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The first edition of Coaching, Mentoring & Managing: Breakthrough Strategies to Solve Performance Problems and Build Winning Teams was published by Micki Holliday in 1996, with a second edition in 2001.
Written as a management resource, this manual includes practical techniques to coach employees to become more productive, positive, inspired, and effective.
Presenting a trademarked StaffCoach Model, the word ‘coach’ encompasses three distince roles or approaches: coaching (for people who are performing OK), mentoring (for above average performers), and counseling (for people who are performing below average). What I find interesting is that the common definition I use for coaching encompasses all three areas and focuses more on the motivation and commitment of the person to change.
Ten tools are described for working with teams and individuals of which listening is the one most identify as the the number one skill for coaches. Others included here are flexibility, empathy and understanding, valuing the employee, effective feedback, openness, humor, enthusiasm and optimism, and a proactive mindset.
How do you view the coach’s role?
Vikki G. Brock, Ph.D., MCC
Director, History and Archive Division
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There are 3 Responses so far...
I would agree that listening is the major part of the coach’s role… the other major thing I see is missing from the list of 10 tools is questioning.
The thing I find interesting about coaching books is that they spend a lot of time explaining the coach’s role. Of course, that’s important, but equally important is for coaches to understand the clients role.
Vikki, you are so abreast of coaching literature, I’ve read quite a bit of your work and you know what’s where in coaching! Do you happen to know of a book that explains the client’s role – if we really are in a “partnership” then shouldn’t coaching books explain, so that coaches understand, the roles equally?
Kerryn Griffiths
ReciproCoach >>> Where coaches go for coaching
http://www. ReciproCoach.com
The thing about coaching is that we generally have the inclination to focus on the coach’s role (which is a good thing).
More importantly is the client’s/coachee’s role (because that will be evident enough to validate the coach’s efficiency, effectiveness and impact? – included in the coach’s role would be to evoke, motivate and induce performance of the client/coachee to ‘optimize’ his/her role as a client/coachee?).
One of my critical measurement of ‘coaching success’ is the coach’s ability to facilitate/coach the client’s/coachee’s awareness & realization of the ‘things/issues/matters’ that are ecological meaningful, important, and of top priority to the client/coachee to work on, and facilitating/coaching to make them happen and realized (if a coach is unable to ‘make happen or realized’, I personally believe the coach has ‘failed’ or need to ‘explore’ further).
Equally important is the client/coachee ‘readiness state’, ‘motivation’ and ‘performance’ to make them happen and realized. So how do we get the client/coachee to be in his/her ‘readiness state’, having the ‘motivation’, and executing the ‘performance’ to ‘make happen and realized’? How critical are these client’s/coachee’s role to contribute to ‘coaching success’? How do we measure them?
So we can have the best coaching tools/techniques/methodologies, yet at the end of the day, coaching is about ‘making things happen and realized’ for and by the client/coachee. Am I right in this respect?
Billy C H Teoh
Malaysia.
Kerryn and Billy – Great comments.
I believe that many of the books about the client role are self-coaching type books where the client is responsible for both the coach and the client role. I have not kept up with the books released since 2007 – does anybody know of any books that focus on the client role? I do know that in the early 1990s Thomas Leonard had a short ‘client coachability index’ that could be used to determine the clients readiness and willingness to be coached.
Coaching is about making things happen, and those things can strictly be ‘awareness’ – anything that is physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual is fair game for a coaching outcome. I remember a client who gained confidence (which is hard to quantify), and the way he described it was that “he was able to see opportunities and possibilities that he could not see when he lacked confidence’.
Vikki Brock, MCC, Ph.D.
Director, History and Archives Division
The Coaching Commons