Coaching for Excellence and the Skills Involved

Coaching is a helping process that emerges from a personal relationship. The relationship is established between a person who is trying to solve a problem or develop a plan and one who is trying to facilitate these efforts.

The following skills or capacities are important for effective coaching:

LISTENING: The ability to hear the problem descriptively without evaluating or pre-judging.

EMPATHY: The ability to identify with the other points of view and to communicate that understanding.

FLEXIBLITY: The ability to adjust to the environment, terminology, and work habits of the other.

CONFIDENCE: The ability to communicate realistically high expectations of the other, and to encourage other's potential for learning from experience.

AWARENESS: The ability to diagnose accurately what is "really going on," and to be aware of one's own values and habits they do not get in the way.

MUTUALITY: The ability to communicate shared interest in the problem and the willingness to share influence in its resolution.

EXPERIMENTATION: The ability to demonstrate a spirit of exploration and deferred judgement in relation to possible solutions.

TIMING: The ability to ask questions and to offer information and suggestions at the moment that the other is ready to hear.

CONGRUENCE: The ability to send messages that represent one's genuine feelings or judgements.

PROBING: The ability to ask questions that clarify or extend the other's thinking.

SYNTHESIZING: The ability to see relationships among various pieces of information and to discover patterns.

Paul Pohlman is The Poynter Institute's associate dean and a member of the leadership and management faculty.