and how to refresh your leadership to make it even more effective. This can also take in specific assistance with developing new approaches to organisation renewal or business improvement
q Coaching for Change: Helping you work through a specific change management challenge or initiative in your team or organisation
q Critical Issues Coaching: To better engage with a critical strategic, leadership issue or management concern that keeps coming up for you.
q Conversational Coaching: Raising your level of conversational skills can dramatically improve your leadership effectiveness and the quality of your interactions with others
q Performance Improvement Coaching: Aimed at specific performance difficulties behavioural patterns or other things you single out that are just not happening well for you at work
q Specific Skills Coaching: Equipping you with specific leadership or communication capabilities and tools to enhance role performance, meet new challenges or beat old ones that keep coming up
But the best way to define coaching is by seeing how it works in action. So we’ve put together a mini self-reflection exercise to help you think about the key elements of coaching. It’s called ‘The Coach and the Window-Cleaner’. It goes like this...
5. The Coach and the Window-Cleaner
Sometimes in my executive team coaching sessions, I find myself in the top floors of very tall buildings. If I want people to step back and reflect on what’s going on with them and their interactions, I ask them to just imagine that a window cleaner has hoisted themselves down to this floor and they’re looking in on us.