The Sublime art of Coaching

Coaching is an art — the art of facilitating to help another person to improve their performance through learning rather than teaching.

Coaching can be effective and impactful when the coach and coachee have fostered a formidable partnership.

Many organisations who have embarked on their journey of transformation hire agile coaches to help them and their teams in imbibing the new ways of working, creating a culture of learning and empowerment and to guide them in building right products for the customers.

However, key to successful coaching and transformation is ensuring that coaches and coachee are in sync and are aligned to the organisation purpose and vision.

Many times, we have seen and observed that agile coaching is primarily associated with activities related to feelings, happiness, mindset etc which at times can be considered as fluffy work. These fluffy procedures at times leads to resistance and create wrong perceptions in organisations around coaching and people fail to see the value of coaching and coaches.

For being an effective coach and help the coachee in their journey, we can look at adopting few things.

1. Focus on tangible improvements

As coaches, our primary goal should be to help the people and organisations to achieve better results. We should try to help the coachee in identifying the relevant problems which needs to be solved, help them focus on tangible improvements and help them align the expected outcomes to the organisation objective.

2. Understand the audience

It is very important for the coach to establish a rapport and trust with the individuals and teams. We need to understand their style of work as well as preference and accordingly tailor our coaching tone and approach to avoid fluffy elements.

3. Don’t start with solution in mind.

Many of us start coaching by offering solutions in the form of frameworks, tools, collateral to the coachee. Instead of prescribing, lets acknowledge their knowledge and wisdom and instead invest our time listening to their problem and help them to explore frameworks and tools which may better fit their specific needs.

4. Pull coaching

Many coaches get anxious to make the process work for the organisations. They don’t apply the right amount of patience to help the teams thrive in their journey of being a high performing team.

In the process, they face resistance and challenge from the teams on ground. Instead we should focus on spending our time talking to the people about their environment, understanding their problems and challenges and helping them explore the solutions to the problem. Let us make the people know that we can help, and they will seek us when the time is right for them.

With this approach, we as coaches get an excellent opportunity to focus on important and meaningful improvements instead of wasting our time chasing people who don’t want to listen to us.

The above approach I think can help us as coaches to become impactful and help the individuals and organisations in their transformation journey. To become an effective and a good coach, we also need to continue our learning, reinvent ourselves as well as methods as we grow.

Would love to hear your views and thoughts on how to create an effective coach-coachee partnership