How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

COACH, DON’T TELL
What if the other person still isn’t sure what to do, after we’ve done some
extreme listening to help them clarify their thinking? What if we want some
reassurance that the person is going to approach the issue in a sensible way? In
cases like this, we might feel the need to shift gear and take a more active part in
shaping whatever happens next.
At this point, we have to achieve a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, if
our colleague is doing something important, we want to be helpful and we want
to be sure they’re going to deliver. We might have ideas to share and deadlines
to convey. It’s tempting to look over his or her shoulder and do our best to keep
them on track.
But psychologists have shown that autonomy is one of the most fundamental
motivating forces in life.
2
 Give someone space and responsibility, and they feel
competent and respected; take it away, and their enthusiasm collapses. Many
managers know this instinctively, and research confirms that this can make all
the difference to people’s performance, especially when tackling challenging
tasks that require perseverance. Autonomy even helps when people are trying to
quit smoking, a notoriously difficult thing to do. In a study of patients who were
seeking medical help to quit, researchers showed that those whose doctors were
“autonomy-supportive” as opposed to “controlling” (as assessed by expert
observers listening to audiotapes of their interaction) were more likely to be
smoke-free, both six months later and thirty months later.
3
So if we’re trying to equip other people to do their best work, we should strike
a balance that falls somewhere between micromanaging the heck out of the
situation and delegating it so completely that we relinquish all control.
Ndidi is a senior manager who’s worked hard to find that balance in recent
years. An executive director responsible for the regional operations of a global
educational charity, she says she used to be overly hands-on. She recalls: “My
check-ins with staff always involved me saying, ‘I think you should do this or
that.’ I meant to be helpful. But I realized my micromanaging was setting up a
dynamic where my staff thought, ‘Oh, Ndidi knows the answer, so I won’t
bother to work it out—I’ll just ask her to tell me what to do.’ As a result, they

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weren’t learning to think strategically. They’d bring the same issues to me again
and again. Yet they’re highly skilled people. They just didn’t feel that I trusted
them to think for themselves.”
The good news for Ndidi, and for us all, is that there is a sweet spot between
total micromanagement and total delegation, where you can both respect
people’s autonomy and ensure that they have the guidance they need to get the
job done. One of the surest ways to strike that balance is to ask a simple set of
coaching questions that help the other person reach their own insights. By doing
this, you leave the other person with the sense of autonomy and ownership that
psychologists have found to be so important for high performance. You still get
to guide and challenge their thinking, but in a way that gives you confidence that
they’ll succeed. It’s the best of both worlds.
So what are these magical coaching questions? They’re based on something
known as the “GROW model”—because they walk people through steps called
the 
goal
, 
reality
, 
options
, and 
way forward
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