Access the essential membership for Modern Managers
In a leadership role, one of your most important responsibilities is to help your team members grow and develop. When you coach people to reach their potential, you're helping them gain the strengths and skills they need to excel in their roles.
If you've never coached anyone before, or received any formal training, you may wonder where to begin. The good news is that there are plenty of tools and resources out there to help you improve your skills. One of them is the GROW Model. [1]
GROW is an acronym for GOAL, current REALITY, OPTIONS, and WILL. You can use this tool to structure your coaching sessions. Here's a simple example of the GROW Model in action.
Imagine you're coaching a team member. You decide to use the GROW Model to focus the conversation. So, you start with her GOAL. Here, you help her identify an objective she wants to work toward, and you ask her to write down the outcome she wants to see. In this example, your team member's goal to achieve a promotion within the next year.
Next, you ask her to think about her current REALITY. This is an important step, because none of us can achieve a goal unless we know where we're starting from. Your team member tells you that she's doing really well, and meeting all of her performance targets. So she would like a new challenge. She knows that if she were given the chance, she could help the team accomplish even more than it is doing right now.
Once your team member has identified her current reality, you'll move to the next step in the model, and help her define her OPTIONS. At this point, you want to look at all the ways she could achieve her goal. You'll also consider the benefits and drawbacks of each approach.
In our example, your team member identifies several possibilities. One is she understands that a more senior colleague might be moving elsewhere in the organization. If she can start demonstrating the required skills right now, she might be considered for a promotion if it becomes available.
The last step in the Grow Model is to establish the WILL. This is what your team member is going to do next to achieve her goal. Here, you also explore the obstacles she might encounter, and come up with a plan to overcome them. So for this step, your team member lists what she's going to do next.
Her first action is to ask to help lead an upcoming project to learn some new skills. Then, when she thinks of the obstacles standing in her way, she realizes the biggest one is her lack of experience. Leading this project will help her overcome this. She also decides to start studying management and leadership in her own time. And, she's going to enroll on a training program at work to build her knowledge.
The GROW Model is a simple tool that you can use to help guide your coaching sessions.
You can find out a lot more about it in the article that accompanies this video.
Reflective Questions
Once you've watched the video, reflect on what you've learned by answering the following questions:
- Do you coach your people enough?
- Do you review your team members' goals regularly?
- Are you team members' goals realistic? What can you do to help them reach them?
References[1] Whitmore, J. (2002). 'Coaching for Performance: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership.' London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
