The Coaching Habit Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

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Brief Summary

A coaching habit requires you to empower the person you’re coaching to see where they need to go and how to get there.

Being an excellent coach is more than just offering your employees advice and bits of personal wisdom. It’s about developing a relationship with employees that empowers them and provides them with greater autonomy. By asking seven important questions and listening to your employees, you create an environment in which you are much more capable of being an effective coach.

About the Author

Micheal Bungay Stanier is a best-selling author and founder of the development company, Box of Crayons.

Bungay Stanier is also an accomplished keynote speaker who has spoken in front of thousands of people on a variety of stages around the world. He has regularly spoken at the International Coaching Federation conferences and the International Association of Facilitators.

A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, Bungay Stanier has won numerous awards including the Canadian Coach of the Year and he has been named the Coaching Guru of the Year every year since 2014. In 2019, he was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 coaching prize.

Topics

Communication Skills Management & Leadership

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Key Insights

A good coach can help you to improve your life and enhance your career. Unfortunately, not all coaches provide employees with this kind of experience. The reality is that most employees rarely experience the benefits of an outstanding coach. As a result, they are more likely to think coaching won’t be of use to them.

To be an effective coach you have to be more than just someone who talks to people and hands out advice. You need to develop good relationships and understand the needs of those you are coaching. This means asking questions, initiating conversation, and finding out how you can be more useful to them. By implementing a good set of behaviors, you can become a better coach and in turn, you can improve the performances of your employees.

Giving advice is not the same as coaching people.

Giving advice is part of being a coach but it is not all there is to it. If you want to be a coach that truly wants to help people you need to ask questions. While giving advice will enable you to lead the discussion, you should be prepared to listen and learn about other people.

One way to learn is to ask questions, but these can have a negative effect if they don’t encourage the other person to open up. The best approach is to develop your personalized coaching techniques and refine them. This means developing a method that helps you to bring out the best in people.

If you want to be effective in coaching people, develop an effective coaching habit.

It may seem like an obvious statement, but if you want to be effective in inspiring people, you need to develop good habits. When you are in a leadership role, your employees likely defer many decisions to you.

This can do a disservice to everyone involved. For you, it means more work and more responsibilities which can make you feel more overwhelmed than you should. For your employees, it can make them feel uninspired and sometimes they lose a sense of their own value at work.

The reality is that the deference to leadership is a habitual behavior that often occurs in workplaces. Research has shown that almost 50% of our actions are habitual. If you can develop the right coaching habits, you are more likely to influence employee work habits too. It will prevent you from feeling overwhelmed and enable employees to be more independent.

Another benefit of good coaching habits is the improvement to work relationships. As employees become more independent through coaching, they are more likely to tackle difficult assignments. Ultimately, a lot of the burdens that are on you will be taken away as employees feel capable of handling tasks independently. Helping employees to become more autonomous is the mark of an effective coach.