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The focused Type A listening skills that underpin coaching are the same as those used by people who are described by others as ‘good listeners’. Watch what they do and you will see them encouraging; clarifying; summarizing; reflecting;

empathizing.

Encouraging

This provides regular signals that the good listener wants the person to con-tinue, because they are engaged in what they are being told. Those signals may be visual – nods of the head, smiling, body matching. They can also be verbal, providing they are intentional. A series of ‘Mm’s and ‘Aha’s’ can be genuine encouragement or a signal of zoned out listening.

In coaching, encouraging listening is about enabling the other person to tell as much as is helpful to the coaching purpose – but no more. It is not coaching to simply leave space that the other person can fill. Encouraging listening is focused on unearthing what is relevant through such interventions as:

g Tell me more about . . .

g What else?

g What haven’t you said so far?

g I value your openness in saying that – is there anything more you want to say about it?

While encouragement is a means by which we signal to the other person that we value and validate them, as a Manager Coach your encouragement is also about helping them to focus on what is important.

Clarifying

Good listeners make sure that they understand what they are being told, rather than assuming it. Being asked to clarify is a means by which a coach signals that they want to be sure that they have got it right. When someone is given the opportunity to talk about themselves they will often dump large amounts of content that the coach has difficulty understanding. Understanding content should not be the goal of a coach, but understanding the meaning of that content for the individual is.

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Rob has asked to talk about a promotion interview he has just failed.

He starts to describe in detail the questions and the answers he gave.

Since Rob is in a highly technical role, the questions and his answers are unintelligible to the listener, unless Rob is asked to explain them in simpler and simpler terms. This would help the listener understand content, but it would serve little purpose for Rob.

The listener holds back from asking for clarification as the content washes over them, until Rob puts in the throw-away line, ‘I’ve now completely messed up my career here’. The listener recognizes that this comment is central to understanding his purpose in having the conversation, and says, ‘Messed up your career. That’s a strong phrase.

Help me understand what you mean by messed up your career?’.

The request for clarification helps Rob to think more deeply about what he means, so his thinking moves forward.

Summarizing

Summarizing is feeding back to the other person what they have understood so far. Summarizing what another person has said is particularly helpful in the setting up stage of a conversation. This is because the invitation to talk about something that has been fermenting inside the head often means that, when it is first articulated, it comes out in a jumble of ideas and a stream of consciousness. In this spilling out, the speaker often loses track of what they have said, so intent are they on getting it out.

The purpose of summarizing is to hold up a mirror so that the speaker can look at what they have said and decide which threads are most important for them in taking the conversation further.

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John has had a poor performance review and now has to set some objectives for the next year. Given the opportunity to talk about setting objectives, he starts with a rush of thoughts about the unfairness of the appraisal process, the partiality of his boss, the number of conflicting demands on him, the challenges of a newly formed team and the bringing together of two departments. The coach summarizes that, so far, he has talked about his feelings about his review rating and his boss’s role in that.

He has also spoken about the heavy demands on his time, and the need to get a new team performing quickly. He has also touched on the demands of bringing together two very different departments into one whole. The coach checks out if he has been correctly understood, and when he confirms the accuracy of the summary, the coach asks him to identify which aspects it would be most useful to explore, given his purpose of wanting a more successful performance review next year. Put in that light, John then decides that key to this will be the successful merger of the departments. John now knows that he has been heard, but he has also been able to select the most useful route for taking the conversation forward.

Reflecting

Reflecting is the simple act of repeating back to the other person key words or phrases that they have used. This requires the active listening of the coach because the selection of the phrase is central. The reflection is of ideas, images or feelings that the coach hears are important to the central purpose of the conversation. The repeating of a phrase or word, when well chosen, acts as a prompt to further thought, particularly if it is offered in a tone that suggests the listener’s interest and curiosity. The speaker, caught up in their own thoughts, may not realize what they have said until the coach shows it back to them. A thought that has only previously existed in their head takes on a new life when it is expressed back to them by another person.

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Gwyneth had taken a career break after having her second child and was promoted soon after her return. She appeared to be coping well and to be dealing with the demands of home and work comfortably. She asked for a coach to help her with some of the new business aspects of the role.

