Think Like A Coach

You’ve made it to manager! But balancing a hectic schedule with empowering your team is proving challenging and you’re struggling to delegate. So how do you make this all work? How you do get the best from yourself, your team and still have a life outside work?

The answer is to Think Like a Coach.

Boost the performance and productivity of your team
Promote commitment, personal responsibility and self-sufficiency
Free up precious time to focus on important tasks
Make recruitment and retention easier and smoother
Drive and deliver excellence in a team that’s motivated and empowered

Seamlessly integrating into your everyday management style, Think Like a Coach is your trusty go-to guide that bridges the gap between theory and reality. It shows how, even in high-pressure scenarios, it’s still possible to tap into the true potential of your team, empower their success and become the manager your team truly needs and deserves.

“Line Managers have a key role to play in unlocking individual’s potential, and this book forms a useful resource in their toolkit helping them develop coaching skills, to navigate daily conversations. This book demystifies the art of having a coaching conversation, making it simple to try out and provides the reader with practical tools and support for everyday use.”

Honey Clarke

HR Director, InfraRed Capital Partners Ltd

"‘Think like a Coach’ does what lot of other books have tried and failed to do – make coaching something easily transferable to a manager’s daily life. This outcome-focused model could revolutionise how we train people in the art of coaching and how we can truly embed coaching in our day-to-day management of teams. Gone are the days of learning abstract models in the classroom that have limited application outside a formal sit-down coaching session. For internal L&D leaders, this really solves the problem of ‘what’s in it for me?’ that so often hinders our attempts to change manager behaviour."

Holly Jones

Head of Talent Development, Global Construction Company

"Think Like a Coach is a beautifully simple guide to help new managers to develop and hone their coaching skills with lots of easy to apply practical steps. I love the coaching two-step, where in listening and asking questions the coach can lead the team member to find their own answers."

Clare Hill

CEO, Sysdoc Limited

"Think Like a Coach is an absolute must read for every new manager. It is without a doubt the best coaching book I’ve read and here’s why: 1. It’s easy to digest and dip in and out of as you need to. It was a real revelation to me to read such an ‘accessible’ book. 2. It provides the reader with the confidence to try new approaches. It does this by breaking down areas of management that can feel overwhelming and scary for new managers such as feedback, delegation and problem solving and provides simple, practical, tried and tested techniques that will work every time. 3. Jude uses her own experiences and expertise to bring the examples to life and make them meaningful. I’d loved to have read a book like this when I started my own management journey. For those of us a little nervous about how to manage teams to get the best results for everyone, this book shows you how to have the best, most productive conversations and assures you that you can do it!"

Holly Williamson

Head of People & Purpose, Global Risk Advisory, Deloitte

"This book can act as your own pocket coach, to help build your own coaching skills. Written in a simple accessible way, it allows the reader to think and then act themselves into this vital role. Highlighting easy to apply techniques while encouraging people to develop their own authentic coaching style, this book will act as a reference for any new team manager and a refresher for others, to grow coaching capability."

Libby Gordon

CEO, FARA Foundation

The Coaching Two-Step was specifically developed with managers in mind. It takes skills you already have and shows you how to use them to coach your team.

When your team member comes to you for help, stop what you’re doing and give them all your attention, listening with curiosity to what they have to say. This is your starting position. When they’ve finished talking, you have two options you can take:

Ask them to ‘tell me more’; or
Summarise the essence of what you’ve just heard.

Once you’ve tried one of these options, you go back to silently giving them all your attention while you listen with curiosity to what they have to say. When they finish, you have the choice between the two options again and the conversation continues.

If it were a dance it might look like this:

Limiting yourself to these two options at the beginning of the coaching conversation helps you hold back your urge to be helpful. And by helpful, I mean solving the problem for them. Even if you were to offer a solution after only trying one option, at least you’d be closer to solving the right problem and you’d have a lot more insight into your team member and the team.

Try each option at least once, ideally twice, before you ask your first question. After asking a question, you go to attention, the starting position of the Coaching Two-Step and use the two options to help your team member explore their thinking further. Try at least one option before asking a new question.

1.

Order Think Like A Coach, your practical and trusty go to guide to empower and develop your team.

2.

Explore the Coaching Others category in the blog for more ways coach your team effectively and constructively.

3.

Check out Coaching Skills for Managers under Services, and then get in touch to chat.

The best way to learn how to use the coaching two-step is to see in action. In this five minute video I coach Vicki who is stepping into a new leadership role.

The coaching two-step model is in the top right corner so you can see where I am.

As you watch the demo consider these questions: