Five Tips For Coaching Your Team

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.

If you are a leader or manager who would like to have a team who are much more independent in their thinking, who proactively come up with solutions to everyday problems and challenges, then today's episode of the Leader's Kit Bag is for you. If you've been tuning in to the latest chapter of the Leaders Kit Bag, you'll have heard me talking about how as leaders and managers, we can start to bring in some of the skills of a coach into how we lead and manage on a day to day basis. Well, in today's episode I've got five quick and easy tools or strategies that you can play around with to transition yourself from somebody who just manages to a leader who coaches. So number one, this is about learning to hold back and not to jump straight in, to simply telling people what to do and how to do it when they come to you with a problem or challenge. If we can learn to hold back, create that pause that gives us the time and space to step into coaching mode. The second thing to do is to really work on your listening skills. Okay, practice active listening. The standard of listening in most organisations, in most meetings and one to ones, is pretty terrible. People don't listen to understand. In many cases, people are simply listening to speak. So focus. The second step is to focus on dialing up your listening skills. You'll get significantly better results from your team if you do that. The third thing to do is to get really comfortable with silence. You might ask somebody in your team, hey, what are some of the potential solutions? What do you think you could do to solve this challenge? And the person in your team might go silent and you will almost certainly find that silence really, really awkward. But it won't be awkward for them. They are simply thinking and processing what you have just asked them to help you. To help make that slightly less awkward Pay attention to their eyes. If their eyes go up to one corner or down to one corner, that simply means they are processing it. If you see the eyes move in that manner, have the courage to hold the silence a little more. The fourth tip for you around how you can become much more of a coach instead of just a manager is to really focus on asking better questions. If you want to get better ideas from people, we simply need to focus on asking better questions. Good coaching questions are always open questions, questions that people can't simply answer with a yes or no. And the fifth and final tip for you around bringing in the skills of a coach into how you lead and manage on a day to day basis is around making sure that you are not trying to add too much value. You might have a very short coaching conversation with someone in your team where they come up with a perfectly workable plan that is going to deliver great results. And because of your experience and expertise and knowledge, you might think of an idea that would just make it that little bit better. And because we are a leader and we think we have to add value, you might add that on. Just make that final suggestion. But be careful in sharing that little bit extra. You might improve the plan by say 10%. You might make their plan 10% better, but in doing so you could reduce their motivation by 50%. Why? Because their plan, their great idea that they developed themselves just with a little bit of coaching from you, suddenly becomes your plan. And people are always much more motivated and engaged to work on our own plans as opposed to executing the plans of other people. So there you have your five tips for how you can bring in some of the skills of a coach into how you lead and manage on a day to day basis. Hope it's been useful. And as always folks, look, look after yourself, look after those you've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. And until next time, lead on.