Applies a non-directive coaching style to interactions

Essentials of Safety, Featured
January 18, 2022

ESSENTIALS OF SAFETY BLOG 11/14

You coach and adopt a coaching style in your leadership and management toolkit to help your people be the best they can be. It entails asking questions in a way that promotes thinking and learning. It is easy to learn, amazingly effective, and fun.

This is the eleventh of a dozen or so blogs covering the Essentials of Safety that I talked about in the first blog of this series. We have covered an introduction – which we called Essentials of Safety, Understands their ‘Why’, Chooses and displays their attitude, Adopts a growth mindset – including a learning mindset, Has a high level of understanding and curiosity about how work is actually done, Understands their own and others’ expectations, Understands the Limitations and use of Situational Awareness, Listens Generously, Plans work using risk intelligence and Controls Risk.

The other blogs in the series are:

Has a resilient performance approach to systems development.
Adopts an authentic leadership approach when leading others.
Bonus – The oscillations of safety in modern, complex workplaces.

Applies a Non-Directive Coaching Style to Interactions

As you are developing your approach to leadership and the development of your people through these essential elements, I hope you realise that it must be supported by an approach that will help your people be the best they can be. One way of doing this is to provide coaching. The mistake leaders often make is assuming leaders know how to coach. This is not always true. Leaders are often good mentors, good teachers, good answerers, and instruction givers, but not all are naturally good at coaching. We need to help leaders understand what coaching is and how to do it effectively.

When businesses are interested in helping leaders become good coaches, they often start by bringing an external consultant in once a year or so and have them coach the leaders directly. This approach can absolutely make a difference, quite often one that lasts a reasonable time. But it is not a sustainable solution. If, on the other hand, you were to bring in a coach and had them develop, mentor, and coach your leaders to be great coaches for their teams, you can end up with a sustainable and on-tap resource within your business that can make a huge difference over the longer term.

It is a bit like the old proverb ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’. I have seen so many leaders become much more effective in all areas of their work once they understand the impact they can have as a coach in addition to their impact as a leader and a manager.

I am sure many of you have seen several forms of coaching models over the years and thought that most of them are fine. Some are more complicated than others, but if you apply any coaching model that puts the player first (and make that your intent during a coaching session), you will generally not go too far wrong. Having said that, as I mentioned above, I have a favourite. It is simple, powerful, beneficial, and really fun to use. It is what I currently use with many clients.

I chose to align my coaching style to that described in Myles Downey’s work. It entails the understanding that coaching is neither teaching nor mentoring, and understanding that coaching is instead all about learning, growing, and raising awareness. You can choose your own coaching method of course, but I believe that Downey’s explanations and examples provide excellent clarity and advice and are a great start to any excellence-in-coaching journey.

As I am sure you are aware there are many elements to coaching and the one I want to share with you – as it is so powerful in practice – is a model called the GROW model and it works like this:

GOAL (The G in GROW) is about establishing what the desired outcome of the coaching conversation is all about. It is very much driven by the player with the coach prompting the player with a series of questions to help the player think about exactly what it is that they seek assistance with for the specific coaching session. It quite often is not the broad-brush initial statement that ends up being the goal of the session. The secret to a successful coaching session is in the questions the coach asks. These help to focus the player on a very specific topic for the goal of the coaching session.

REALITY (The R in GROW) is concerned with achieving the most accurate picture of the current state of play that it is possible to achieve. The reality part of the coaching session is always directly related to the goal of the session and it is here that the coach really helps the player see what the world looks and feels like for them. It is in this phase that the coach’s skills of listening to understand, following interest, generating understanding, and providing feed- back and choice really come to the fore. During this stage, there should not be any analysis, no offering of bright ideas, no suggestions of ‘how I would do it is …’, and no jumping to conclusions.

OPTIONS (The O in GROW) is about what can be done – what is possible for the player to do. The intention here is to draw out a list of all that is possible without judgement or evaluation. Questions such as ‘Which of those would you like to pursue first?’ ‘So what could you do differently?’ ‘What else?’ ‘Anything else?’ ‘What else can you think of?’ are the food for the coach at this stage. The Options stage is usually directly related to an aspect of the Reality stage when the player has identified an element that is not quite how they would like it. For this reason, it is worth pointing out here that the GROW stages are not always linear. Sometimes, it helps to move backwards and forwards a bit between the phases as the conversation grows. With practice, it becomes more of a style of conversation than a rigorously applied process.

WRAP-UP (Or Will-do, the W in GROW) aims to select the most appropriate option from the Option stage of the coaching session and agree the next steps. In this phase, the coach’s intention is to gain commitment from the player for an action. Things like ‘So tell me, what, exactly, are you going to do?’ appear here. This is where one of the options becomes a reality that the player can take away and do. Coaching is for the purpose of improving performance, and so it must result in tangible ways of being or doing that change the view, approach, or actions of the player in order to be effective. This is an essential component and the player needs to get it and to commit to going away and doing it.

To give it some visual perspective, this is how I usually draw the GROW model. The idea being that it is not a forced flow but a flicking back and forth between Goal, Reality, Options, and Wrap-up (Figure 1).

Coaching (and using a coaching style) needs to be recognised as an essential skill for all leaders. It needs to be taught, supported, nurtured, and practised over a long period of time.

Once leaders have an ability to apply true non-directive coaching when they want to, they can then, and often do, apply a range of behaviours that could easily be described as a coaching style in their management activities on a day- to-day basis. They ask – not tell. They apply intent-based leadership. They limit ‘instructing’, and they limit ‘command and control’ behaviour. This is what is usually meant when we talk about a leader applying a coaching style to their leadership or management activities and approaches.

Coaches and leaders using a coaching style know that the answers to problems lie within the capacity and expertise of the player, not with the coach or with the leader. This ties the concept of using a coaching style in management and leadership to intent-based leadership that David Marquet so masterfully discusses. By this, I mean that the answers to problems and issues usually lie within the expertise and knowledge of the worker, not within the expertise and knowledge of the leader.

Doing the thinking for players may seem like the easy solution to help peo- ple be the best they can be. This is usually not true. And is often a waste of time – in the longer term. People learn much more effectively if we get them to think by asking great questions and listening to the answers. You need to work at the level of thinking – thinking about how we think about our thinking – as thinking goes to talking which goes to actions. That is where the rubber hits the road with the player. We need to aim to improve players’ performance by helping them improve their thinking through our coaching. After all, people are paid to think so we need to help them get better at it.

Using a coach to help us combine our leadership and coaching styles with a thorough understanding of your ‘Why’ can really help us drive towards a state of passionate and authentic leadership. This is not rocket science, nor is it com- plex or complicated. It is simply about focussing on a few things that all work well on their own but are hugely powerful when combined. It is that fluidity that can be strived for, easily moving between managing, coaching, mentoring, and a spot of telling.

A bit of an aside about feedback. Feedback, whether a part of mentoring, coach- ing, or simply a part of managing, is only useful if it has been asked for and if it is authentic. I value the concept of feedback and am very careful to give it and ask for it. I make sure I do not pump people up based on the outcome of things they do, but rather for the effort they put into the process – remaining quite often, somewhat silent on the outcome. I am also very mindful of the impact that feedback can have on an individual’s state of mind. If feedback is given purely for the purpose of helping others, in a similar way that coaching is intended, you will not go too far wrong. It can be very useful in helping people realise that they can have a growth mindset, and can then grow and have potential. And we can help them do that through coaching. If they already feel that they are the best thing since sliced bread, this can tend to support a fixed mindset. On that note, please give me some feedback about this book (ian.long@raeda.com.au). I welcome it.

The principal difference between coaching and mentoring is that with mentoring many of the answers lie with the mentor. With coaching, nearly all of the answers lie with the player. If you have trouble with this during a coaching session, try to remember the maxim: ‘let expertise lie where expertise lies’.

There is a bit of guidance that I have found useful during difficult bits of coaching conversations, or for that matter, difficult conversations during mentoring or general leading and managing activities. It is the ‘Crucial Conversations’ tool described by Kerry Patterson et al. This employs seven simple steps and is highly effective in helping the process move along and be effective:

1. Start with the heart (i.e. empathy and positive intent):
– This ties in with being an authentic leader as well.

2. Stay in dialogue:
– No arguments here. Always build on the other’s words.

3. Make it safe:
– Included in here is authentic and generous listening.

4. Don’t get hooked by emotion (or hook them):
– Keep focussed on the end game, refuse to get into an emotive argument – back off, listen, pause, and then respond.

5. Agree a mutual purpose:
– Find the common ground about what you are trying to achieve here.

6. Separate facts from the story:
– Recognise and call it when you are no longer in the world of facts and have moved into the world of opinion and stories.

