How to Get Coaching Feedback & How to Interpret and Apply It

Building a Coaching Culture - #113: Coaching Feedback === J.R. Flatter [00:00:42]: Hey. Welcome back, everybody. It's JR Flatter here with Lucas. How are you doing, Lucas? Pretty good. Before we get started, tell me what this, police officer thing is all about with Declan. Lucas Flatter [00:00:52]: He said, at school, I wanna be a police officer so I can put people in jail. And I was like, give me some more yeah. I was like, what is this about? And he was like, I wanna get bad guys. J.R. Flatter [00:01:12]: That is hilarious. Where did he get that from? Lucas Flatter [00:01:15]: I think that they were having people come into the school this week like firefighters and J.R. Flatter [00:01:22]: Oh, okay. Today, we're gonna jump into coaching feedback. I don't think it's a topic that we've discussed yet. We'll talk about it informally, formally, what the International Coaching Federation expects of us when we're giving you feedback, what we expect of our student coaches, and we're educating them. Any thoughts as we get started? Lucas Flatter [00:01:49]: I mean, I think it's something worth talking about because, like you said, we're kind of doing it in the live coach training in front, like, of people and and ad hoc context and also, you know, an ICF context? J.R. Flatter [00:02:04]: Yeah. So it's fresh on my mind. I was mentoring a few potential student coaches. Looks like they're gonna sign up this morning individually. And so I went through the 5 phases of and I set accreditation with them this morning. And I hope I don't have, you know, one of those moments where I can't remember the 5th, but education. So you need certain hours of education, which we provide. You need experience, and so you need certain levels of coaching experience. J.R. Flatter [00:02:33]: Entry level for both is 60 hours of education and a 100 hours of coaching for the associate certified coach. You need, performance evaluation, which we provide as part of our mentor coaching. You need mentor coaching, which we also provide. And then the final one that's independent of us and actually proctored by a third party, which is the International Coaching Federation coaches exam, which is proctored by a third party. Neither we nor the ICF get it between you and the proctor. And that was a a necessary change that the ICF made so that they could align themselves to the international accreditation standards and become an accredited, sounds redundant, but an accredited accreditation. But the formal performance evaluation that we give and that the ICF requires of us to say that you're ready to take the exam comes straight from a course that I took a couple of years ago on assessors. And so it's a formalized course of instruction on assessing other coaches. J.R. Flatter [00:03:51]: And if you send your recording and transcript into the ICF, one of their assessors, and they subcontract it out, will use the same format that we use. The same template looking for the same things. So we try to mirror as much as we can within our program. So as an ICF accredited program, we can assess, and the ICF asks us to give you a performance evaluation on your coaching. So currently, there are 2 different paths to an ICF accreditation. They've they've recently revamped the process. The first one and the hardest, in my opinion, is the portfolio path where you go find all of your education, your mentoring, and get your coaching hours independent of an accredited provider. And the reason it's the harder path is you have to first go find all of that instruction. J.R. Flatter [00:04:55]: Go find a mentor and have them someone give you a performance evaluation along the way. And then submit a recording and a transcript and have the ICF assess it, which takes, for the ICF's website, 18 to 24 month or weeks, not months. But still that's a long time to wait. If you go through an ICF accredited program such as ours, we affirm that you're ready because we watch all of your edge we provide all of your education. We provide your mentor, and we provide the performance evaluation. And we have privy to your coaching. We don't affirm your coaching, but we affirm that you've counted paid as paid and pro bono as pro bono. And then you simply apply and say you received all of that from a single provider. J.R. Flatter [00:05:49]: There are many others out there that do what we do. We think we do it better, but there are many others out there that you can submit through if you've received all of the above, all 4 of those. So your coaching, your education, your mentoring, your performance evaluation, all from the same provider. Then you don't need a transcript and you don't need a recording, and you'll receive your answer within 24 hours. So, really, it's a one stop shop convenience for you. But back to the performance evaluation. So you'll receive in your journey 10 hours of mentor coaching. And if you go through our program, you'll receive that 10 hours of mentor coaching from one of our mentors. J.R. Flatter [00:06:34]: We have about a dozen mentors at any given time providing mentor coaching. 