What is Coaching
What is Coaching?
Coaching is about inspiring individuals to change behaviors that lead to an increase in performance. It is helping an individual or team reach their full potential! Coaching is a process that empowers and enables people, to draw on strengths and create the opportunity to self-reflect and find the answers within themselves to constructively move forward.
Coaching is a term that we typically use in a sporting context. Most sports teams and sporting individuals have a coach. It is critically important to their success. A coach can add a huge amount of value to an individual or team in relation to behavior change and performance improvement. Equally, a coach can be detrimental to behavior and performance if they coach in a way, or style that is not conducive to the individual or team outcomes. This is no different in an organizational context. The importance of learning and executing best practice coaching techniques is critical to performance outcomes.
Coaching in the workplace was introduced by Timothy Gallwey, a Harvard Educationalist, and tennis expert and coach. He threw down the gauntlet with his book entitled “The Inner Game of Tennis”. The word inner was used to describe or identify a player’s internal state. Or as Gallwey himself put it “The opponent within one’s head is far more formidable than the opponent on the other side of the net”. Gallwey went on to assert, “if a coach can help a player remove or reduce the internal obstacles to their performance, an unexpected natural ability will flow forth without the need for much technical input from the coach”.
Definition
There are many definitions of the word coaching, the one we like to use comes from best-selling author and coach Timothy Gallwey.
"Coaching is unlocking a person's or team's potential in order to maximize their performance. It is about asking rather than telling".
What Coaching Is Not
At the same time as defining what coaching is, it is useful to also define what it is not. We commonly see people and organizations mistaking coaching for other methodologies, which can be complimentary but are not coaching.
Coaching is not:
- Advising
- Teaching
- Training
- Telling
- Criticizing
Ask - Don’t Tell!
Coaching works on the philosophy of asking people questions so they can solve their own issues rather than telling them what to do. As the coach, you are an important part of this process, as the quality of your questions will influence the quality of someone’s learning and execution.
As a coach, you are trying to create “a-ha” moments for people, rather than the typical “ah-doh” moments that some managers and leaders are highly skilled at creating for people. Typically, they give feedback in a way that leaves the other person feeling stupid or incompetent. This is not coaching; at its best, it is incompetence on behalf of the person giving the feedback. When you think about your own learning, it is more likely you discovered something for yourself rather than being told. In fact, it would be fair to say that much of what you have been told you have forgotten.
Our experience over 25 years shows that individuals will become motivated to change behaviors if they discover insights about their own performance, without being told what to do or when to do it. “The difference from the leaders of today and the leaders of the future will be their ability to ask powerful questions”
Key Point: Telling unmotivated people what to do, will only ever get you one result. FRUSTRATION!
Rational Commitment vs. Emotional Commitment
This is a key concept within the High-Performance Coaching framework. People are committed to their work for two reasons. These are referred to as Rational Commitment and Emotional Commitment.
Rational Commitment
Rational Commitment is the reason you are rationally or logically committed to doing your job. It is what you agree to give an organization when you are hired. This is your time and energy in exchange for financial compensation and potential career development.
Rationally committed employees do what they HAVE to do.
Emotional Commitment
Emotional commitment is about the passion and the purpose behind the job. It is the WHY, and it is what keeps you in the relationship with the organization. You are there doing the work because it has a positive emotional impact on you, such as providing you a sense of achievement every day.
Emotionally committed people do what they LOVE to do!
Some Research
The Corporate Leadership Council recently surveyed 50,000 employees from 59 different organizations in 27 countries, representing 10 industry groups.
One of the key findings from this survey highlighted, that emotional commitment is four times as valuable as rational commitment in driving employee engagement and discretionary effort.
Discretionary effort means you raise your hand to take on more work, you offer to assist others when they are overloaded, and you proactively go the extra mile to drive results without anyone tapping you on the shoulder to ask for your assistance.
When you are emotionally committed to your organization, your brilliance is ignited because you cease wondering if you are valued and secure in your position.
Rationally committed employees stay with their organization when they believe it is in their self-interest and often give only minimal effort to comply. Emotionally committed employees stay with their organization because they believe in the value of their job, their team, their manager, and their organization. As a result, they are far more willing to give discretionary effort.
McKinsey and Company
McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm that serves leading businesses, governments, non-governmental organizations, and not-for-profits. They help clients make improvements to their performance and realize their most important goals. They conduct ongoing international research, so they can keep their clients informed and educated on what works, what is changing, and how to be successful and high-performing.
In a 2019 in-depth study, they found managers that wanted to create high-performing environments, teams and cultures needed to spend up to 55% of their time, day to day and week to week with their team.
High-Performance Coaching and Commitment
StellaHP's high-performance coaching system focuses largely on increasing emotional commitment. When you can fill, or refill, the emotional commitment cup of your people, performance and productivity grow exponentially.
Our experience over more than two decades shows that people start their jobs with a full emotional commitment cup. Specifically, they are keen, enthusiastic, positive, optimistic, and willing to put in discretionary effort. Over time and because of poor leadership and lack of organizational systems and processes, their emotional commitment cup gets emptied. Sometimes, to the point where it is bone-dry. There is nothing left in the cup. And now they show up to work every day because they get a paycheck at the end of the week and that is what they look forward to. We call this the honeymoon period and as a rule of thumb, the high emotional commitment generally lasts anywhere between 6-12 months.
People Join Organizations and Leave Managers
Everything you do as a performance coach or leader influences the performance, engagement, and commitment of your people. The question to ask ourselves is NOT “Am I influencing the performance of my teams”? because the answer is already YES!
The more effective question to ask ourselves is; “How am I influencing the engagement, performance, and commitment of my people and teams”?
Are you doing things daily and weekly that are bringing out the best in your people, that support and encourage them to reach their potential or are you accidentally doing things that are limiting your people and teams preventing them from being their best and reaching their potential?
A person's direct manager is 70% more responsible for their day-to-day performance, engagement, and commitment than anybody else in your organization.