"Seek First to Understand" - Best Practice when Observing Team Members
To coach in an effective way, you must observe your ‘players’.
To improve a behaviour or the performance of a player, a coach must observe the current ongoing activity of a player in order to add value through coaching.
To ‘embed’ a behaviour or action you have coached with a player, you must also observe regularly.
To ensure players maintain a ‘conscious competence’ state (wherein a player is focused and aware of what they are doing and ‘present’ in the moment) you must create and embed an observational feedback and coaching culture, which is built upon a foundation of observation.
Unless you observe effectively, you will not know HOW to improve performance, compliment it or teach it to others. Where we assume behaviours or infer them from other evidence, we create conflict and damage the coach/player relationship, making later coaching activity more difficult.
This is an important point: Observation is NOT simply to find things for you to fix. The ideal world scenario would be for you to only find examples of best practice to share with the team as players push each other to perform.
Observations will tend to be focused around literally watching and/or listening to the player as they perform all or part of their sales/advice process.??
However, observations could also be:
How to observe activity
Pre-Position
Usually you should explain, in advance, what you are doing before you begin to observe IF you are ‘visible’ to the player during your observations. Adding additional distractions for the player are counterproductive.
HOWEVER, you do not need to pre-position players you are observing remotely. there is value in planning for a ‘blended’ approach to observations it can be valuable to understand whether a player is performing in a certain way only when they know they are being observed.
Keep Quiet
There is nothing worse than a Coach who can’t keep quiet whilst observing players.?
You are looking to observe natural behaviour in order to help direct coaching activity. Do not interfere with your player unless there is a risk to the client.
Interrupting damages the perception that you are there to support your player.
Interruptions should only occur if there is a risk that the players activity may endanger a client. In these instances it is important that the coach takes over AND that the player both observes the coach and then has the reasons for the ‘takeover’ explained to them.
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Recording observations
When observing player activity, structure the notes you make (that will subsequently form the basis of your feedback) around these three areas:
Positives and Best Practice
Look for and listen to new and existing skills and methodology.
Development Areas
What could be improved? Were there areas where the bare minimum was done and there are ways to grow?
Anything Missing/ Not Performed
Was anything incorrect/missing?
Objectivity
Your observations should be ‘clinical’ in nature, and not contain:
Once you’ve completed your observation, review the notes you’ve made and clarify them. It may help to first write out your notes in your notebook, then transfer them to a standardised sheet for feedback.
When you’re providing observational feedback, you’ll need to refer to these notes, so they should be of a reasonable quality.?
The best way to think when completing notes is: “Could a stranger pick up and feed back this observation?” if the answer is no, then your notes aren’t of a sufficient quality.
Starting to ‘bank’ observations
Once you are used to observing and feeding back calls, it is best practice to start filing good examples of behaviour or activity so that you can support your Coaching with this.