Help People Reach Their Full Potential

This principle is the cornerstone of any worthwhile coaching philosophy or highly successful coach. Remember our definition of coaching? Here it is again just in case you forgot.

"Coaching is unlocking a person or team's potential to maximize their performance"

Below is a diagram of an observational coaching checklist.

On the vertical column are the letters A, B, and C. For the purposes of this exercise, we will say these represent behaviors that you have to do in your job, and running along the top horizontally are the numbers 1,2,3, and 4.

The numbers represent the number of observations your manager observed you perform. Behavior A - you completed this 4 times out of 4, behavior B - you completed 2 times out of 4, and behavior C - you did not compete the behavior at all.

Observational Coaching Checklist

The Question

Think of a current or previous manager or leader. Given the above observational checklist, in your experience where would that manager or leader begin in order to coach you? Where would most managers and leaders start to coach you? Behavior A, B, or C?

If you identified Behavior C you are correct! We have asked this question to 10,000+ people and 99% of people say Behavior C. Herein lies a significant problem.

To Help People Reach their Full Potential, Catch them Doing Things RIGHT

This is a fundamental principle in coaching and leadership. Great coaches and leaders begin by focusing on “catching their people doing things right”! NOT by catching them doing things wrong. They intentionally look for the good things people are doing before they attempt to correct anything that is not working.

While they are very willing to address performance issues and correct behavior, it is NOT where they start from. 

Coaching is ALL about helping people reach their full potential. To achieve this, we need to be catching people doing things RIGHT. However, 99.9% of people we have asked have told us that their manager would do it by catching them doing things wrong. 

Herein lies a major flaw around what works versus what we naturally do. What works, is to look for the good and catch people doing things right. However we know most mangers try and help people reach their full potential by catching them doing things wrong!

In our proven coaching system, we start with Behavior "A", by giving the individual positive feedback to reinforce positive behavior.

Positive reinforcement is a cornerstone of any good performance coaching system. Many people don’t think of positive feedback as a coaching methodology, but our experience and research shows it is the most powerful you can ever use. 

We then move to coach Behavior "B". They have done this 50% of the time. As a performance coach and people leader you can easily turn 50% into 90% without much effort. 

Lastly, we would address and coach Behavior "C". We are not saying ignore it – what we are saying is DO NOT start there. 

The Emotional Bank Account

Think about relationships like a bank account. A healthy bank account is one that has savings in it. We put more money in than we take out.

If all we do is withdraw money from our bank account we eventually run out of money, go into overdraft and potentially end up bankrupt.

Relationships are no different. We can make deposits or withdrawals from relationships. Think about catching people doing things right and giving them positive feedback as a deposit into a bank account. The more you do this, the more credit you have to make a withdrawal (corrective feedback) when you need to.

The only difference is we are not dealing with money, we are dealing with emotions and people's psychological safety, respect, credibility and trust in you as their leader.

Exercise - The Emotional Bank Account

Download the Emotional Bank Account worksheet and complete the exercise. Refer to the example worksheet once you have completed it.