Lesson 5: Coach for performance (5.18)
Expert analysis: What do you think is going on?
“What really made the difference here?”
In this video, Kirstan offers her analysis of Mina and Tim’s coaching session.
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KIRSTAN MARNANE: Let's take a look at this second scenario. It's a little bit better. I think you probably saw that. What really made the difference here? First of all, she recognized his good performance. So here is somebody starting off with saying, "You know what? You've really been good up to now. Let's talk about what's going on." The second thing she did was ask some really good probing questions.
"What else is happening here?" "What do you see going on?" "What happened?" Questions beginning with "what" or "how" really can open up somebody's mind. And what happened as a result of that? He actually told her something that he had held back before, and he then thanked her for this conversation at the end. What was happening with that? Well, probably he had wanted to tell her this.
He's a high performer. Something difficult happened, and he'd been holding onto that. And it was a relief to let go of it. The other thing she did was set the goal in a much more positive way. "Let's get you back up to that level." This is a little different to "You've always been a great performer. What happened?" And with these few small changes, great probing questions, recognizing his previous performance, listening to him without threatening when he told her the thing that had gone wrong. She just said, "OK."
Those simple things made the difference between a pretty poor coaching conversation and a pretty good one. If Mina had wanted to make this into a great coaching conversation, she probably should have opened up with a question asking him how he was, recognizing his body language, which was quite nervous. He didn't like to meet her eye. He was fidgeting. She also could have been a bit more inclusive in her body language. So a little bit more open as if she has a little bit more time for him.
A couple of great questions she could've asked him were "Your performance has been so brilliant in the past. What did you do that you could start doing again now?" She could have probed back into what his strengths are, if she knew what his strengths were. She could've asked him some questions about who he could get to help him. And she probably, if this were truly a coaching relationship that was not just one conversation, she could have set up a couple of more conversations for them to have together. He opened the door for that when he thanked her.
He would have then walked away with some confidence that he didn't have to keep things to himself for so long and that he had a supporter. So another thing that made the difference between this being a good conversation and the other one being the poor one was the ending. At the end, she offered him a series of monthly dialogues. What this does for the coachee, because he was already thanking her for her help, what it does is it gives them a sense of confidence that his leader's behind him. And probably, it will be a much shorter time for him to hold onto some bad news without sharing it.
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