Repost: how to GROW your coaching skills

Whether we manage only ourselves or manage a huge team of employees, we can help to facilitate problem solving and encourage personal and professional development in a number of different ways.

In this blog, our skills coordinator Kate chats to Darren Burns - the expert who delivered coaching training for us in May 2021, which showed delegates how to become more skilled at listening, questioning and drawing insights out of themselves and others.

Darren is an operational leader and lean practitioner with more than 20 years in the UK manufacturing industry, working for several multinational companies such as Bosch, Honeywell and Siemens.

GROW coaching – what does it mean?

We love an acronym in training! GROW is an acronym for the four key steps in coaching:

G-oals - what do you want to achieve?

R-eality - where are you now?

O-ptions - what are your options to get to that goal?

W-ill/W-ay - how will you achieve that goal?

This interactive session will describe how people can use the four-step GROW model to become more skilled at listening, questioning and drawing insights out of themselves and others.

Why are you so passionate about using coaching methods?

Coaching is a technique I was taught very early in my career.  It’s about giving people a sense of autonomy. It can sometimes just be a case of helping people feeling like they can have a conversation with you, that they can speak up, and that they have a positive outcome or direction at the end of it.

In my role people come to me in the work environment for very personal reasons and, in this way, there is an overlap with counselling. It’s not you that tells them how to solve their problem or that sets that direction, it’s them. They ultimately set their own goals and that gives them a real sense of empowerment. That is very rewarding to see.

Coaching can be a single conversation or it could be a three or four workshop depending on the size or complexity of subject matter.

Why can coaching be so beneficial and what do you hope people will get out of the training?

People have to make decisions and solve problems every day. If you continually tell someone what to do, they will never start thinking for themselves and they will become very task orientated. But, as a leader, if you coach them they will start become more independent and therefore more effective in what they do. Then it’s not just about me saying ‘this is how we should do it’. 

It essentially helps to empower the individual, like they are being trusted and that they have authority. If they have been told what to do and do not like the outcome, they are unlikely to feel responsible.

Coaching makes people feel positive about their ideas and that they are adding value to a situation. The three key words when it comes to coaching I would say are ownership, accountability and responsibility – it prompts people to think for themselves.

If I have an outcome at work that I need, I don’t dictate or tell people how to get there. We talk through the process as part of coaching and it helps me have trust that this outcome is reached.

What impact does this trust have on the culture within the workplace?

It means people hopefully enjoy being at work and doing their job because they feel trusted to go away and deliver something themselves rather than continually being told what to do. Its saying ‘we need to achieve this or do this’ and encouraging them to get to that point themselves.

However, these tools and techniques don’t just have to be applied to work, they can be applied in everyday life as well.

If you have a problem, do you ‘coach’ yourself to solve it?

Yes, definitely, although not consciously! Whenever I’m faced with a problem I’ll write down what I need to achieve, how I’m going to get there, what are the potential problems are and the opportunities around these problems. I’ll then map out a way forward to visualise how to get to my end goal. This is something that I instinctively follow, probably on a daily basis.

This is important as well as it shows that those working for themselves with no leadership as such, can still benefit from these techniques and coach themselves to when making decisions and managing situations.

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We’d like to say a big thank you to Darren for taking the time to share his knowledge with us, and if you’d like to share what you know and learn from others about Coaching and Building Teams, why not join us for our next Connect and Reflect shared learning session on Tuesday 10 August?