Consultant, coach, and partner in Giraffe Business Publishing LLC, Jane Murphy, was kind enough to take the time to answer a few questions about her very practical and idea packed book What Could Happen if You Do Nothing? A Manager's Handbook for Coaching Conversations.
Jane Murphy describes how adding or enhancing coaching skills as an integral part of a manager's toolbox can help facilitate improvement in the workplace.
Thanks to Jane Murphy for her time, and for her informative and fascinating responses. They are greatly appreciated.
What was the background to writing this book What Could Happen if You Do Nothing? A Manager's Handbook for Coaching Conversations?
Jane Murphy: There was no resource like this on the market, so we’re meeting a need for both managers and coaches. Some key factors that influence engagement and high performance in the workplace include:
time to think and reflect
opportunity to be supported and challenged to grow
encouragement to collaborate and create
Coaching facilitates these often-neglected needs. I wrote this book to help managers get a basic grasp of how coaching works. It offers them easily accessible skills to instill a coaching orientation into the way they manage and develop their people, build teams, and boost performance. Integrating coaching into one’s management style is a significant factor in developing leadership.
The book describes the value of coaching as a managerial skill. Why is coaching so important for business people to consider?
Jane Murphy: I contend that the three pillars of coaching—engaged listening, deliberative questioning, animating suggestions—put the focus on the individual. Coaching conversations draw upon people’s potential, push them to think more deeply, reframe issues, consider new responses to challenges, and up their game. The process itself acknowledges the value and potential of the individual, the importance of healthy communication in teams, and how each person’s performance impacts business success.
How does the concept of coaching add to the leadership skills that are so important for managers?
Jane Murphy: Leadership involves inspiring top performance. Leaders need to support risk-taking and creativity. They need to offer valuable, timely, and specific feedback. And they need to model transparent communication. And they need to do all this with a view to developing people’s talent and potential and connect each person’s performance to business success. Coaching helps enhance all these behaviors.
Communication is critical for any organization. Why then do so many managers fail to communicate well with their employees?
Jane Murphy: Time is always a factor and an excuse for poor communication.
Often the reason is that managers need to understand the link between performance and healthy, ongoing, specific, and timely communication. Communicating clearly and often keeps people engaged. Coaching can help a manager recognize where gaps exist and take action to build successful communication with their troops. It can also work well across departments, and upstairs to the C suite.
The book stresses the importance of listening skills. Why is it so difficult for some managers to actually listen to what their staff is really saying?
Jane Murphy: We’re often too distracted to really listen well. Listening is a kind of acknowledgment, since it recognizes the importance of the other person’s words and thinking. Powerful listening can reveal hidden strengths and capabilities, but it takes time to develop the skills of listening to what’s behind the words and to what’s not said, as well as listening to what is said.
Keen listening skills can also uncover misunderstandings and misperceptions and help get people back on track. Listening well also opens the door to those penetrating questions that get a person to dig deeper and think through tough challenges, to innovate, and to solve problems.
Jane Murphy (photo left)
How can these managerial listening skills be improved?
Jane Murphy: Practice, practice, practice. The most critical factor impacting listening is presence. It’s the capability of being in the moment, getting rid of any internal or external distractions and focusing on the other person and the conversation. Like any skill, being present can be learned if one puts one’s mind to it.
You describe asking as part of the process for coaching. What do you mean by asking and why is it so important?
Jane Murphy: The manager who asks penetrating, open-ended questions helps someone expand their thinking, reveal hidden strengths, and promote forward momentum. All these things help a person create options to meet a challenge head-on.
Very often, there is a problem of everyone not understanding the manager's goals. How can vision and goals be formulated better for greater achievement?
Jane Murphy: Of course, managers have an overall responsibility to communicate their goals clearly. But coaching is about the goals of the person being coached. A manager may discover that the person she’s coaching has goals that aren’t aligned with the team’s goals. For example, a salesperson might be spending a lot of time trying to develop new business, while the team is focused on growing existing accounts. In that case, the manager could take the opportunity to articulate the team’s goals, then help the person being coached to clearly define the changes required to improve alignment with the team.
You describe suggesting as another crucial part of the coaching process. What do you mean by suggesting and why is it important?
Jane Murphy: Suggesting offers the benefit of some added options to put on the table. Suggestions can be powerful. They are, after all, just that— suggestions—ideas, possible plans, or actions for someone to consider. They are not direct orders or prescriptions.
There’s a difference between suggesting (“Have you considered using some vacation days?”) and advising (“You should use some of your vacation days”). Suggestions should follow the direction of the coachee’s thinking. The book addresses the issues of “when, how, and what” to suggest.
How can employees be put at ease throughout the entire coaching process so as to not feel threatened by it?
Jane Murphy: First, establish confidentiality. Coaching conversations are based on trust and confidentiality. The coachee must feel safe, heard, and supported—a critical foundation for effective change. Your role as a manager should not conflict with your ability to ensure trust and confidentiality when coaching your people. You must be clear about what is confidential and what is not. If you ever tackle a topic that must be shared with others, then you need to clearly explain this with your coachee.
Next, be clear about the process. Coaching is an iterative and animated process whose script gets written in real time. The coach manages the process. The coachee manages the content.
And you need to be clear about expectations. Coaching conversations don’t necessarily end with a solution. In fact, as a colleague has shared, some of her most powerful coaching sessions end “openly.” The coachee takes away thoughts to sit with and consider, and then returns with greater awareness and new thinking.
What is the first step that managers should take to enhance their coaching skills?
Jane Murphy: Being coached or having some training in coaching skills is optimal. Of course, my hope is that “What could happen if you do nothing?” will start people on their way and support them as they practice a coaching orientation in the way they work with their people.
What is next for Jane Murphy?
Jane Murphy: We’re working with authors in developing new titles for Giraffe Business Publishing to further our mission to help managers do their jobs better. I continue to coach managers and teams and write for my blog: www.coachingmojoformanagers.com. I’m also involved in two other projects: a multimedia adventure series for children and a novel for adults.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
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My book review of What Could Happen if You Do Nothing? A Manager's Handbook for Coaching Conversations by Jane Murphy.
Jane Murphy (photo left) is a partner in Giraffe Business Publishing LLC and Giraffe LLC, a consulting firm that designs custom solutions to help organizations improve the management capabilities of their people. Jane also leads Giraffe’s coaching engagements, working with clients to solve business and leadership challenges. Jane has been principal and co-founder of several publishing ventures, including KIDVIDZ, which won numerous awards for its special-interest videos.
She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation National Video Resources. She has co-authored several books, including “What could happen if you do nothing?” A manager’s handbook for coaching conversations (Giraffe Business Publishing). Jane speaks and writes regularly about coaching in the workplace. Visit Jane on her blog: www.coachingmojoformanagers.com.
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