7. Agree a clear action plan:
– Make a mutual decision and then work out what that looks like.

In the end, we can practice, promote, and pursue excellence in coaching, using a coaching style, and mentoring our people for the purpose of helping everybody be the best they can be.

Here are some examples of some questions that I have found useful when preparing for a coaching conversation:

Goal

What is it you would like to discuss?
What would you like to achieve today?
What would you like from this session?
What would need to happen for you to walk away feeling that this time waswell spent?
If I could grant you a wish for this session, what would it be? What would you like to be different when you leave this session?
What would you like to happen that is not happening now, or what would you like not to happen that is happening now?
What will be of real value to you? What do you want?

Reality

In relation to … (the Goal), what is happening at the moment? What has been working? What has not?
What have you tried so far?
Tell me about …
Who or what are you doing this for?
What’s happening?
What is the most difficult part of this task?
What did you like most about the way you accomplished this task?
How do you know that this is accurate?
When does this happen?
How often does this happen? Be as precise as possible.
What effect does this have?
How have you verified, or would you verify, that this is so?
What other factors are relevant?
What is their perception of the situation?
What does that mean?
In what way?
What do you understand by x? What don’t you understand?
Did you observe anything in particular to make you think he/she was happy with your feedback?
What are the anticipated consequences of x?
What do you notice as you look at x, or consider y?
At your best, what qualities, attributes, capabilities do you bring to the situation?
What is your understanding of the current situation?

Options

If you could turn back the clock and try that again, what would it look like or sound like?
What could you do to change the situation?
What alternatives are there to that approach?
Tell me what possibilities for action you see. Do not worry about whether they are realistic at this stage.
What approach or actions have you seen used, or used yourself, in similar circumstances?
Who might be able to help?
Would you like suggestions from me?
Which option do you like the most?
What are the benefits and pitfalls of these options?
Which options are of interest to you?
Rate from 1–10 your level of interest in the practicality of each of these options.
What alternative possibilities can you consider?
What would success in this look like?
What do you feel most strongly about in this situation?
What stands out?
Tell me, in an ideal world, how would things be different?
What would it look like in x months or years?
What changes would you like to make?
If you could do it any way that you wanted, how would you go about accomplishing this task?
When have you succeeded in a challenge similar to this one? How comfortable (confident) do you feel about doing x?
Where could you find the help you need to accomplish this task? What would it take to make you feel more comfortable?
What do you really want?

Wrap-Up

What are the next steps?
Precisely when will you take them?
What might get in the way?
Do you need to log the steps in your diary?
What support do you need?
How and when will you enlist that support?

An Example

Karen Ross, an exceptional senior safety professional in BHP, who I have worked with for many years, kindly provided this example of the impact coaching and using a coaching style can have. She wrote: ‘Such a simple concept, so how did the GROW model have such an impact on my life?

Well it all began about 10 years ago, when my leader (aka the author of this book, or Longy as he is generally known) started sprouting all this information about how this GROW model could change the way we interact with our people and this would lead to better safety outcomes. The concept was very easy to understand, but I was sceptical. At the time, I was studying risk management and believed risk management was the Holy Grail to improving safety.

Each month, Longy would come for a site visit and I was very quick to identify where I thought our issues were, but I was not following through on how to resolve them. Then I started to notice when I raised the issues with Longy, the conversations we had were very different. We talked about what it could look like, where we were now, the options we had to get there, and what I needed to do. Mind you, this was not without a few throw way lines made by me to Longy such as: ‘Stop doing that GROW shit on me again Longy’.

I then thought that maybe there is something in this coaching. I started practising with my team, peers, general manager, and even the family did not escape from my GROW experiment. I was constantly surprised by how engaging and easy the conversations were. The beauty was that I did not need to know the answers, just how to ask the questions. I finally GOT IT, people noticed and it was a turning point in my career. I had learnt to ask questions differently.

Over the past 10 years I’ve had the privilege of sharing the GROW model with lots of people, who have all been surprised at how easy and effective it is. I’ll be forever grateful for Longy’s passion and patience to make sure I got it.’

Key Takeaway: You coach and adopt a coaching style in your leadership and management toolkit to help your people be the best they can be. It entails asking questions in a way that promotes thinking and learning. It is easy to learn, amazingly effective, and fun.