I am just reading "The Coaching Habit" and it changed my mind regarding coaching.
First of all, I always thought coaching was BS, and not a real thing.
With age, and by getting more senior at work, I understand that it's even more important to mentoring.
When it comes to leadership, one of the questions in the book: "how can I help", is probably they key action a leader can take to make sure the team is performant.
I'm glad you're going this journey as well. I had similar opinions mainly because coaching is hard and slow.
More than the book, what helped me was a workshop/session where I could learn and practice coaching with other attendees.
I agree that "How can I help?" (or what do you expect from me?) is a great question to encourage the coachee to share their expectations from you as a manager.
Interesting article Suresh, I never thought about it like this :)
Would be interesting to hear scenarios where it worked for you, and what you would have done otherwise (like what advice you would have given vs what the actual result was using coaching)
A had a scenario I almost added in the post but it's an ongoing situation, so I was cautious. I'll abstract it a bit and share how I could have used coaching here:
A new team member was struggling to deliver. My first observation was they weren't autonomous. So I bluntly said in my next 1:1, "Hey, I like my team members to be autonomous, so let me know how I can help you". I had indirectly passed a judgment and had given an advice ("be more autonomous"). This led the engineer to be on the defensive. So they started rambling and touching different topics on why they aren't autonomous but also think their level of autonomy is in line with their current role. I got a lot of information about how they perceive things and I understand them better. But I could have used a healthier approach by practicing coach-like curiosity which I started to do it in bits in follow-up meetings.
I have replayed the entire convo in my head a few times, where I'm more coach-like:
Me: "Hey, how's the project going?"
They: "I don't have full info about the project and I depend a lot on the lead to tell me"
Me: "Tell me more about it"
They: "I joined the project in flight and a lot of planning was done already, so I don't have the full picture in mind. I can only focus on the tasks in sprint. But the tasks require me to understand the golang code and I need extra time for that because I'm only used to program in java."
Me: "So I hear you mention problem about roadmap and programming language. What's the biggest or the important one right now?"
They: "I want to understand the full plan"
Me: "And what's the way to get that?"
They: "I guess I can ask the lead or read some documents"
Me: "Great. Do you think you'd be able to carve out some time for that before our next meet?"
I am just reading "The Coaching Habit" and it changed my mind regarding coaching.
First of all, I always thought coaching was BS, and not a real thing.
With age, and by getting more senior at work, I understand that it's even more important to mentoring.
When it comes to leadership, one of the questions in the book: "how can I help", is probably they key action a leader can take to make sure the team is performant.
I'm glad you're going this journey as well. I had similar opinions mainly because coaching is hard and slow.
More than the book, what helped me was a workshop/session where I could learn and practice coaching with other attendees.
I agree that "How can I help?" (or what do you expect from me?) is a great question to encourage the coachee to share their expectations from you as a manager.
Interesting article Suresh, I never thought about it like this :)
Would be interesting to hear scenarios where it worked for you, and what you would have done otherwise (like what advice you would have given vs what the actual result was using coaching)
Thanks for the support, Anton!
A had a scenario I almost added in the post but it's an ongoing situation, so I was cautious. I'll abstract it a bit and share how I could have used coaching here:
A new team member was struggling to deliver. My first observation was they weren't autonomous. So I bluntly said in my next 1:1, "Hey, I like my team members to be autonomous, so let me know how I can help you". I had indirectly passed a judgment and had given an advice ("be more autonomous"). This led the engineer to be on the defensive. So they started rambling and touching different topics on why they aren't autonomous but also think their level of autonomy is in line with their current role. I got a lot of information about how they perceive things and I understand them better. But I could have used a healthier approach by practicing coach-like curiosity which I started to do it in bits in follow-up meetings.
I have replayed the entire convo in my head a few times, where I'm more coach-like:
Me: "Hey, how's the project going?"
They: "I don't have full info about the project and I depend a lot on the lead to tell me"
Me: "Tell me more about it"
They: "I joined the project in flight and a lot of planning was done already, so I don't have the full picture in mind. I can only focus on the tasks in sprint. But the tasks require me to understand the golang code and I need extra time for that because I'm only used to program in java."
Me: "So I hear you mention problem about roadmap and programming language. What's the biggest or the important one right now?"
They: "I want to understand the full plan"
Me: "And what's the way to get that?"
They: "I guess I can ask the lead or read some documents"
Me: "Great. Do you think you'd be able to carve out some time for that before our next meet?"
Thanks for the example, it’s a great one :)