Performance Coaching

A Complete Guide to Best Practice Coaching and Training

Carol Wilson

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789664478
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Mentoring & Coaching
• Index: Business

Performance Coaching is a complete resource for improving organizational and employee performance through coaching. Full of tips, tools and checklists, it covers all the fundamental elements of the coaching process, from developing the skills needed to coach effectively, to coaching in leadership, manager-as-coach training, cross-cultural coaching and measuring return on investment. It explores the key techniques and models in the field to allow readers to identify which approach is most suited to specific situations. Featuring case studies from organizations including Virgin, IKEA, the NHS and England Rugby showing how effective coaching approaches have been applied in practice, this book is for coaches of all levels of experience, as well as HR managers and leaders looking to embed a coaching culture in their organizations.This revised third edition of Performance Coaching has been updated to include the latest insights and developments and contains new chapters on creating a global coaching culture, the coaching-mentoring-managing continuum and how to lead a generative thinking meeting. New material also covers distance coach training, neuroscience in coaching, coaching the bully at work and coaching in education.

Part One

The fundamentals of performance coaching

Introduction

Coaching is a relatively new profession and yet arguably as old as human communication itself. Socrates is sometimes said to have been the first coach, because many of the quotations attributed to him display the coaching approach of asking questions instead of giving instructions, for example: ‘I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think.’

Coaching is not just a workplace phenomenon. Many of the managers I have trained shared stories of how their newly acquired skills improved their relationships with family and friends. An Indian manager told me that in 20 minutes he resolved a family feud that had lasted 20 years by asking questions from the GROW framework described in Chapter 21; an American described his relief at having rescued his son from a prolonged period of depression, getting back on track with planning his future after only one GROW session; a paediatric consultant described how his recently learned coaching skills helped to save the life of a baby, related in Chapter 6.

We have had many laughs in the training room over people describing their attempts to coach their partners and children. Coaching close family members is an excellent way to gauge how you are really doing with your coaching skills: one hard-pressed, over-worked European mother said her young children responded with a mortifying ‘Mummy, why are you talking funny? Why aren’t you telling us off like you usually do?’

Some have received a short reaction from husbands and wives, while others have seen an all-round improvement in home communication. And there are some lucky spouses who have discovered the joys of being listened to, perhaps for the first time in the entire marriage.

Nancy Kline, the renowned author of Time to Think (Kline, 1999), relates that she and her husband of over 20 years consistently provide each other with an informal ‘thinking session’ every day: one listens to the other without interrupting for 15 minutes, then they swap over. If they are in different places, they do it by phone. The value of listening is fundamental to coaching, and to building trust and healthy relationships. Listening is explored further in Chapter 17.

So how did the skills that we now term ‘coaching’, which are widely used in management training in organizations across the world, become recognized as an effective method of communication? How does it differ from mentoring, sports coaching or teaching, the more well-known applications of the word? How did the coaching style that managers use to motivate their staff become known as ‘performance coaching’?

My first chapter answers all these questions and explores the broad range of trends, professions and academic disciplines from which the framework of performance coaching has been developed.

01

What is coaching?

SUMMARY

• Origins of the term ‘coaching’
• The principles of coaching
• Types of coaching

Origins of the term ‘coaching’

In the free Western world of the 1950s, a post-war zeitgeist embraced a new sense of optimism, self-responsibility and focus on the future. Over the next three decades, these trends showed up in psychology, business, sport, culture, politics and parenting.

The twentieth century saw rapid developments in the field of psychology. Until the 1940s, the focus was on identifying problems and fixing them, notably through the work of Freud and Jung. A major shift then occurred through the work of psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Fritz Perls.

Maslow’s widely publicized ‘hierarchy of needs’ (1968), shown on the next page, depicted the stages through which people have to pass in order to reach what Maslow called ‘self-actualization’, meaning the fulfilment of the best that a person could be in terms of their own unique potential (Maslow, 1998).

Maslow chose to study exemplary individuals such as Albert Einstein rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing that: ‘The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy.’

The difference between this approach and what went before is that Maslow looked at what was right about human beings rather than what was wrong. In this lies one of the key principles of coaching: focus on the solution, not the problem.

Figure 1.1 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Figure 1.1 details

The Maslow’s hierarchy pyramid from top to bottom is explained as follows.

• Self-actualization: personal growth and fulfilment
• Self-esteem: status, responsibility, recognition from other
• Social: love and belonging, connection to others
• Security: protection, security, law and order
• Survival: food, water, sex, shelter and sleep.

Perls’ Gestalt therapy (1951 Perls, 1973) focused on creating awareness in people. Its principles were:

• Live now, stay in the present
• Live here, be with the present
• Stop imagining, experience reality
• Stop unnecessary thinking
• Express, rather than manipulating, explaining, justifying, or judging
• Give in to unpleasantness; do not restrict your awareness
• Accept no ‘should’ or ‘ought’ other than your own
• Take full responsibility for your own actions, feelings and thoughts
• Surrender to being who you are right now.

Therein lie the two principles of ‘awareness’ and ‘responsibility’, later identified by Sir John Whitmore as the essence of good coaching (Whitmore, 2017).

