Supporting Your Team With The 3 Stage Skilled Helper To Enhance Your Business Success

This article is written by J Keightley, qualified life coaching specialist and business owner of a successful ecommerce business Giggleberries Mens Underwear and explores how you can help you business by supporting your team.

Coaching has for a long time been notes as a powerful medium through which to support other to develop and to enable them and the organizations they work for to grow.

Often, people or businesses stagnate in their limited position because they create unnecessary barriers for themselves or hurdles that they just can’t see away around. The saying that, ‘you can’t see the wood for the trees’ is so true and sometimes we become so fixated on a perceived problem or barrier that we become blinkered to the alternatives or solutions, which are often right under our nose. It is only in hindsight that people are puzzled by how obvious the answer now appears and yet was so difficult to find beforehand.

This is what coaches do, they provide a non-judgmental environment where they are able to offer non-directive, but facilitative support and coach the client in to discovering their own way to what they identify as something they want.

Coaches use many particular tools to gently and respectfully coax information from their client and to then use this to support them finding the solution. One of my most favorite tools is called ‘The Skilled Helper’ because it is so simply that anyone can use it and at the same time is so powerful in gaining the desired results.

This tool looks at identifying; 1) what is going on for the individual, 2) what they want to achieve instead and 3) how to go about achieving that.

With any form of coaching it is essential to ensure that you spend a lot of time listening non-judgmentally and not to direct the individual as to what you believe they ought to do, you have to allow them to take ownership and find the solutions for themselves.

Exploring the Problem – begin by identifying what is going on for them, what do they perceive as being the issue, blockage, hurdle or problem. Sometimes, they wont know where to begin and it is tempting to rush in and start asking direct questions to try and get to the nub of the issue, don’t. Relax and be comfortable with not knowing, just provide them with as much space and time as they need. Perhaps start by asking them, ‘What thoughts are foremost in your mind right now?’, and just see where questions like this lead to and take it from there

Defining the Problem – often, clients will feel considerably better for having just off loaded much of what has been bothering them. However, as the coach this is where you can start to drill down to enable the client to really identify for themselves what is at the root of the issues. Listen for re-occurring themes that you can pull together so you can assist the client by challenging some of their assumptions and enable them to re-evaluate their own beliefs around key blockages and issues.

Moving Forward – here is where you can now support the client to start to identify and look for a solution to the hurdles they have identified. Get them to look at alternative and to consider things from a different angle and to step safely outside their comfort zone. It is during this last part that you can work on setting goals, commitments and a plan of action.

As you can see, this is a very simple technique and very often clients have achieved a great deal after the first part for having talked about it, that the remaining two steps seem to run themselves. You can use this on your self or with co-workers to help find creative solutions to particular obstacles.

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