You've got this

Think of a time when you had a challenge in front of you that you were anxious or uncertain about.

Now think of one of those times when someonea parent, a manager, a coach, a teachersaid, “You’ve got this.”

How did that make you feel? Probably pretty good, right? It feels good when someone shows you that they believe in you. Especially when that person also knows how difficult the challenge is for you.

The two most powerful things you can do for people on your team are to help them find their own answers and believe that they can do it.

That’s why the #1 principle in The Engineering Manager’s Charter is “Point me toward an answer, don’t hand one to me.”

You can review the full Charter here.

These are the two essential ingredients of “facilitation coaching,” which is the style that I practice, and that you can start using today to unlock the true potential of each of your team members.

Why should you integrate coaching into your leadership?

In short: because it works. Coaching methodologies, broadly, have been shown time and again to improve outcomes.

According to a 2017 survey of 1,500 professionals in the learning and development industry conducted by Chief Learning Officer magazine, coaching is the top skill targeted for growth among frontline managers (you can see the full readout here).

Note that this survey spanned industries. Coaching was seen as the most important area in which frontline managers could grow regardless of what their direct reports actually did.

Similarly, Google’s manager research (“Project Oxygen”) concluded that one of the most important behaviors of the highest scoring managers was that they were effective coaches. Based on that research, we can see that coaching is as important (if not more important) in our industry.

What does it mean to coach?

Indeed, “coaching” is a very broad term. There are different styles of coaching, including “teaching” and “facilitating,” which are quite different in practice. There may be times when one style is more appropriate than another.

In my practice, I focus on “facilitation” coaching, which is an approach based on open questions and active listening. An advantage of facilitation coaching is that you, as the coach, don’t need any specific knowledge of the problem space. It isn’t your job to provide answers, but rather to change someone’s perspective so that they can discover the answers on their own.

As a “teaching” coach, you mix in more concrete knowledge sharing, helping someone to develop real-world skills through advice and demonstration. There is another word we use more often for this approach, which is “mentorship.” A mentor shares experience and knowledge, but also guides and asks questions.

It is quite likely that in the real world, you’ll move fluidly between these two styles depending on the problem and the person.

If you do nothing else, do this one thing

Everyone likes a quick and easy answer, so here it is. If you want to introduce a coaching methodology into your leadership, here is one thing you can do right away:

Be more curious.

That’s it. If you can do that, you can begin to integrate the coaching mindset into all of your conversations and drive everyone around you to grow and succeed. It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Trust me, it can be pretty tricky!

As an engineering manager, you’re responsible for helping a team of people do something you know how to do, and it’s very likely that you know how to do it pretty damn well, too.

So here’s the trick: when you’re talking to a teammate and they tell you about a specific problem they’re having, you’re going to recognize it. You’re going to remember when you faced that problem. You’re going to have a thousand ideas about how to solve it.

You’re going to want to give advice.

This is the moment of truth, the test of your coaching mettle. Do. Not. Give. Advice. For just a couple more minutes, challenge yourself to ask another question or two. Here are a couple of good ones to start with:

• What have you tried so far?

• Is there a smaller piece of the problem you could go after first?

• What would have to happen for this to be easy to solve?

The point is not to solve the problem, but rather to help someone to see it from a different direction. Most people are ultimately able to solve their own problems, they just need to see the problem more clearly or see the options in front of them.

Remember that the most powerful questions start with “what” or “how.” This isn’t an interrogation or tribunal, so it is not often useful to ask “why” questions.

In fact, almost any “why” question that you actually want the answer to can be rephrased as a “what” or a “how” and yield better results. That is a topic for a future article perhaps.

There’s more to it than that, right?

Yes, absolutely. If coaching was just a matter of asking a couple pithy “how” questions, we wouldn’t have an industry built around it and countless books written about it. I call it a practice because, like all things, you get better at it by practicing it.

Also, like all things that you learn, don’t be afraid to be bad at it, because you will be at first. Here are my top suggestions for starting out:

• Don’t be afraid of silence. You might need time to think of a good question, but you’ll also be surprised how silence helps bring out new ideas.

• Try not to be embarrassed by asking questions that don’t land. Even a question that doesn’t go where you want it to still brings out information, so focus on that.

• Be bold. Don’t shy away from asking “big” questions, like “How will you feel about this a year from now?” or “If everything goes exactly the way you want, what will the world look like?” Zooming in and out helps people re-frame their thinking.

• Be open about it. If you are nervous about how it will be received, you can start the conversation with “I am going to coach you through this, is that OK?”

Finally, read books.

There are so many coaching books out there. Some are great and, well, some are not. If you want to read just one book, I really like The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier.

I like it because:

1. It’s short.

2. It’s practical.

3. The author has a sense of humor.

If you want to pick up a copy, you can check it out in my library. If you purchase it through there, I get a tiny cut, which pays to run the website for about half a day, believe it or not. So buy two, please. I’m just kidding. But not really.

Finally, as always, send me your feedback. You can email, tweet at me @aaronbieber, or leave a comment.

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