Effective Coaching

"We grow the most in our areas of strength!" - Marcus Buckingham Organisational growth ultimately comes down to the people in the organisation. In other words, if our organisation has to be at its best, then the people in the organisation have to be at their best. So the question beckons, how can leaders ensure that their people are operating at their best? Well to answer that, we need to figure out how to be most effective in the way we influence our people i.e. how can we coach our people most effectively? I think all the research done byandmakes one thing very clear - that the most effective way of doing so is through focusing on the strengths of the employee. Once again, it is important to remember here that a strength is not something a person is good at but something that strengthens them. I highly recommend going through their content which is available on every platform. What I would like to focus on within coaching are two important aspects to keep in mind to help us really double down on strength based coaching - idiosyncrasy and empathy. To paraphraseagain, the only thing that all effective managers have in common across all fields is an appreciation that every individual is unique. And so, there is no one effective method that can be used as the best way of coaching everyone - rather we have to be able to shape how we coach people in accordance to who they are as people. In other words, effective coaching requires you to take an idiosyncratic approach. In my personal experience, the aspect where idiosyncrasy helped me the most was in how I generally support my team. I tried supporting them in every way I thought was most effective yet my team still wouldn't feel fully supported. One day out of desperation, I just asked "What does support look like to YOU?" And from then, my team would never not feel supported. “Empathy fuels connection. Sympathy drives disconnection.” - Dr.. Empathy is, as Dr Brown explains, "I'm here with you. I'm not here to fix you." I think it is extremely important for us to be able to get to the same place our employees are to be able to help them properly. Say your employee is someone who struggles with self assurance. A lack of empathy would look something like "You got this/You'll be fine/this works for me" - all of it might be compassionate, but it is not empathetic. Empathy would look like allowing yourself to get back to the point in which you felt the same lack of self assurance. You don't need to give advice or anything, because well you can't(here is an excellent podcast episode from Angela Duckworth titled "Is Empathy in Fact Immoral? (NSQ Ep. 44)" to explore this further). All you gotta do is be there for them and let them know that you have been there too.