During the 1980s, solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) (Shazer, 1988) was developed through the collaboration of several psychologists, including Steve de Shazer and Milton Erickson. As its name infers, SFBT encouraged people to look to the future and take action, rather than analyze and therefore remain limited by the past. SFBT’s methodology is illustrated by its ‘miracle question’, of which there exist many variations:

Suppose our meeting is over, you go home, do whatever you planned to do for the rest of the day. And then, sometime in the evening, you get tired and go to sleep. And in the middle of the night, when you are fast asleep, a miracle happens and all the problems that brought you here today are solved just like that. But since the miracle happened overnight nobody is telling you that the miracle happened. When you wake up the next morning, how are you going to start discovering that the miracle happened? … What else are you going to notice? … What else?

At the same time as these later developments in psychology, there were extraordinary changes taking place in the field of commerce. Ricardo Semler, for example, turned control of his multinational organization Semco over to its employees, even allowing people to set their own salaries (Semler, 2001). Andy Law practised a similar style of management when he formed St Luke’s Advertising Agency (Law, 1999). In education, responsibility for learning started to be devolved on to the pupils, sometimes at the expense of a formal curriculum.

Meanwhile, whole new areas of personal self-development emerged, encouraging people to create their own solutions for their physical, mental and spiritual health. This trend occurred both in the field of fitness, with the proliferation of gyms and the spread of practices such as yoga, Tai Chi and aerobics, and in personal wellbeing, which spawned a multitude of books starting with Dale Carnegie’s 1956 bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and including Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Female Eunuch, Games People Play, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and numerous guides on how to be happy, including one by the Dalai Lama.

The principles now identified as coaching (which are explored later in this chapter) were evident to some extent in many of these areas and have been particularly identified in the writings of psychologists, especially organizational, over the last 40 years. However, the only direct link between these principles and the word ‘coaching’ that I have been able to find came from the sports arena, and offers an answer to the question of why the term, with its inappropriate implication of instruction, has been applied at all.

Tim Gallwey was a Harvard graduate of the 1970s who became captain of the tennis team while on sabbatical. Gallwey noticed that when he left the court, his students tended to improve their game more quickly than when he was there to instruct them. Already a disciple of spirituality and psychology, Gallwey explored this paradox and developed a series of questions, statements and exercises to support the self-teaching process. One of his key actions was to apply ‘directionality’ – identifying one’s goal before starting out (Gallwey, 1986).

During the 1980s, Gallwey’s work was embraced by English baronet, Sir John Whitmore (1937–2017), who in 1992 published Coaching for Performance, a book now regarded as the ‘bible’ of coaching and available in 19 languages. Whitmore came of age in the 1960s both as a member of the elite British aristocracy and as a racing driver who moved in international circles, counting the Hollywood actor Steve McQueen among his friends. Then he discovered the Esalen Institute in California and his life changed profoundly and acquired a deeper direction. Esalen was...

Table of contents

• About the author
• Foreword by Sir John Whitmore
• Foreword by Sir Richard Branson
• Acknowledgements
• Part One The fundamentals of performance coaching
• 01 What is coaching?
• 02 The differences between coaching and mentoring
• 03 The coaching–mentoring–managing continuum
• 04 Coaching and neuroscience
• Part Two Creating a coaching culture in organizations
• 05 What is a coaching culture?
• 06 Ten steps to creating a coaching culture
• 07 One-to-one coaching in the workplace
• 08 Manager-as-coach training
• 09 Creating a global coaching culture
• 10 Bullying in the workplace
• 11 Resilience in leadership
• 12 Coaching for transformational leadership
• 13 Coaching supervision: a workplace perspective
• 14 Coaching in schools
• 15 Coaching in charities for social transformation
• 16 ROI: Measuring the return on investment in coaching and coach training
• Part Three Skills for coaches and managers
• 17 Listening
• 18 Reflecting, summarizing and clarifying
• 19 Questioning
• 20 Permission protocol
• 21 The GROW coaching model
• 22 The EXACT model: a coaching approach to goal setting
• 23 Team coaching: the generative thinking meeting
• 24 Coaching feedback
• 25 The structure of coaching
• 26 Setting and reviewing actions
• 27 How to become an executive coach
• Part Four Continuing professional development
• Section one: Adding to the toolbox
• 28 David Grove’s Clean Language
• 29 David Grove’s Emergent Knowledge
• 30 Transpersonal Coaching
• 31 Systemic coaching
• 32 Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument
• 33 Leadership models
• 34 The Inner Game
• 35 Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment
• 36 Cultural Transformation Tools
• Section two: Psychometric personality types and learning styles
• 37 The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®)
• 38 Bruce Tuckman’s ‘forming, storming, norming and performing’ team development model
• 39 DISC
• 40 More personality profiling tools
• 41 Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory
• 42 The dangers of psychometric profiling and learning styles
• Section three: Awareness of self and others
• 43 Self-limiting beliefs
• 44 The Reuven Bar-On Emotional Quotient inventory (Bar-On EQ-i)
• 45 Appreciative Inquiry
• 46 360-degree feedback
• 47 Mindfulness
• Conclusion
• APPENDIX I: Coaching questions
• APPENDIX II: Coaching supervision questions
• References
• Index