The Key to Strategic Coaching: Trust, Empathy, and How You Ask
Tags: Leadership, Empathy, Coaching, Impact, Trust

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A friend once asked me: “what is your typical lovely day?” and I went rolling out my eyes thinking, this person hits me with a simple boom. I have never (at least in the past 6 months) thought about my typical lovely day and imagine if I have one — most of the time I just think about a typical l̶o̶v̶e̶l̶y̶ day. The question has struck me so I took a minute to reflect and there goes “Oh! Out of all activities I can think of, grabbing insights is my first call.” — just like that, and I’m pouring it into this post today.

I have been almost 4 months researching and learning about coaching and how to make it more strategic — effective and impactful. A series of coaching trials and consultations have been done in my part and I was struck when I learned from David Peterson (Google’s ex-Executive Coach) and David Goldsmith (Executive Director at 7 Paths Forward) on explaining accelerated ways to produce better impact in coaching.

They revealed the highlights in below:

Start fast — generate value per minute by building trust, focusing on the next steps, and knowing speed is the outcome, not the process.

— generate value per minute by building trust, focusing on the next steps, and knowing speed is the outcome, not the process. Find leverage — identifying the position of development process from the coachee using Peterson’s 5 Development Pipeline.

— identifying the position of development process from the coachee using Peterson’s 5 Development Pipeline. Increase action-and-reflection repetition — because that is when the learning happens. Repetition generates habits, and what is repeated must be behaviors that posit in the edge of coachee’s comfort zone (must be motivated and challenging enough for coachee to shift it)

— because that is when the learning happens. Repetition generates habits, and what is repeated must be behaviors that posit in the edge of coachee’s comfort zone (must be motivated and challenging enough for coachee to shift it) Zoom in, zoom out — coach must be flexible enough to ask coachee to zoom into the specific behavior that they’d like to do, but also remind them back to the initial objective, principles, values that they hold.

— coach must be flexible enough to ask coachee to zoom into the specific behavior that they’d like to do, but also remind them back to the initial objective, principles, values that they hold. Use advice strategically — not the type of game that coach plays, but I quote them: “if giving advice helps the client learns, do it, because the essence of of coaching is to help people learn.”

From the 1.5 hour video I’ve delved the keys we need to hold to make coaching to be more strategic:

Trust — with no trust, you cannot help digging up what’s wrong with your coachee. With no trust, your coachee won’t be as open as you expect them to be. With no trust, the added value will be minimum.

— with no trust, you cannot help digging up what’s wrong with your coachee. With no trust, your coachee won’t be as open as you expect them to be. With no trust, the added value will be minimum. Empathy — this helps you building foundation of trust. In addition, coaching with empathy sometimes works differently with coaching with speed. The two Davids mention that we can go slow to go better. I’d say we would need to infuse more empathy in order to produce better impact.

— this helps you building foundation of trust. In addition, coaching with empathy sometimes works differently with coaching with speed. The two Davids mention that we can go slow to go better. I’d say we would need to infuse more empathy in order to produce better impact. End in Mind: Value per minute — it’s not about speed, but efficiency that creates impact. So coaching with speed is not 100% effective. It can be crafted through how you ask questions: How you choose the question to generate the trigger, how you elaborate your questions to delve into specific behaviors, or how you structure your questions to direct coachee to the desired solutions for them.

This makes my day lovely. Bring one thought to hopefully influences many.

Cheers!