So many models of coaching,  3 step, 4 step, 5 step, even an 8 step model.  Whilst I do appreciate that all these have their place, and especially for new coaches, are extremely useful for the purposes of ‘navigation,’ I worry a lot that they detract from the basic premise that coaching is a conversation, a focused exchange that is going somewhere, and uses some fundamental skills that seem to me to be key to our unique ability to communicate with each other, to care about each other, and do a great and useful service to/for each other of facilitating thinking and decision making.  I do so wish that we would simplify and get back to basics.  Some of my thoughts, some quotes and some reflective questions are below:

Fundamental skills of coaching:

• Building trusting relationships; where the absolute focus is on the customer / client / coachee / colleague.
• Listening beyond the words with full attention; a special quality of listening, a creative force that can evoke new ideas
• Expert question asking, to discover what’s important, and support the creation of new possibilities
• Ability to put our own agenda aside

Quotes

“Something fundamental changes when people begin to ask questions together. The questions create more of a learning conversation than the normal stale debate about problems.”

Mike Szymanczyk, Chairman and CEO, The Altria Group

“Good questions ………….. like all good conversations, succeed or fail based on what we’re talking about. Good questions – ones that we care about and want to answer – call us outward and to each other. They are an invitation to explore, to venture out, to risk, to listen, to abandon our positions. Good questions help us to become both curious and uncertain, an this is always the road that opens us to the surprise on new insight.”

Juanita Brown, “The World cafe: shaping our futures through conversations that matter”

“True learning organisations are a space for generative conversations and concerted action which creates a field of alignment that produces tremendous power to invent new realities in conversation and to bring about these new realities in action.”

Fred Kofman and Peter Senge, “Communities of Commitment”

 Questions, Listening, Conversations and Reflections

Think of a time when you felt heard and really listened to. What were the conditions that enabled that to happen?

Consider an upcoming important meeting, how might you create a special quality of  listening, to and for others, so as to evoke new ideas?

Knowing you …. how does your ‘special quality of listening’ need to change to be more effective?

What are your challenges to having better quality conversations?

Consider the conversations you are currently having with customers, and/or those that are important to you in any context. To what degree do they create frustration and fragment efforts, OR offer new insights and ways to work collectively and collaboratively?

If you were to accept the perspective that conversation really is a core process for accessing collective intelligence and co-evolving the future, what practical difference would that make in how you can approach conversations?

 New Behaviours

Pick an upcoming conversation that matters:

What one specific thing might you do, or what one choice might you make that would improve the quality of that conversation for all parties involved?

How might your success in this drive success in your business, your life, your friends and colleagues, customers, coachees and just about everyone you meet?

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Often I hear of frustration and disappointment that managers and leaders  who have been on a coaching skills workshop do very little with it on their return to the workplace.  It seems, from my experience, that the introducing managers to the skills and models applicable in coaching is a realtively easy task, they are bright people and intellectually the content is not that challenging.  What appears to be much more of a challenge is implementing the ‘coach  approach’ in their everyday  business life.  The approach and effective conversations of a  ‘leader / coach’ are often very different to what they learned in the past, not least because it demands a shift from the problem solving behaviours that so many managers have found successful, and have been rewarded for in their organisations.  The legacy role of ‘manager as problem solver’ can be deep routed in corporate / professional cultures.

Training has an important role in introducing new constructs, behaviours and propositions for future business success, it’s in implementation that the challenges arise.  So how can we go about sustaining the momentum in building a coach apporach to leadership?

I would recommend a structured approach over time.  Following an inital say 2 day workshop bring the managers back together regulary in ‘practice and build’ sessions where they co-coach each other on real business issues and/or their challenges / experiences of integrating a coaching style into their leadership.  This way they get to experience first hand on how coaching can be used in e.g. issue / problem resolution, and are encouraged to use this approach with their people.  These sessions also give the opportunity for us to give more input to them, according to the challenges they are facing, e.g. coach approach to development, or coach approach to performance management, or coach approach to delegation.  If you can’t get them back together face to face every time, run some 90 min telecalls where they come and share what’s working / not working and encourage them to coach each other so others can listen, give feedback etc.  I’ve learned the hard way over some 15 years of bringing coaching skills to business leaders – Always contract follow up sessions, Never leave them with just a (for example), 2 day coaching skills workshop, This will rarely be successful, Stay with them over a 6 to 9 month period, keep the dialogue going on how coaching is helping the business, get them to publish success, encourage their managers and support each other.

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Using Objects in Coaching – Case Study

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Using Objects as an aid to a Coaching Conversation

Introduction

This article explains how everyday objects such as a pencil, pen, cup, saucer or spoon can be used to great effect in a coaching session. 

