Think Like A Coach

You’ve made it to manager! But balancing a hectic schedule with empowering your team is proving challenging and you’re struggling to delegate. So how do you make this all work? How you do get the best from yourself, your team and still have a life outside work?

The answer is to Think Like a Coach.

Boost the performance and productivity of your team
Promote commitment, personal responsibility and self-sufficiency
Free up precious time to focus on important tasks
Make recruitment and retention easier and smoother
Drive and deliver excellence in a team that’s motivated and empowered

Seamlessly integrating into your everyday management style, Think Like a Coach is your trusty go-to guide that bridges the gap between theory and reality. It shows how, even in high-pressure scenarios, it’s still possible to tap into the true potential of your team, empower their success and become the manager your team truly needs and deserves.

Pragmatic and actionable – very useful for anyone who wants to adopt a coaching style

Great demo of how to do the coaching basics brilliantly…

Practical, concise, easy to apply

Useful advice for anyone who deals with people

The Coaching Two-Step was specifically developed with managers in mind. It takes skills you already have and shows you how to use them to coach your team.

When your team member comes to you for help, stop what you’re doing and give them all your attention, listening with curiosity to what they have to say. This is your starting position. When they’ve finished talking, you have two options you can take:

Ask them to ‘tell me more’; or
Summarise the essence of what you’ve just heard.

Once you’ve tried one of these options, you go back to silently giving them all your attention while you listen with curiosity to what they have to say. When they finish, you have the choice between the two options again and the conversation continues.

If it were a dance it might look like this:

Limiting yourself to these two options at the beginning of the coaching conversation helps you hold back your urge to be helpful. And by helpful, I mean solving the problem for them. Even if you were to offer a solution after only trying one option, at least you’d be closer to solving the right problem and you’d have a lot more insight into your team member and the team.

Try each option at least once, ideally twice, before you ask your first question. After asking a question, you go to attention, the starting position of the Coaching Two-Step and use the two options to help your team member explore their thinking further. Try at least one option before asking a new question.

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Order Think Like A Coach, your practical and trusty go to guide to empower and develop your team.

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Explore the Coaching Others category in the blog for more ways coach your team effectively and constructively.

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The best way to learn how to use the coaching two-step is to see in action. In this five minute video I coach Vicki who is stepping into a new leadership role.

The coaching two-step model is in the top right corner so you can see where I am.

As you watch the demo consider these questions: