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Writer's pictureKerrie Smit

Leadership Essentials: Master the Coaching Response

Updated: Apr 3

In our role as a leader of people, especially in change environments, it's essential we master our responses when presented with emotions and problems that may be brought up by our teams and colleagues.


Business is all about people, and people are all about emotions! Helping others to move their experience from emotion to thought is an essential skill for any organisational culture, especially those that pride themselves on psychosocial safety. Leaders transmit and embed culture every time they interact with their teams, so being prepared for an emotional interaction just makes good sense.


You can do it! Let's look at how.


As adults, we may have developed a tendency to react to the emotions and problems of others in the same way we were dealt with as children. Depending on how we learned to deal with emotions - and any compensatory skills we've developed since - we may not naturally react in a way conducive to coaching others through difficult times.


Many Leaders and Change Practitioners understand the importance of empathy, and you may already be a master of responding well to the pain points of others. Even so, circumstances change and this blog is a mini-skills workout to refresh your understanding of how to lean in when confronted with difficult problems and emotions.


What's your natural leadership response?

Reading through the responses below, you may identify how you're naturally inclined to deal with emotions. You might even identify how you've been dealt with in the workplace in the past. Try to remember how it feels, and how it shuts down the path to resolution. These responses are not recommended because emotions that are shut down, judged or left to wander unchecked become even bigger problems down the track.


​The Dismissive Response.

This response disengages, ridicules, or curbs negative emotions. Leaders who naturally feel this response may be uncertain or fearful that things will get out of control, they may typically have used distraction techniques in the past, and may feel that emotions are toxic or unhealthy, using the passage of time (or procrastination) as a cure-all replacement for problem-solving.


Effects: Team members or colleagues may feel dismissed or unsafe. They may feel that there is something wrong with them, they might become confused or feel that what they're discussing with you is not appropriate, not right, and abnormal.


​The Laissez-Faire Response. 

This response is endlessly permissive, offers little to no guidance about problem-solving or understanding emotions and how they link to how we behave. It doesn't set any limits on professional conduct but rather encourages “riding out” the problem until it's out of the way and out of sight.


Effects: Team members or colleagues may not be able to concentrate well at work, they may falter in their discussion of the issues or start to make light of them, they may not be able to regulate their conduct in a professional way.


​The Disapproving Response.

This is similar to the dismissive response but more negative, judgmental or critical. Leaders who feel this reaction can potentially come from a place of panic about the emotion or problem being expressed. Their concern can become directive and authoritative expressed as discipline, or getting it "right". Leaders feeling this response can become unconcerned with what's driving the problem, because they may be taken to a place of deep visceral reaction. When this happens, they may abandon a calmer process of listening, analysing and responding.


Effects: Similar to dismissiveness, team members or colleagues feel unsafe or may 'give up' when they hit the brick wall of criticism or direction, concluding that it wasn't professional of them to raise that particular concern. Faced with an over-bearing reaction from a Leader, a team member may close down and change the subject.


Your new essential leadership skill: mastering the Coaching Response


Working through a Coaching Response with your team member or colleague slows down the potential for both of you to become overwhelmed with frustration or upset, and potentially gives team members a framework they can self-apply after your discussions.


The Coaching Response. 

This response allows the professional relationship to become closer and develop into trust and understanding. Many Leaders already have strong empathy and great listening skills. Following these Coaching Response steps may help to master this essential leadership skill when responding to others' problems and emotions in the heat of the moment.


  1. Be aware of the emotion or challenging moment

  2. Recognise the team member or colleague's expression as a perfect learning moment

  3. Listen with empathy and verbally validate their feelings

  4. Help your team member or colleague to label the experience with applicable emotional and professional vocabulary

  5. Ask them what they want to do about the problem, explore options without drawing conclusions or giving advice

  6. Ask if you can help support their plan to resolve the problem, and if so, how. Very often, they won't need your help, they'll just have been happy to talk it out.


Getting to step 4 may take time. It's important that you don't move into discussing solutions until they're all 'talked out'. Until this moment, continue working through steps 1 - 4 for as long as it takes. In his book, The Coaching Habit, Michael Bungay Stanier suggests the question "What's on your mind?", author and entrepreneur Kobi Simmat takes it further with "And what else?" until he gets to the root cause of the conflict.


Once you're at the root cause, move on to steps 5 and 6. Try to remember that even though you're a skilled Leader who takes responsibility and a willing listener, this problem is not yours to own.


Effects: Mastery of this technique will enable you to lead your team members and colleagues through discussing challenging topics, facing feedback about the situation and recognising the pathway to improvement. By not becoming affected by the emotions or problems your team member raises, you offer reliable perspective from a distance, which helps them to feel safer, self-confident and perform better at work, as well as in similar situations in future.


The Coaching Response helps team members and colleagues move the cognitive function of processing their problems away from the amygdala (the brain's lone-wolf survival instinct) to the prefrontal cortex (the brain's well-connected control centre). From here the problem can be examined, and planning and execution can proceed much more clearly, unclouded by the spike of emotions and signals brought on by a fight, flight or freeze response. Mastering this response, and avoiding the others, is an essential leadership skill for a modern Leader.


For more support with leadership in change, you can always rely on Agencia Change. We're here to help.




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