Popular Coaching Tools

[whitecoast]

Hey all, I wanted to share a couple of things I picked up from my work in various workshops I've done with the leadership there for coaching and developing the problem-solving abilities of employees. I think these are quite interesting examinations how how people solve problems with other people from all walks of life, especially if they don't exactly have a context for understanding things related to The Work.

The three main tools I share here are Experience Cube, GROW Model, and SMART Goals.

Experience Cube
The first of these two is called the Experience Cube. This is a technique used to deal with a student or subordinate who is stuck, resistant to change, not really aware of what their real situation is, not proactively looking to improve their situation, or whenever there is a concrete divergence in a manager's, teacher's, or coach's expectations and the employee's or student's performance.

Experience cube has the following shape and describes different categories of information you relate to a student.

The four categories above are Observations, Thoughts, Emotions, and Wants. Usually (not always) one starts with Observations, and then moves onto the other ones.

• Observations: objective facts about a situation that you can capture in a video or audio recording
• Thoughts: interpretations of those objective facts as thoughts, stories, narratives, or beliefs
• Emotions: your emotional or physical reactions
• Wants: your expectations, and wishes for the student in what he or she does with the observations, thoughts, and feelings shared

I'll give an example. A boss notices that one employees is staying particularly late at work and looking busy. So the coach tells the student what he or she sees (observations), then asks them what their own reasoning or story behind staying so late is (thoughts). These thoughts may go towards wanting to finish a certain project so there's more time for other things. Since the coach thinks that the employee is productive and efficient enough with his regular work hours and nothing is really pressing, he or she shares that with the student , and then shares some wants about having some better work-life balance, and then some feelings about how he or she really appreciates the drive shown by the student.

Another example. A supervisor notices that, while an employee is training another, he mentions that while the official standard for cleanliness or some other metric is X, usually they won't be bothered unless it's below Y. So the supervisor has a conversation with the employee, starting with his observation about saying Y is okay. The supervisor says that X is the standard (want), that lowering the bar will probably just lead to increasingly lax performance (thought), and that he or she felt a little annoyed when the employee wasn't teaching the correct standard he was taught himself (feeling). The employee responds with his own experience, observing that there were times where the standard incidentally wasn't met, but the supervisor didn't raise any issue or complaint then. This led the employee to think that the supervisor's expectation wasn't as strict as he was initially told. At this point the supervisor sees that there were times when he didn't raise Y as an issue, and that makes him think more about what may have led him to look at that less. The supervisor thinks that may have contributed to mixed messages or was in some other way misleading for the people he was supervising. So the supervisor apologizes for not catching the gradual slip when it first started, and decides to have a wider conversation about what the actual requirements are (X). In the end everyone is on the same page with minimal misunderstanding.

The goal of the experience cube is to align expectations between people while staying as objective as possible and not allowing the facts of the situation to be conflated with immediate interpretations or emotional reactions to those facts. Everything has a particular box into which it goes. Obviously, a person who has not worked on their emotions can have a very hard time untangling observations, thoughts, emotions, wants, and so on. So it is a tool which also trains to coach him or herself to be as objective as possible about what they see as "wrong" with a situation, since going through the experience cube process may result in them realizing that their OWN expectations or stories are being colored by incorrect interpretations of observations, or thoughts that are more based on negative emotions. Sometimes when practicing this a conversation can seem a little artificial in the sense that what we see must be qualified by the category of the information (observation, thinking, feeling, want), but with experience one can become very good at expressing themselves without these training wheels. During our own training for this, the trainer literally drew a four-square grid on the ground, and people were invited to share something with someone else about it while moving between the categories; the coach would correct them if they stood or moved into an incorrect category for what they were trying to express. That's just a fun way of getting someone to think in clearer categories via embodied cognition.

To reiterate, this is a technique used to deal with a student or subordinate who is stuck, resistant to change, not really aware of what their real situation is, not proactively looking to improve their situation, or whenever there is a concrete divergence in a manager's, teacher's, or coach's expectations and the employee's or student's performance.

GROW Model
GROW model is a questioning framework for back-and-forth conversation between a coach and student. This model already presupposes that the coachee is already in a self-improvement and externally considerate mindset. If someone is not in such a state, the coach is encouraged to use the experience cube until he or she and the student are in alignment.

70 Coaching Questions Using the GROW Model

Explore a list of coaching questions for managers who use the GROW model, the most common coaching framework used by executive coaches.

www.thebalancecareers.com

(this is where I pull the questions below from).

The GROW Model is the most common coaching framework used by executive coaches. Given its relative simplicity, many managers have taught themselves the GROW model as a way to structure coaching and mentoring sessions with their employees. GROW is an acronym that stands for:

• Goal
• Current Reality
• Options
• Will (or Way Forward)

Managers use the model to help their employees improve performance, solve problems, make better decisions, learn new skills, and reach their career goals.

Each category contains within it a large set of questions to help a student get to where he or she wants to go.

