Learning from Coaching To Enhance Your Communication Skills

Investigating 5 key coaching techniques and the FUEL model

Communication in coaching is vital, both for the coach doing the coaching, and for the coachee, who’ll need good communication skills to articulate their goals, lead their teams, and make their voice heard in their respective role or industry.

According to Breakthrough Public Speaking, quoting a study by Forbes, “93% of executives consider effective communication to be the most important skill for long-term success”. And that’s why so many executives and managers are looking to coaching to help them improve their communication skills and build their confidence.

How exactly does coaching help build a coachee’s communication skills?

Whether you’re a coach working with your coachee, or an individual who has undergone coach training, there are some core coaching techniques you’ll learn that are vital for everyone’s communication skills.

Five of these techniques include:

• Active listening. This means really focusing on what the other person is trying to say, and using their verbal (and non-verbal) cues to interpret the underlying emotions and motivations behind the words. A deeper understanding of the underlying communication will help you get to the crux of the matter more quickly and effectively.
• Asking open-ended questions. As a coach, or a leader, it’s important not to make assumptions about what a person is going to say or wants to communicate. Instead, ask open-ended questions, free of judgment or assumption, and let the person you’re talking to share their thoughts and opinions. Don’t interrupt them - if you have follow-up questions, wait for them to finish their point before following up.
• Speaking confidently. The ability to deliver what you want to say in a calm, concise and confident manner doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Through working with a coach and building your confidence, however, you can learn how to speak with both authority and authenticity, getting your message across in a way that reflects your unique views and personality.
• Providing constructive feedback. One of a coach’s most important roles is to help build the coachee’s self confidence. This doesn’t mean that they cannot shine a light on potential problem areas or challenges, but the idea is to always make the feedback constructive and to supply positive suggestions of what actions the coachee can take to make progress in that respective area. This same advice applies to leaders who are better served building up their team’s confidence and giving them responsibilities that are achievable and that will build their abilities and skills in the process.
• Using Check-Ins and Check-Outs to structure the conversation. This means establishing, at the outset, what it is that you want the upcoming conversation to tackle. Then, when you’re wrapping the session up, summarize what was discussed and set some next steps or action items. This is a skill that many executive coaches teach their coachees in leadership roles, particularly for team sessions where common goals and action items will be needed and where employees look to the leader to take charge and establish a systematic plan.

Good communication coaching in action - Using the FUEL model

To show what the coaching process might look like when working with a client to improve their communication skills, the FUEL framework is very helpful.

FUEL stands for:

• Frame the Conversation
• Understand the Current State
• Explore the Desired Goal
• Lay Out the Plan

Let’s unpack it:

Frame the Conversation
This is where the coach and coachee establish the coaching relationship, discuss the process, and agree on what goals they’d like to work towards. In a leader/employee relationship, this would be more centred around setting up a project or task, allocating roles and responsibilities, and starting to discuss KPIs.

Understand the Current State
Here the coach uses open-ended questions to understand the coachee’s situation and gain insights into their strengths, fears and limiting beliefs. In a leader/employee situation, this is about understanding capacity, managing expectations, resource planning, and project managing what needs to be done.

Explore the Desired Goal
For both the coach, and the leader, this is the stage where the coachee/employee will benefit from SMART goal-setting - that is setting goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound. This stage also broadly involves conceptualizing what success looks like and what the coachee/employee wants to achieve by a set date in time.

Lay Out the Plan
Now it’s time to get into the specifics. In a work setting, this will involve actions such as managing stakeholders, delegating tasks, and setting deadlines, whereas for a coachee, this could more broadly involve setting specific intentions and putting a time frame on it.

Is coaching something you'd like to investigate further?

If coaching is something you’d like to investigate, either as a potential career path or for your own self-development and skills building as a leader and communicator, we have a range of courses that would be a good starting point:

• Train the Trainer Course: Learn how to be a confident and transformational trainer. This course focuses on developing your creative abilities as an inspirational speaker and teaching you how to step into a coaching style of facilitation that can powerfully engage your audience and team. 
• Team Coaching: The Erickson Certified Team Coach Certification (ACTC Pathway) consists of three courses: High Performance Team Coaching, the Advanced Team Coaching course and 5 hours of Group Team Coaching Supervision.
• Leading With Impact: Learn a high-performance communication system that helps managers and business leaders to ask powerful questions and to use solution-focused conversations to drive breakthrough business outcomes. Built on the foundation of Milton Erickson’s system in the 1950s, Leading With Impact includes many principles adopted from sports psychology, NLP, positive psychology and coaching.
• The Art & Science of Coaching™: This is our award-winning flagship coach training program, globally recognized as the global gold standard for life, executive, and professional coaching certification.
  
  Do you have questions or need more information? Book an online call with one of our advisors: https://www.erickson.edu/en/get-in-touch.