6 Steps to Extraordinary Coaching Skills, Elevating Feedback, and Strengthening Leadership

The Coaching Skills Gap

Organizational surveys show that most managers believe they are providing coaching to employees and score themselves high. However, most employees state they receive little coaching from their leaders and score their leaders low. Leaders often fall into these common coaching traps:

• Failing to get objective feedback on their coaching effectiveness.
• Trapped by reactive problem solving that puts out short-term fires and doesn’t build long-term personal, team, or organization capabilities.
• Jumping into coaching discussions with little planning and no framework to guide the conversation.
• Confusing giving advice/feedback with coaching.
• Perpetuating the Manager-Employee Dependence Cycle: Employee complains about what’s not working, hopes for solutions and advice from the manager, and expects him or her to own the issue. The manager listens to the problem, gives advice, and expects results from the employee.
• Climbing The Ladder of Inference way too quickly; rapidly stepping up from data/observations, to adding meaning, making assumptions, jumping to conclusions, adopting beliefs, and taking actions that often damages relationships and doesn’t deal with the root issue.
• Focusing their own skills development on fixing weaknesses rather building on their strengths.
• Spending 85 – 90% of conversations with employees on project or status updates and very little time on coaching and developing. Employees want a 50/50 ratio.
• Confusing performance appraisal/management with performance coaching.
• Not providing timely, balanced, and effective feedback.

What’s Really Creating the Gap?

When asked why they aren’t providing more coaching managers will typically say I am overwhelmed and don’t have enough time, my boss doesn’t coach me, or my employees don’t need coaching. Our research shows these are excuses coming from low performing leaders without coaching mindsets on wobbly foundations of weak coaching skills. Within the very same organization conditions and culture, working for the same senior leaders, with the same set of employees, exceptional leaders provide extraordinary coaching – and deliver dramatically higher performance results than their lesser skilled peers.

Here are four of the main reasons many managers don’t develop their coaching skills:

• Avoiding potentially uncomfortable discussions.
• Insecure about the true value of his or her coaching.
• Misunderstanding the true nature of good coaching.
• Direct reports seldom ask for coaching.
• Not understanding how their coaching effectiveness is perceived.
• Failing to align their strengths, passion, and organizational need.

Why Strengths-Based Leadership Development and Coaching Works Better

Zenger Folkman’s deep research shows very clearly that it’s the presence of strengths — not the absence of weaknesses — that defines highly effective leaders. Building strengths is proving to be the only way to move from an average or ordinary leader to extraordinary or exceptional.

• Building strengths is the only way to become an extraordinary leader.
• A strengths focus produces up to three times higher change and improvement.
• Profits, sales, engagement, morale, and energy levels, turnover, health and safety, and customer satisfaction skyrockets.
• The spectrum of development methods broadens with cross-training and Companion Competencies.
• Participant motivation to improve is much higher.
• Organizational culture is much more positive and energized.
• It’s a lot more fun to work on strengths!

What’s especially remarkable is how obtainable extraordinary leadership is proving to be. A leader needs to develop just three existing strengths out of sixteen competencies to catapult his or her leadership effectiveness from the 34th to the 80th percentile!

There are dramatic differences between the weakest and strongest leaders:

• 4 – 6 times higher profits
• 6 times higher sales revenues
• 10 – 20 times higher levels of employee engagement
• 3 – 4 times reduction in employees thinking about quitting
• 50% fewer employees that do leave
• Double the satisfaction with pay and job security
• 4 – 5 times more employees “willing to go the extra mile.”
• 1.5 times higher customer satisfaction ratings
• Over 3 times safer work environment

Elevating Feedback

Although organizational leaders are recognizing that feedback is one of the best vehicles to help people grow and develop, they lack the skills and courage to give and provide the most effective forms of feedback — reinforcing and redirecting.

Reinforcing feedback can be highly motivating. Most people like to hear positive input about themselves and their performance.

