This week’s Guest Blog is from our Associate Trainer Tania Ashton Jones

Coaching Conversations

Are you looking to engage to a greater level with your employees, seeking better growth in their performance and business ambitions, to instigate better working relationships amongst team members and ultimately to improve organisational success?

As managers you will be conversing with your employees regularly on various aspects of the organisation, the business outputs and their role within it. Yet consider how many of these conversations reach the levels of being coaching conversations? This might be difficult to answer, but putting time into having coaching conversations can be paramount to supporting your employees in their role and enhancing their business output, commitment, motivation and performance.

So when does a conversation become a coaching conversation? Well how often do you find yourself in a conversation with an employee where you are telling them what you expect to see, how they should reach the goals, giving them the ideas to hit the targets or solve particular issues? If all of this sounds familiar then changing the approach to use a coaching conversation may provide you with a deeper knowledge of your employees. Coaching conversations can help discover hidden strengths and talents and elicit ideas, which otherwise may remain dormant or not be realised. Adopting a coaching conversation approach uses a myriad of skills, such as building rapport, listening, questioning, feedback and the use of frameworks and models to structure the conversation. With practice these skills can enable dynamic, engaging and often soul searching and challenging conversations to occur. So instead of you, the manager, doing all the talking and telling, the coaching conversation can start to form with the focus on using skills to elicit the information and realise potential which otherwise may not be tapped into.

But where do you start? It takes time to practice all the required skills and techniques to adopt a coaching conversation approach, but the benefits gained can be immense.

The Challenge

Take time out to consider the quality of the conversations you currently have with employees and ask yourself if there is scope to elevate the quality and intent of these to bring greater worth and value. By starting to take some small steps and changes to the conversations you are engaged in, you will be on the first rung of the ladder to taking a more coaching conversation approach.

Four tips for coaching conversations

1. Clear your mind space – When engaging into coaching conversations it is important to ensure the space in your mind is clear and uncluttered. Take a few seconds out prior to entering a conversation to mentally remove the previous task or interaction you have just had. Look to eliminate or park any thoughts regarding the person, how they have performed in the past, how you would like them to perform in the future, any assumptions, perceptions or judgements you may have on them. Your mind should be like a blank piece of paper ready to embrace what you are presented with.
2. Encompass the moment – Give the person your full all encompassing focus, without the interruptions of modern day life. Too often conversations are unnecessarily interrupted by technology; the fantastic smart phone which has its uses, but also it’s time and place. If you are to truly focus on the moment of the conversation, then the phone should be left behind or switched off. The time set aside should be seen as precious.
3. Listen to them not you – As the manager, how often have you already decided what is the best course of action and you aren’t really listening because you know what you want to say and what needs to be done? Consequently you spend more time listening to your own inner voice. Take a step back and listen to what your employees are actually saying, not just to what you want to hear.
4. Question them, don’t tell – Rather than telling people what to do or what you expect to see, start to see how you can incorporate questions to elicit ideas from them. For example; What is happening at the moment? What could you do you change that? What other ideas do you have? How could you make that happen?

These tips are just the start, but their impact should not be underestimated. If you feel you could enhance the quality of conversations you are having and raise them to a coaching conversation level then coaching skills for managers provide a powerful toolset to support this. Start by identifying opportunities when you can employ these tips and experience the power of conversation.

Tania Ashton Jones
Associate
Training To Achieve