Business Coaching

OPTIONS - open-ended questions to facilitate creative thinking

‘What could you do? What ideas can you bring in from past successes? What haven’t you tried yet?’

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  WHAT - focused questions to get an agreement to specific actions and criteria for success ‘What will you do? When will you do it? Who do you need to involve? When should you see results?’
  

Used judiciously, the GROW model offers an excellent framework for structuring a coaching session. It is particularly useful for beginners, helping them to see the wood for the trees and keep the session on track. However, Whitmore is at pains to emphasise that models and structures are not the heart of coaching:
GROW, without the context of AWARENESS and RESPONSIBILITY, and the skill of questioning to generate them, has little value.
I prefer to think of the GROW model as a compass for orientation rather than a rigid sequence of steps to be followed. I don’t think I’ve ever taken part in a coaching session that began with Goals, then progressed smoothly through an analysis of Reality, then brainstormed Options before settling on the What?/When?/Who? and How? of an action plan.
Coaching can begin at any of the four stages of the GROW model. A coachee might begin by telling you about something she wants to achieve (Goal), a current problem (Reality), a new idea for improving things (Options) or by outlining an action plan (What). As a coach, it’s usually a good idea to follow the coachee’s lead initially by asking a few questions to elicit more detail, then move onto the other steps.
Personally, I always start a coaching conversation by asking a goal-focused question (e.g. ‘So what do you want to achieve?’) as a way of setting the tone for the discussion. Sometimes the coachee replies with a description of a problem (Reality) which is fine - I’ll listen, probe for a few details then as soon as possible return to Goals, to keep the conversation focused. On the other hand, if someone comes to me full of ideas and enthusiasm (Goals, Options), I’ll do my best to help them maintain this while taking account of hard facts (Reality) and getting a commitment to specific action (What). As so often with coaching, the important principle is balance.
10. Formal and Informal Coaching
The word 'coaching' conjures up an image of a one-to-one session scheduled in the diary, focusing exclusively on the coachee's goals and how s/he can work towards them. And a lot of coaching does take place in this format, particularly when delivered by an external coach.
For a manager-coach however, the picture is not quite so clear. Formal coaching sessions are a powerful way of using coaching with her team, and should never be undervalued - yet she also has the option of using coaching informally, integrating the coaching approach into her everyday conversations with her team, so that it becomes part of her basic approach to management. In their book Solution-Focused Coaching, Jane Green and Anthony Grant talk of a 'coaching continuum':
In-house workplace coaching lies on a continuum from the formal structured workplace coaching at one end to the informal, on-the-run workplace coaching at the other - what you might call corridor coaching: the few minutes snatched in the corridor in the midst of a busy project.
The two types of coaching are not mutually exclusive - many effective coaching managers use both styles in complementary ways.

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