As a Coaching Leader, your primary goal is to unlock people’s potential to maximise their own performance. Conversation is one of your primary vehicles to achieving that goal … if your conversations are effective.

How effective are your conversations?
What makes for more effective conversation?

Recall a few recent work conversations and ask these 4 questions:

🔹How problem-focused were our conversations?
🔹How solution-focused were our conversations?
🔹Do we tend to be down in the detail?
🔹Or do we tend to be up in philosophical concepts?

Where do you and your colleagues most like to spend your conversational time? How effective were those conversations, as a result? And what subtle shifts might make your conversations even more effective? Where “effective” means:

Best at generating positive energy.
Best at reducing negative resistance.
Quickest to a meaningful outcome.
Least effortful.

If you want to elevate performance and potential in others, you must find ways to have the kinds of conversations that (i) elevate awareness, (iii) encourage personal responsibility, and (iii) strengthen self-belief. (The prerequisites to performance.)

Start embedding this kind of Coaching Leader mindset by asking these 4 questions and mentally plotting where the conversation resides. With that insight, you can begin to coach the conversation towards the learning and performance “sweet spot”.