Goal
Coaching starts with establishing a goal. It could be a performance goal, a development goal, a problem to solve, a decision to make, or a goal for the coaching session. The gold standard for any type of goal is whether it is a S.M.A.R.T. goal, which is another acronym for:

• Specific (a specific thing to achieve, not something broad or vague)
• Measurable (so you have feedback about whether you are moving toward or away from it)
• Attainable (something you have a good chance of achieving, and that isn't too far out of reach or overwhelming)
• Realistic (this enriches other parts of your life and values, and isn't an end in itself)
• Timely (there is a deadline, which will help to discipline your use of time between now and then. No deadline means it never gets done.)

There's more details about how to fulfill each requirement for a SMART goal here.

When it comes to coaching for a goal, it helps the student to ask these types of questions:

1. What do you want to achieve from this coaching session?
2. What goal do you want to achieve?
3. What would you like to happen with ______?
4. What do you really want?
5. What would you like to accomplish?
6. What result are you trying to achieve?
7. What outcome would be ideal?
8. What do you want to change?
9. Why are you hoping to achieve this goal?
10. What would the benefits be if you achieved this goal?

It's best not to spend too much time on this section, since it can lead people prone to overthinking to second-guess themselves a lot.

(current) Reality
This section of the grow model is just for fact-finding.

1. What is happening now (what, who, when, and how often)? What is the effect or result of this?
2. Have you already taken any steps towards your goal?
3. How would you describe what you did?
4. Where are you now in relation to your goal?
5. On a scale of one to 10, where are you?
6. What has contributed to your success so far?
7. What progress have you made so far?
8. What is working well right now?
9. What is required of you?
10. Why haven't you reached that goal already?
11. What do you think is stopping you?
12. What do you think was really happening?
13. Do you know other people who have achieved that goal?
14. What did you learn from _____?
15. What have you already tried?
16. How could you turn this around this time?
17. What could you do better this time?
18. If you asked ____, what would they say about you?
19. On a scale of one to 10, how severe/serious/urgent is the situation?
20. If someone said/did that to you, what would you think/feel/do?

If the Grow model is being used between a coach and student, it is discouraged to spend too much time on fact-finding about the student, since the student already knows those things implicitly. But this section can be very useful for a student who went through these types of questions on his or her own to recapitulate their experience and take better stock of their current situation. It is less useful to a coach, since the presumption of fact-finding is that with more information the coach will be better able to solve the problem for the student so they can achieve the goal. But the whole point is to teach the student how to solve the problem and achieve the goal. The coach serves primarily as a catalyst so the student is better able to achieve and do the work themselves.

Options
This is the most important section of the Grow Model in my opinion. I've also heard this model be referred to as the grOw model on this account. These questions ask the student what they can do to achieve the goal.

1. What are your options?
2. What do you think you need to do next?
3. What could be your first step?
4. What do you think you need to do to get a better result (or closer to your goal)?
5. What else could you do?
6. Who else might be able to help?
7. What would happen if you did nothing?
8. What would happen if you did that?
9. What is the hardest/most challenging part of that for you?
10. Who could you speak to, or what could you look into, to make those parts easier?
11. What advice would you give to a friend about that?
12. What would you gain/lose by doing/saying that?
13. If someone did/said that to you what do you think would happen?
14. What's the best/worst thing about that option?
15. Which option do you feel ready to act on?
16. What could you do differently?
17. Who do you know who has encountered a similar situation?
18. If anything was possible, what would you do?
19. What else?

As you can see, these are very open-ended questions, and they are designed to get a student to look around their own minds with a flashlight to find the solution, and to open up avenues of activity that they can use to get closer and closer to the goal. So any coach worth their salt will be spending most of the time asking Option questions to the student.

Will
These questions are a temperature test for the level of commitment from the student.

1. How are going to go about it?
2. What do you think you need to do right now?
3. Tell me how you’re going to do that.
4. How will you know when you have done it?
5. Is there anything else you can do?
6. On a scale of one to 10, what is the likelihood of your plan succeeding?
7. What would it take to make it a 10?
8. What obstacles are getting in the way of success?
9. What roadblocks do you expect or require planning?
10. What resources can help you?
11. Is there anything missing?
12. What will one small step you take now?
13. When are you going to start?
14. How will you know you have been successful?
15. What support do you need to get that done?
16. What will happen (or, what is the cost) of you NOT doing this?
17. What do you need from me/others to help you achieve this?
18. What are three actions you can take that would make sense this week?
19. On a scale of one to 10, how committed/motivated are you to doing it?
20. What would it take to make it a 10?

Protip: for any question for rating things out of 10 do not use the number 7. 7 isn't committing, and it's not really admitting that you need to improve in that area either, so it's a bit of a weasel position to take. If you're a bit more brutal with yourself you can be more upfront about whether it's actually a 6 or an 8, and that gives information about whether it genuinely needs work of if it's good and there's other things that need more attention.

You'll notice that some of these questions are related to SMART goals again as well. It's only in having measurable feedback that you can really tell if you're succeeding or not, or just sort of going through the motions of acting like you're trying to achieve a goal.

Have any of you encountered similar tools or ways of problem solving? There's a lot here similar to Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.