Sharing Content as a Coach

To be an effective coach, it’s often necessary to share content with team members. But the ability to share content well has two prerequisites – deep listening and intelligent questioning.

Bill and Ralph discuss the concept and offer tips on how to hone your own listening and questioning skills and enhance your leadership.

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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 and leadership. I’m Bill Berthel

Ralph Simone: And I’m Ralph Simone.

Bill Berthel: So, Ralph, as, another part of our series in talking about this coaching space for leaders, leaders as coach, coaches get to share content. They get to share some of their expertise. Sometimes it comes out as advice. This is really important for coaches to have some content to share.

Ralph Simone: Yeah. And this is interesting for me. So my early career, I was a consultant, a subject matter expert.

Bill Berthel: Yeah.

Ralph Simone: And I love sharing my expertise. But the balancing act here, as we’ve been trained as coaches, is how do you strike the right balance between sharing what you know and drawing out of your client what he or she knows? So I think this is a stumbling block for professional coaches as well as leaders as coach.

Bill Berthel: Yeah. No, I think so, too. And one of the biggest barriers to effective coaching is projecting too much of our experience, too much of our know how, too much of our subject matter expertise onto the person we’re coaching, whether that be our employee or our client. I think this type of projection, at best, can be received as advice that might get acted upon. But I think we miss that opportunity to really connect, grow the client, draw out their ideas, their best, and even worse as a leader. I think we might start to build a dependency on our advice.

Ralph Simone: This links back then to consciousness

Bill Berthel: very much,

Ralph Simone: kind of being aware. Are we sharing too much too soon? Are we projecting our experiences or solution on, before we fully understand?

Ralph Simone: So let’s talk about, for the benefit of our listeners, how we strike that balance of sharing content as a coach.

Bill Berthel: So I think if we’re able to hold on to sharing that knowledge or expertise as a coach, as not first place, deep listening and intelligent questioning long before projecting our own brilliance, our own advice, our own subject matter expertise that I think we all like to share, by the way. I think we do. Yeah. We like to share that.

Ralph Simone: It’s validating. We want to make a contribution. But what I heard you say in that is understand the challenge or the problem or the opportunity at hand before you prematurely dispense information that may or may not be useful. And I think there’s another thing that a leader and a coach needs to be mindful of. You have a position of maybe expertise or authority that people might be more inclined to pay attent