Master the Coaching Continuum and Become a Transformational Improvement Coach

[00:00:00] We all know that leading is about asking great questions, but can you ask too many questions? The answer is yes. And in this episode, I’m gonna dive into the biggest mistake that leaders and coaches alike make and how you can avoid it. Welcome the chain of learning where the links of leadership and learning unite.

[00:00:17] This is your connection for actionable strategies and practices to empower you to build a people-centered learning culture. Get results and expand your impact so that you and your team can leave a lasting legacy. I’m your host and fellow learning enthusiast, Katie Anderson. Have you ever been working through a problem or a complex situation and someone, a coach, a friend, or your boss ask you questions to supposedly help you make improvement, but all they do is ask you question after question and you really don’t know what step to take next.

[00:00:49] How do you feel Frustrated, lost. Deflated. Yes. We’ve all been there and experienced someone with good intentions trying to be helpful by asking us questions, and all it feels is unhelpful. This is the number one mistake. I see leaders and coaches alike when they first learn about how to break their telling habit about how to move from telling all their answers or suggesting their ideas, or being the one jumping in to do the problem solving and discover the power of asking questions.

[00:01:22] They over pivot to seeing coaching as just asking questions. And you know how much I’m an advocate of asking questions and the power that questions have in unlocking improvement, developing capability, and solving problems. In episode 13, three ways to break the Telling Habit, I admitted that just like you, I have a habit of.

[00:01:42] Telling of jumping in with my ideas and answers and I’ve had to work really hard at asking better questions because we as humans default to too much telling. So it’s great to move towards more asking to write this balance between advocacy and inquiry. But the challenge is when we over pivot, when we move from telling to asking, and then seeing that coaching and people development is.

[00:02:07] Only about asking questions. There are times that asking more and more questions is not helpful. Someone is stuck like in that situation I described earlier and can’t see their way to the next step. And I see this happening over and over again when leaders and coaches discover that their role as an improvement change leader is not to do all the doing, not falling into the doer trap like I talked about in episode 40, but rather to help others learn, do, and improve.

[00:02:37] As a coach for improvement, you are there to help someone else solve a problem, improve their capabilities, and make progress on a challenge. What’s critical is that you keep the problem solving ownership with that person and not take away that ownership by doing the doing. And there are many ways to show up to do this.

[00:02:57] It’s about navigating what I call the coaching continuum between directive coaching and open coaching. What’s really critical here, as I mentioned, is what help does the learner need to learn or the problem owner need to have solve their problem. And your intention is about not taking away that ownership, but about finding out what help they need and then adjusting how you’re showing up.

[00:03:22] To be helpful in helping that person move forward and to keep ownership of their problem. There’s a graph that I often share to illustrate this coaching continuum that I was inspired from. One that John Shook shared at a lean coaching summit, actually the same conference a decade ago that I attended when I first met Mr.

[00:03:39] Yoshino, the subject of my book, Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn. And John was talking about how we really can be more effective about navigating how we show up as coaches and leaders for improvement. If you wanna see what this graph looks like, be sure to go to the full episode. Show notes where I’ll put an image of the graph.

[00:03:59] On this graph of the coaching continuum, on the horizontal access is the complexity of the challenge or problem from simple to complex. And then on the vertical access is the problem owner’s skills from novice to expert. If someone is a beginner or working on a more simple issue, you likely show up as a coach to be helpful as being more directive by teaching and demonstrating, showing how to do something, showing how to take the next step.

[00:04:28] For example, If someone doesn’t know how to look at their data, you may need to go into their Excel file with them and show them how they could do a Pareto chart or how they could do a pivot table to understand what the data is that need to show. It’s about demonstrating how to do the standard or the process, and just like with a novice doctor, you wouldn’t just say to a new trainee in a surgery, well, what do you think the next step should be?

[00:04:53] They would be seeing and walking alongside with the training surgeon. However, if someone’s more experienced or working on a complex issue that needs to be thought through more deeply than open coaching, asking questions like those what and how questions that I talked about in episode 13. The ones for which you truly don’t know the answer are the most effective in helping someone think through a problem that they have ownership for.

[00:05:21] And what your skill needs to be is how you navigate this continuum, and then how you respond based on where the learner is in the moment. There are three key things to remember to help you effectively navigate this coaching continuum and show up more effectively as a transformational improvement coach.

[00:05:43] The first, you need to hear where someone’s thinking is at before you can know where they fall on that coaching continuum and what help will be most beneficial from you, either open coaching or more directive or instructional. So just like I talked about in episode 33 about asking the right questions you need to ask a question to

[00:06:06] open up their thinking and hear how they are approaching the problem. We often assume people need our help by us giving our expertise by telling the answer or telling exactly what we would do. And people often ask us for help thinking that is what they need. But in fact, what they really needed was someone creating the conditions for their learning through asking questions and holding space for thinking.