When she met with the coach, she spoke clearly about the demands of the new role, and an agenda around helping her to develop a more strategic approach was developing. She then dropped in the phrase ‘sometimes I think people believe I just got lucky in getting this job on returning from my career break’. The coach repeated the phrase ‘just got lucky’. Gwyneth picked up the reflection and opened up into owning her own feelings that she had got lucky and that somehow she did not deserve it, par-ticularly when she had days when she would rather be at home with her young children. Had the coach challenged Gwyneth by saying, ‘Look at your track record there is nothing lucky about your promotion’, the issue would have gone back underground. By reflecting it back to her, Gwyneth was able to talk about her own ambivalence about the role and the demands of wanting to be both a good manager and a good mother. She was then more able to define what her true purpose was in the coaching conversation – to find a way of doing her job without feeling guilty.

Empathizing

Empathizing is accepting that this is how it is for the speaker, even if it would not be experienced that way by the listener. It is the ability to understand how

it is from the other person’s position without having to take their point of view.

It is an important listening skill in building connection because it signals to the other person that their position makes sense from where they are standing.

It does not mean that you have to share that viewpoint. As the Manager Coach you may know very well why they were not chosen to head up that project, indeed you may have made the decision. However, if they are to move on they need to be freed from having to defend themselves. Sympathy, offered from the best of intents, can work to hold the person in the same place.

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Jane had worked for many years as a secretary for one boss. She prided herself on her commitment to doing her best for that person. When cut-backs meant she was having to support three other managers, she was deeply hurt. She saw it as an affront to the loyalty she had always shown.

Other secretaries supported her in her feelings of hurt through telling her how awful it must be for her that she had been discounted, and they encouraged her to dig her heels in and refuse to take on the extra work.

In their well-intentioned sympathy, their unintended outcome was that Jane’s view of herself became less and less confident. She saw herself as a victim and her feelings of powerlessness increased. The Personnel Manager decided to approach the issue with her, and after listening to her said empathically, ‘If I were in your shoes, I would feel the way you do.

It can’t be easy having to change the way you work when you have liked the way things have been’. She did not pretend that things could go back, but in acknowledging that Jane’s position was a valid one, she was also signalling that she saw Jane as an adult rather than a helpless child.

They were then able to look at what Jane valued most in her role, and how elements of that could be built into the new arrangement.

Being able to apply Type A listening is a bedrock of building the coaching conversation. It allows the content to be laid out and for the process of discriminating amongst the content to find what is helpful to be identified.

It is a necessary part of coaching, but it is not enough.

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Ben was an administrator in his 30s who said he was frustrated in his role and was keen to move into something more challenging. His boss

suggested he talk with an internal coach as he was unsure how to help Ben, since he could not see any obvious openings. The coach, listening at content level, saw the issue as one of clarifying his skills, putting together a c.v., giving him some help in interview skills and encouraging him to network in other departments. What the coach did not hear were Ben’s explanations as to why he had failed to do anything about his job situation except to moan. The coach did not hear the commonalities in the stories he told about his career, which were linked by the belief that he had been let down by a series of previous bosses. The coach did not hear the beliefs Ben held that, as a man without a degree about to hit his 40s, he could not expect more than what he had. What Ben was telling the coach in the level beneath content was that he lacked any confidence that his situation could change. Because the coach failed to listen closely to what was in the subglacial zone, the issues were never discussed and the coach became increasingly frustrated with Ben’s failure to act on actions they had agreed.

The failure of Ben’s case was not that the coach failed to listen, it is that they listened at the wrong level. The coach listened and responded to the content of what Ben was saying, when what they needed to do was to look for the meaning in what Ben was saying. Listening for meaning requires a different set of skills.

That listening starts with being able to stop listening to ourselves.

The concern of most people when they are asked to coach another is that they will not know what to ask. Having accepted that coaching is not about offering wisdom in the form of advice, they switch their attention to asking questions, and become caught up in trying to think of good and clever questions. All the time the other person is speaking, their self-conscious self is desperately thinking

‘What do I ask next?’. They are caught up in worrying that they will lose face if they don’t have a question immediately on their lips the moment the other stops speaking. The focus on themselves stops them from fully listening, and makes it difficult to stay engaged. Letting go of worrying about what to ask next is the key to starting to fully listen. Accepting that message is difficult, but two things help:

1. The human brain works six times quicker than the human mouth. This means that the brain will do the work for you if you let it. Focusing your energy on an internal dialogue about what you should or should not be asking, combined with an internal critic who is looking at how you are performing, are two ways of ensuring interference to what the brain should be doing – focusing on the other person.

2. Letting go of worrying about questions and listening to all the information that the other person is leaking to you guarantees that questions emerge without having to be worked on.

These other forms of information are available to us when we use Type B listening skills.