No matter the style, it’s imperative a coach does the following four fundamental things to drive success: 1. Acknowledge people’s strengths more than the areas they need to improve. 2. Ask open-ended questions, typically starting with the word ‘what.’ 3. Demonstrate active listening by paraphrasing back what somebody said or meant, which leads to greater trust. 4. Celebrate progress as much as possible, not just by acknowledging it but truly celebrating it by pinpointing it and demonstrating or reviewing its value. Why Questions Questions stimulate a different response in people. For example, if you approach someone who has a negative attitude and you simply tell them they have a negative attitude, do they honestly look back at us and reply, “I think you’re right?” No, they typically become defensive and push back. Now, when you ask questions such as, “What are you going to do to positively engage with your teammates?”, that will stimulate a different response and begin a thought process using a technique called framing. Framing is when you can somewhat control the individual’s response by framing out the question so they can only answer in a positive way. This is just one technique and strategy, yet this is where a great leader learns different questioning skills and models of questions, a vital step to their success. It has been estimated that 80% to 85% of employees significantly lack self-awareness, according to a study done by Tasha Eurich. She’s a PhD industrial psychologist who reported in her survey that 95% of the people stated they were highly self-aware, then later after a series of exercises she discovered only 10% to 15% were truly self-aware. That is a significant gap. When considering self-awareness, think about some of the most fundamental times we have to provide feedback. When you tell someone they’re being negative and they’re nodding, yet they leave our office and typically start to strike the same behavior even within a few days, it shows that change of behavior requires practice and constant application of coaching. Simply telling someone to be more positive doesn’t work. This is why coaching is so powerful. The Rules of Coaching We live in such a finite society where things are deemed right and wrong, and parameters are very linear and literal. The toughest thing about coaching people is the element of unpredictability. It is vital we learn conversation skills. Even when people share the same challenges, they’ll have different impacts on different people. It’s critical to realize that conversational navigation is when our questions or coaching are not having the success we would like, we must navigate and draw upon different questioning skills and models.
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