Applications

This technique can be used in any coaching conversation of 30+ minutes where the coachee’s topic contains a number of elements.  The topic may be of a personal nature, an inter-personal issue, a structural or systemic issue or about a project or process. 

Benefits

The benefits include:

(a)    An opportunity to unravel a problem, identify its separate parts and to see the relationship between them. (spatial sorting)

(b)   The ability to look at the whole ‘system’.

(c)    Getting the issue/problem ‘out of the coachee’s head and onto the table’.  This usually helps the coachee look/see/feel the situation more objectively and as an observer (disassociation and/or 3^rd position)

(d)   More scope for the coach to come out and be more detached and to ‘play’.

(e)   An ability to see, through the simplicity of the process:

(i)      How the situation is now; and

(ii)    How s/he wants it to be.

(f)     The process appeals to people with a strong visual/spatial preference or a strong bodily (‘tangible’) kinaesthetic preference.

(g)   It helps the coachee reveal the root cause of an issue on a deeper level.  The objects can represent intangible as well as tangible things e.g. the component pieces regarding an issue around using time effectively might be (i) love of variety; (ii) No time for myself; (iii) I never do anything properly.

(h)   The emphasis is more on awareness raising/personal insights, gathering and testing data, unblocking an issue rather than creating an action plan.

Process

The coach needs to start with some coaching questions, focussing down on the issue before inviting the coachee to work with the objects.  Until you become experienced in using objects I suggest you restrict the number of components/issues to between 3-5.  So for example one object could represent the whole of a team, rather than having lots of additional objects which represent each member of that team. 

You can use the process at a variety of levels.  The coachee could use one object to represent his/her diary and, at a deeper level another object(s) could represent a fear, guilt, a belief, lack of self confidence. 

Suggest to the coachee that they are open to anything that shows up and say that they can end the process at any stage. 

As in any coaching situation use your intuition and sense where the energy is flowing and what is working or not working.  Also give the coachee the space and time to think and feel into the issue. 

Clear a table and sit opposite, or alongside or at 90 degrees to the coachee, whatever is more comfortable for the coachee.  The coach should not touch the objects on the table at any stage in the process.  

Ask the coachee to focus on the current situation.  Let the coachee choose the first object from what’s already in the room e.g. a pencil.  Ask the coachee to place the object thoughtfully on the table. 

Ask the coachee the following type of questions as appropriate. ‘In which direction is the future, the past?  In which direction do you want your object to face?  Is there anything that springs to mind? 

Then repeat the above process with the other components/objects.  With each object the coach should check what the object represents e.g. my boss, low self esteem and ask ‘Where do you want to place e.g. your boss in relation to the existing objects?  How far apart?  Which way is it facing?  What’s happening in that space?  What, if anything, is missing in regard to your issue/question? 

Once the current reality is in place check that the coachee is happy with how the issue is represented. 

Now ask the coachee  ‘Let each of the objects have a voice and an emotion and let each piece talk to you and to each other’.  Ask the coachee to take each object in turn.  A project might say ‘I would like to benefit more from X’s expertise’. 

Ask the coachee e.g. ‘What is the overall system telling you?  What are you experiencing in your body?  What do you notice that you were unaware of before’?

The coach may comment on anything that may be significant to the coachee e.g. ‘I notice that your deputy is standing in front of you and is facing you’. ‘What are the messages regarding this?’ 

The next stage is to ask the coachee one or both of the following types of questions:

(a)    ‘What piece(s) would you like to move to help shift your perception/feelings about the current situation? or

(b)   How would the objects need to be arranged for the situation to be more satisfactory for you?’The coach could then deepen what this might mean in terms of the steps s/he could take.  Then the coach could end by asking for example ‘How do you now see/feel/think about the issue?’  What has changed for you?  ‘What insights have you had?  To what extent has this process been helpful? 

If you would like to receive a copy of a case study send an e-mail to Richard Fox at rjfox@tlc.eu.com or download it from www.coachingknowhow.com

Author

Richard Fox is a partner in The Learning Corporation LLP, a pan European firm of coaches and training facilitators.  He is a qualified executive coach, a business mentor and a master NLP practitioner with a particular interest in helping organisations and individuals clarify their unique identity, meaning and purpose and values. 

Acknowledgements.

I would like to thank and acknowledge Meike Buegler, Constellator and Organizational Development Consulatant at Syngenta Crop Protection AG for introducing me to Organizational Constellations, using people as well as objects.  Also Lesley Pugh, an executive coach and NLP colleague for contributing to this paper and the case study

Richard Fox    6 May 2009

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