Published in Kingstown College Coaching Magazine 2020/2021
“A regular challenge is finding time to coach and be coached when circumstances are changing so fast and goals need to be recalibrated rapidly.”
James McLeod explains how, as a coach, you can help to accelerate learning for your coachees through the speed coaching process.
We live in interesting times. Abnormal is the new normal. As we think through how best to use the coaching approach to help others, the SPOT coaching framework is something to put in your toolkit.
In essence the SPOT coaching method will give you:
- A method for helping your clients find quick resolution around barriers and blocks
- A way of leveraging opportunities and increasing momentum around initiatives that are going well
A regular challenge is finding time to coach and be coached when circumstances are changing so fast and goals need to be recalibrated rapidly. In pandemic times, there is a kind of paradox at play. More people have seen the need to reach out and adjust their bearings, but organizations have not, on the whole, created frameworks which allow employees at all levels to benefit from the coaching ethos of learning and self-discovery.
The SPOT method focuses on five core pillars:
- Rapid Goal setting
- Building short-term plans
- Clarifying and working through options
- Solution-Focused Action Planning
- Tracking impacts and measuring outcomes
It is primarily a corporate coaching tool best focused on clients who are willing, able and ready for a coaching conversation. It is also focused on the premise that the client has a clear and present goal rather than on someone who is stuck or ‘blocked’ and is in a complete re-set mode.
In that spirit, I have defined SPOT coaching as a:
‘A timely, informal coaching intervention (usually with a maximum of 20 minutes duration) to help a coachee move forward on an issue on which they are seeking clarity, validation, a new way forward or a sounding board’
“The idea is to get your client rapidly to a place where they can clearly visualize what is going on for them.”
It is my belief that there are many employees in corporate settings who are high in motivation and competence who would be delighted to be given the opportunity to participate in this type of coaching intervention.
The Acronym SPOT stands for:
S set goal
P work on a short plan
O clarify options
T take action
1. SETTING GOALS
The first part of the model looks at helping our client set a goal. The idea is to get your client rapidly to a place where they can clearly visualize what is going on for them. This requires asking powerful coaching questions such as:
- What is the specific issue you want to address with me?
- Where are you now with this?
- Where do you want to be with this?
- What is my role in helping you to get to this objective?
- How will you know when you are moving in the right direction?
- What will be the first sign?
- What is your motivation for wanting to do this?
- What has stopped you from pursuing this so far?
The idea behind all of these questions is to allow your client to rapidly clarify their thinking and for you as the coach to assess how best you can help the client with the quality, depth and breadth of their own thinking.
2. WORK ON A SHORT PLAN
The second part of the model looks at helping your client to work on a plan. The idea is to try and get your client to imagine a tight deadline by which time a plan must be made. A metaphor for this is If the tide is coming in and the car is stuck in the sand on the beach, there is not too much time for reflection and a plan must be made and acted upon rapidly.
Effective questions to ask at this stage are:
- What are your core building blocks?
- What critical support do you need?
- What does the first step look like?
- Take me through your sequencing ladder,1-5. 1 is where you are now and 5 is where you want to be:
- The idea behind the sequencing ladder is to break the plan down into byte sized chunks so small actions are constantly been taken towards the goal and the plan is always in perpetual motion. I like to explain mini action steps repeated often with the metaphor of the bathtub. When you fill up the bath with a dripping tap, not much happens at first but over time the bath will fill up. The critical part of this step is to ensure that your client has a plan to keep moving forward and maintain a direction of travel with room for course adjustments where necessary and appropriate.
3. CLARIFY OPTIONS
The next stage of the plan is to help your client clarify their options. Catalytic questions to ask at this stage of the process are:
- Take me through your palette of options…. What is popping up into your head?
- What have you tried before that worked in similar situations?
- What have you seen others do that has been effective?
- What will be the likely consequences and impacts of each option?
- What can you try first?
