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What is coaching?
Coaching is a process aimed at helping another person to maximise their own potential through enabling the self-realisation of what will work for that person. The way coaches achieve this isn't through telling people how to perform, but by questioning them to help the coachee create their own solutions to problems and opportunities.
At Knowledge Bites, we use the COURAGE™ coaching framework, which we believe is the most useful in a business situation. The questions are mapped out over the letters of COURAGE™, but can equally be applied to many other coaching methodologies.
The COURAGE™ framework is an ideal tool to guide your conversations so that your remote staff feel supported in their tasks. It reminds us of the 7 conversation elements we should be having with our remote staff to ensure that management works remotely as well as face-to-face. COURAGE™ stands for:
- Current task: What should they be working on?
- Ordinary state: What’s their current performance level?
- Ultimate state: Where could their performance level realistically get to?
- Required steps: How are they going to complete the task?
- Assistance: What assistance do they need, and where will they get it?
- Guidance: What guidance will you offer, and how often?
- Execution: What steps do they need to take to get started?
As you work through these steps, the key element to consider is the questions you’ll ask to guide the conversation.
Current objective
- How are you doing with the task we talked about last time?
- What’s changed since we last met?
- What do you think I’d like to talk about?
- What are you avoiding at the moment?
- What are you hoping I won’t bring up?
- What’s your biggest challenge in the coming week?
Ordinary state
- What’s happening at the moment?
- What’s stopping you from solving your biggest problem right now?
- What else is this issue affecting?
- If you don’t solve this, what will it mean to you?
- What’s holding you back?
Ultimate state
- Where do you need to be with this?
- What does “great” look like?
- How skilled do you want/need to be in this?
- What sort of performance will bring the results you need?
- What might prevent you from succeeding?
Required steps
- How are you going to complete the task?
- What options do you have?
- What other options do you have?
- If you could wave a magic wand, what would you do?
- If the constraints were removed, what would you do then?
- What personal resistance do you have to taking these actions?
Assistance
- What do you need from me that you’re not getting at the moment?
- Who would be the best person to ask for help?
- What would you expect that person to offer?
- What resources will you need?
- Who do you need to speak to get these resources?
- What will you say to them?
Guidance
- What guidance would you like from me?
- How would you like me to give that guidance?
- What’s worked well so far?
- What hasn’t?
- What will you change in your approach to make the biggest improvement?
- What would be a logical next step?
- What does your gut feeling tell you to do?
- What can you do to make a 10% improvement from now on?
Execution
- What’s your first step going to be?
- What results to you expect to see and in what time frame?
- What will you do if you don’t see the results you expect?
- When are you going to begin working on this?
