Executive and Leadership Coach, Lecturer, Founder of unabridged – engaging your power and potential for greater personal and social impact.

As a leadership coach and trainer, I find that most managers are delighted to learn about coaching and enthusiastic to give it a try. But what happens when you are asked to start implementing the techniques you learned in a two-hour coach training? Objections surface: “Coaching takes too much time — time I don’t have,” “I don’t want to look like I don’t know what I am doing” and “This is really too woo-woo/touchy-feely for me in the office environment.”

Here are four practical suggestions to start coaching that even the most time-pressed and/or skeptical leader can put into practice.

Broaden Your Leadership Repertoire

When we coach, we are guiding someone to their own inner power, wisdom and possibility. This involves accompanying, exploring and encouraging rather than directing, telling and answering. This can feel uncomfortable and like a loss of power for a manager.

Expanding your leadership repertoire is not about replacing one way of being with another but about adding new approaches. Use a simple “3 Rs” check to rethink how you intervene with your direct reports:

• Reframe your intention. As a coach, your goal is to help your direct report access their resourcefulness so that they can resolve an issue — not step in yourself to solve it.

• Replace your direction with a question. Ask, “What would your most resourceful self do?” or “What else might be possible?”

• Revise your approach to weighing in. Give space and wait. For example, when discussing options, wait for three employee-generated options before you weigh in with any suggestions.

Remember that when adopting a coaching approach, you are orchestrating to engage hearts and minds and achieve a more efficient and sustainable result.

Manage Your Own Expectations

No one expects managers and leaders to demonstrate a professional coach’s level of proficiency with coaching tools, and you shouldn’t expect this of yourself, either. Manage your expectations accordingly:

• Commit to using some of the coaching tools. These might include entering a conversation with a mindful presence and an other-focus, not judging, asking a coaching question at your next face-to-face or team meeting or demonstrating deep listening. By setting an intention and following through, you develop skill and confidence.

• Practice! Plan a 10-minute coaching conversation using a coaching model (e.g., GROW, OSKAR, SCARF) with one of your direct reports. Prepare questions for each phase beforehand, let your employee know that you will be using a coaching approach as part of the contracting process and have a go.

By starting small and managing your expectations, you can get the ball rolling and develop your coaching skills, build confidence and add to your leadership toolbox.

Ask Powerful Questions Anywhere, Anytime

One of a coach’s superpowers is their ability to ask powerful questions. Questions should be simple and open-ended and prioritize “what” or “how” over “why.” Aim for questions that help employees access their strengths, experiences, power, values, wisdom and possibilities.

Develop a repertoire of open-ended coaching questions that you feel comfortable using. Some of my favorites include:

• What is the issue? Can you bottom-line it for me?

• What have you already thought about doing so far?

• What would you advise your most trusted colleague to do in this situation?

• What would you do if nothing stood in your way?

• What else can you think of?

For those less comfortable with the “feeling side,” note that none of these questions dip into emotional terrain. Virtually all participants I work with agree that they can introduce more powerful questions into their conversations and begin to create a balance between traditional closed-ended, directive questions and the more generative, open-ended questions that stimulate thinking. 

Don’t be afraid to “borrow” others’ questions as you develop your favorites. And remember the golden rule: Don’t ask a question if you are not prepared to listen to the response.

Practice Listening — And Keep Practicing

Despite a wealth of resources on how to be a good listener, most of us still struggle with this basic, fundamental and often difficult-to-master skill. It can be challenging to bring our full attention to the other, paying attention to cues from the body, face and shifts in energy. We often stay with familiar listening habits that occur at more shallow and ego-centric levels, where we are preoccupied with our own interior monologue or what we should say next. This is normal, but we can improve. Here are some tips that can be integrated into any conversation:

• Set an intention to listen with curiosity to your direct report in the next meeting, including specifics about how you are going to do this (paraphrasing, taking notes, uh-hums, not speaking until they have finished, asking follow-up questions, etc.).

• Notice when your attention has drifted and return to attentive listening. Don’t beat yourself up — this is normal — just notice and come back.

One of my leadership clients explained how difficult she found it to listen to others, even other senior managers: “They are too slow; I am way ahead of them.” Not surprisingly, her colleagues and staff didn’t feel heard. We prepared a customized checklist for her to use that included icons for the head, heart and body, which were triggers for her to pay attention to what she heard, what she captured in terms of emotion coming from the other and herself and what she witnessed in terms of gestures or expressions in the other, as well as herself. This helped her slow down, focus attention on the other and notice information about her conversations that she had previously missed.

If you’ve had some training but have been reticent to try it out, these practical tips can get you over your inertia. A coaching conversation can take place in as little as 10 minutes, and there are plenty of tools, including asking powerful questions, listening and being present and non-judgemental, that can be used in any number of settings. The next time you want to have a conversation that engages and empowers a direct report, pull out a few of your coaching tools and give them a try.

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