A Coaching Language for Managers with Joy Van Skiver

Suppose you're a people manager that wants to get better at coaching people toward better performance. What works? What can you say? How do you say it so that your people are motivated to get even better at what they do? Joy Van Skiver walks us through examples of a simple coaching language that she teaches managers that helps them with in-the-moment coaching.

For the entire conversation, click here or play the video embedded below. 

All the words below are Joy's, except the some of the headers, which are based on Senia's questions.

How Do We Help Managers Become Better Coaches?

Everybody in my field agrees that most people managers are not effective coaches. Where we disagree is in the solution to that problem. I believe the solution is simple. We just need to help managers know what to say and how to say it. We need to focus more on the words and the expressions that they use. That’s why I'm a believer in a coaching language. In my experience, people who get the words right also get the coaching right.

I often ask people about the best manager they've ever had. Usually they say something like, "She told me what I needed to hear. Maybe not what I wanted to hear, but what I needed to hear. She also did it in a motivating way."

If we could get all the managers in the world to motivate people, performance would soar.

Everybody wants to solve this problem. How do we get managers to be more effective? I go to conferences and hear statistics like 80% of managers are just not effective. What do we do now? My peers think we've given them so much and more is better. Let's give managers more theory, more psychology, more formulas to follow, more terminology.

My feeling is that we're making it too complex. It's not. We don't want to turn every manager into a professional coach. We want managers to go beyond infrequent check-ins to in-the-moment coaching. Three-minute coaching. Five-minute coaching. They don’t have to be professional coaches.

I love simplicity, and so do the people that take my training program.

Next Time + Direction + Benefit

One of my favorite examples is "next time." If you start a coaching comment with "Next time," you're automatically focusing on the future, not the past. That's really important.

Here’s an example. A new sales associate was giving a presentation to customers on a Zoom call. She did a great job. Her slideshow was wonderful; her product knowledge was wonderful. She got to the end and asked, "Any questions?" Silence. Nobody said anything. You've probably had experiences like that. I know I have.

She was new, so it was tough for her to handle. Her manager was on the call, but he chose not to rescue her. I’m in favor of this: “Let her get through it.” After the Zoom call, he did a really smart thing. He called her to do a little quick coaching. He started his phone conversation with another word we give people: “How?” which opens up dialogue. He asked her, "How do you feel your presentation went?" She offered that it went well until the silence. He had words ready: "Next time, have five or six questions ready to ask, and that will help you generate discussion."

That's the kind of coaching that people need. There are far too many managers who would said, "What's the matter with you? Why didn't you ask some questions?" Or, "You should've had some questions." Let me point out that "You should have," are not words that get us very far in helping people improve performance. Instead, I recommend one of my formulas: start with "next time," give a direction, and then follow with a benefit.

What we find is that this approach works not just for next time, but for all subsequent times. She's not going to forget that suggestion.

It's not accusatory or judgmental. It's simply, "This is something to do from here on out." I work with so many managers who take a negative approach. I sometimes ask people, "What do you say to someone that didn't do what you thought should be done?” I can't tell you the number of times, managers start with, "You failed to..." You failed to? That's not going to work. It turns people right off.

We don't have to gloss over the fact that she wasn't quite prepared for that part of the presentation, but we're not going to get stuck on it. We're going to move on.

I'm guessing we have about 25 or 30 tools like this that can be used in various ways.

“To” + Benefit + Direction

Another favorite is to start with the word "To," give a benefit, and then give a direction. Let's suppose you have somebody who's not quite measuring up, and you want that person to reach a particular goal. “To get all your projects in on time, set aside time …” Benefit, then direction. I'm a big, big believer in benefits. Sales people know that benefits sell. Benefits also sell performance changes. If you can show somebody the benefit of doing something, they want to do it.

Managers get very frustrated when people don't do what they tell them to do. Sometimes I say to them, "Well, how did you express it? How did you say it?"

"Well, I told her to do it." That might not be enough. That's where the idea of persuasion comes in. Managers may not realize that they have a job that requires persuasive skills. Often, they're persuading somebody to do something very simple.

In-the-Moment Coaching

I've talked to a lot of people in human resources who feel like that in-the-moment coaching may be the most important thing managers do. When you catch somebody when they're doing something right, you can reinforce it. When you catch somebody doing something that’s not working well, you can give them the guidance that they need to move on.

A manager who took my training said she is better at in-the-moment coaching because she has the words to use. That's music to my ears. In a virtual team meeting, one of her team members did not speak up or offer anything. In the old days, she could have done in-the-moment coaching walking out of the meeting and down the hall together. Nowadays you can do the same kind of coaching by picking up the phone.

She started with another formula, "I noticed..." That is, she said, "I noticed in the meeting that you didn't offer any of your experiences." Then she paused, and that's really, really important because she gave the person a chance to say why. Didn't ask, didn't force it. Then her team member said, "I wasn't sure that my experiences would be helpful."

This is a perfect opportunity to coach. The team member is expressing discomfort with sharing. The manager was then able to give some support. "While you may be hesitant to speak up, remember that you're there to support the team and contribute what you know." Then she used the "next time" approach: "Next time, offer one experience, and I'll bet that people will ask for more." That’s a combination of "I noticed" and "next time.” I like to tell people, "I have all these words in a basket, and I'm just going to give you a formula, and you take it from there."

When I'm doing the training, people say, "I'm going to try this with my kids.” One client said, "This coaching language is life altering." It works with your team members. It works with peers. It works with senior managers. It works with family.

How Did Joy Come Up With the Coaching Language?

I had a wonderful opportunity about a decade ago working with a sales VP to analyze 150 sales coaching reports. What we wanted to find out was what the managers were telling their reps. What kind of advice and coaching were they offering? The results were interesting, even disturbing. Only 23% of those reports contained strong or meaningful coaching. 26% had some coaching. 51% had no coaching at all. They just offered observations without any direction or perspective.

I studied the reports written by the strong coaches to figure out what they were saying. That's when I created the coaching language, because it had to be very easy to get everybody on board.

I came up with a lot of word prompts. I call them thought formulas, like putting "next time," a direction, and a benefit together. We did the training for this particular group. They loved it. We did a post-training assessment, and almost 80% of the managers were strong coaches. We went from 23 to 80.

That's when I decided I'm going to spend the rest of my life doing this.

Closing Thought

Aside from learning the language itself, which is pretty simple, you could start by just being aware of what you're saying and how you're saying it. After you have a coaching conversation, stop and reflect. What did I say? How did I say it? Was it effective? Could it have been better? Common sense might say, "I wish I had opened that up a little bit more."

Listen to yourself. Then start with "next time," give a direction, follow with a benefit.

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