For me, one of the pleasures of being a manager is the opportunity to coach and guide your team members. Coaching is a big skill to learn. But if you don't have the time, or the opportunity at this stage to do so, let me offer you four tips for really effective day to day workplace coaching for a manager, to your team members. The first tip is to recognize that coaching is a big commitment. And the proper coaching conversation requires time. It requires time and a certain amount of privacy, so called the time out of your diary.

In fact, I'd go further than that. prioritize this time in your diary. Because developing your people is your primary role as a manager. Your role is no longer to do but to manage and managing means giving people The skills they need to do a better and better job to advance in their own skill levels and ultimately, to be ready to take on your role. When you coach, there are many simple formulas for the structure of a coaching conversation. My favorite is what's called the grow model.

And this divides the coaching conversation into four stages. First, talk about the goal of the conversation. What is it that the personal coaching wants to achieve? Second, is what's called the reality stage where you examine the current level of performance or the challenges as they really are. This is where you as the coach will test the other person to make sure that they fully understand what's going on. When you've got a full understanding of the reality of the situation, This is where you help them to discover all of the options they have for taking action, what are the choices available to them?

The consequences of those choices? And having understood that, which choice or choices, will they select? So that's the Oh the option stage. The final stage is the wheel stage. What will you do? This is where you nail down that decision and start to put plans around the options that have been selected.

So the grow model enables you as a coach to first of all, find out the goals that the other person wants to set for themselves, to help them to explore the reality of the situation, give them a good high quality awareness of what's going on. Then to help them explore their options, and then help them to decide what they will do and how they will do it. So The next three tips. Having told you that you need to make the time are linked to using the grow model? Well. The first is to focus on your questions.

The quality of the coaching that you give is going to be more directly related to the quality of the questions that you ask them to anything else. asking good questions will evoke higher qualities of awareness in the person you're coaching and will help them to decide to take greater levels of responsibility for the choices they make. The next tip is to listen hard. Turn off all distractions in your mind focus on what you're hearing on what the other person is saying. Listening is important for two reasons. First, we love to be listened to and so the higher the quality of your listening the the The quality of the coaching relationship that you'll have with the other person, human beings have a deep need to be listened to.

And if you're able to give that gift to somebody, then your relationship will deepen, the level of trust will increase and you'll get better answers. But secondly, the other reason for listening hard, is because it will affect the quality of the questions that you'll be able to answer. The more carefully you listen. Then, the more precisely your understand their reality and their situation, and you'll be able to find the right question. And my top tip, if you do need a question, and you don't know what to ask, is just to use Silence. Silence is my fourth tip is nothing quite like it, provoking more cancer.

When you give somebody the gift of silence, you're not saying, I don't know what's next, or I haven't got any thoughts in my head. I don't know what to say. What you're saying is, that was interesting to think about. And of course, nobody feels comfortable with a silence. If you are able to control that silence, and the other person may just fill it with deeper thoughts than the head originally thought to let out. So, my four tips, one, make the time to ask great questions.

Three, listen hard, so that you could strengthen the relationship and understand what the next great question will be. And fourth, use silence to evoke a deeper answer