7 of the of the 10 hours will be in group. There can only be 10 people in each mentor group. That's the maximum. So no more than 10. So that you're getting that close observation, and you're getting real time feedback in sessions. So every session we teach, they're usually an hour each. We have a focus experiential assignment. J.R. Flatter [00:07:06]: And for the mentor coaching, it's in session coaching with feedback from the mentor. So there's the mentor, perhaps 10 students, and the mentor will ask someone to be coached and someone to coach and then give real live feedback in that session from a mentor who's at least a PCC. Oftentimes, they're MCCs. So you're getting that kind of observation and that kind of real time feedback in session. But when you get into your one on ones, so of the 10 hours of mentor coaching, 7 can be in group and at least 3 must be 1 on 1. So when you get into the 1 on 1 sessions, it's just you and the mentor and whomever you invite to coach. And those usually last an hour, maybe a little more. And the ICF asks us to observe you coaching from anywhere to 20 to 60 minutes. J.R. Flatter [00:08:11]: And so we usually ask the coach to coach for a minimum of 30 minutes, and then they will get 30 minutes of immediate written and verbal feedback from the mentor who's been observing 1 on 1. And so this is really the closest opportunity that we have as a accredited program to watch you coach and give you feedback on your coaching. And we follow the same format that the ICF assessor would follow. You've probably heard us talk about the PCC markers before. So the ICF asks us in our education programs to assess you at a minimum level of PCC. Even if you're going for an ACC, they ask us, the education provider, to measure you at a PCC level. So we look at the PCC markers, which there are 8 competencies within, the ICF competencies. And within those 8 competencies, there are 40 plus markers that assessors watch for when you're coaching. J.R. Flatter [00:09:24]: And the competency is the definition of what we want to see, but the marker is the demonstration. And so how are you demonstrating building trust and safety, for example? Or how are you demonstrating creating awareness? Those are all buried in the markers. And as a trained assessor, your mentors are watching for those markers. Lucas Flatter [00:09:51]: On the 3 hours of 1 on ones, my understanding is the the coach will generally use the same person each time. Does that give you kind of an opportunity to look at more of an arc of the relationship over time with 1 individual, or is that important to have the same person each time? J.R. Flatter [00:10:13]: Yeah. Thanks for that question. Yeah. Absolutely. We do strongly recommend in those 3 one on one sessions that you invite the same leader to be coached each time? There's 2 components to this. 1, don't script it. Don't get together with a good friend and say, hey. I want you to come in. J.R. Flatter [00:10:34]: I'm gonna coach you for 30 minutes, and here's what we're gonna talk about, and here's what I want you to say. That's gonna be of no value to you, and your mentor is gonna see right through it. So invite someone. You know, we often say in in coaching instruction, you can coach anybody anywhere at any time on any topic because that's the skills you're learning. We also recommend when you do get a coach or when someone's trying to pick a coach, pick someone as different from them as as humanly possible because you don't want them pretending they know what it's like to be you. But I've seen very successful coaching between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, all configurations. Even in the military, a lot of our cohort are military commanding officers and their senior enlisted advisers. You just have to set the parameters at the beginning of the relationship to say when we're doing this, that we're peer to peer coaching and leader relationship. J.R. Flatter [00:11:37]: But you're right to point out the arc of the relationship. Because of the 8 competencies and the 40 plus markers within those competencies, it would be impossible in a single session to observe all of those markers. And the ICF doesn't expect that we're going to demonstrate all those markers in a single session. But across the arc of 3 sessions, and certainly across your practice as a coach, you should be demonstrating all of those markers and all of those competencies. Naturally, as a human being, you're gonna migrate to the ones that work best for you, the ones you're most comfortable with. But you need to strongly hesitate doing that, becoming you know, getting in a rut with your coaching, starting with the same question, navigating to the same competencies, demonstrating the same markers. Competency 2, I think, if I'm remembering correctly, asks us to be reflective and have a growth mindset as a coach. So you need to reflect on your coaching, and that's what we're trying to provide in these in session feedback. J.R. Flatter [00:12:57]: So even in regular sessions, we have a couple of Eric's experiential assignments that promulgate feedback. And so in any session, whether it's mentored coaching, whether it's live coach training, whether it's part of a boot camp, you're in one of 3 roles always. You're the coach. You're the leader being coached. In one of the more important roles, you're the coach of the coach. So at any minute, you're gonna be asked to provide feedback, and we call it 1 and one feedback. One thing you loved and one thing you thought have might have been done better or they could improve upon. And the reason it's 1 and 1 is we don't wanna get into a lovefest and say, man, you're so magnificent. J.R. Flatter [00:13:45]: We, as coaches of the coach, need to be able to pick up on good coaching. Another thing that the ICF competencies ask us to do is be collaborative. And so to this day, I have several coaches from all over the world that I regularly reach out to to ask them for feedback. They've got this particular topic, always maintaining confidentiality and the anonymity of the person that I am coaching, but nonetheless, reaching out to another coach to get that kind of feedback. So feedback is a gift, and feedback is something you could you should continuously seek. But in session, we do 3 questions with 1 on 1 feedback. So as a coach, you'll get to ask 3 questions, and then the next person gives you 1 and one feedback, and then they ask 3 questions. So feedback's built in. J.R. Flatter [00:14:45]: Another experiential assignment we regularly do is one question and what was your hypothesis? So you ask one