My Journey with Coaching
Coaching has taken various definitions – let’s have a common understanding of what we mean by Coaching Conversations
Coaching in Sports
Like most young boys, my first encounter with coaching was in sports. I started with soccer in primary school and then went on to track and field and enjoyed bodybuilding. I had the opportunity to be coached and to coach others. Coaches in sports have a clear mandate to win. Though they motivate their teams to win, they typically take a hard-nose, no nonsense approach to improving performance. It is about the drills, techniques, and giving feedback for improvement. Coaching in sports is most often equated to Training.
COACHING for IMPROVED PERFORMANCE
In the business world, I was formally introduced to Coaching in 1997 in a leadership workshop. The textbook for the workshop was, “Coaching For Improved Work Performance by Ferdinand F. Fournies, 1978“. While Fournies busted some myths about what manager get paid for, he typically provided techniques related to behavior modification. Fournies makes an assumption that managers are thoroughly familiar with the employee’s expected and appropriate behaviors for their specific jobs and suggested they, “start managing those behaviors”.
Coaching FOR COMMITMENT
“In 1999, when the second edition of “Coaching for Commitment by Dennis Kinlaw” was published, the focus had shifted to an employee-centric viewpoint wherein empowered employees were expected to operate as leaders, thus shifting the focus of coaching to include every member of an organization to act as a coach to others.” This was the era of computerization, and the start of the internet and the knowledge economy.
BRAINED-BASED COaching
In 2008, I attended a Brain-Based Coaching workshop conducted by the NeuroLeadership Institute (NLI). I was also introduced to the book written by the founder of NLI, David Rock, “Quiet Leadership, 2006“. In this book David describes the “Six Steps to Transform Performance“ and the first step begins with “Think about Thinking“. “Brain-based coaching can then be defined as facilitating a positive change by first improving thinking.”
DAILY COACHING CONVERSATIONS
You can now probably see why managers have different definitions and views on coaching. Likewise, colleagues may have had different experiences (some unpleasant) when they were told they are being coached.
I’m not claiming that I have become a guru in coaching. However, as the saying goes, “you teach what you need to learn most“, I have studied this subject for more than 20 years. In sports, I was introduced to coaches who were typically full of vigor and were loud. While they were there to motivate the team, they sometimes yelled and got aggressive to drive performance. You were reminded often – “no pain, no gain“. Things did not change much when I joined the Navy. While in the Naval Academy we were thought about leadership by example, and coaching was pretty much about conditioning behaviors and attempted motivational speeches. I plead guilty here as well.
Since the time I was introduced to coaching in the corporate world, I have attended several workshops, read numerous books on coaching, and facilitated coaching workshops across the world. That’s right, I’m a hardened believer that if you wish to learn something, you need to learn with the intention of teaching. As expected, participants in my workshops had differing views of coaching. Coaching while it was introduced as one of the 4 Leadership Style in the Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership model, I have now come to the conclusion that Coaching is about the Leadership Conversations we have daily with our teams. In another words, Leadership Conversations are placed synonymous with Coaching Conversations.
I have also observed that the Coaching Conversations are not easily put in practice. One of the reason for this is most workshops are typically theoretical. In other cases, manager are either introduced to models that are too general, or are confused with varied frameworks and acronyms. Also, as a manager and/or leader you are enrolled into various workshops; Coaching, Providing Effective Feedback, Negotiations, Managing Difficult Conversations, Sales etc. Managers struggle to learn all the different concepts, let alone build a strong habit to have effective conversations. Trust me – I still struggle with it and and am only able to catch myself as I recall what I’m sharing and more often my family and colleagues just remind me when I don’t walk my talk.
I have given a lot of thought on how best to help leaders develop their coaching habit and have developed a single framework that discusses the fundamental principles, processes and practices that will help with effective conversations and engagement.
I coined this framework 