If your senior manager performance conversations are part of your role.
But how do you guide somebody without sounding too directive?
Today we'll look at how to lead coaching style conversations in english so you sound collaborative and not micromanaging.
Let's crack on.
Hello and welcome back to Confident Business English.
My name is Anna.
I'm a neural language coach and I help senior managers, just like you, feel more in control with their English.
If you use English every single day at work but you notice that you find these important conversations, like the one we'll look at today challenging, this podcast is definitely for you.
Today, we're looking at how to structure a coaching conversation with a team member.
This is actually inspired by work that I'm doing at the moment with a specific client.
This person is actually based in the UK.
They have wonderful vocabulary.
Honestly, they sometimes use words I've never heard anybody else use before.
But their challenge is and you might resonate with this too is they want to move up in the organization.
They're already in a senior role, but they want to take that next step to more global responsibilities.
Part of that is running a team and leading a team.
And they felt that in their team interactions, especially the one-on-one conversations, that they were being too directive and they wanted to approach it in a different way.
Because of course, those conversations are fine when we need to tell people things that need to be done, but they wanted to try it a different way.
How could I do it in a style that's more about coaching rather than just telling people what to do?
Basically,
In the case that we role played and that we're going to take as an example throughout the episode, it was a member of their team that they felt was just focusing on too much stuff.
They had too many things to do.
They were overloaded, but they felt that they weren't being honest about that.
And one way that we can say this in English and you might have heard this expression is to spread yourself too thin.
The way I like to explain this expression is imagine you've got a piece of toast, a big piece of toast, but only a tiny little bit of butter.
It doesn't matter how far you spread it, it is not going to cover the bread and it's just a nasty piece of toast right.
Same thing with work.
If you spread yourself too thin, you're not able to cover enough things.
You're doing a lot of things, but none of them very well.
They wanted to have a conversation with this person and coach them on how to solve the problem.
They had an idea, right?
They knew what they wanted to be done.
They didn't just want to tell them that.
They wanted to see what their thoughts were.
How can we reach a conclusion together so that they feel like they own this?
First of all, then, what is a coaching conversation?
At a high level, we're going to focus on four areas that I'll bring out during the exercise.
The first one is open questions.
The second one is demonstrating active listening.
The third one is about guiding the conversation, not just giving them the answers on a plate or spoon, feeding them the answers leading them to the conclusion.
And the fourth one is we're living in the land of suggestions.
So we're framing any guidance that we're giving as a suggestion that can be taken forward or not.
Just to be clear.
Also, I'm not saying that every conversation you have with your team member needs to be a coaching conversation.
This is a tool.
It's definitely not a rule.
But what I'm saying is, if you want to have this style of conversation, here are some of the things that you can do.
The key thing with this interaction, as with other interactions, is all about learning some key phrases and phrase stems.
Just like the stem of a flower, we're talking about the start of a phrase that you can use time and time again.
If you know what are the right phrases to use and when, it's going to help you feel more confident navigating that situation.
Grammar-wise, we're not touching on anything revolutionary here.
It's question formation.
A lot of the questions here in the present and present continuous tenses.
A little bit of softening phrases with would and could.
We're also going to be using some perception verbs.
That's quite a common theme.
So seem, feel, sense.
Nothing that's technically very difficult, but they might be things that you're not necessarily used to using on a day-to-day basis.
So as we go through and have a look at them, do take note of ones that you would like to revisit.
So we've set the meeting with the team member.
They've come to the meeting.
We've started, we've done a little bit of small talk, we've got it out of the way and then we transition into the conversation.
How do you kick that off?
Well, I would suggest if you want to have a coaching conversation in English.
It's all about that nice open question to start.
I really like a question with how.
For example, so Anna, how are you finding things? at the moment?
Quite a general question, but then we want to start big and then get more specific.
Or it could be so.
Anna, how are you feeling about your work right now?
Or you could even open with a question asking about a specific piece of work.
So, Anna, how have things been going on the English project?
Notice how all of those questions are in a continuous form.
How are you finding?
How are you feeling?
How have you been finding?
It could even be how have things been progressing?
Just to help you with that pattern there.
