The New Importance of Coaching Circles

This is the sixth post in the Training in Turbulence series, insights on developing talent amidst the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Accelerating coaching through communities of practice

In a time of crisis, a combination of microlearning and nudges will prove to be the most efficient way to teach coaching skills. But it's not enough to teach these skills. As talent developers, we must also look at how to catalyze continuous skill improvement, which can only be achieved through consistent practice.

To consistently practice coaching, we would do well to join a community of coaches, known in the talent development industry as “coaching circles." In a coaching circle, a peer group gathers on a semi-regular basis for a facilitated meetup.

A coaching circle is a “meta-coaching” exercise - a fast-paced discussion to coach about coaching. While ICF suggests an hour for such conversations, I’ve facilitated coaching circles that move the proverbial skill development needle in as little as 15 minutes. The purpose of this brief meetup is to collaboratively determine the best way to leverage coaching in highly specific circumstances.

Running a coaching circle

Each coaching circle consists of a "coaches," a "coachee," and a "facilitator."

Whether in-person, on the phone, or in an online setting, a coaching circle typically begins with one individual, the “coachee” for the day, sharing a coaching challenge. The coaching challenge could be scenario-based, such as trying to keep their team productive during a time of layoffs or trying to keep their team collaborating effectively after the departure of a key contributor. The challenge could be individual-based, such as an anonymous individual who needs to bring their productivity up to match expectations or an individual who needs to improve their presence. The “coachee” who supplies the coaching challenge describes their scenario in detail, providing contextually-relevant data and insight into their past coaching efforts. Whoever supplies the coaching challenge initiates the next step of the meetup either by explaining their ideal end-state, or what they would like to achieve from their coaching efforts.

Next begins the facilitated group discussion. Here, one member of the coaching circle takes the role of discussion facilitator. Their responsibilities are simple - keep the questions circulating, maintain privacy, and keep a record of action items. All others take the role of coaches, who are obligated not to provide advice or statements on “what I would do if I were you,” but to ask powerful coaching questions. This format has three primary benefits - first, it provides a setting in which we all can practice our coaching skills, integrating what’s working for others in our group. Second, it gives us practice at limiting the advice we offer and increasing the questions we ask. Third, it ensures that the “coachee” is empowered to determine their way forward, building their confidence, and increasing the likelihood that they will act on the next steps. The conversation adjourns whenever the coaches and “coachee” have agreed on and documented the next steps.

As an L&D employee at both Google and Zendesk, I have seen many different coaching circle formats, applications, and success stories. I’ve seen especially strong engagement in coaching circles amongst new people leaders, who are often more proactive in developing their managerial skills. To keep the conversation grounded in plausible scenarios, the coaching circles should focus on bringing together peers at approximately the same level within the org chart.

Global businesses should aspire towards cross-regional representation in a coaching circle, as this promotes global alignment and mitigates groupthink. From what I have observed, the most engaged coaching circles at the executive level tend to be gatherings of peers from several different organizations, which ensures a level of candor that may not be possible for an internal coaching circle. Just as talent developers have long-supported pairing senior leaders with external coaches, the talent developer in a time of turbulence should work to convene senior-level coaching circles that bring several organizations together.

However, we should not think of coaching circles merely as manager meetings.

Organizations that create a coaching culture will have many peer-to-peer coaching circles. A peer-to-peer coaching circle provides individual contributors with the space to develop their coaching practice, though the format may differ from that of their management counterparts. While “meta-coaching” or coaching about coaching, is a useful format for leader-level meetups, few individual contributors will have “coaching challenges” that they feel called to discuss in a group context. Talent developers should pivot these coaching circles away from “meta-coaching” and towards group coaching interactions. In an individual contributor coaching circle, members bring a workplace challenge on a rotating basis - something that is inhibiting peak performance. The talent developer facilitates a question-driven dialogue, tamping down “advice” when needed. All other participants serve as “coaches,” asking thoughtful questions to help the “coachee” discover their next steps. As a caution to L&D professionals, my experience suggests that peer-to-peer coaching circles can, at times, devolve into senseless complaining, or what my high-school physical education teacher referred to as “pity parties.” These meetups don’t need to have “supervision,” but they do need to have a trained coaching expert who can recognize and course-correct when the conversation becomes counterproductive.

