ROGERS’S SIX PRINCIPLES OF COACHING
Use this when you want a basic set of principles to support you to coach at all levels within an organisation.
Jenny Rogers claims that coaching is a partnership of equals whose aim is to achieve increased and sustainable effectiveness through focused activity. She suggests that coaching raises self-awareness and identifies choices. She offers her Six Principles of Coaching model as a process for achieving this.
The six principles are:
The client is resourceful.
The coach’s role is to help the client to develop this resourcefulness.
Coaching addresses the whole person.
The client sets the agenda.
The coach and the client are equals.
Coaching is about change and action.
The philosophy underpinning Rogers’s model is that the core purpose of coaching is to increase self-awareness, to make choices explicit and to close the gap between what the client is currently doing and what they are capable of doing.
HOW TO USE IT
- Make sure that the person you are coaching has sufficient information and resources to achieve their desired outcome. If not, find out what you can do to help them get it, but don’t spoon-feed them with it.
- Never give advice. This implies that you know better than them, that they therefore are lesser people, which in turn may lead to them becoming dependent on you. Of course you’re not their coach for nothing and they clearly want to learn from you but do this by asking challenging questions and getting them to reach their conclusions about what to do next.
- Although you’re not their therapist, there may be issues that they have to deal with, which require you to look beyond the immediate circumstances; personal as well as professional. You may feel uncomfortable about this and will need to know what your boundaries are. Don’t duck these issues but have the sense if necessary to signpost them to others who may have more expertise in dealing with the issue.
- There should be no hidden agendas. It’s the individual’s role to set the agenda for the coaching and your role to respond to this. If you feel that the agenda poses difficulties for you tell them how you feel and discuss what alternatives are possible.
- Work together with the person you are coaching on an equal footing. You may be coaching a junior member of staff or a senior executive. You may be getting double or half the salary of the person you are coaching. None of this is relevant when coaching, and the relationship should be based on the trust and respect that should underpin all colleague-to-colleague relationships.
- Appreciate that the individual is being coached by you because they want to improve on some aspect of their work. Your role is to support the individual by increasing their self-awareness of what options are available to them and what needs to be done to close the gap between where they are at present and where they want to be.
QUESTIONS TO ASK
- Have I created a high level of respect and trust in the relationship?
- Are we approaching the coaching on an equal footing?