The Confident Coach 5: Feedback in Coaching

What makes a new coach confident about their coaching approach? How does this translate into their ultimate success as business coaches?

Feedback in Coaching

This is the fifth in a series of five articles about The Confident Coach. I thought it would be interesting to discover the factors new coaches starting out on their coaching journey report they are confident about; and how this is a predictor of their ultimate success. To do this we must track their progress over the first 18 weeks of the Coaching Master Class programme. Here’s how the programme works. After the initial training I run three coach-the-coach sessions at six week intervals. Session one focusses on the new coach’s confidence in the five key elements of the training. Session two on the business results being achieved with coaching. And session three to assess coaching capability. A couple of years ago I ran a worldwide Coaching Master Class programme for 100 top leaders. I’ve looked at my notes from coach-the-coach follow up sessions with the top 20 from this group to see what makes them ‘Confident Coaches’.

In the Coaching Master Class training I teach the AIDA feedback model. This is about observed Actions, associated Impact, Desired outcomes and Alternative actions required to achieve the outcome. The art for the Coach is to use feedback in two distinct ways in a coaching session: pre-planned feedback; in-process feedback.

Here is a selection of comments made by leaders during my coach-the-coach follow up sessions. They were all confident about their approach as coaches. What are the key factors for success being described here?

“It was an honest feedback session where both the coachee and I could express many things, so I felt very good and was most productive”.

“I gave honest and direct feedback on my observation that he has not fully utilised his potential. Used momentary silence for the coachee to think and reflect on what needs to be done to achieve his ideal status. Asked open questions for him to do self-reflection on this feedback”.

“His body language showed that he had not taken the task seriously and was talking around the task. I gave him feedback on this according to AIDA. What did he think the impact was of him avoiding the issue? What did he need to achieve? What did he need to do to take this seriously and show commitment to the task in hand?”

“I feel this worked well. I gave her feedback what she had said during the coaching session to align our understanding. I then offered different scenarios to obtain her perspectives and have her propose different options for how she could move forwards”.

“Feedback: I used the observation that no clear action plan was delivered from previous coaching session, so we decided that every meeting with his stakeholder departments shall deliver a clear action plan for following up”.

“I used A-I-D-A feedback to kick the coaching session off”.

“I provided feedback based on facts rather than perceptions which makes the coachee realise the real situation we are facing”.

 

Further Reading:

Feedback in Coaching

AIDA Guidelines for Feedback

The Confident Coach 4: Challenging Perceptions

The Confident Coach 3: Levels of Listening

The Confident Coach 2: Purposeful Questions

The Confident Coach 1: The GROW Coaching Model

Author: Trevor Sherman

Trevor Sherman: Author, Blogger and Coach. What do I do? I develop leadership training material and personal learning modules. I am the owner and operator of this Blog. I coach senior executives for their development and role transition. I am based in Northamptonshire UK and operate globally - in person and through technology.

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