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This week we are talking about coaching our team. What does it mean to actually “coach” a member of your team and “coaching” as a leadership style versus actually being a coach. This comes a little from a blog post I wrote titled “Why you can’t coach your team”. That post was really about making these distinctions between being a formal coach and using coaching as one of many leadership styles. When you want to be a coach, you need powerful questions and a few other things on-board.

What is “coaching” as a profession? One description is that it is a result-oriented, systematic process in which the coach facilitates the enhancement of life experience and goal attainment in the personal and/or professional lives of normal, non-clinical clients. Here is a key distinction; I am not telling my clients what goals they need to set for themselves are achieve.

As a “boss” this may be a little different.  There are two key descriptions offered to us about coaching as a leadership style and as an approach from Ken Blanchard and Dan Goleman.

What about those coaching questions? Well here they are in a list for you:

• What does a “win” for all solution look like? (great with interpersonal conflicts)
• What is this situation here to teach you? (great for any)
• What do you really want?
• How are the people/person in this situation your allies for learning and growing?
• If there were no obstacles, what would you be doing about this?
• Are you willing to feel your feelings about this issue? Which feelings are you avoiding?

If you’re going to coach, you need to be unattached to the outcome and ask powerful questions.

What question do you like to ask and how does coaching work for you?