The five fundamental coaching skills.

Coaching has evolved into an indispensable skill for modern-day leaders. Progressive leaders are actively seeking to enhance their success by mastering coaching techniques. They’ve come to realize that the traditional managerial roles of supervisor and overseer are no longer sufficient to drive organizational goals. Instead, the success of an entire team hinges on the accomplishments of each individual member.

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Progressive leaders have recognized the critical importance of coaching skills. They understand that the effectiveness of coaching is profoundly influenced by the interactions between leaders and their team members. More than anything, it’s the manner in which leaders listen, perceive, reflect, and provide feedback within coaching conversations that truly matters.

Successful managers and leaders employ five essential coaching skills within their coaching conversations to achieve their objectives. These coaching essentials for managers include:

  • Listen with Curiosity: Active listening is a cornerstone of coaching. When we talk about listening with curiosity, we’re referring to conveying genuine interest in what others have to say. This is particularly valuable in coaching conversations. Often, we listen impatiently or with insufficient attention, which can hinder effective dialogue. We tend to focus on our next argument or our own agenda. Be genuinely curious, avoid interrupting, and take your time. Don’t be afraid to slow down the conversation and stay focused.

 

  • Remember What You Hear: While you may exhibit all the necessary nonverbal cues to make the other person feel heard, you might not actually retain everything they’ve said. Therefore, it’s essential to fully capture their words, body language, thoughts, ideas, and emotions. Ensure that you’ve listened attentively. Control the pace of the conversation and truly put yourself in the other person’s shoes.
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  • Reflect Accurately: Another essential coaching skill is accurately reflecting what the other person has said. Reflection demonstrates that you’ve truly listened and confirms that you’ve understood the information correctly. It also allows the individual to hear their own words again and examine them. You can reflect by:

 

    • Quoting: Use your own words to convey the essence of what you’ve heard, or repeat the exact words the person used.
    • Summarizing: When you’ve received a lot of information, you might want to condense the main message into shorter, more concise sentences. When people talk, they often do so without a strict order. You can help the other person focus on what they seem to consider most important.
    • Repeating Key Words: By repeating significant words, you show the other person that you’ve heard the things that matter most to them. This makes them feel heard and understood.

 

  • Ask Questions to Uncover the Unknown: Asking questions is another of the five essential coaching skills. Questions keep the conversation going and foster active dialogue. Open-ended questions (those that can’t be answered with a simple yes or no) lead to greater exploration. By asking open-ended questions, you give the people you’re coaching the opportunity to find the answers within themselves. When individuals discover the answers themselves, they feel empowered. When you ask exploratory questions, you convey the belief that you value them, their opinions, knowledge, and experiences. You’re essentially building their self-confidence.

 

  • Provide Feedback for Growth: Feedback is another of the five essential coaching skills that is often equated with criticism, but it doesn’t have to be. Effective coaches are careful to use feedback in an unbiased and non-judgmental way because they know that poor or unhelpful feedback can make the other person feel inadequate. Successful coaches avoid using feedback to showcase their own knowledge. Vague, arrogant, or unhelpful feedback can put the other person on the defensive and erode the trust that is essential to your relationship. When giving feedback, strive to be clear, relevant, and value-neutral so that it has a positive and beneficial impact.

By mastering these five essential coaching skills—listening, remembering, reflecting, questioning, and providing effective feedback—you can easily build trust in your coaching relationships.

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Taymour Miri is an ICF master coach and a Gallup certified strengths coach and more recently one of the first 136 coaches world wide to be awarded an Advanced Certificate in Team Coaching. He has 30 years’ experience in leadership roles and 20 years of experince in coaching. Taymour has trained over 1,500 coaches across five continents and is the founder of International Coaching Education (ICE).