How To Coach As A Leader

The Mindset And Tools Required To Add Coaching To Your Leader Toolkit

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Before we get into what coaching is, let’s cover a few things leaders call coaching that are not, in fact, coaching:

• Advising
• Training
• Editing and critiquing
• Cheerleading
• Evaluating
• Directing
• Doing it themselves and telling the team about it later

What do all of those leadership actions have in common? They all center on the leader’s knowledge instead of the team members’ growth — and focusing on others’ growth is what coaching as a leader is all about. While there are times when advising, training, and directing are the right leadership choices, coaching helps people discover their strengths and come up with their own solutions, empowering them to develop skills autonomously and ultimately building a more flexible and resilient team.

What Is Coaching As A Leader?

Among a leader’s tools, coaching is the least direct and authoritative. It can also feel the most cumbersome to execute when you’re not sure of what it is, or when and how to use it. The first step is to understand that it is just a tool among many — not an exclusive style in which all you ever do is coach. That would be annoying. It can be more accurately thought of as a way to respond to someone else’s challenge. A choice.

When you choose to coach, it might last for just a moment or a whole conversation. It’s the choice not to try to solve the problem yourself, but to become a sounding board and sidekick for the other person to problem-solve. Rather than suggestions, it involves evocative reflections, powerful questions, and encouraging silence that inspires the person being coached to think deeper and puzzle out their own solutions.

The Coaching Mindset

Coaching begins with the assumption that everyone has the potential to set objectives, solve problems, and move their work forward themselves. It involves:

• Taking the time to learn about team members
• Staying curious and open to new ways of thinking
• Big-picture awareness to reflect and ask questions that keep team members on the right track
• Deploying conversational tactics that drive others toward solutions

In other words, coaching is more than just taking certain actions, it requires being present and having a presence that inspires team members to want to find an answer.

Getting To Know Your Team

The secret to being a good coach is creating a presence that makes team members feel open to being coached. That takes relationship building and cultivating a feeling of safety. It requires getting to know team members individually. The way they think, engage with others, and work are clues for when and how to choose to use coaching. Centering the person being coached involves shaping the conversation, including the tone and language, around them. The more customized the conversation, the better.

Staying Curious To Invite New Thinking

Simply telling someone what to do for expediency’s sake and because you already know a good solution usually makes sense. Unless it starts to feel like doing other people’s jobs for them is all that leadership entails, with no time for higher-level tasks like strategy and innovation. Finding moments to coach rather than direct grows trust and autonomy within a team, and can also lead to new ways of thinking that might have otherwise been overlooked.

That openness to new thinking is best characterized by curiosity. Rather than assuming what the right moves are when someone has a familiar challenge, explore the situation together to uncover the layers beneath. This investigative approach helps to depersonalize issues, create a bigger-picture perspective, and spot opportunities for change.

Knowing The Rules Of The Game

The best coaches are grounded in reality. They can see the person they’re working with, and the situation they’re working within, clearly. This is especially true for leaders using coaching.

Every workplace has its own brand of politics, policies, and cultural features, and leaders will nearly always have a greater understanding of how the game is played than their team. While coaching is intended to center the skills, knowledge, and potential of the person being coached, leaders can guide their coaching conversations toward what’s truly within their team members’ control, or to set realistic expectations for the outcomes of their choices.

Growing Coaching Skills

Learning how to add coaching to your leadership style is a process, and implementing it takes trial and error to find what comes naturally. It helps to practice the skills that contribute to a coaching mindset.

• Self-awareness — Understand who you are, how you’re seen, and what drives you
• Situational awareness — Consider how things get done and who does them on your team, in leadership, and in any other context that impacts your work.
• Empathy — Use what you know about how people think and feel to see things from their perspective
• Curiosity — Set aside assumptions and lean into a desire to learn more
• Goal-orientation — Make sure conversations and actions have clear intentions

With the right mindset in place, the following three tactics can be used to support coaching conversations:

Evocative reflections are statements that reframe what the person being coached is expressing. They draw out a particular detail of the facts, their way of thinking, or an underlying emotion. It’s an observation that creates a moment of focus and invites the person being coached to think more deeply.

Reflections might break down a complex challenge into smaller segments: “So before you can get started on the project you need to get support from one naysayer.” Or draw attention to what the speaker is projecting: “I can tell you’re finding this really frustrating.” Or, it can shift the tone from complaints to an objective: “It sounds like understanding how to win that person over is a top priority.”

Powerful questions help others go deeper into a challenge, focus on problem-solving, and uncover their own unique skill sets. This is where assumptions get cast aside in favor of curiosity. In addition to a wide range of situationally specific questions, there’s one small, powerful multi-purpose question, “Can you tell me more about that?” For leaders just beginning to add coaching to their toolkits, this one moment when a team member gets more space to go past the surface of their challenge can be transformative for that person’s challenge and their relationship with that leader.

Silence might be the most difficult of the basic coaching skills to master. In the corporate world, especially “move fast and break things” organizations, silence is uncomfortable. But if a leader has nurtured enough psychological safety, and is fully present in the coaching conversation, not saying anything at all and being comfortable with that silence can be magical. This skill is the ultimate in resisting the urge to jump in and control the course of the conversation. It provides space for the person being coached to regulate, quietly reflect, and take responsibility for what happens next.

Putting Coaching Into Action

Since coaching is one tool among many, it can be intentionally incorporated into leadership when the moment is right.

• Start with the situations and team members that are most conducive to coaching moments:
• The issue is not urgent and low-risk
• There are several possible solutions
• The team member likes solving problems and is likely to solve this one
• There’s already a collaborative relationship between the leader and the person being coached
• Introduce the idea of coaching before beginning: “I’d like to help you come up with a solution for this yourself. Let’s talk it through.”
• Stay curious.

Adding coaching to a leadership practice is a powerful way to support diversity and inclusion, creativity, autonomy, and leadership development. To do so successfully requires believing in the potential of the team, one’s ability to draw it out, and the idea that there’s always more to learn.

Liza Dube is a career and leadership coach with 20 years of experience as a marketing communications leader across several industries. Using the fundamentals of emotional intelligence, she helps socially conscious leaders create more compassionate workplaces, starting with themselves.