A growing body of research has shown that coaching can enhance people’s resilience, improve their performance, build self-confidence, and overall increase their level of wellness.
In fact, when we look at coaching in line with the problem areas associated with the work-related factors, we can see how each of them can be improved through coaching. We know that these are the things that contribute to people’s stress, depression and anxiety. So, if we can solve these issues through coaching – by having the conversations – it is imperative that we take action to:
Relieve pressure points for our people by having coaching conversations with them around their workload and schedules
Provide them with the ability to influence and control aspects of their workload and direction
Support promotion by having development conversations and considering the support they need to achieve their goals
Develop our relationships with each person and coach them in building rapport with other team members and stakeholders
Help them understand where their role fits within the organisation and how what they do contributes to the bigger picture
Support and coach them through the constant change organisations now face.
Not every coaching conversation needs to be about wellness.
Simply having coaching conversations around the pressures they’re facing, where they can have influence, promotion opportunities, relationship development, role clarity and change will have the added benefit of improving wellness by addressing these important work-related factors.
Being curious and having the conversation is the point.
According to HBR Article The Leader as Coach, leaders accustomed to Command and Control styles of leadership tend to tackle performance problems by telling their people what to do, and as such see the coaching approach as too “soft.”
Additionally, coaching can make them feel psychologically uncomfortable as it deprives them the ability to assert their authority.
In fact, in a study by Daniel Goleman on leadership styles in 2000, leaders ranked coaching as their least-favourite style, citing lack of time for the slow and tedious work of teaching their people to help them grow.
Although they may be unenthusiastic, these leaders still tend to think they’re pretty good at coaching. Research, however, says they are not. In a study with 3,761 executives, they were asked to assess their own coaching skills, which were then compared with those of people who worked with them.
According to HBR, the results didn’t align well. This was largely due to the Executives switching to “tell” mode to get their own solution or conclusion across, meaning that at the end of the coaching no-one had learned anything about the situation or themselves.
This kind of “coaching” is unfortunately still quite common. The good news, however, is that with the right learning and support, a sound method, and lots of practice and feedback, any leader can improve their coaching capability.
Key insights from the study:
Twenty-four percent of the executives significantly overestimated their abilities, rating themselves as above average while their colleagues ranked them in the bottom third of the group.
The authors concluded,
“If you think you’re a good coach but you actually aren’t, this data suggests you may be a good deal worse than you imagined.”
As the evidence shows, when it comes to coaching, leaders can often fall into the trap of trying to provide solutions, or worse — just doing the work ourselves, rather than being curious and asking questions to pull solutions from our people.
Bringing curiosity to our coaching conversations is imperative, as it increases engagement, allowing our people to be more confident, more competent, more autonomous, and more self-sufficient.
One of the learners from the Integrated Approach reflected on this point and remarked:
“I do my team members’ work for them when they don’t get it right and I’m realising that I disempower them by doing so.
By not coaching them on how to improve, I’m not extending them or holding them accountable and I’m seeing that this ultimately undermines their confidence and affects their sense of purpose.”
If leaders can get to a point where they’re having regular coaching conversations around pressure, influence, promotion, relationships, role clarity and change, they will in turn address the factors that are contributing to the issue of wellness in their people.
By having these robust coaching conversations, they are in turn allowing their people to reflect on and improve their understanding of their internal world — their strengths, weaknesses, ambitions, and fears, as well as their external world — the threats, opportunities and resources around them.
By ensuring that they’re coaching to strengths and not just areas for improvement, they help their people to see different possibilities, in turn building motivation and resilience to behavioural change.
When it comes to implementing these conversations, there is one key measure that leaders should consider. When they’re having any coaching conversation, leaders should ask whether they’re moving someone towards mental health or away from it.
There are numerous tools available to support leaders in having coaching conversations, such as the GROW Model, but ultimately leaders need to ensure that the conversation moves their people towards mental health.
Call To Action
Some organisations may have leaders with strong coaching capability in the business, but sometimes it may need to be developed, particularly when we consider the research which points to the fact that most leaders aren’t as good at coaching as they think they are.
Additionally, we have to consider the difference between aspiring to coach and actually making it happen as an everyday practice though the various layers of the organisation.
For most organisations, there is still a huge gap between aspiration and practice. Commitment to coaching at the leadership level is imperative and building awareness of coaching with a lens on the six core areas (pressure, influence, promotion, relationships, role, change) known to negatively impact mental health and wellbeing.
In The Integrated Approach, Lysander built this commitment by helping leaders learn about and practice the coaching leadership style, as well as providing individual coaching over six months to model coaching and embedding practices with them.
Taking it Further
For more on Hudson’s Model, visit the Enhancing Team section or the Safe Work Australia site.
In every interaction we have, we must always strive to create a psychologically safe workplace for our people. This is especially important when it comes to coaching, where we want our people to feel safe to have open and honest conversations.
This in turn leads to a culture where information flows freely up the line from our people, and down the line from senior leadership.
The best leaders are able to impart and listen to feedback, empowering their people through important generative coaching conversations.
In the section Enhancing Team, we look at Hudson’s Model of Safety Maturity which strives for a generative culture where this two-way flow of information occurs, something that is supported through coaching as leaders provide transparent information and feedback up and down.