- What would you do if your initiative could not fail?
Try and ensure that your client has at least two options to consider before moving into the last stage of the model which is the action stage.
4. TAKE ACTION
The action questions to ask are:
-
- What will you do?
- What is your first step?
- How will you measure success?
- Who will be your accountability partner?
- How are you tracking the impacts and consequences of taking this action?
- When shall we check in again? What do you expect to have happened by then?
The idea is to make sure that your client walks away with a tangible action, however small, to start working on. Once ‘the ball starts rolling down the hill’, it is remarkable what can happen over time. The client needed your support to give them the time and space in a neutral setting to verbalize and challenge their thinking and to bounce ideas off a supportive and non-judgmental person. This space is what unleashed their thinking potential and took the conversation down productive paths towards growth.
The SPOT sessions should not have to take more than 20 minutes. As the coach, it will be up to you to instill time discipline into the process. The idea is not for SPOT coaching engagements to be one-offs. They can be held regularly. The difference is the actual length of the duration of each session, hence the term, SPOT coaching.
Other terms that are used for this type of coaching intervention are flash coaching or laser coaching. The expectation to set here with your client is that you will meet again for another spot session but only when they have completed agreed upon actions and follow-ups and are ready to work through fresh steps to further growth.
“this space is what unleashed their thinking potential and took the conversation down productive paths towards growth”
In my experience, SPOT coaching will not work in all coaching scenarios as mentioned earlier in the article. Transformational, holistic, compassionate coaching where an individual is going through quantum shifts in how they think, feel and act in the world require longer engagements and periods of reflection. In these scenarios, we give our clients the time and the space to reflect on their thoughts, beliefs, feelings, sense of identity and how they interact with both themselves and the outside world.
SPOT coaching falls more into the domain of: ‘I have a challenge – How will I leverage my knowledge, skills, attitude and networks to succeed with whatever immediate challenge I am facing?
The principle is the same, however. ‘I need to think for myself and back myself to find the answers inside myself…but to do this, I want a coach as a thinking partner to illuminate my path’.
Typical SPOT coaching scenarios are:
- Project deadlines
- Team conflicts
- Other Conflict management issues
- General People challenges
- Flagging intrinsic motivation
- Time Management issues & Prioritization challenges
- Work overload
- Assertiveness and finding effective ways of ‘speaking truth to power’
- Thinking traps
- Repeating mistakes and failing to respond well to constructive feedback
- Finding ways of giving others constructive feedback
- General discipline issues particularly where you are responsible for a High Performer with a low ability to communicate well with others
- Getting the motivation and a method to stop avoiding the difficult conversations
- Prepping for Performance Management Reviews
- Interview preparation
- Patterns of missing targets and missing deadlines
- Persuading and influencing skills without formal authority or mandate
- Managing ‘upwards’
VUCA times call for creative solutions and innovative ways to help our clients fulfill their full potential and find their ‘flow’. I believe the SPOT coaching method is a firm enabler for growth and results and I encourage you to practice this method with your client base.
By James McLeod
After a long career in international media sales, James moved into training and coaching in Shanghai, China in 2009. He worked exclusively with multinational corporations based in Greater China including Ericsson, Siemens, Novartis, Carrefour and Rio Tinto. He moved to Ireland in 2014. As a Senior Faculty Member of Kingstown College, James has been running modules for their Advanced Diploma in Personal & Executive Coaching, the Advanced diploma in Mental Health and Well-Being and for their Train the Trainer (6N3325/6N3326) accreditation programmes. He is a regular speaker and facilitator at events focussing on Coaching and Leadership Development. Outside of the training arena, he is an avid long-distance runner and has completed his 100th Marathon in 2018! He is a passionate believer in running as a philosophy on life and advocates that the principles of distance running can be applied successfully to strengthen self-awareness, improve self-management, grow and retain self-esteem, heighten performance and increase happiness, meaning, focus and purpose.
