This is good for the coachee, because stretching your thinking is how you develop skills. And it’s good for the whole team, as the ideas that emerge in coaching tend to be more considered.

If you’ve not experienced coaching before, it’s worth saying a few words about what it’s like. Coaching is a structured conversation where the coach asks questions to help unlock the other person’s thinking. The coach isn’t there to provide advice or give answers (however much we may want that sometimes!). Instead, they will gently probe about what the coachee’s goals and options are, helping them to slow down and look at a problem in another way.

Outside of formal sessions, a coaching approach can also be used in our day-to-day work. For example, if someone comes to their line manager asking what to do about the situation, instead of giving an immediate answer, the manager might ask some questions. What do you want out of the situation? What do you think other people might want? What are some different ways you could approach this? Usually, some unexpected insights will emerge.

But the manager doesn’t have to be the coach. I personally regularly get coached by people I manage, and we hold regular peer coaching sessions. It’s one of our most useful tools to unlock problems.

Agile mindsets in coaching

Coaching relies on the idea that the people who know most about a problem are the ones closest to it. This is a core idea in agile. Instead of defaulting to asking someone more senior, or doing what you’ve always done, agile helps create structures so that everyone can use their own expertise and make their own decisions.

This is honestly a bit of a relief as a manager. There’s plenty of things my team knows way more about, and I don’t have enough space in my head for all of their work context as well as my own. Empowering them to independently solve their own problems feels better for both them and me.

People are also much more bought into ideas that they’ve come up with themselves. You can see this emphasis on ownership in agile practices like backlog refinement and stand-ups. Empowered teams care personally about what they are doing and are more effective in doing it.

Reflection is another core agile mindset. It’s very difficult to learn and adapt your approach if you don’t have the space to stop and think about it. I find I reflect much more deeply with coaching, as it deliberately slows you down to explore something more thoroughly. It reminds me of Oliver Burkeman’s advice to develop a taste for problems. Coaching is one way I move through the discomfort of not knowing the answer, to really think about possible ways forward.

Coaching and psychological safety

Coaching relies on a certain amount of psychological safety. But done well, it should also help foster that safety.

If people don’t feel basically safe with each other, coaching won’t work. People need to feel comfortable sharing what they don’t know, or where they are stuck. Being coached is inherently vulnerable and, like agile, relies on a base level of psychological safety.

But if you have that safe foundation, coaching is a practice that can help reinforce psychological safety. We can’t just tell people that they should feel safe sharing – we need to demonstrate it. Coaching means really listening to someone without judgement. It’s a clear signal that their thoughts and opinions matter, that you believe they have the resources within them to solve their own problems.

Our default ways of interacting often set the expectation that managers have all the answers – which implies that non-managers’ ideas are less valuable. By helping you shift away from this, coaching makes it easier for the whole team to speak up. When no one person has all the answers, it’s easier to share your own perspectives even if these differ from the group.

Next week we’ll look at how to get started with coaching. Sign up to my newsletter to get a regular round-up of posts.