[00:06:31] There is a phrase that’s ingrained in my mind that I learned from one of my most impactful coaches and mentors, Margie Heney. And she would always say, before I heard where your thinking is at, I didn’t know what question you needed. I’ll say that again. Before I heard where your thinking was at, I didn’t know what question you needed, and you could also say, before I heard where your thinking was at, I didn’t know what help you needed, because sometimes it isn’t a question that you need.

[00:07:00] It maybe is more directive or more instructional. However, more often than not. People make their own progress on the problem they have ownership for. They just needed those questions in the space for thinking. So the second step though, is to get comfortable with struggle. So one of our challenges as human beings is we don’t like to see people struggle to not immediately have the right answer.

[00:07:24] And we then jump in too soon assuming that people need us to be more directive and tell them what to do or how to do it. So we have to get more comfortable with someone not having the answer to our question immediately and see if they maybe need us to come back tomorrow or, wow. They could say That was a really powerful question and I don’t have the answer to it.

[00:07:46] Well, that’s great because that’s why they’ve come for help or it’s a complex situation that they don’t immediately have the answer to. What’s important here is being able to assess the level of struggle so you can tell if someone’s like truly drowning. You don’t wanna just let them struggle and flounder.

[00:08:04] You wanna go in and help them in a different way. So it’s, if there’s a little bit of discomfort in not knowing, that’s okay. That’s part of the learning process. The learning comes through the struggle. But if someone’s really frustrated, like I shared in the beginning, you know when you’re asking question after question and someone’s like, I don’t know.

[00:08:20] I don’t have the answer. I don’t know what to do. That’s real struggle. That’s when the frustration’s coming in, and that’s where you then need to pivot how you’re showing up and move away from being that open coaching perhaps to more directive. And so what’s really important here to do is to label your actions.

[00:08:37] I talk about this in a lot of different episodes. The importance of labeling what you’re doing to make it explicit, both for you and so that the person you’re helping knows your intentions. So you would label your actions and say, maybe I’m gonna take my open coaching hat off. I see that you’re frustrated or you’re stuck, and I want to put my teaching hat on and help you think about how.

[00:09:00] You might approach this problem, so maybe there’s a, that, maybe that’s the time where you need to sit side by side and go into the Excel spreadsheet, or maybe you give an example about how you’ve approached a similar problem in the past. What is critically important is not just giving the answer, it’s about talking about the process that you might take to get to the answer or someone you know that might be helpful for them to talk with.

[00:09:23] So it’s about the problem solving process, not necessarily just giving the answer. I always go back to my kids when they ask me for help with math. If I just give them the answer, it’s not helping them. But if I can sit side by side with them and help walk through the process to get towards the answer, then they’re learning the process.

[00:09:42] So, label your actions and tell them why you’re moving into more a directive coaching. And then what’s really important is don’t stay there too long. So help them by giving some process, uh, explanation or demonstration or work. With them and then put your open coaching hat back on and tell them, label what you’re doing.

[00:10:02] Okay, so now I’m gonna put my coaching hat back on and I wanna ask. How does that help you think about the problem? Or how does that help you think about what next step to take? So don’t stay in that directive zone too long. That’s our risk. We keep pivoting down to this directive coaching, and it’s really critical that we keep moving towards the open coaching, but it’s about hopping.

[00:10:24] People learn along the way towards the process of problem solving. When you can do this, you become much more effective about truly being a transformational improvement coach. Then the third part is to remember that today is not the only day. This is another phrase that I learned from Margie. It’s about the importance of following up, that not everything has to happen in that one coaching session.

[00:10:48] You know, sometimes we think, oh, we have an hour on the calendar. We just need to keep doing that. No, maybe a few provocative questions is what that person needed. Or maybe they’re feeling frustrated, or maybe today’s just not a day that’s working out for them. Remember, today’s not the only day and you have a relationship with this person and you can follow up.

[00:11:06] So give them space to learn. Give them space to struggle and not have the answer immediately. What’s important here too is to ask what next step will you take? This is a process question that I always ask at the end of any coaching engagement or any coaching conversation. What next step will you take?

[00:11:26] It puts the thinking back onto them about the process of problem solving and a really helpful added element to that is, second, what do you expect to learn or happen when you take that step or do that thing or go talk to that person? So frame the action as an experiment.And then you have something as the coach to come back to when you meet up again with your learner or the leader you’re helping.

[00:11:49] When you embed the cycle of learning in the process, you really then are continuing to frame up the whole problem solving process on a meta level, not just on the specific problem that they’re working on, but embedding this as a habit. I also encourage you to ask another question for feedback and follow up too.

