6 Tips for a Good Coaching Conversation

We’re told that coaching is a vital part of being a good manager, but it’s a huge topic, and it can be quite daunting to know where to start.

At LeadDev Live, Nik Knight of JHC led an excellent panel discussion with Zego’s Phillipa Rodney and Ecosia’s Jessy Halison on Holding Effective Coaching Conversations.   

They drew out some of the fundamentals of getting coaching right, which we know will be very useful, particularly if you’re just starting to think about how you can be a better coach to your team.

• Think about your role as a coach.  Your role is to guide the coachee towards finding their own solutions to achieve their goals.  As Rodney said, ‘guiding the journey, but letting you steer it’.  This is different from mentoring, which typically involves more direct transfer of knowledge and expertise to the mentee. 

• What does success look like?  You may be aware of a particular area a team member would like to improve, but to make sure you meet their expectations, you need to make sure you understand what success looks like.  Both to give you a goal to aim at, but also to check whether your coaching will be sufficient to help your team member reach it. 

• Be sure of their motivation. It’s essential to understand why a team member wants to work on a particular area of improvement.  Without that, even if you achieve ‘success’, it may be that it doesn’t help them in pursuit of their ultimate goal.  Both Rodney and Halison gave examples of discussions with team members where once they discussed motivation, it led to a completely different goal being pursued than the one the team member was originally focussed on.

• Don’t be afraid to challenge people. Part of your value as a coach is to offer a different perspective to the coachee on their work.  That’s not to say there should be a lot of disagreement, but there should be room for discussion about their motivations, approach, and goals.  This can be particularly valuable for more senior coachees, who are more confident in their work, and may not be used to having their assumptions challenged.  Of course, this has to be done in the spirit of helping the team member grow, it should never become adversarial.

• Listen for what they’re not saying.  Every coaching manual will tell you that you should spend most of your time listening to the other person rather than talking, otherwise it’s likely that you’re not fully understanding their needs.  But this discussion went a step further.  When coaching you need to be paying close enough attention to be able to notice what the coachee isn’t speaking about, what areas they’re avoiding.  This is often instructive as to what you really need to be talking about. 

• Be aware of how your advice fits with someone’s lived experience.  Societal realities and systemic discrimination means that the advice you give to one person may not be relevant or helpful for another.  As Halison mentioned, coaching a Black woman to achieve her goals by being more assertive may result in her just being stereotyped as an angry Black woman rather than fulfilling her career aspirations.  Any advice needs to be tailored to how it would work in practice for the individual.