Coaching circles, but faster

In a crisis-laden workplace, not everyone has a spare 15 minutes to gather for a CoP. Here are some efficient ideas for such organizations:

Training in turbulence begins with coaching. It’s the foundation upon which we build the critical capacities of critical thinking and change resilience. With certain changes on the horizon, it’s time to pull coaching from the exclusive grip of coaching practitioners (no offense to coaching practitioners). It’s time to stop imagining coaching as the exclusive domain of managers and executives. We need a revolution in talent development that ensures that 100% of our organization can achieve meaningful progress through coaching. Once established, we can turn to our second pillar of training in turbulence, our second core capacity in the recession-ready workplace: critical thinking.

Build coaching skills with "nudges"

This post is the fifth in the Training in Turbulence series, which explores how to develop talent amidst the disruption and volatility of the COVID-19 pandemic. Talent developers will find that the concept of nudges pairs well with micro-learning, as described in the last post!

From programs to systems

Before COVID-19, talent developers taught coaching skills in “macro-learning” contexts that required considerable resources, particularly of that increasingly-important resource: employee time. As this resource wanes amidst economic disruption, talent developers have to develop alternative strategies for building core skills. One such strategy, that of behavioral nudges, doesn’t just require “less” of learner’s time. It requires no time investment whatsoever.

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein suggest in their book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" that “nudges” are strategic configurations of the “choice architecture” surrounding behaviors. Those who want to use nudges to improve the performance of a skill, say coaching, should seek to influence the “physical, social, and psychological aspects of the contexts that influence and in which our choices take place – in ways that promote a more preferred behavior rather than obstruct it.” If we want to develop coach-like behaviors through nudges, we need to stop managing learning programs - and start acting on organizational systems.

Getting started with nudges

At first, this may seem daunting. Many of us were educated in the traditions of cognitivism or other theories of education, trained to teach primarily through the well-sequenced delivery of high-quality content. In support of this, we learned to work within a system. We didn’t learn to be architects of the system itself. If we want to build nudges, we need to give ourselves the time and patience to learn this new tactic. Still, I believe that everyone in this profession can affect positive outcomes through nudges, regardless of our level of experience or expertise with this type of intervention.

Let’s start with the basics. To create nudges that assist in the building of coaching skills, we need an awareness of when, where, and why coaching should ideally take place within our organization. When we isolate these variables, we begin to understand the best place to deploy a nudge.

Since workplace coaching originated with formal “sessions,” team meetings and 1:1s are the natural places to begin. Team meetings often have a recurring cadence, they occur in conference or huddle rooms, and they provide an opportunity for coaching because they are the typical setting for performance-oriented conversations.

When considering the physical, social, and psychological aspects of team meetings and 1:1s, perhaps we are drawn to that physical (or virtual) organizing tactic that guides nearly all of these interactions: meeting agendas. Meeting agendas are often “topical,” in that they sequence a list of items for discussion. It is here that we can apply a simple nudge to encourage coaching behaviors by writing each agenda item not as a topic, but as a question. Then, below each question, we might include 2-3 coaching questions. For example, let’s say a manager and an employee are reviewing candidate resumes in search of a third member to add to their team. Rather than writing “candidate selection” or “new employee hiring” atop the agenda, the manager can add the question: “What next steps must we take in our hiring process?” Below this question, they add three popular, practical coaching questions: “What do we know to be true about each candidate? How can we separate the facts from our judgments? And if we say yes to this candidate, what are we saying no to?” By formatting meeting agendas in such a way, the manager nudges their meetings away from reporting sessions and towards coaching opportunities.

But coaching as a habit cannot be limited to team meetings and 1:1s. Nudges can make us more likely to practice coaching on a peer-to-peer basis, but only if embedded in the environments where our peer-to-peer coaching should occur. My background is in technology, and currently, I work for Zendesk, a company that builds software for customer interactions. Customer service conversations in the form of “tickets” form the most common use case for this software. Customer service agents or salespeople can work out of Zendesk to respond to emails, serve chats, and take phone calls. Zendesk then logs the conversation in a ticket that facilitates further communication. Working at Zendesk, it’s clear to me that many of our customers deal with highly complex questions from their clients. When evaluating this scenario for nudges, we again want to consider the when, where, and why. In this context, our “when” includes the moment before a new hire submits a response to a customer. Our “where” is the software user interface in which customer support agents work. We can deploy a nudge in this context to accelerate new agents in their ability to support customers.

Nudges and technology

Let’s use this example in the context of an online store that uses Zendesk to field questions ranging from refunds and billing to product troubleshooting and issue resolution. If that online store needed a fast way to bring their new hires up to speed, they could pair a new agent with a tenured mentor for 1:1 assistance on ticket responses. That’s where the nudge comes in. The online store could configure Zendesk in such a way that the new hire’s replies are automatically sent to their mentor for feedback and coaching before they are sent to the customer. The store could even configure Zendesk in such a way that the mentor could initiate a coaching dialogue based on the new hire’s responses, giving the new hire a chance to revise their answer before sending it out to the customer. By configuring a software application to initiate a coaching dialogue automatically, a talent developer nudges their organization towards peer-to-peer coaching. By the way, such a use case is quite common amongst Zendesk’s customers - it can be configured with a simple and widely-used feature known as “macros.”

