Coaching skills can help people maximize their strengths and increase responsibility, accountability, creativity and resourcefulness to overcome challenges and achieve results. The primary coaching skills presented in this interactive presentation will focus on the principles of a coaching conversation, listening, the art of asking curious questions, leading cultural change, and how to promote responsibility and accountability to support people to elicit their own solutions and strategies and take action to implement these solutions. Speaker: Callie Bland, Executive Coach, RN and CEO, Coach Callie Consulting

1. COACHING SKILLS FOR
EXCELLENCE IN
LEADERSHIP
Facilitator: Callie Bland BSc, BSN, RN, CPCC, CPP
Date: May 30th,2017

2. Learning Objectives
1. Understand the principles of a coach conversation
2. Apply the qualities of experiential listening and the art of
curious questions
3. Learn how to structure a coaching conversation
4. Discover how to tell/and give advice using a coach
approach.
5. Identify opportunities to implement a coach approach to
help navigate people through change

3. What is Coaching
“The ICF defines coaching as partnering with another
person in a thought-provoking and creative process that
inspires them to maximize their personal and professional
potential.”
Transformation
International Coach Federation, 2015

4. Coaching Principles
1. Trusting partnership.
2. People are not broken and don’t need fixing.
3. People are creative and resourceful to discover their
own solution/strategies.
4. Coaching is action oriented.
5. The other “person” takes ownership/responsibility.
6. Curious/non-judgmental.

5. Benefits of Coach Approach
• Develop critical thinking and decision making skills of staff
• Increase staff self awareness of strengths and
opportunities to improve
• Increases sense of responsibility and accountability
• Enhances creativity, resourcefulness and resilience
• Increases collaborative approach to overcome challenges
and achieve results
• Focus on solutions rather than problems
• Engages staff
• Transformational

6. Foundational Coaching Skills
1. Listening
2. Powerful Questions

7. Levels of Listening
Level 1
• Tracking words while engaged in another task or
thought simultaneously.
• Emerges when internally or externally multitasking.
Level 2
• Attention is on the words.
• The question running through your mind is “what does
this mean to me?”
Level 3 or Experiential
• Listening to the other’s experience.
• The question running through your mind is “what does
this mean to him/her?”

8. What are you listening for?
3 components in an experience
Feelings
Thoughts/assumptions
Values/Wants/Needs

9. Level 3 Listening
Reflect back on a conversation you had with a direct report
or colleague it didn’t go well.
1. What was the other person thinking?
2. How might he/she have been feeling?
3. What did the he/she want or need?

10. Listening
• Listening is a skill which needs to be practiced.
• Evidence of effective listening is that people feel seen,
heard, and valued.
• Involves seeking to understand before being understood.
• Cultivates presence and connection.
• Builds trust.

11. Curious Questions
Questions that engage people by stimulating introspection,
insight, creativity and responsibility.
Qualities:
• Don’t already have the “right” answer already made up
in your mind
• Open and expansive
• Typically use who, what, where and how
• Doesn’t lead to a YES/NO answer

12. Open Questions Examples
1. What do you want?
2. What does your best performance look like?
3. What resources are available to you?
4. How much time do you need to implement change?
5. What are the possible solutions to help you move
forward?

13. Structure of a Coaching Conversation
1. Set up the conversation
2. Explore/brainstorm
3. Create action plan
4. Assess confidence
5. Design Accountability

14. Set up a Coaching Conversation
Identify
Topic
Clarify
Agenda
Assess
Current
State
Clarify
Time
Align
Expectati
ons

15. Set up a Coaching Conversation
1. What is the topic for the conversation?
2. What do you want to achieve as a result of our
conversation?
3. How much time do we want to devote to this
conversation or topic?
4. Where are you now?
5. I think we can achieve _____ in the context of this
conversation, how does that work for you?

16. Explore/Brainstorm
Perspectives/assump
tions
Strategies
Actions
Values
Emotions
Obstacles
Solutions
Goals
Options/possibilities
Decisions

17. Create Action Plan
Action planning involves specifying what, when, where and
how to enact a goal-directed behavior.
1. What do you want to do as a result of our conversation?
2. What will you commit to and when will you do it?

18. Assess Confidence
Rate confidence
On a scale of 0-10 how confident are you about taking the
actions you committed to?
If people rate 7 or below get curious about what would help
them raise their confidence level to take action.

19. Design Accountability
1. What type of accountability would you like around this?
2. How would you like to be held accountable?
3. What do you need in terms of accountability?

20. Positive Visuals
• More likely to engage and be sustainably motivated to
pursue a positive visual than a negative visual.
• State what you want, not what you don’t want.

21. Telling/Giving Advice
Telling and giving advice is an essential component of
being a leader.
1. Check in to see what the person already knows
2. Share your intention
3. Ask permission

22. • The righting reflect is the natural desire to correct
someone.
• People have a tendency to resist persuasion, especially
when ambivalent and correcting the person can increase
resistance to change.
• Recognize that the person’s may argue and your role is to
guide them through their ambivalence and understand
their motivations for change.
Miller, W. R., Rollnick, S. (2002). Motivational Interviewing: Preparing People for Change. 2nd Edition. New York:
Guilford Pres
Righting Reflex

23. Opportunities to implement
What scenarios/conversations are a good fit for a coach
approach in your organization?

24. Confidence
✓Know your strengths and lead with them.
✓Set a SMART goal to improve/implement a coaching
approach.
✓Take risks, get out of your comfort zone.

25. Complete