Planning and prioritizing

Planning skills are about identifying what you want to do and deciding, in small steps, how you are going to do it. The skill of planning is breaking down a task into key steps, putting them in the right order and then allocating time and other resources for each step. Successful planning involves:

• Identifying the overall aim or goal “ where do I want to go?

• Writing outcome or success statements “ how will I know when I have got where I want to go; what will it look and sound like?

• Identifying what actions I need to take “ how will I get there?

• Prioritizing the actions required “ what do I need in order to take each action? What equipment, money, time or people are required? Which actions must I take first?

• Reviewing priorities within the plan based on resources needed, which might involve reordering the steps based on availability of resources.

• Deciding how I will review my plan, both during and after implementation.

The priority of action steps will be influenced by dependencies, ie whether one thing needs to happen in order for another to take place. The other traditional way of prioritizing actions is by assessing their urgency and their importance: urgent actions are things that need to happen now, or within an immediate time frame, in order for the effect of that action to be valid. If an urgent action is not taken at the point of it being urgent, it is unlikely that you will need to take it at all. You might need to take a larger but different action, or not do anything because the moment is lost. Importance is measured in terms of the impact of the action, how vital it is to the achievement of the goal. Therefore, all tasks or actions can be viewed as being:

• urgent and important;

• urgent and not important;

• important and not urgent;

• not important and not urgent.

As a coach, you need planning skills in a number of ways. These include:

• fitting coaching time into your diary and around other responsibilities that you have;

• planning the coaching programme with your coachee ;

• planning each individual coaching session.

The coachee needs to do the same planning; and sometimes your plans, and the priority level you have given to actions, may not match the coachee s. There may be times when, in the greater scheme of your life, attending the coaching session is not as important or urgent as other things; however, remember that if you decide to move the coaching session, this may adversely impact your relationship with the coachee. This isn t to say that you must never move a coaching session, only that this needs discussion and explanation.

All plans need to be flexible, in order to take account of the unknown or the unexpected. You can achieve this by building in contingency (or buffer zones), and by reviewing plans regularly with your coachee. Particularly check out if you have missed any action points that now need to be included, and that your coachee is comfortable with any deviation from the original plan.

At the start of each coaching session, you will agree a broad plan for the time you have with your coachee; as the coach it is your role to ensure that time is managed according to the plan, and if you deviate from the plan, you bring it back on course or agree a new plan.