Adjust how you use them to be even more successful. By Kevin Higgins
Adjust how you use them to be even more successful.
By Kevin Higgins
This is adapted with permission from Higgins’ book, Engage Me
I have some great news! You have the skills that you require to be a world-class coach! You need to learn nothing new to be fantastic. Well, that’s not quite true. You need to learn how to adjust how you use the skills that you already have to be even more successful than you are currently. Here are the five skills we’ve all learned to use when coaching:
- Acknowledge. The use of verbals (such as yes, hmmm, and ah-ha) and non-verbals (body language like nodding our heads and making eye contact) acknowledges that we are genuinely listening to the person we are coaching and interested in what they are saying.
- Question. Questions help us gather information about the person we are coaching, their situation and their challenges. Ask them about their perspective. A good phrase to use is, “Tell me more about that.”
- Confirm. We use confirm to help us make the progress of our discussion very explicit. In communication, messages can get lost. Confirm allows us to ensure that we have correctly heard the person and that we have not missed any information they have given us. One way to confirm is to paraphrase what we have heard. It is also our opportunity to create value by interpreting, integrating or summarizing information.
- Respond. When we have engaged the person and built trust, we earn the right to respond. We can start to share our knowledge and our experience to assist the person in solving their problem.
- Check. This step helps ensure the person is comfortable with the conversation and allows us to pause from coaching. Often we look for an emotional by asking something like, “How are you feeling about our discussion?”
These are the definitions of the skills. You can see that you already have them. It is not the skill that is new—it is new to recognize your current behavior so you can determine how you can improve as a coach. The good news? Small changes will lead to big results!
Kevin Higgins is CEO of Fusion Learning, a world-class sales training organization.
