Context Matters to the Coach

Context is key. Until you understand the situation and its background, you can’t be effective as a leader or coach. With the context, you’re better prepared to ask relevant questions and share information that may be useful in helping someone move forward. Listen and learn more as Ralph and Bill discuss the importance of context.

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*Note: The following text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors

Bill Berthel: Welcome to the Get Emergent podcast, where we discuss leadership, team, and organizational topics and best practices. We like to provide ideas, concepts, and pragmatic experiments to help you develop your potential in your work in leadership. I’m Bill Burthal.

Ralph Simone: And I’m Ralph Simone.

Bill Berthel: So Ralph, today we’re going to talk about another concept, another topic around leader as coach, and that is that the context matters to the coach. Context matters,

Ralph Simone: We sometimes say in our weekly planning process, context before content.

Bill Berthel: Yes.

Ralph Simone: So you really need to understand the situation and maybe even some background to the situation before you can ask great questions before you can share information that may be helpful in moving someone forward.

Bill Berthel: So this really starts with the desire to understand as a coach, as leader as coach, starting with understanding the context, the why of the client or employee, their situation, maybe what’s going on on their team, what’s going on in the organization that comes first.

Ralph Simone: Absolutely. And I think we really have to slow down to go faster. If we’re internal leader as coach. I think sometimes we don’t know as much about our people as like an outside coach may know. We spend a fair amount of time in our coaching early on in the discovery process. We want to understand significant life experiences that, cause people to think and act the way they do. That’s part of context, part of imprinting. And then how are they bringing that or not bringing that into the current challenge or situation. Really important.

Bill Berthel: Well, it’s part of our strategic approach as an external coach to start with that discovery. We have the right excuse because we’re typically starting a relationship. I think what gets in the way often, and I’ll go back to my days as being an internal coach, as an HR professional, I would assume I knew my people.

Ralph Simone: Yeah.

Bill Berthel: I’ve worked with them for lengths of time, some decades. And that assumption was there, that I knew those folks. And that assumption wasn’t necessarily wrong, but I would sometimes miss the specific situation they were in. I would rely on the experience in the relationship more than the current state.

Ralph Simone: Yeah.

Ralph Simone: More than current state. And more than how the current state might be triggering things. Their past that we’re not aware of. And I think just, one thing I can think of is we’ve talked about this in previous podcasts. Let’s release judgment. Let’s start this conversation as if I don’t know much about you.

Bill Berthel: Fresh and new. Yeah.

Ralph Simone: Beginner’s eyes. Because we bring too much preconceived information into it and then we don’t really understand the situation. We may not understand some of the or