| 1. Coaching | 3. Leadership |
| 2. Feedback | 4. For Further Reading |
OVERVIEW
One of the most common issues that comes up in my practice is how my clients--CEOs and other senior leaders--can provide more effective coaching and feedback to their execs and employees.
Early in a leader's career they typically offer advice based on their own experience or skills: "Here's how I'd handle this situation..." But senior leaders manage people who sit much closer to the problems being solved and who may have more expertise in their functional area than the leader. Directive guidance from a senior leader can be counterproductive by preventing execs and employees from making full use of their own knowledge or from taking responsibility for a problem they would rather leave to the leader. Such an approach also keeps senior leaders involved with tactical details and distracts them from larger strategic issues, which is a particular concern in rapidly growing or changing organizations.
An alternative approach for the senior leader is to employ coaching skills to help direct reports come up with their own solutions to the problems they face. To be clear, an internal manager is not a substitute for an external coach--the relationship between leader and employee is fundamentally different than that between coach and client. The leader who aspires to coach their employees must take great care to acknowledge and account for the power differential that exists in these relationships. Subjecting execs and employees to a "coaching conversation" that takes the form of a series of leading questions will rightfully be seen as a theatrical performance and appropriately resented.
This isn't to say that senior leaders who seek to employ coaching skills are precluded from sharing their opinions with execs and employees. But it's important for leaders to develop effective feedback skills and to build relationships with their reports that are conducive to meaningful feedback conversations.
The resources below are derived from my work coaching leaders in my private practice since 2006, teaching The Art of Self-Coaching at Stanford for seven years, and training MBA students in both coaching and feedback skills (in the Leadership Fellows program and Interpersonal Dynamics) for a decade. I've also appended a list of books that have had an impact on my approach to coaching and feedback and whose concepts are readily applicable to organizational life.
Connect, Reflect, Direct...Then Ask (On Coaching)
- Thoughts on coaching as a tool for leaders, broken down into a four-step process.
How Great Coaches Ask, Listen and Empathize (Originally published at Harvard Business Review)
- By using coaching methods and techniques in the right situations, leaders can still be effective without knowing all the answers and without telling employees what to do.
HBR Guide to Coaching Employees
- I wrote the Introduction, Why Coach?, as well as Giving Feedback that Sticks and Help People Help Themselves, on self-coaching.
Coaching Your Employees (Harvard Business Review Webinar)
- HBR webinar (1-hour video)
- HBR's summary of my remarks (7-page PDF)
A Challenge to Leaders: Help Others Self-Coach
- Helping people self-coach is a natural fit with knowledge work's emphasis on self-management and flat hierarchies.
- This is an earlier version of Help People Help Themselves, which appears in the HBR guide above.
- Skilled managers can coach their employees, but to do so effectively they must be careful to identify and discourage signs of deference
Hammering Screws (Bad Coaching)
- Bad coaching feels like hammering screws--a solo effort on the part of the coach that can make a lot of noise but accomplishes very little.
- We invest in people, but we're attached to outcomes.
The Six Layers of Knowledge and Better Conversations
- When we're leading and coaching, how can we help others surface more useful information? How can we make those conversations more effective?
Scott Ginsberg on Asking (Better) Questions
- Yes/no questions are simple and direct, but they surface a minimum of new information and constrain the boundaries of the conversation.
Tips for Coaching Someone Remotely (Originally published at Harvard Business Review)
- Advice on logistics, focus, equipment and timing.
- I find The Cult of Done professionally relevant, personally inspiring, and an apt metaphor for the coaching process itself.
Emotional Mountaineering (The Three Tasks of Coaching)
- There's an arc to this journey that involves pushing ourselves to reach new heights, navigating those peaks under difficult conditions, and safely returning to lower altitudes. Looked at from this perspective, coaching can be seen as emotional mountaineering.
- A number of key concepts from Gestalt therapy can be seen at work in contemporary approaches to executive coaching.
20 Tools for Coaching and Teaching
- While I make use of these resources in my work at Stanford and my practice, almost all of them can be applied by a leader or manager within their organization.
Getting Coaching for Your Team
- While I believe that leaders should be able to coach as part of their repertoire, there are limits on the efficacy of coaching as a managerial tool. This is where a professional coach can play a particularly helpful role.
