Building Your Coaching Skills
Many of us have experienced sports coaches, where they helped us stretch for the crawl, turn in dance, or catch a ball. But sports coaching tends to be just one kind of coaching—and not necessarily the kinds of coaching you need to provide or hear at work.
Coaching is one of the most important—and most difficult—responsibilities of technical leaders. And the more management responsibilities you have, or the more Agile a team you work with, the more you need to coach. Too often, people struggle and fail when it comes to coaching others to excellence. Sometimes, managers make the mistake of trying to coach someone into performing work in a way that doesn’t fit for that person. Other times, the coaching isn’t explicit about how to perform work in a new and different way.
We will explore practical steps to help you assess your team members’ skills and recognize when coaching is appropriate. We’ll review several coaching approaches and provide an opportunity try out these techniques. Bring your most challenging coaching situation and come prepared to practice!
10 minutes: short intro. Depending on how many people, ask people what they want out of the session 20 minutes: do a simulation of coaching/debrief. 10 minutes: debrief: elicit what worked/what didn’t 10 minutes: add more approaches (whatever people missed in the debrief) 20 minutes: try more coaching and debrief 20 minutes: more coaching. Depending on how many people want to coach “up,” we’ll try things specifically for coaching others at a “higher” level in the organization. Final debrief
Note: the time is flexible here. I try to do this timing, but typically end up doing more teaching at the beginning because people only know about sports coaches or think they have to teach.