If we take the example of the person at the beginning, who's got a lot on their plate, perhaps the question we could start with is so John, how are you finding your workload right now?
So you throw out the question and you're just waiting to see what you get back.
And this is the part where you want to demonstrate active listening.
If you want to emulate that coaching style, this is where you rephrase in your own words what you've heard, so they see that you've been listening and paying attention to what they said.
These are some of the core structures you could use to demonstrate that.
The most straightforward would just be, it seems that.
Imagine you were responding to that and you could say oh right well, and it seems that you've got a lot on your plate right now and that there's a lot of competing priorities at the moment.
Another option could be.
This is a little bit more complex.
I'm getting the sense that If we were responding to the same scenario, it could be okay.
Well John, I'm getting the sense that you've got a lot of things on your plate, perhaps even too much on your plate.
And I think there's an opportunity for us to reprioritize here, for example.
Another very common way to start a sentence like that could be OK.
From what you've said, it sounds like.
So it could be, wow, John, from what you said, sounds like you're managing a lot of tasks.
And I think we probably need to think about how we narrow down what you're working on.
As you continue going back and forth, of course, perhaps they'll give you more information and you can rephrase what you said to demonstrate that you've been listening.
Then it gets to the part where we want to guide the person to solve the problem.
We don't want to give them the answer on a plate.
We don't want to spoon feed them.
We're like a shepherd with the sheep we're guiding them.
You could start this sentence by saying okay well, before I share my perspective, how do you see things?
Or before I give my thoughts, what do you think would be the best way forward?
Or simply, how do you think we should approach this?
Before I give my comments.
Where do you think we need to reprioritize?
And of course, you might need to edit the questions a little bit, depending on the situation.
The final, really important touch point here is reframing what you're saying as a suggestion rather than being directive.
And when I say directive, I mean, you need to do this.
I think we should do that, which is not the angle we're going for in this specific conversation.
I would recommend using a phrase to front your suggestion.
For example, we can do an if combination.
If I could make a suggestion, what do you think about?
If I could maybe offer a perspective here, maybe we could.
If I could suggest something, one option perhaps could be.
Then when you close your suggestion, ask them for that agreement.
Would that work for you?
Or how does that sound from your side?
Does it seem realistic?
I would always recommend saying, would that work for you?
Rather than, would you be happy with that?
Happy, it carries a little bit more emotion, right?
And it's a little bit less precise because the other person might not be happy about doing your suggestion.
But they're like yeah, that would work.
So it sounds a little bit more neutral.
It's not always the best option, but I would definitely say, when we're talking about practical solutions to problems, would that work for you is generally the better fit.
Putting that together in a longer example, it could sound something like well John, if I could, I'd like to make a suggestion.
Why don't we prioritise these three tasks you outlined to me at first?
We can leave the rest until further down the line, and that way you're focusing on the key tasks first and not spending a lot of the time doing these time-consuming things.
What do you think?
Would that work for you?
Here's a funny nuance as well, because if in that sentence I'd said that way, you're focusing on the key tasks and not wasting time Well, that changes the tone of the sentence, because immediately when you say waste, it sounds like a criticism of that other person that they're wasting their time.
So be careful with spend and waste time, because it can change quite significantly the meaning behind the sentence.
You don't want it to come across as a criticism that you think I've been using my time poorly.
You just want to say, look, I think you're spending too much time here.
Why don't we focus somewhere else?
So, to wrap up the episode today, if you want to build your confidence with this type of interaction, the first part, of course, is practice and just going for it and doing it, even if it feels a bit intimidating.
If you want to improve the technical side, if that helps you feel more secure, I would definitely.
The first thing I would start with is using some more open questions.
Write them down before you go into the conversation so that you're very happy with how you're starting the conversation.
I always say make sure the start is strong, because that's going to help you feel more confident throughout.
If you're happy with that side, you could also try to use some of the different techniques I've talked about today.
And then it's just a case of iteration.
Keep practicing it.
Keep doing it until it feels like a more comfortable interaction for you in English.
Let's leave it there for today then.
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Thanks again for taking the time to squeeze in your training with me this week and I will see you again same time, same place, next week.
Bye-bye.
