iDevelop Series - Listen as coach

iDevelop Series - Listen as coach

Effective Coaching Skills

Listening

One of the most important coaching skills is listening – active and intense listening. Your communication style is certainly important, but great coaches make their impact with exceptional listening skills. To help you coach more effectively, here are five strategies you can use to improve your listening skills. 1. Listen on a deeper level. Great coaches know how to get team members talking so they can access their approaches. Not just their solutions, but how they arrived at those solutions. They listen for that information by prompting them with open-ended questions, like - What options have you explored? - How did you choose your final recommendation? - What results are you expecting? Coaches who listen for broader context can guide team members to make smart decisions and improve their decision-making skills. 2. Be patient with your listening. Before you start with a coaching session, try to get into the right mindset. Remind yourself that their success is a shared success. Your position as a coach is to be on their side, to be their advocate, and if need, be their accountability system. Then give your colleague your full attention. Focus, be patient for them to finish rather than cutting them off mid-sentence, and don't jump in with advice or volunteer the answer.

3. Demonstrate that you're actively listening. While you work on being patient and mentally engage, make sure your body language isn't sending a different message. Remove outside distractions that could naturally divert your attention. Put away your phone, move away from your computer, may be hold the meeting in a different location. 4. Clear up any confusion. As you listen, identify areas that sound vague or contradictory. Ask for clarification. Sometimes you can uncover critical information about the project or the process when you prompt a colleague to further explain a decision. 5. Summarize and paraphrase. At the end of a session, we should provide a concise summary of the conversation by paraphrasing what we heard the colleague say. When we summarize the message, we can confirm that we understand their intent, that we are on the same page, and we value their thinking.

By following these five steps, we can improve our listening style and make a positive impact on our coaching process.