question, and then we ask you as a group, what were you trying to discover with that question or with that observation? So feedback is built in to the every fiber of, our education programs. But back to the, 1 on 1 sessions that you'll have with your mentor, 2 practice performance evaluations and one final performance evaluation. All you coaching one person that you've invited, hopefully, the same person all three times so that we can observe the arc of a relationship for 3 sessions. And competencies 1 and 2, as we're looking at the competencies, ethics and core values and competency 1, and then competency 2, a coaching mindset. All of those are a yes or an both of those are a yes or a no. Is if I'm your assessor, I'm either observing them or I didn't see them. I either observed you being ethical and following the core values or I didn't. I either saw you in a coaching mindset or I didn't. J.R. Flatter [00:16:07]: The others have anywhere from 4 markers to 9 markers each within them, then I'm looking for evidence that you're following each of them. And so I'll I'll dig into competency 3 first because it's the baseline of the session, and it's the baseline of a relationship. And so if you don't set that baseline, it's going to be very challenging for you to have a strong session. Lucas Flatter [00:16:39]: I'm curious if there's ever situations where or I guess just advice in a situation where maybe you get some negative feedback and how do you bounce back from that and how's the resilience kind of built into this? J.R. Flatter [00:16:55]: Yeah. That's a great question. We tend to think about feedback as being negative. Right? That's why we use 1 and 1. We do wanna hear what you did well. Because most people relatively quickly pick up on a coaching mindset, pick up on the ethics and core values, pick up on laying a baseline and having a heart of a session, and then closing it appropriately, not to leave the leader hanging. But also, everyone starts at 0. And so there's lots of room for improvement. J.R. Flatter [00:17:31]: Even after coaching for years, I have tons of room for improvement. I'm currently pursuing my MCC, and so I will enroll in an MCC mentor coaching relationship. Because I know I have a lot to learn in order to kick my coaching to the MCC level. So you have to remember that feedback's a gift. You have to purposely seek it out either in an audience or the privacy of a 1 on 1 conversation with another coach. And I learned from one of my mentors many, many years ago, doesn't matter how much you disagree with the feedback. There's probably a hint of learning in there for you. And so whenever I get feedback and I disagree with it, my initial response is, well, that's ridiculous. J.R. Flatter [00:18:23]: Then when I really slow down, use my slow brain, not my fast brain, as Daniel Kahneman talks about, I I start to see hints of learning in there and, you know, recognition that, yeah, I don't know it all. And I still have a long way to go. You used the word resilience. Yeah. You need tons of resilience to be a coach because every question you bring into the room is an informed guess. And learning to accept, no. That's not really what I said, or that's not really where I was thinking. It's just part of the the methodology, and it's actually buried in the competencies. J.R. Flatter [00:19:06]: Are you seeking feedback from the leaders you're coaching on your methods? Are they working for you? Are we getting where we need to go? And so you're asked very explicitly to solicit feedback. But just as a a leader with a growth mindset, you need to elicit feedback purposefully, regularly, and accept it as the gift that it is. Yeah. So thanks for that question. So I have the assessor form opened right here. I'm just gonna start walking through it a little bit. So most of the markers, and I'm looking at company c 3, company c 4, 5, 6, and 7. Of all the markers, the majority of them are one observation. J.R. Flatter [00:19:52]: Marks off that marker. Some of them require a minimum of 2 observations to count it. It doesn't mean that you failed the session. It just means that that marker wasn't observed in that session. And you'll probably hear about it in your feedback. So when we're assessing you and preparing to give you feedback, we're watching the clock. So right now, it's 3:1 after after the hour. And anybody who listens to our podcast knows we talk in minutes because we teach all over the globe. J.R. Flatter [00:20:25]: And so if you if I observed a marker and you were doing a practice session, I would mark on the form at what time did I observe and then a a note as to why it was either a marker that was observed or a contra marker. And a contra marker means you violated that marker. So one of them is that you shouldn't interrupt. And so if at the end of the session, I didn't see you interrupt, I'm gonna mark that. But if I did see you interrupt, I'm gonna mark the time. I'm gonna provide you feedback on that with the time in the session and and what I observed. So back to competency 3, laying that baseline, competency 3 dot 1, sort of 4 markers in 3, is the baseline of the entire session. So if you don't lay that down, you can't have an 8 dot one. J.R. Flatter [00:21:19]: I know it sounds overly academic. But 8 dot 1, when you get to it, is actually checking on how did we do if we said what we were gonna do. And if that happens, you don't fail because your leader might say, I don't know. I just need someone to listen to me. And that's completely acceptable for a session or maybe 2. But if I observe that, I'm gonna give you feedback. You know, 2 sessions in a row, you haven't laid a baseline. And there's several components to the baseline. J.R. Flatter [00:21:50]: 1 is, what is it you think is the best use of our time? What is it and then what would success look like? That's the second component. By the