How To Coach
(6 Min Read) A simple framework to become an effective coach
Note: Coaching is a skill that varies from coach to coach, coachee to coachee, the relationship between them, the goal, the situation, the type of coaching, and the industry being coached in. As it varies greatly, in this post, I am sharing the framework that I apply when coaching people in tech. However, I believe this framework will work for others too.
The last few posts focussed on various aspects of mentoring. But coaching is a very different skill from mentoring. In today’s post, we discuss how to coach.
Before diving in, let's refresh what a coaching is or a coach does:
Coaches help us achieve our long-term goals (5+ years). They provide strategic and long-term guidance to keep us on track. This allows us to grow in the right direction and prevents us from getting sidetracked on our journey toward our goals.
To do this effectively, I have developed the following framework as the basis for all of my coaching. The framework consists of three parts, each building on the previous one. Here is the framework:
Self-Reflect: Coaches help coachee self-reflect.
Right-Question: Coaches ask coachee the right questions.
Drive-Accountability: Coaches keep coachee accountable.
As a coach, doing these effectively is hard. Before diving into why it’s hard, let's understand why these three elements make up the framework and how you can apply them effectively during your coaching sessions.
Self-Reflection
Let's look at the coaching definition again. A coach helps coachees achieve big, ambitious, long-term goals. However, the journey to success has to be covered by the coachees themselves.
During that journey, a coachee must lean on their strengths, build and develop new strengths, and overcome many challenges. This is where self-reflection helps.
All of us have core strengths and areas for growth. A coach must help coachees uncover both by assisting them to self-reflect. The mechanism of self-reflection can be any personality test like Myers-Briggs or INTF, or journaling (my preference) as it’s free and equally effective. Regardless of the mechanism, it's critical to identify the strengths to lean on for the journey towards the goal.
Another area where a coach can help a coachee with self-reflection is by helping them reflect on their actions. This is similar to a retrospective. The mechanism I recommend leads to the next part of the framework, i.e., asking the right questions.
Asking the Right Questions
Both the coach and coachee have different perspectives on the journey towards the goal. A coachee's role is to overcome challenges, whereas a coach's role is to help the coachee think about how they will overcome these challenges.
An effective coach helps coachees come up with solutions to their problems by asking them the right follow-up questions in an inquisitive rather than accusatory tone.
I cannot emphasize enough how critical it is to ask the right question in the right tone. This is the most important aspect of coaching and where many coaches fall short.
Also, the reason I call these the right questions to ask instead of the right inquiries is that questions are information-seeking by nature, whereas inquiries are information-repeating. As a coach, we want our coachee to think or seek information based on our questions, not repeat the information they already know.
Why is the tone of the question important?
We, humans, get defensive when anyone questions our way of operating and the goals we are working towards. If the tone seems accusatory, we stop listening.
As a coach, that’s the worst thing to happen during coaching. We are there to help our coachees. If they shut down, then coaching is ineffective.
Keeping our tone inquisitive rather than accusatory can help avoid this situation.
What are the right questions to ask your coachee?
Our goal in asking questions is to help them see things that are in their blind spots. The right follow-up questions are contextual by nature, so it’s hard to write them down. However, here are a few categories of questions/inquiries that, as a coach, are worth asking:
Question the unsaid assumptions that coachee have made but haven’t realized.
Question various aspects of the coachee solution approach like timelines, priorities, velocity, team, etc.
Inquire about the second-order, third-order, etc., impact of their decisions and how they plan to overcome them.
Inquire about the best-case and worst-case scenarios for their next steps and why they believe those are the best and worst cases.
Inquire if you suspect that the next step is taking them away from their goal why this detour is needed and why now.
Inquire about their strategy or push them to create one.
These are a few examples. There are many categories of questions that I may have missed. If you have them, please leave them in the comments.
As a result of our inquisitive coaching session, our coachee will have some actions to take. This leads us to the next part of the framework.
Drive Accountability
Coaches need to drive accountability from the coachees. Without accountability, coaching is not effective.
There are various ways a coach/coachee can drive accountability. They can create short-term goals, milestones, and even dates by which a certain type of decision has to be made.
The best tool I use to drive accountability is called the State & Date framework (details in a separate post). I learned this from a guest on Lenny’s podcast. The summarized version is that whatever action your coachee is going to do, ask them to give you a state the thing will be in and a date by which it will be in that state.
For example, a coachee may say that they will launch a product in the upcoming months. Ask them to give a state and a date, and then keep them accountable. In practice, this could look like, "I will launch the MVP, which will have these two core features in 30 days." And then, as a coach, you keep them accountable for it. If they miss the state or a date, help them self-reflect by asking questions and repeating the loop.
The above framework is cyclic. It takes many iterations during each coaching session. In a typical session, a coachee reflects, the coach inquires, the coachee reflects and determines action, the coach helps set accountability goals, and then repeats. It is an intense exercise for both a coachee and a coach. But it's completely worth it.
Summary
This post barely scratches the surface of the topic of coaching. We haven’t even talked about the types of coaching such as executive, leadership, career, performance, business, etc., that a coachee may need and when they should seek one over another.
Regardless, we did cover something fundamental i.e. how to coach. The above framework can be applied to all types of coaching with the right context.
Now the question is, how do you know when coaching is working?
The best way I can describe that coaching has worked is when the coachee leaves with the feeling that they have solved their problem by themselves. The coach and the coach vanish into the background.
This feeling may seem unrewarding to many but not to coaches. A great coach is like a great teacher, a parent, a well-wisher, and a master, who gets more pleasure from seeing their coachees succeed and get well-deserved credit than from being recognized for their coaching.
I hope this information was helpful. If it was, please consider subscribing to this newsletter.
Here are other posts in the series that you may find interesting: