Business Coaching

Goal setting
Coaching is a goal-focused (or solution-focused) approach, so the ability to elicit clear, well-defined and emotionally engaging goals from a coachee is one of the most important skills for a coach to possess. Like many aspects of coaching, there are both formal and informal aspects of this ability. On the formal side, a coach needs to know how and when to introduce goal-setting into the coaching process, and will usually be familiar with models such as SMART goals (a SMART goal is Specific, Measurable, Attractive, Realistic and Timed). On the informal side, a coach will typically have the habit of thinking and asking questions from a goal-focused mindset. For example, ‘How does doing x help you reach your goal?’ helps the coachee to evaluate whether what she is doing will help or hinder her.
Another common habit of a good coach is reframing problems as goals - e.g. if a coachee talks about the problems he his having with a ‘difficult’ colleague, the coach might ask ‘What needs to be happening for you to have a workable relationship with this person?’.
Looking
A good deal is rightly written about the importance of listening in coaching, but looking is often (ahem) overlooked. When running coaching skills seminars, I often say to the trainee coaches ‘The answer is right in front of you’. Meaning that the person’s body language tells you a huge amount about her emotional state and level of commitment, yet it’s so easy to ignore that if we are too focused on our own ideas about what needs to happen next.

Another obstacle to looking is a company culture in which people have been conditioned to focus on processes and tasks at the expense of human relationships, so that people can stop seeing each other as human beings, but merely ‘managers’, ’staff’ or [insert job title here]. This is often compounded (in the UK at least) by a general sense that ‘it’s rude to stare’ - with the result that the coach literally stops seeing what is in front of her eyes, and misses valuable information about how the coachee is thinking and feeling. The good news is that as soon as coaches are encouraged to actually look at the person in front of them, they nearly always ‘get’ how the other person is feeling, and this opens up new options for moving the conversation forward.