At Reejig, we know how essential it is for larger organizations to use workforce intelligence in order to bring two-way visibility between people with skills and work that requires those skills.
We also appreciate the importance of supporting human-to-human moments that reduce barriers and enable potential to be unlocked in people, once that two-way visibility is in place. Both technology and human interaction are vital to creating a world of Zero Wasted Potential, and coaching as a leader plays a significant role in this.
After all, leaders often adopt coaching duties — informal or formal — at work. So, we're calling out to other leaders to think about their role as coaches in the workplace as we unpack what it means and its impact.
To begin, we’re focusing on the importance of demystifying the coaching process. There is a whole heap of people who care but think “I’m not qualified!” or who worry that they will enter types of conversations where they’re out of their depth.
At its heart, the coaching style appropriate for manager and colleague coaching consists of three parts; listening, questioning, and reflecting.
We believe it's possible to safely and responsibly harness our own inner coach at work, without retreating with a hasty “I’m not qualified!”. It's important to state that coaching is not therapy. It's not advice-giving and therefore it’s not telling someone what to do or how to do it.
A coach doesn't need to get into deep dark areas of a colleague’s (or “coachee’s”) life or history. These areas are the domain of a professional therapist.
What colleague coaching offers is a space that is nonjudgmental and safe, exploratory, and not wedded to KPIs. It's a space in which the coachee can bring questions and reflections about what they might like to develop through their career journey forward.
For the coach, this is especially important as it brings further clarity to visibility around career pathing for team members, and where and how a team member might benefit from upskilling, having their role reejigged within the team, or through internal mobility.
We know that coaching can be golden for developing and supporting employees at all levels to unlock their potential. As Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular put it in their HBR article The Leader as Coach;
“Coaching ..is ongoing and executed by those inside the organization. It’s work that all managers should engage in with all their people all the time, in ways that help define the organization’s culture and advance its mission”.
Effective coaching predicts employee engagement, career growth, team productivity, business performance, and culture. So it makes that 70% of a variance in team engagement is determined by the manager.
As a psychologist and coach myself, I would suggest we go one step further and seek to embed certain cornerstone coaching activities into the culture of the organization, so that everyone from burgeoning leaders to frontline workers experience a coaching culture, to amplify their sense of inclusion, belonging, and potential.
“By addressing what matters to their frontline workforce, employers can harness the untapped potential of a large and motivated talent pol - an urgent priority amid labor shortages and challenges in attracting and retaining talent. And when employers do more and do better to support the advancement of frontline employees, they create opportunities for their employees to meaningfully improve their lives and livelihoods.”
McKinsey, July 2022 Bridging the Advancement Gap
Everyone has something to offer in the coaching space — coaching is everyone’s business. Everyone, in the right context, has something they can give and something they can receive.
Coaching is about listening, questioning, reflecting, and fundamentally being there to unlock ‘aha!’ moments and the potential of a coachee. Coaching is not mentoring — although it can happen within the mentoring context — and is not advice-giving.
It can be as much about offering a thoughtful and well-timed, “what is it that makes you feel that way?” or reflecting back what you’ve heard, as it is about having experience with what a coachee is discussing. It's about enabling someone to be seen, heard, and valued through current focus and future follow-up.
Irrespective of your ‘level’ within an organization, your frame of reference is like your fingerprint — it’s different from anyone else’s. — and there's value in that. Your frame of reference allows you to ask questions with a curious, nonjudgmental mindset from your own unique vantage point, which may prompt further thoughts, or remove blockers, on the part of a coachee.
As a coach, you're not there to give someone answers.
You're not there to advise them based on your opinion of what they ‘should’ or ‘need’ to do. As an experienced leader, coaching may incorporate your experiences and insights. However, even in that context, it's important to offer personal experience from an open, not a dictatorial, perspective, where you intentionally give credence and balance to pros and cons, irrespective of your personal opinion about what someone should do.
A coach is patient and gives space to a coachee. This can necessitate leaning into allowing space, as some people depending on their character and background may need more time to reply, and if you jump in you may never enable their personal, “aha” gold to come to the fore.
As the coach, it may feel uncomfortable to sit in silence. For this, one technique is to count your breaths and think “I’ll allow another five breaths and then I’ll jump in”. The expression, “silence is golden”, could have been written about the coaching experience!
Perhaps the most important element of coaching is learning how to listen — nonjudgmentally, empathically, and with a focus on valuing the long-term relationship over short-term gains.
A great employee is far more valuable to the organization in the long-term than in the short-term, both financially and culturally, no matter what the perceived cost to the team’s KPIs right now. Yet a trap for some newer coaches is the use of coaching essentially as a cattle prodder for the sake of short-term gains or prioritizing those immediate gains over long-term value.
Conversations around burnout and enabling time to recover are the ultimate example of a moment where short versus long-term trade-offs can come to the forefront, especially when the coach is experiencing symptoms of burnout too. Whilst cattle-prodding may enable short-term gain, it's almost always at the expense of compounding, longer-term benefits and it's important to remember this as a coach.
Working on your listening skills is an especially important component of seeing, hearing, and valuing what someone brings to work. It contributes greatly to unlocking potential in people at work.
Active listening — to really seek to hear what someone has to say as well as giving the space to say it — is one particularly important element of coaching.
There is so much to come around coaching, including getting into the nitty gritty of active listening and socratic dialogue. For now, the nutshell is that amongst the myriad of skills that a leader should seek to develop, coaching represents the important act of helping reduce wasted potential in people.