When Not to Coach
I was having an interesting conversation with someone recently, about using coaching as a management style. We were talking about how open questions (how, what, where etc.) elicit more responses than closed (i.e. yes or no answer), and they asked what to do if they were getting short or unhelpful answers even when they asked open questions.
I tend to use a coaching approach as my default style, for obvious reasons, and I wrote a simple and easy guide to a model for doing that here. So this was an interesting question to explore.
The answer, as it so often is, is it depends.
I know, super helpful, right?
Context is everything here. Even if your go-to is a coaching style, there are times when you’ll need to do something else.
Here are a few potential scenarios:
Feedback First
The number one rule here is that you can’t coach someone who doesn’t want to be coached.
This is because in order for coaching to work, the coachee has to want to change something, or evolve in some way. If they don’t know it’s a problem, or don’t see it as an issue then you’re not going to get anywhere.
So if that’s the case, you might want to deliver some feedback first. You need to highlight the area concerned so that there is a desire to change. Note that it might take some time for the person to absorb the feedback, especially if it’s particularly challenging to them.
From there you can work more from a coaching perspective, as long as the feedback has landed and been accepted. You might set up a follow up session to do this - it’s probably going to be too much to do it in one sitting - use your judgement and knowledge of the individual to make this call.
More beached than sinking…but you get the idea
The Ship is Sinking
There may also be times where schedules, deadlines, or emergencies mean that a more autocratic style is required. When the ship is on sinking, get people to the lifeboats, rather than asking, “What do you think would be a good course of action here?”
Again this can be followed up with some post-mortem activities in a coaching style. Questions like: - How did we get here? - How can we avoid situations like this in future? - What did I contribute to this scenario? - What did we learn from this?
As always I’d recommend this only be a short term approach - if you do this all the time your team will lose trust and agency. You don’t want a bunch of automatons working for you.
It’s Just Not the Right Time
There are some topics or areas that you might want to explore with a staff member that it doesn’t make sense to take a coaching approach for. If you need to brainstorm around a topic, plan an upcoming meeting, or do an organizational or strategy design session, you might want to approach this in a different way. You can (and should) still ask a lot of questions and be democratic in your discussions, but these may benefit from a slightly different angle than a pure coaching one.
Although even in cases like this you might find following one of the coaching frameworks here can work too - using OSCAR (as linked to above) could look something like this:
Outcome - what do we want to achieve this session
Situation - what’s the context in which we are working
Choices & Consequences - what are the options we’re evaluating and their subsequent pros & cons
Actions - what path are we going to choose and where will we start
Review - how will we judge progress
I think something like that would work for a brainstorm or planning session, or even just as a meeting framework.
Conclusion
These are all tools in your toolkit. Use what makes sense, and practice good judgement in what to use when. Seek feedback and learn from your experiences. Experiment and reflect on what worked and what didn’t. You’ll be a better leader for it.
When you're ready, I offer 1:1 coaching for leaders who are looking to take their life and career to the next level. Send me an email and we'll set up a time to have a chat.
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