Redirecting feedback, on the other hand, is even more valuable. When delivered with skill, corrective feedback can act like a powerful medicine that cures, however, it can do harm if not done well. Because of that, most managers are cautious to give it, and the combination causes it be in short supply, despite the critical need.

Webcast Presentation Outline

Six Steps to Developing Extraordinary Coaching Skills

1. Defining What Coaching Is and Isn’t

• Key Differences between Training, Mentoring, and Coaching
• Defining Performance and Career Coaching

2. Showing the Huge Impact of Coaching

• How Much of a Difference Does Coaching Really Make?
• Coaching’s Impact on Engagement, Intention to Stay, Extra Effort, Leadership Satisfaction, and Feeling Valued.

3. Using a Coaching Conversation Framework

• Common Coaching Traps
• Improvement in Many Disciplines Comes with Structure
• The Four-Step FUEL Process for a Coaching Conversation

4. Bringing Science and Other Best Practices to Coaching

• The 14 Differentiating Competencies of Extraordinary Coaches
• Learning from Other Research and Disciplines
• Research on Motivational Interviewing and the Practical Lessons for Coaching

5. Building Coaching Effectiveness Through Skill Development

• Unique Challenges in Coaching Skill Development
• Manager-Employee System: Creating Dependence versus Creating Empowerment and Growth

6. Strengthen Coaching Collaboration

• Empower and Encourage “Coachees” to Seek Coaching
• The Power Of Focusing on the “Coachee’s Agenda and the Coach Asking for Feedback
• Choosing a topic the “coachee” cares about

Elevating Feedback

• Reinforcing and Redirecting Feedback
• What Gets in the Way of Providing Effective Feedback
• Feedback Pitfalls
• Using the FUEL Model

Building Coaching and Leadership Strengths

• The Power of Focusing on Strengths
• Why a Strengths Focus Doubles Improvement Rates
• Critical Components of a Strengths-Based 360 Assessment
• Cross Training: A Revolutionary New Approach to Building Strengths

Draw for Copies of The Extraordinary Coach: How the Best Leaders Help Others Grow

Jim Clemmer and Zenger Folkman

For over three decades Jim Clemmer’s keynote presentations, workshops, management team retreats, seven bestselling books translated into many languages, articles, blog, and newsletters have helped hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

Jim Clemmer and Jack Zenger’s training and consulting firms first partnered when they led The Achieve Group and Zenger Miller. The CLEMMER Group is now Zenger Folkman’s new Canadian strategic partner. ZF is pioneering groundbreaking new strengths-based leadership research, assessment, development, and sustainable implementation systems. They’ve built unique evidence-driven approaches for developing extraordinary leaders and coaches empirically showing the performance impact on sales, profits, employee engagement, health and safety, turnover, and customer satisfaction. It’s a well developed and highly proven system that produces extraordinary results.

Client Feedback on The Extraordinary Coach

A strong, empirically-based approach to cut right to the heart of the (coaching) issue to provide something both situationally-relevant and contextually profound…threads the needle between theory and anecdotal practice and provide perspective and tools that can benefit everyone from CEOs bent on changing culture to frontline managers plying their skills on the factory floor.
– Courtney Rogers, Executive Director, Human Resources and Talent, Amgen

A powerful, yet digestible, framework to help leaders become the coaches they aspire to be: relationship-based, collaboration-oriented, change-focused, and FUEL-ed for success! Leaders in all types of organizations, and at all levels, will benefit from this insightful work.
– P. Artell Smith, Vice President, Human Resources, Hewitt Associates

This critical leadership skill begins with a context of research, moves to the realities of the workplace, and then settles into a series of practical guidelines and examples.
– Ronald E. Galbraith, Chairman/Chief Consulting Officer, onFocus|Healthcare

The concepts are profound and practical… provides the FUEL for our approach to creating a coaching culture at Associated Food Stores.
– Steve Jones, Manager, AFS University, Associated Food Stores