Chapter 13: Skills | Coaching Handbook: An Action Kit for Trainers and Managers

As we have talked about the process, we have identified the different skills that you will need to use as you carry out coaching. This chapter gives a short summary of each of these skills and a few tips about how to develop them. This alone will not enable you to develop the skills to the required level, but, we hope, will offer enough for you to be able to identify your strengths and areas to include in your own development plan. (You may even want to get yourself a coach!) We have also included a section entitled Skills in the list of Further Reading at the end of the book “ the publications listed there are useful if you wish to explore any of the skills in greater depth.

In this chapter we have identified skills and listed them in alphabetical order. However, we have discovered that in reality the skills overlap, sometimes even merge into each other, ie you can t use one skill without using another.

Analytical skills

You will be using analytical skills throughout the coaching process. At each stage you will have some information that you will need to make sense of in order to move you on through the process. One option is that you simply gather the information, mull it over in your brain and let conclusions seep through from your unconscious mind. The other option is to take a more systematic approach to analysis and involve your coachee. The benefits of the latter are that you are creating a structured approach and encouraging the coachee to own the analysis, enabling the coachee to do it him- or herself in the future.

Analysis is about looking at information and drawing conclusions from it. There are a number of steps that you take in carrying out analysis.

Collection of information.
Categorization of information.
Creating and testing hypotheses, theories and assumptions.
Checking hypotheses and theories and drawing final conclusions.

In the coaching relationship, most of the information that you will be analysing will come from the coachee. Some may come from third parties and possibly from task outputs/observations.

The real skill is around categorizing the information and drawing conclusions from it. A number of things may inform the categories that you choose:

Questions such as ˜What do I want to know from this information? or ˜What does this information tell me? .
Things that the coachee has told you about what he or she wants to achieve from the coaching.
The objectives that you have agreed for the coaching.
Your knowledge of the subject.

Having categorized your information, you can begin to create some hypotheses, theories or assumptions. These will generally come from looking for themes or patterns that run through the information and a number of different sources of evidence all saying the same thing.

Example 1: Your coaching topic is improving delegation. Categories might be what the coachee does well, what the coachee finds difficult and what problems arise because the coachee can t delegate.

Your hypotheses could be generated from the fact that there are more things in the ˜problems pile than in the ˜finds difficult pile. One hypothesis might be that the coachee spends little time supporting the person who has been delegated the task; another might be that the coachee feels that he or she is able to delegate, but that the organization is preventing him or her from doing so. These are the hypotheses that you would then explore further with the coachee.

Example 2: Your coaching topic is building a brick wall. Categories might be knowledge, skills and attitude.

The hypothesis will come from the information that tells you that the coachee is technically competent to build a wall, but has a limiting belief about the value of his or her work. The hypothesis is that the coaching needs to focus on the attitudinal aspects of the coachee s work. You will check out this hypothesis with the coachee before agreeing the coaching objectives.

The art of effective analysis involves remaining objective at all times. It is often easy to look at information with a foregone conclusion or to allow your experience to limit your thinking. It is therefore important to always think widely and openly about the information in front of you and try to create at least two hypotheses about what the information is telling you.