A Manager’s Role in Coaching
Praxis is the gap between theory and practice. Talent Praxis focuses on helping leaders turn their ideas into actions ultimately developing an ongoing strategic practice to achieve their goals.
What is Coaching?
With Talent Praxis, coaching is a partnership, where the coach partners with the coachee through a question-based creative process to find inspired solutions. The coach respects and believes in the coachee's expertise and acts as a partner to help unlock potential.
Talent Praxis utilizes coaching for strategic skills in leadership where there is no clear solution. In these situations, options are endless for any challenge or opportunity based on the leader's skills and needs, the skills and needs of the audience, and the unique needs of the organization.
The most common leadership topics are:
Setting and achieving impactful goals
Managing your team for high-performance
Nurturing strong relationships
Working and leading strategically
What Can Leaders Expect in Coaching?
Coaching is a partnership based on creative questions and observations to find inspired solutions.
Coaching is unlike training, advisement, or consulting in that the coach is not there to give advice or tell leaders specific next steps but rather to ask questions and create a space where leaders tap into greater awareness and determine the best approach to achieve their goals.
Coachees can expect their coach to look at them as a partner in setting a valuable coaching focus, building their plan for coaching, and determining topics on upcoming calls. Expect questions like:
What are you hoping to get out of coaching?
What would be a valuable focus for coaching?
What is on your mind for today’s call? What do you want to focus on today?
Where’s the best place to start? Where should we go from here?
Coaching is also unlike therapy because coaching is more focused on progress and looking toward the future. Coaching is also not diagnostic. There is not one way to be a great leader, so the coach is not there to diagnose leadership capabilities but rather to inspire and empower coachees to explore them.
You can expect a coach to share observations for discussion, ask coachees what they are observing from things they share, and ask coachees thought-provoking questions such as:
How is this important to you?
If you achieve this what becomes possible?
If you remove barriers what can you learn?
Looking forward to the moment you achieve your goal, what is present?
Through our intake process, reviewing guides on the most common leadership topics, and partnering with a coach leaders can set a valuable focus for coaching and create a strategic plan to achieve their goals.
Before Coaching Begins
Onboarding in coaching starts with setting a meaningful focus for coaching and building a custom coaching plan. A coaching focus often reviews:
The individual’s current work objectives and goals
Their personal goals and career ambitions
Any recent feedback both positive and constructive
How well work is aligned with their current expectations
How they and their team are performing against expectations
TPCS builds custom onboarding and intake processes with companies to best collect this information and help participants consider multiple perspectives as they go into coaching. As a manager, you should help with this as well.
In a 1:1 consider discussing the points above. “I am excited you have the opportunity for leadership coaching. I want to help you brainstorm a potential coaching focus, so you can get the most from the experience. Can we dedicate our next 1:1 to discussing impactful coaching focuses? How would you like to prep for that call or is there anything specific you would like to discuss?”
Things you may want to brainstorm on:
What are this individual’s role and responsibilities?
What are their strategic focuses for the next 6-12 months?
Overall how would you summarize their performance? Their team’s performance?
How do you measure the success of this individual’s performance? Their team’s performance?
If they focus on anything strategically with a leadership coach, what may have the biggest impact on their development, their team’s performance, your department, and the company?
Checking in Throughout the Program
We encourage you to check in on your team member’s progress in your one-on-ones and support them in their coaching journey. To track success from coaching we use the Kirkpatrick learning evaluation framework. We collect data on (1) general satisfaction, (2) knowledge acquisition, (3) changes made from coaching, and (4) results from those changes.
You can also assess this more regularly in 1:1 conversation using the questions below.
Satisfaction: How are you liking coaching? What do you enjoy about it?
Learning Acquisition: What topics are you discussing in coaching? What are you finding useful? What have been your key takeaways? What have you learned from coaching?
Changes: What have you applied from coaching? What changes have you made as a result of coaching? What are you testing or doing differently as a result of your coaching conversations?
Results: How has coaching been beneficial? What are the results of the changes you made? How has coaching been impactful on your goals, your approach to leadership, etc?
After Coaching
At Talent Praxis we believe that management and leadership are ongoing practices to achieve results rather than skills learned once. Coaching goes deeper than acquiring knowledge by focusing on evoking awareness, discussing behavioral changes, and developing ongoing strategic practices. Learnings from coaching should not be something participants apply and then move on from but rather ongoing changes in how they approach work.
After coaching check with your team member on takeaways with discussions using questions such as:
What was most impactful from your coaching engagement?
What do you want to take away from your time in coaching?
What progress have you made?
How can you measure progress or success?
What do you want to apply moving forward?
How do you want to hold yourself accountable to your progress?
What does the future hold?
How can I best support you in your goals?
Thank you for investing in your team member’s growth and development and creating the space for them to grow. If you have any questions about coaching or your role in coaching email us at hello@talent-praxis.com.
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