What’s Your Coaching Style?
Each one of us is unique: Our personalities, experience, education, and successes all contribute to give us a coaching style. What’s yours? I’ve given some thought to some of the more prominent coaching styles I’ve seen and have listed them here. It’s not an exhaustive list, nor have I tried to provide a balanced look of good points and bad points. These are a collection of observations.
It’s helpful to gaze into the mirror occasionally and think about how you do things. That doesn’t mean you need to change, but this mirror-gazing can help us to leverage our strengths and mitigate our weaknesses.
The director. You tell people what to do. You listen to their situation and then you outline what needs to happen and you pass the list back to them. You may provide ongoing director-style coaching as they follow your list (or you may not; I’ve seen both). This kind of coach is in demand because people like to be told what to do (even if they don’t think they do).
The peer. You sit on the same side of the table as your client. You nod understandingly and share from your own experiences. You tend to prefer referring to your work as "collaboration" rather than "coaching". You coach your client with a "let’s do this together" attitude that often helps the client to feel like they’re not alone in the effort. People respond well to this kind of coaching but there are times (like during payment) when you need to be professional so it can get challenging.
The bucket. You see each client as a deep well of potential and your job is to draw the answers out of them. Your coaching style includes plenty of probing questions and invitations to "explore those thoughts further". Clients explore their situations and use discussion with you to uncover the answer within themselves. This is a very client-centric model and can be quite empowering to clients. However, they may one day decide that you aren’t actually giving them "advice".
The librarian. You have a vast list of resources and tools at your fingertips. As soon as a client explains their challenge to you, you pull a book off your shelf and call up a list of websites to give them. This kind of coaching can be very empowering for clients but you may find that your clients are "spinning their wheels" because they are overwhelmed with information and lack the ability to act on it.
Each of these coaching styles presents opportunities and challenges. And it doesn’t hurt to think about who you are and how you might bring in aspects from other styles into your coaching.
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