Coaching

Most confusion comes from treating coaching as a superior mode to be used generally. It is a tool with a narrow purpose: developing judgement in someone who has the raw material to reach a good answer and has not yet done so.

Where the person lacks information, coaching is an obstacle. Asking someone what they think the payroll cut-off should be, when they could be told, wastes their time and signals that you are running a technique on them.

The most common failure among managers who have been trained in coaching is advice delivered as interrogation.

Have you considered speaking to the vendor is not a question. It is an instruction with a question mark, and the recipient understands this immediately. It is worse than direct advice because it takes longer and adds a layer of pretence to it.

The distinguishing test is whether the coach knows the answer they want. If they do, they are not coaching, and the honest move is to say what they think and explain why.

Genuine coaching questions are ones the coach does not know the answer to: what have you already tried, what makes this difficult, what would you do if you had to decide today, what is the part you are avoiding.

There is nothing wrong with giving advice. Most workplace conversations should be advice. The problem is disguising it, because the disguise is transparent and costs credibility.

Organisations frequently ask managers to coach their own reports, and the arrangement has a structural limit worth acknowledging.

A coaching conversation depends on the person being able to say what they are struggling with. The manager is also the person who rates them, decides their pay, and influences their next role. Full candour in that setting is a lot to ask, and the employee is making a reasonable calculation when they withhold.

This does not make manager coaching worthless. It does mean the manager should be realistic about what will not be said, and should not treat guardedness as a failure on the employee's part.

Two things help. Separating the coaching conversation from the assessment conversation in time and framing, so they are not the same meeting. And ensuring the employee has some access to a coach or mentor outside their line, for the topics that cannot be raised with the person who writes their appraisal.

• The person lacks knowledge. Tell them, or arrange training.
• There is a standard being missed and it has not been named. Say what the standard is first; coaching is not a substitute for a clear expectation.
• The problem is structural, being workload, a broken process or an unresolved conflict. Coaching an individual through an organisational problem relocates the problem to them.
• The person does not want to be coached. It requires participation, and mandated coaching produces compliance.
• There is a conduct issue. That is a disciplinary conversation, and running it as coaching leaves the employee unclear that anything serious was said.

The third and fifth are the costly ones. Coaching someone about their stress when the cause is an unmanageable workload reads as an assertion that their reaction is the problem. And a conduct concern delivered as a coaching conversation frequently leaves the employee genuinely unaware they were warned, which surfaces later as a procedural defect.

• Agree what the person wants from the conversation at the start, rather than assuming.
• Ask questions you do not know the answer to, and be willing to be surprised by the answer.
• Allow silence. The useful answer usually arrives after the pause most people rush to fill.
• Finish with something specific the person has chosen to do, not something you have chosen for them.
• Keep it confidential, and where it cannot be, say so before rather than after.

The last is the one that determines whether coaching survives in an organisation. A single instance of something raised in coaching appearing in an appraisal will end the usefulness of every coaching conversation in that team, and the story will outlast the people involved.