Fishbowl Coaching (A Group Exercise)
- If you're a leader who wants to integrate coaching into your toolkit, you may feel daunted. What does this look like? How will you improve? Here's an exercise to sharpen your skills that can be conducted by a small group in under an hour.
- It's data.
How to Deliver Critical Feedback
- If we want our critical feedback to be truly useful to the recipient and not merely an exercise in self-indulgence, we owe it to our colleagues to be more thoughtful and intentional in how we deliver it.
Giving Feedback That Sticks [PDF]
- Effective feedback doesn’t happen spontaneously; it’s critical to learn how to give—and receive—feedback in a way that’s effective in a particular context.
- Originally published in the HBR Guide to Delivering Effective Feedback
- This is a revised version of Give It To Me Straight (Effective Feedback)
Make Feedback Normal. Not a Performance Review.
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Performance reviews aren't going to disappear, but their persistence need not prevent you from "making feedback normal" in your organization.
Why Some Feedback Hurts (and What To Do About It)
- The key with any painful feedback is ensuring that you don't miss the signal while filtering out the noise.
- You've just learned that your 360 report is ready, and you're about to review it for the first time. What can you expect?
Four Responses to Feedback (Adapted from the piece above)
- It's important to be open to feedback, but being open to feedback doesn't necessarily mean that you should simply accept it.
The Problem with Anonymous Feedback
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Critiques become criticism; there's a tendency to blame and a failure to take responsibility; and necessary skills go undeveloped.
Make Getting Feedback Less Stressful (Originally published at Harvard Business Review)
- We need to recognize that receiving feedback is inherently a stressful experience.
Making Feedback Less Stressful (Harvard Business Review Webinar)
- HBR webinar (1-hour video)
- HBR's summary of my remarks (8-page PDF)
Building a Feedback-Rich Culture (Originally published at Harvard Business Review)
- As leaders, how do we build a feedback-rich culture? What does it take to cultivate an ongoing commitment to interpersonal feedback? Here are four essential elements...
Building a Feedback-Rich Culture from the Middle
- For employees working from within an organization.
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Good coaches understand how important it is not to provide too much advice or feedback to clients. But this isn't to say that coaches should never offer advice or feedback--there are times when it's essential to do so. Excerpts from three key texts on coaching.
Feedback and Coaching with the Stanford Entrepreneurship Commitment Group
- This is my slide deck from a workshop I conducted on these topics with the ECG, a select group of venture founders who meet regularly at Stanford to support their own growth and development as leaders.
- Caution and skepticism are essential when exploring the question I pose above: What do great leaders do? And yet there’s a tremendous desire to find answers—I see it in my coaching practice every day,
How Leaders Create Safety (and Danger)
- Change is hard, and safety is important, but how do leaders actually create the safety that's necessary to support change in their organizations?
- I find this a compelling model for the range of roles that must be played by every leader in any group.
How to Scale: Do Less, Lead More
- A leader who continues to lead by doing more often becomes less effective and may even undermine the organization as it grows larger and more complex.
Group Dynamics: The Leader's Toolkit
- A set of options for the leader whose team of direct reports are experiencing difficulties working together.
Group Dynamics: Norms and Emotion
- A group's emotional intelligence is a function of the norms that A) create awareness of emotion and B) support emotion regulation during group activities.
- At its core leading is an act of love. It's the ability to love those around us in a way that allows us to understand them, to see their full potential, and to enable that potential to be realized.
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler
Difficult Conversations: How To Discuss What Matters Most, Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen
- Written by three Harvard Law professors associated with the school's Negotiation Project, this book includes one of the most important readings we use at Stanford in Interpersonal Dynamics, "Have Your Feelings (Or They Will Have You)."
Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time, Susan Scott
- I've never met Susan Scott, but she's a personal hero of mine, and this book has had a substantial impact not only on my approach to coaching but also on my decision to launch my coaching practice in 2006.
Helping: How to Offer, Give and Receive Help, Edgar Schein
- This concise volume by Schein, a longtime professor of management at MIT, is relevant to all potential helping relationships--personal and professional, formal and informal--and it's the book I recommend most often to my clients and students.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini
- Cialdini is one of the world's leading experts on this topic; this classic text was in the curriculum when I was an MBA student at Stanford many years ago, and we still use it today.
Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen
- A subsequent volume by two of the co-authors of Difficult Conversations.
Photo by Rob Kemme.
Updated September 2021.
