Asking powerful questions is a necessity for a successful coaching conversation.  However, asking someone a bunch of random questions does not necessarily mean that you are coaching them.  A coaching conversation has three distinct components:

1. Determining whether or not the situation requires coaching by using the Success Equation.
2. Asking questions to create a dialogue that builds awareness about the issues at hand
3. Empowering the coachee toward action that will create more effective behaviors
   

There is a simple process to Build Awareness and Move to Action, which you will find in Brian Emerson and my book, A Manager’s Guide to Coaching. We call it the W.I.N. B.I.G. model because when you help an employee become aware of what’s going on and take action, you WIN BIG and they WIN BIG.  

There are six steps in the W.I.N. B.I.G. model.  Three of them Build Awareness and three Move to Action.  They are:

Build Awareness

• W-onder About Root Cause
• I-nvestigate Wants
• N-ame Possible Solutions

Move to Action

• B-uild a Plan
• I-nsure Action
• G-ive Affirmation

Creating a dialogue that progresses through these six steps will help you increase your employees’ effectiveness, make you a better manager, and allow everyone involved to WIN BIG.

Today we will talk about how and why to build awareness while coaching; in our next blog, we will talk about moving employees to action.

Build Awareness – W.I.N.

W-onder About Root Cause

When there is a problem at hand, most people want to jump in and immediately move to action. It’s easy to see that sales are decreasing, for instance, and assume that the sales team must be the problem.  However, 99% of the time, what you see is just a symptom, not the real problem. Your job as a manager is to step back and wonder about the root cause of the problems that arise.  Why are sales decreasing?  What else is happening in the organization?  How effective is your customer service? 

It is often difficult to see the benefit of stepping back to build awareness about the situation.  Yet, in the first step of coaching, Wonder About Root Cause, your job is to ask questions that will help your employee be curious about what’s really going on under the surface. 

This stage can sometimes be a challenge for busy, problem-solving managers.  Notice the first word of this stage: Wonder.  It’s not Fix, Control, Stop or any other action-hero type of word.  Coaches don’t, shouldn’t, and can’t have all the answers; the person in front of you has many more answers about themselves than you do.  If you always fix their problem yourself, then you’ll be known as a good fixer and a so-so manager at best.

Start off by getting really curious.  You know this employee can do good work, so what’s going on?  Take time to wonder, but don’t judge. Because it’s your job to help your employee get curious so they can Build Awareness. Ask questions in a manner that makes this fun, not scary. Some good questions for this stage of the process are:

• How does that impact you?
• If you were watching this on TV, what would you say was going on?
• What’s the main obstacle getting in the way here?
• What’s underneath all of this?
• Which of your buttons are really getting pushed here?

Don’t confuse ‘Wonder About Root Cause’ with getting all of the nitty-gritty details and facts about an issue.  For example, if an employee comes to you frustrated about a conversation she had with a team member, don’t ask for a recount of what happened. Instead, look for what the anger is really about—the root cause. In this case, you may find out your coachee has been working with someone who can’t meet deadlines, which interferes with her meeting deadlines, and therefore her ability to be successful in her role. In the case, the issue isn’t actually about the team member conversation at all.

On to stage two—Investigate Wants.

I-nvestigate Wants

As people, we usually get what we say we want; the problem is we usually aren’t clear on what we really want, so we end up with the wrong things.  Raff is miserable at his job so finds another one. In a few months he’s miserable at his new job. That’s because Raff was miserable in the first place because he had no one to challenge him and help him grow. If he had known what he actually wanted before taking another job, he’d have been much more likely to find a job he liked.

The goal of the second stage in W.I.N. B.I.G. is to help your employees investigate what they really want (Investigate Wants).  In the first stage, you create safety by asking open-ended wonder-type questions and get to the root cause of what is going on.  Next, it’s time to look at what the person wants, how they want to be seen as things move forward, and what they want things to look like on the other side.  This requires you to ask questions that open up possibilities and help the person paint a clear picture of what they want their world to look like.  Here are examples of questions that help the employee think bigger and look to the future:

• How would you like people to describe you as you resolve this?
• What would success look like?
• If you could use a magic wand to re-create the scene, how would you want it to look?

It’s important here, more than anywhere else, not to tell the employee what you think she should want.  You have no way of knowing.  We are all really good at thinking we know what others want, but we don’t.  Be sure to give the person space and time to figure it out for herself.  She may even need a few minutes of silence to think it through.  Let her have that time without filling the empty space. If she feels stuck, just ask another open-ended question about her desired outcome.  The bottom line is: deep down, we all know what we want.  We just don’t always get a chance to voice it. 

On to stage three—Name Possible Solutions.

N-ame Possible Solutions

There is a definite reason why this stage of W.I.N. is called Name Possible Solutions and not Name the Solution.  Remember that you are still trying to Build Awareness, so the goal of this stage is to help the person become aware of the multitude of possible choices they have in the situation. Typically, if left to our own devices, we humans will go about implementing the same solutions that have worked for us in the past—even if there is a potentially more effective or efficient way of doing it. Your job is to get the employee to think big and outside the box, to explore all the possible options before settling on a specific strategy of action.

This is a tempting place for managers to jump in and solve the problem—to help the employee and maybe even save the day for them.  But remember, coaching is about letting the person come up with his or her own answers. 

Your goal here is to help the employee have fun and brainstorm.  A good way to do that is to ask questions like:

• The 85-year-old you is looking back at this situation; what does she say to do?
• What do you have to do to get where you want to go?
• How would Bill Gates tell you to solve the problem?
• What would it take to work this out?

A key here is to be sure to ask follow-up questions.  Do not settle with just one solution (even if you think it’s a great one).  Inspire your employee to think bigger and consider different options.  So, ask follow-up questions or statements such as:

• What else could work?
• That’s a great idea; what’s another?
• Great! Let’s think of 5 more.

After you have generated lots of options together, you need to start weighing the impacts of the top ones. One of the biggest things you can do here is to help the person map back to what they said they wanted during Investigate Wants.  Sure, their solution may solve the problem, but does it really get them what they want?  When you have a few solutions on the table, ask questions like:

• So which option gets you closest to what you want?
• What would be the impact of your favorite solution?
• What possibility is your favorite?  What would that get you?

Now that we’ve looked in detail at how to build awareness of the problem when coaching an employee, it’s time to talk about how to move them into action. Stay tuned for the next post for all the hows and whys.