Coaching

Key Concepts

Coaching is key for leadership development; the goal of coaching is to help people find their own solutions to meet challenges, and the role of the coach is to ask questions to get people to uncover the answers in themselves.
Coaching can be thought of as a five-step process – inquire and observe, diagnose, plan, action, and check-in – and these five steps provide a simple framework for effective coaching in organizing.
Developing a culture of coaching is key for building effective teams.

What is coaching?

If If organizing is leadership that enables people to turn their resources into the power they need to make the change they want, then coaching is about enabling others. In trying to create change, organizers will undoubtedly run into challenges as failure, conflict, and obstacles are inevitable in our campaigns. Coaching is a means of helping individuals and teams work through these challenges.

The role of the coach is to help people find their own solutions; rather than offering advice, coaches ask questions to get people to uncover the answers themselves and use their own resources to meet challenges. The purpose of coaching is to enable others to build their own capacity to act, so they can coach others, and so on. In this way, coaching is synonymous with leadership development and so is key for building scalable, sustainable teams.

In organizing, coaching usually takes the form of an intentional conversation with an individual that helps them overcome a challenge or increase their, or their team’s, effectiveness. Read on for more details on effective coaching and the coaching process.

Maintenance 1:1s are the primary opportunity to coach an organizer in depth. See the Building Relationships section for more information on what these are, how frequently they are practiced, and why.

Inquisitive Coaching


Inquisitive Coaching	Directive Coaching
Being present and listening.	Providing solutions before hearing / observing the obstacles.
Providing a space for your coachee to speak and be heard.	Being an expert or having all the answers.
Asking questions that both support and challenge the person you are coaching.	Telling the coachee what to do.
Helping the coachee explore their challenges and successes.	False praising the coachee because you don’t want to hurt their feelings or solely criticizing the coachee for their weaknesses.
Empowering the coachee to identify resources and find solutions to the challenges themselves.	Identifying the challenge and coming up with the solution yourself.

Coaching: A Five-Step Process

There are five steps in the coaching process. While contexts vary, these five steps provide a simple framework for effective coaching in organizing.

1 Inquire & Observe

When you are observing a coachee’s actions or someone comes to you for help, your first inclination may be to draw conclusions from the initial observations you make. Instead, be present with the coachee and start by listening, asking questions, and closely observing what they say and do so that you can both dig deeper into the challenge(s) at hand.

Ask yourself: what do I see and hear?

For example, is the coachee struggling to recruit people to their leadership team? Is the coachee articulating feelings of frustration or fatigue? Is the coachee struggling to complete routine tasks correctly or on time?

Remember, challenges aren’t always obvious, and, sometimes, the bulk of the coach’s work is simply supporting the coachee in discovering the nature of the obstacle they’re facing. “Backtracking” can help both coach and coachee uncover the challenge(s) by summarizing the problem and checking if the coach’s understanding is accurate. Here are some sample backtracking statements and questions:

“Let me be clear about this...”
“Let me see if I’ve got this right...”

“What I’m hearing you say is ____. Is that right?”

2 Diagnose

Challenges in organizing usually fall into one or more of the following three categories: strategic, motivational, and skills challenges – or “head, heart, hands” – and how you coach depends on the nature of the challenge.

Ask yourself: what is the nature of the challenge and how will I intervene?

From the examples above, if the coachee is struggling to recruit people to their leadership team, you might focus on the coachee’s understanding of strategy (head), or how they are approaching recruiting people and ask them questions to explore their plan and how it might need to be modified. On the other hand, if the coachee is articulating feelings of frustration or fatigue in recruiting leaders, you might focus on the coachee’s motivation (heart) and offer encouragement. Lastly, if the coachee is struggling to implement their strategy or plan well, you might focus on the coachee’s skills (hands) and offer learning or practice to make sure they have mastery over the necessary skills.

Coaching is not only about addressing challenges and problem-solving. Inquisitive coaching – that is, asking questions with the aim of supporting people in uncovering their own answers – is an invaluable practice in developing our stories and devising strategy.

In storytelling, the coachee will always know more about their own story than their coach. By asking inquisitive questions, we can offer them the opportunity to revisit or think more deeply about their own motivations and values. In strategizing, having a coach ask good questions can strengthen the strategy by surfacing unnamed assumptions or gaps in strategic thinking, as well as lead the coachee towards more creative and effective strategic choices.

3 Plan

Now it’s time to support the coachee in creating a plan for moving forward. This plan should take the form of specific, timely steps the coachee will take to address the challenge(s) articulated in Step 2. Here are some sample questions you could ask the coachee in order to come up with next steps:

“If you knew you wouldn’t fail, what would you do?”
“How will you put this new information into practice?”
“What is the very next step in moving forward?”
“What resources and support do you need to accomplish this task?”

“When will you do this by?”

4 Act

Next, step back and observe the coachee in action. Give them time and space to take steps to address their challenge(s). Avoid the urge to do it for them.

5 Check-in

Now it’s time to hold the coachee accountable and support them in debriefing what happened.

Ask yourself: how do I help the coachee in reflecting on their experience?

Assess whether the diagnosis of the challenge and plan making were successful.

You may realize that you need to repeat Steps 1-4 and support the coachee in coming up with a different plan for addressing the same challenge, or it’s time to celebrate success!

When setting next steps it is helpful to have clear achievable goals. The SMARTI goal framework can help us set criteria for effective goals:

Specific: the goal should be about one thing. If there are multiple next steps, make multiple goals.
Measurable: it should be obvious when the goal has been accomplished. Set goals so that you can measure whether you are successful.
Achievable: push yourself a little, but don’t set goals that are unrealistic.
Results-Oriented: your goal should be about the outcome, not the process. For example, if your goal is to make reminder phone calls to volunteers, make the goal about how many people you will talk to, not how much time you will spend on the phone.
Timely: set a date and time deadline for your goal.
Inspiring: set goals that make you feel excited! Frame the wording and intention of your goal to be about the exciting impact you will have!

Next, start again! Nurturing a culture of coaching – whereby organizers are consistently and constantly enabling others to find solutions to meet challenges – is fundamental to leadership development and building power in organizing.

This page adapts material from “Organizing: People, Power, Change,” Version 5.0 (August 2017). Credits: Originally adapted from the work of Dr. Marshall Ganz (Harvard University), the Leading Change Network, the New Organizing Institute; revised by contributors from Dogwood Initiative, Leadnow, One Cowichan, David Suzuki Foundation, Stonehouse Institute, and genius (Organize BC & Organize Ontario). Design/photography: Shelby Tay. See Rights and Use for the full terms (non‑sale, attribution required, include these restrictions, send significant modifications, and grant back a royalty‑free license).