[2022-05-28] From feedback to coaching
For tonight's Jenesis post, I dip into the Café Jen archives to share another article about providing guidance to employees. It was a recurring theme in my first blog (and, increasingly, in Jenesis) given how challenging it can be to recommend improvements to others.
Among the top reasons people avoid difficult conversations at work is fear of hurting the other person's feelings and fear of making things worse rather than better.
This fear is often present when managers consider how to provide constructive feedback to an employee to improve performance.
As a manager, I encountered defensiveness just as often as openness when offering suggestions for improvement to a subordinate. While some employees welcomed input and expressed gratitude when I pointed out something they could do to improve, others reacted defensively and tried to justify their current behaviour.
This was understandable. I struggled as much as anyone to hear that I could be doing something better.
So what if there were a better way to provide feedback in a way that engenders openness and gratitude rather than defensiveness and justifications?
Coaching conversations
Coaching conversations may be the answer.
In a Harvard Business Review article, professor Monique Valcour suggests that you can't be a great manager if you're not a good coach.
To be a stand-out manager and coach, writes Valcour, "you must understand what drives each person, help build connections between each person’s work and the organization’s mission and strategic objectives, provide timely feedback, and help each person learn and grow on an ongoing basis."
She suggests having regular discussions, called coaching conversations, to help employees make progress at something that's meaningful to them.
Ask, don’t tell
Such coaching conversations differ from the ones we might be used to having as managers.
Valcour points out that managers are accustomed to being asked to share their expertise, often in a direct way. This is effective when someone requests our opinion or advice, or when we need to provide direction to staff on a project.
But in a coaching conversation, asking is better than telling. "Open-ended questions, not answers, are the tools of coaching," says Valcour. "You succeed as a coach by helping your team members articulate their goals and challenges and find their own answers."
Valcour suggests this open-ended question: "How would you like to grow this month?" What I like about this question is that it reflects both an expectation that the employee needs to grow and an understanding that they will probably make the most progress if supported in advancing a goal that's meaningful to them.
Valcour's question reminded me of the very satisfying conversations I had had with employees when asking them: "Where would you like to go in your career?"
Both questions are future oriented and it's this focus on the future that makes them less threatening for employees than questions that look back at past performance that didn't measure up.
Other tools in the coaching toolbox
In addition to asking questions rather than providing answers, Valcour offers these four coaching suggestions:
- Listen deeply. Valcour advises: "clear your mind, listen with your full attention, and create a high-quality connection that invites your team member to open up and to think creatively."
- Follow through. If you support your employee's idea for development, give them the time and resources to put the idea into action, but don't stop there. "Follow-up is critical to build trust and to make your coaching more effective. The more you follow through on supporting your employees’ developmental plans, the more productive your coaching becomes, the greater your employees’ trust in you, and the more engaged you all become."
- Be positive. Change is hard. If your employee gets frustrated with the lack of progress on their goal, acknowledge the frustration but move the conversation in a more positive direction by asking questions that help them see new possibilities. A common frustration is lack of time to work on the goal. In response, you might ask: "Could you schedule two hours of time for developmental activities each week as a recurring appointment?"
- Build accountability. Help your employee be accountable by asking questions about what they'll do by when. Then check in to see how they're progressing.
Coaching conversations needn't be limited to employer-employee exchanges. The techniques recommended by Valcour could work whenever one person is in a position to transfer knowledge to another person: a parent teaching a child how to cook, a child helping a parent learn a new technology, an experienced volunteer instructing a new volunteer. In those cases, the best question might be, "How can I help you?" For some, the answer will be "show me"; for others, it will be "watch me." For others still (most notably, my son), it will be "don't tell me what I'm doing wrong—tell me how to do it right."
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