Nurturing the Art of Self-Coaching
by Kirstin Lynde
When it comes to strengthening your team’s performance, there’s only one thing as powerful as taking the time to coach your direct reports: teaching them to self-coach.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge advocate of letting your team know what you like and don’t like about their work. Please don’t stop dishing out your insights!
However, getting your direct reports into the “self coaching” habit has a couple undeniable benefits:
- You, the team’s fearless leader, are unlikely to be present as team members are doing most of their work – therefore you can’t always say what worked and what didn’t. In some cases, you may be able to deduce where someone’s efforts derailed simply by looking at their work output. But more often than not, unless you’re present to watch each sales presentation or research project, you won’t be able to say exactly where each effort went off the tracks — or what could have been done better.
- Constructive criticism is infinitely more powerful when it is “owned” by the person who is trying to improve. The best way to create that ownership is to nudge someone to come up with key constructive insights themselves. “I should have asked more clearly for the sale” turns out to be 10x more powerful than “You should have asked more clearly for the sale.”
So what’s the best way to nurture self-coaching skills?
Regularly ask your direct reports the pair of coaching questions you’d like them to start asking themselves after each significant work effort. Here’s one that works well: what went well about that negotiation you just finished (or meeting, or analysis, or other)? And what might you change about your approach if given another crack at it?
Note it is essential to ask both questions: what did they like, what didn’t they like? Too frequently team members focus solely on finding / voicing fault with themselves. Don’t let this happen. While finding ways to improve is critical, so is recognizing and reinforcing what went well. Acknowledging “what’s working well” helps maintain the self-confidence needed to constructively respond to critical feedback. Therefore both are essential.
Let’s say you start asking your team member (we’ll call him Mark) for “1-2 things that went well and 1-2 things you would do differently” on a regular basis. Guess what happens? Mark starts anticipating these questions….. and planning answers. Which means he starts giving himself feedback! Before long it becomes a habit for Mark to ask those two questions of himself when walking away from each significant effort.
I can hear a few of you murmuring in the back row. Can I trust my team members to have good judgment regarding their own performance? Managers I’ve worked with generally report that they’re surprised how accurate their team members can be when answering self coaching questions. They’re not perfect – but for the 9 out of 10 times you’re not able to watch someone in action yourself, self-coaching beats the alternative by a wide margin. Mentally taking a brief time-out to focus on what they liked — and didn’t — about each new work performance helps an individual fast-track improvements.
When you ARE able to witness how someone handles an important work effort, I recommend you ask the same pair of questions before sharing your own “two cents” about your employee’s performance. Doing this regularly can give you confidence that your team member has reasonable judgment about their own work. If it doesn’t, your feedback (on the heels of their answers) should improve their self-awareness. And give them key performance issues to assess next time they look in the rear view mirror at a particular work effort.
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