Coaching Skills For Leaders

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. It's the weekly micro edition of my podcast. Each episode is just six minutes long and is designed to provide you with tips, tools and tactics around specific aspects of leadership and management. It addresses some of the most common challenges you will face as a leader or manager. They are all recorded unscripted whilst I'm out walking in the countryside. So you'll probably hear birds tweeting in the background or just ambient noise as the people around me are going about their day to day life. That's all I'm going to say by way of an introduction, so let's dive straight in to this week's episode.

Today's episode of the Leaders Kitback is the last in a series of four that's focused on helping us to bring in the skills of a coach into how we lead and manage our teams on a day to day basis. So if you've enjoyed the last three and are looking for a simple practical framework to help you coach your team members to great success, then you're in the right place. In this episode of the Leader Kit Bag, I'm going to give you a four minute overview of one of the simplest, most long standing and most effective coaching frameworks that you can take away and use right now. A very quick overview of the GROW coaching model. It was created by Sir John Whitmore, allegedly although there's been various claims to its origin, but widely accredited to Sir John Whitmore back in the early 2000s. And it's the GROW framework which is a simple acronym to keep in your mind to guide you through these coaching conversations with your team. So to the acronym the G of GROW simply stands for what is the goal? What is it the person you are coaching is really trying to achieve? If we don't know where we're trying to go, if we don't know really clearly, if they don't know clearly what it is they're trying to achieve, then any solution is going to be the right solution. So we have to start by helping them get really clear what is the goal or outcome they're looking for. Sounds obvious, but in my experience from having hundreds of coaching conversations with leaders at all level, so often the individual doesn't really know what it is they are trying to achieve. So the G is about nailing down the goal, the R in the GROW model, that's about understanding the reality. In other words, what is the current situation? Where are they right now? How far short of that goal are they what's going on? What does the challenge look like? What have they tried? These are all the sorts of things you are trying to help them to understand or that you need to understand in order to be able to ask the right question to help them work out the options or the route forward. And talking of options, that's what the O in the Grove model stands for. What are the options? What are the things that they could do that would move them towards their goal? Now, initially, it doesn't matter how realistic, achievable, outlandish those options are, you're just trying to generate solutions. And sometimes one of those outlandish ideas might just within it give you the, or the other person the kernel of an idea that might help them when combined with some other options. So O is simply about helping them understand some of the things that they could do to achieve that particular goal. And once you've done that, you get to the W in the grow model. Now, you'll sometimes hear different sort of words for the W, sometimes it's will. I like to think of it as the way forward. So really here, having created and generated list of options, we're now testing and validating those options and working out which ones are going to work, which ones the individual has got the most energy around, Put it into practice. And when we're looking at the way forward, one of the things I'm always thinking about and asking of those that I'm coaching is like, where is your will or motivation around the plan that we've discussed? And I might be literally asking things like, okay, on a scale of 1 to 10, if you were to go away and put into practice this option that we are describing and we are talking about here, how likely is that to solve the challenge and help you achieve, achieve the goal you want to achieve? And if their answer is anything less than 7 on that 1 to 10 scale, I know there's something not quite right about the plan that they've identified. And similarly, I'd also be asking, how motivated are you to go away and put this plan into action? And again, if they're answering anything less than a seven, I know something isn't quite right. And maybe we need to circle back to options in the model and continue looking at different options. And that leads me to the very final thing in today's episode of the Leaders Kit Bag, which looking at the clock is going to go slightly longer than normal. The grow framework is incredibly powerful as a coaching tool or framework. So long as we only use it as a framework use it as a loose structure to guide your coaching conversations and don't allow it to be a constrained, constrictive, four step process that you push people through. If you do that, you will lose the essence of coaching and people will feel like they're having a process done to them rather than they are being coached. That's it for this episode folks. Hope it's been useful. As always, look after yourself. Look after those you got the privilege and responsibility to lead. Until next time, lead on.