[00:12:08] Ask them what was a helpful question that I asked. This is that process or learning question that Michael Bunge, Stanier and I highlighted back in episode 34, and I’ve talked about in other episodes when we talked about how to be an effective facilitator and more. What’s really important here to become a transformational improvement coach is that you don’t own the problem.

[00:12:29] You own the thinking process, not the actual thinking. You own the structure to help people learn and to think and to make progress. This reflects too the role of manager or coach and learner through the process of working through an A3 problem solving report. For those of you listening who don’t know what an A3 report is, an A3 is really just a size of paper

[00:12:53] Double the size of a four or letter paper that developed at Toyota as a standard for communication, people development and problem solving, as well as a framework for communicating strategy. Different formats have different purposes, but what’s really critical here is that it is this framework for coaching and development, not just completing a report for problem solving.

[00:13:17] And I go into this in a lot more detail in my book, learning to Lead, leading To Learn, because Mr. Yoshino talks about how he learned and developed, creating A3, and then how he helped develop his direct reports, including John Shook, who I learned this coaching continuum from. And what’s often different about how we approach A3 is that.

[00:13:36] In Japan, the original intention is that the manager owns the thinking process, not the thinking, and they actually put a stamp called a hanko. It’s actually like what we consider our signature, but in Japan, they use a physical stamp to indicate their name. And this stamp, the hanko is the sign off that the manager or the coach had overseen the process of the development of the A three, of going through the problem solving process that they had done their best.

[00:14:04] To ensure that the person who owned the problem had worked through it to the best of their capabilities. And so again, it demonstrated that there, they had done their role as manager, not jumping in and doing the A three, not doing the problem solving, but actually overseeing the thinking process. So remember, as a coach or as a leader, your role is to own the thinking process.

[00:14:27] Not the actual thinking and to create the conditions for learning. And this means that you need to not just ask questions, which is very important to do. So definitely ask those open what and how questions and take people on a problem solving journey. But make sure that you’re navigating that coaching continuum and showing up helpful in the way that the learner needs for making progress on their problem.

[00:14:52] Becoming a transformational improvement coach means being able to effectively navigate this coaching continuum to flex how you’re showing up. When you are a coach, your role is to help the other person make progress, to develop their problem solving capabilities and to make progress truly on the problem or challenge that they have.

[00:15:13] Coaching is an art. And a science, it’s different for every person in every situation. It’s about listening, about reading the room, the person the moment, understanding when they need some effective questions and space to think or when they’re stuck and don’t know how to take that next step. And you can help by being more directive.

[00:15:34] Coaching is not just asking questions. It’s so much more. As you reflect on this episode, make a plan for your practice. So first, the next time you find yourself in a coaching situation or someone asks for your help, be sure to ask a question before you immediately jump in and assume they need your answer or need you to show them how to do something.

[00:15:56] Find out where their thinking is at. Two, if someone’s truly stuck, not that they just don’t have the answer right then and there, but really getting frustrated. Label what you’re doing and then move into more directive mode and share maybe an example of how you might approach the problem or situation.

[00:16:15] Then three, put your open coaching hat back on and label it and ask what next step will they take and what they expect to happen. And then be sure to follow up and continue that coaching cycle. The more we can reinforce the cycle of learning through asking questions, framing things as experiments, and building capability and confidence, the more effective the other person will be the next time they’re approaching a problem.

[00:16:39] Importantly, through your process of modeling effective coaching behavior as a leader or as an improvement change coach, you will be able to help them to build that chain of learning as they’re helping others solve problems and work through their issues too, about not taking over that ownership of problem solving, not doing the doing, but showing up most effectively to navigate that coaching continuum between open coaching and directive coaching.

[00:17:06] I’ll put all the links for the podcast episodes that I referenced here, as well as some links to other resources that can help you in navigating the coaching continuum and asking more effective questions in the full episode. Show notes chain of learning.com/four four. And if you haven’t already done so, be sure to download my free catalyst self-assessment that covers all eight competencies that you need to master to become an impactful change leader and [email protected] slash.

[00:17:34] Catalyst spelled with a K, and you can also go back and listen to episode nine to learn more about each competency. The T in catalyst is transformational improvement coach. And all coaches need a coach. If you need outside support for yourself or your leaders, I’d be happy to help breaking the telling habit and learning the skills to become more effective coaches and leaders is the core of my work with leadership teams and internal change practitioners and lean consultants.

[00:18:01] You can learn more about my trusted advisor coaching and custom learning experiences on my website, k bj anderson.com, and the link is also in the show notes. Be sure to follow or subscribe now to chain of Learning and share this podcast with your friends or colleagues so we can all strengthen our chain of learning together.

[00:18:17] And if you’re enjoying the show, please rate and review it on your favorite podcast player or YouTube. It really does help us continue to grow and expand this chain of learning to other people who might not know that they need it. Thank you for being a link in my chain of learning today. I’ll see you next time.

[00:18:32] Have a great day.