Coaching sessions are conversations between you and your employee in which you identify areas for growth, create development plans, perform exercises, and check in on progress. A coaching session can kick off a specific development process around a particular skill or behavior as needed; you can then hold further sessions to follow up and monitor progress. A coaching session can also be a regular, more general conversation about the employee’s growth.
Coaching sessions are distinct from other types of conversations you may already be having with your employees, such as performance reviews or regular check-ins. Table 4–1 compares and contrasts the focus and time frames for each of these; you’ll notice that of these three types of conversations, the coaching session is the one that has the broadest time horizon and also looks the farthest forward to examine, plan, and work toward your direct report’s future.
TABLE 4-1
Coaching sessions typically range from 30 minutes to an hour, but they do not have to be long to be successful. In fact, research from the Corporate Executive Board shows that there is “no connection between time . . . and effectiveness at development.” 1 Instead of adding more coaching time to your already full load as a manager, make the most of each session. You can do so by asking the right questions and engaging in dialogue to increase your direct report’s awareness of her own choices, actions, and behaviors, along with their impact—as well as gain her buy in for the development plan.
As a first step in your coaching session, work together with your direct report to define what you’re looking to achieve. Is there a particular skill she has been working on? A question she has about how to handle a particular colleague or type of assignment? A long-term goal she wants to work toward? And what kind of progress can you expect to make in your time together today?
Encourage your employee to take part in identifying a clear scope for the session by directly asking her what she hopes to achieve and what she wants to make sure to get to. You can offer ideas for further shaping the agenda based on your previous observations, but in most cases you’ll want to start your coaching session by asking your direct report to share her own impressions. This might catch her off guard; more likely she will expect you to set the agenda. But by opening your session with a question, you begin as you’ll hope to continue: with your employee talking, you listening, and with both of you then building solutions together.
There are many types of coaching sessions, but here are three of the most popular:
Setting the explicit goals of your coaching session in this way allows you to plan how to proceed: what kinds of questions to ask and how to frame a solution.
Once you understand what kind of coaching your direct report is looking for, you will probably feel tempted to “fix the problem” immediately—to share your wisdom about the topic, give her the advice you think she needs, or carefully explain your point of view about why things didn’t go well. But don’t do it! This is the place where coaching most often goes wrong.
Instead, at this stage you need to get more information to create a clear baseline understanding of the situation: Your employee very likely still knows more about it than you do. To help her develop effectively, you need to learn more about her point of view of the situation and any related situations in the past, and her level of development with the skill involved. Could she be struggling because she has an outdated mind-set that is repeatedly getting in the way? Does she lack a certain skill? Have her emotions been triggered by something in a way that is holding her back? Is she not preparing as well as she could? Collecting background information is critical to making an assessment of the root causes of your employee’s challenge and thus identifying an effective development path.
Tell your employee that you would like to learn more about the situation and ask her questions that can help you understand her perspective. For example, for the employee with the long-term goal of becoming more comfortable around senior management, ask questions that probe her past experiences and their effects on her and others, as well as her current processes. These questions might include:
For an employee who is many coaching sessions in, a focused debrief of a particular event or project is more appropriate. In this case you can home in more closely on the details.
Or, for an employee with a short-term problem, ask questions that give you a more concrete sense of the issue and its impact.
Keep your questions open-ended; starting your questions with the words what, how, or tell me more tends to draw out an answer, whereas starting with why or asking a closed-ended question (in which the answer is a simple yes or no) can make the employee defensive. In answering your skillfully worded questions, your employee may already begin identifying some root causes and solutions she didn’t see before. This self-awareness will increase her buy in for any actions or development plan that will come out of the session.
Once you have a stronger understanding of the situation, it may again be tempting to simply offer a solution or hand down a piece of advice. Instead, now aim for an open, robust two-way dialogue in which you help the employee herself understand possible new choices, new strategies, or new skills she could develop. Here are several tactics for creating a productive dialogue:
As you offer assessments, introduce possible new frames, and practice exercises, continue to check in with your employee to make sure that what you are saying and doing is resonating for her. If not, take the opportunity to ask more questions and find out more about the situation before proceeding. The observations, suggestions, and practices that you offer are the core of your coaching session, but to be effective they need to be tailored to her particular situation.
As you near the end of the coaching session, ask your employee to articulate what she’s learned and what her action items are, saying something like, “As we get to the last ten minutes here of our session, what are the top two or three things you are taking away from our conversation?” Your employee may highlight a-ha’s that particularly struck her, or new ways of seeing things that have helped her think differently about her situation. Or she may share the things she is excited to practice or do differently. Having your direct report summarize her gains—rather than doing it yourself—helps with her buy in; it also allows you to sense what she’s heard and what she might yet have to learn.
Consider the coaching session as a kickoff for the employee’s actual development: The rubber will hit the road once she puts what she’s learned to use. While you’re both still in the room, agree on when to check in again, and identify any tasks to be completed before then. In this example, you and your employee might agree to meet again in a month; in the meantime she will get ready for another senior-level meeting using the preparation techniques you worked on together in the coaching session.
Continue to demonstrate openness and support as your time together draws to a close, asking questions like, “Is there anything else that you hoped we would get to today? Come by between now and our next session on this if you have questions or need to discuss something.”
Over time, by asking so many questions of your employee as part of the coaching session, you will also help develop her own ability to coach herself—asking herself the questions that you’ve often teed up for her—so that she can continue to grow even without you by her side.
____________
Amy Jen Su is managing partner and cofounder of Isis Associates, an executive coaching and training firm. She is an executive coach and speaker on issues of leadership presence, communication excellence, and executive endurance—factors critical to a leader’s performance success. She is coauthor with Muriel Maignan Wilkins of Own the Room: Discover Your Signature Voice to Master Your Leadership Presence (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013).
NOTE
1. Corporate Leadership Council Learning and Development, Manager-Led Development Effectiveness Survey, available at https://clc.executiveboard.com/Public/PDF/CLC_LD_Program_Brochure.pdf.