Accustomed to a world of macro-learning, talent developers tend to think too broadly about many things within their domain. Shifting from day or week-long courses to small systems-level details is an abrupt change of pace. We must remain focused on the least amount of work that we could do to make it easier for team members to engage in a target behavior - in this case, coaching.

For a nudge to achieve optimal results, it should require little work by the talent developer, and next to no overhead or administrative obligation. Similarly, team members should hardly be aware that the nudge exists at all. That’s why low-tech nudges are not only more efficient to implement than high-tech nudges - they’re often more effective! Ultimately, this is why nudges matter for training in turbulence. They combine little effort on the part of the trainer and the learner - to achieve lasting improvements to recession-ready skillsets.

Low-tech and high-tech coaching nudges

Coach high performers for engagement and retention

This is the fourth post in a series on coaching high performers. In the last post, we explored how coaching high performers creates sustainability and produces competitive advantages.

Researchers continue to find correlations between workplace coaching and employee engagement. When employees receive consistent coaching, they are more productive, motivated, and committed. 66% of employees who receive coaching state that it increases their job satisfaction. Two-thirds of Millennials committed to staying with a company for 5+ years have a workplace coach. It's, therefore, no surprise that coaching drives employee retention.

But when we pause to consider who receives coaching, we have to wonder if we're motivating and retaining the best people. Most "coachees" fall within two categories. The first is executive coaching, a practice utilized by 50% of organizations in which a high-ranking leader works with an external coach. The second is performance improvement coaching, in which a low-performer works with their manager and/or an HRBP in an effort to meet expectations. As we've explored in past posts in this series, high performers receive at best sporadic coaching.

So if we combine the data that coaching drives retention and engagement with the finding that most of our coaching falls outside of the high-performance segment, we can infer that we are boosting the retention and engagement of two groups: highly-paid executive leaders who are likely to stick around by virtue of their compensation packages, and low-performing individuals at all levels of the organization.

The practice of workplace coaching needs to evolve to engage and retain high performers, not just because hiring a new high-performing employee is prohibitively more expensive than retaining an existing one, but because it is essential to an organization's culture of innovation and sustainability.

Talent developers should explore three relatively simple actions that can improve the engagement and retention of high performers.

First, ensure that every high-performer has a high-performing coach. The best way to do this? Recognize that high performers might need a coach from outside of their "chain of command." Nearly every high-performer has a people manager, but most people managers are not effective coaches. Approximately 60% of managers are not seen as good coaches. Talent developers can change this by identifying high performers and pairing them up with an effective coach, internal or external. It should be the talent developer's responsibility to convene, check-in with, and evaluate these pairings, which will often cross org chart demarcations. Sometimes, these pairings will bring-in voices external to the company. We spend over $1B every year in the United States on external executive coaches. In the event a great coach isn't readily available internally, why not extend this same benefit to high performers across the business?

Second, enable the high-performers to be the next generation of coaches. The employees who drive results in your organization likely know what they would like to get out of a coaching/mentoring relationship, but they might lack the vocabulary to initiate, sustain, and optimize coaching partnerships. So don't wait until these individuals are promoted into a management position. The talent developer should resolve to create a new class of coaching talent by upskilling high performing individual contributors (ICs) in the practice of coaching. Don't just create a one-off training for this group. Continuously invest - in workshops, micro-learnings, reading materials, and job shadowing programs, so that the best of your best might continuously sharpen their coaching skillset. Then pair high-performing ICs with peers who need a boost - before you need to move those same peers into a formal performance improvement plan.

Finally, convene the best of your best for regular group coaching check-ins. Identify the best coach in your organization, and empower that coach to engage high-performers in a group setting, such as a monthly lunch group or quarterly happy hour meetup. Group coaching is particularly useful for high performers as it creates a sounding board with which innovative ideas can gain traction. The key to successful group coaching in this context is to bring together a cross-functional selection so that coachees can vet their ideas with the greatest minds in your company, and so that they can continue to work on their own coaching aptitude.

It's no longer a great secret that coaching is correlated with engagement and retention. The question now turns to whether we are engaging and retaining the right people. When we stop neglecting and start coaching our highest performing employees, we elevate the odds that our brightest minds will still be with us for years to come.