The Levels of Change Effort
When you first start coaching someone or a team, the first three or four sessions your aim is to focus on their effort and willingness to improve. It is best to stay away from constructive feedback as much as possible, as you build up their willingness to improve. Progress At this stage, typically between the 5th and 8th coaching session, you are looking for identical areas of improvement specific to progress. When you identify progress, you’ve essentially identified what they need to continue to repeat and improve upon. Result This stage occurs through nurturing into the first level of change (effort) and making people feel good about getting better, and then identifying during the next stage (progress) areas where they are specifically improving. This combination, along with defining expectations of desired results, will lead to predictable and sustainable results. In summary, this process through all three levels of changes takes anywhere from 8 to 12 sessions when targeting a specific area of coaching. A major mistake most leaders make is simply focusing on something (such as a lack of teamwork or a poor attitude, or someone lacking motivation) in one or two sessions and then assuming it’s improvement enough to suffice. It simply doesn’t work that way. People don’t generally improve that way. Define & Coach Define and coach is a strategy to bring specificity to topics that are typically ambiguous or vague. Here is a brief example: we often hear people say things like, “It all comes down to communication,” or “that person needs to be more accountable.” Hearing both those statements, which are fairly common, it leaves things open to interpretation. This strategy allows you to bring specificity to your expectations. In many of the topics, we will suggest this strategy when coaching leaders to coach. Here’s the formula to use: A great teammate is ... fill in the blank by doing what ... list attributes and actions. For a more comprehensive view: A great teammate is somebody who always goes above and beyond the call of duty, assisting teammates voluntarily and arbitrarily with incredible passion and energy to assist, while demonstrating thoughtfulness, active listening, and readiness to help teammates who may be struggling. This may not be your definition, but you can see this is something you can coach to more specifically versus someone just saying, “you have to be a better teammate.”
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