The importance of Coaching as a Product Manager 🤗

The three support mechanisms in business are:

1. Criticizing (providing feedback and suggestions for improvement),
2. Cheerleading (emphasizing and advertising), and
3. Coaching (empathetic support of the individuals and the team).

To me, coaching is the masterclass out of those, and the one I am most passionate about.

What is coaching?

Beyond passing information between leadership and individual teams, managers serve as the most important driver of employee engagement and motivation. Employees rely on their managers for day-to-day guidance, career development, and to set the tone for team morale. Company leaders rely on managers to distill critical information down to their teams and keep them motivated.

As a result, coaching is one of the most important management functions.

How is coaching different from managing?

While coaching has the same objective as managing, the approach is more focused on helping individual employees develop their own critical thinking skills through learning. In other words, coaching is about guiding rather than telling.

Book recommendation: The Coaching Habit 📚

• Identifies 3 symptoms that can be addressed with coaching: over-dependence, being overwhelmed, being disconnected. The 7 questions presented in the book aim to address these issues.
• Kickstart question: “What is on your mind” – focused, yet open, allows you to get to the most important topic quickly
• Focus during session: 3P model
  • People
  • Projects
  • Patterns
• The AWE question: “And what else?”
• The focus question: “What is the real challenge here for you?”
  • Ask “What” questions: What were you hoping for here? What made you choose this course of action? What is important for you here?
• The foundation question: “What do you want?”
  • Understand what lies behind the answer:
    • Talk to VP -> protection
    • Leave early -> understanding
    • Do a new version of the report -> freedom / identity
  • Watch for ‘is it safe / dangerous’ signals
• The lazy question: “How can I help?”
  • Breaks the assumption that the manager / coach has a ‘secret solution’ that is simply not offered.
• The strategic question: “If you say yes to him, what are you saying no to?”
  • Helps to teach setting boundaries.
  • “What could be being fully committed to the idea look like?”
• The learning question: “What was most useful for you?” “What did you take away that was memorable?”
  • Helps persist the experience
  • ‘For you’ make it personal / concrete

Here is a nifty PDF summary of the book The Coaching Habit.

Other coaching frameworks

GROW Model

A good way of thinking about the GROW Model is to think about how you’d plan a journey. First, you decide where you are going (the goal), and establish where you currently are (your current reality). You then explore various routes (the options) to your destination. In the final step, establishing the will, you ensure that you’re committed to making the journey, and are prepared for the obstacles that you could meet on the way.

• G – Goal
• R – Reality
• O – Options / Obstacles
• W- Way forward / Will

OSKAR Model

• O – Outcome / Objective: This is what you and your team member want to achieve from the meeting or coaching session – resolving the specific problem or issue.
• S – Scale: This is where you measure or quantify how close your team member is to achieving the desired Outcome, using a scale (often of one to 10.)
• K – Know-how: The “know-how” is the skills, knowledge, qualifications, and attributes that enable her to move forward. Use your scale to decide how far a particular solution will get her closer to your outcome, and what know-how she’ll then need to progress even further.
• A – Affirm + Action: This is where the pair of you focus on what’s already working well, or is already positive about his actions, skills, behaviors, and attributes. You then need to focus on the actions he needs to take to progress, and to solve the problem you’ve identified.
• R – Review: This is where you both review the action your team member has taken, decide what’s improved, and look at what needs to happen next to improve even further.

More frameworks are out there, so research is a good first start if you are looking to grow your coaching competence.

Take Action 🎬

📅 Book a private coaching session with me to grow your PM career. I will share my 15+ years of experience as a Product Manager, all my learning and pitfalls, with actionable tips and concrete lessons to model after.

📚 The Coaching Habit, by Michael Stanier, is a practical guide to help managers learn how to become better coaches. The principles can be easily embedded in the day-to-day work, without feeling overwhelming.

📝 This article provides a great overview of 7 coaching frameworks that Product Managers can use to improve their individual performance. Coaches with experience in many coaching frameworks can best help a broad variety of personality types and goals.

📚 The Harvard Business Review Manager Handbook is an incredibly powerful ‘getting started guide’ for the modern manager. It covers a wide variety of topics, including how to build rapport with teams, how to create highly functioning teams, and how to lead teams.

📚 A book which helped me is Dale Carnegie’s classic How to win friends and influence people. It truly changed me to my core, helped me build more meaningful relationships with others, inside and outside of work. It also helped me see how to become more humble as a person, something which had tremendously positive effects on my life and opened me up to learn a lot more.

📚 To learn about the growth mindset, read Mindset, by Carol Dweck. The book is a foundational shift in how we perceive the development of motivation, and skills. It provides practical approaches you can apply every day with your team to increase their performance.