time we're done, what would that look like? The third component is, what about this is important to you as a human being? And then the 4th, what are some obstacles that might be between us and that envision success? So I'm looking for all 4 of those, and I'm gonna give you feedback if I don't observe all 4 of them. I want you to stay in competency 3 a little longer than you're comfortable because it is so important to this session. Then 4, 5, 6, and 7, for me, competencies are the heart of a session. And so I'm looking really closely. Once I've seen you establish the baseline or you haven't, but you've moved into 4, 5, 6, and 7, I'm gonna be watching really closely and giving you strong feedback on these markers. Are you adapting? Are you supporting? Are you responding? And are you creating new awareness? That's what 4, 5, 6, and 7 are all about for me anyway as an assessor giving you feedback. So you're gonna spend a lot of time in 4, 5, 6, and 7. J.R. Flatter [00:23:08]: You're gonna lay a strong foundation. You're gonna spend a lot of time at 4, 5, 6, and 7. And then you're gonna watch the clock, and the clock's never our friend. I just looked at it right now to see where we're at in this podcast. And you're gonna have to start closing. We call that the beyond. How are you looking beyond the session in your coaching? And there's several necessary elements. The first that we've talked about is revisiting the opening. J.R. Flatter [00:23:38]: Did you set a good baseline, and did you accomplish what you said you were going to accomplish? And you may not have it. It might not be your fault. Because the leader is in charge, and they can do and say whatever they'd like. And you're gonna follow their lead. Accountability. How are they going to hold themselves accountable is looking beyond. One absolutely essential component of looking beyond is what do you know now that you didn't know when we started this session? We don't force ourselves as an accountability partner, but certainly an option as the coach. And a lot of the close looking beyond is engaging the human brain and using it the way that it naturally works. J.R. Flatter [00:24:26]: And so you don't ask, did you learn something? You ask, what did you learn? You don't ask, is there an opportunity for you to be accountable? You ask, how are you going to be accountable? And so I'm looking for all those nuances when I'm evaluating you. And so when the session's done, after 30 minutes or so, we'll send your volunteer leader home, and then you and the mentor will talk for 30 minutes. And everything they say they've written down, and they will email you, or they'll send it to our team, and our team will email it to you. So you have written feedback. And then you'll also have verbal recorded feedback because you have the opportunity to record this. We're gonna give you 30 minutes of verbal feedback. And it's 1 and 1, things that the assessor loved and things that the assessor thought you could do better on. And that one on one is actually embedded in the assessor form. J.R. Flatter [00:25:28]: The final question on the assessor form well, not the final bit. Next, the final question is which competency did you think they did especially well in? And which which company do you think they need additional attention on? And then we have the opportunity as the assessor to write a paragraph or 2 on what we saw. I usually take anywhere from 2 to 3 pages of notes in each session. And so I have 2 to 3 pages of feedback for you that I'm gonna send you. But also we're gonna talk about it, and you'll have the opportunity to contribute and ask questions. The final final is, did this coach pass or did they not pass? By the time you get to mention coaching, by the time you get to your 3rd one on one session, you're gonna be ready. The further down that road we go, the the crisper our feedback gets, the more particular we get because you need to know where the gaps in your coaching are. We're gonna be gracious and kind, but we're gonna give you strong feedback because you deserve it. J.R. Flatter [00:26:42]: The leaders that you go out into the into the wild and coach deserve it. Lucas Flatter [00:26:47]: Yeah. And you mentioned that it's, you know, useless to try to, like, pre engage with your leader that you're you wanna coach in the evaluation, and then it's pretty clear why. Like, you it's hard to try to say that you evoked awareness when, you know, it's it's not actually happening in real time. Is that client, like, the mentor coach and their client leader, do they often choose other coaches or is it, you know, people that just might need coaching? I'm thinking about do those people then go seek coaching afterwards in in some cases? J.R. Flatter [00:27:26]: Yeah. That's a great question. There there's a couple components to my answer. One would be the requirement and the other would be the practicality. The ICF requires that it be a real coaching session in a real coaching relationship. And so when I say don't script it, that doesn't mean it couldn't be in the middle of the arc of your relationship. And that you know each other fairly well by then, and you you're well into the arc. You know, some of the challenges they have, even though we come into each session with a blank chalkboard and an empty table, we still have history together when we're in the middle of that arc. J.R. Flatter [00:28:02]: It could be a brand new coaching relationship where it's session 1 in session, you know, 1 of 1 on 1 feedback. Certainly, I would encourage you prior to the first one on 1 to have the precoaching conversation that we always have and put a coaching agreement in place. It says, here are the parameters of coaching. Here are the ethics and core values of coaching. We're gonna be peer to peer. Here are the lines in the sand between counseling and therapy and coaching, clergy, law enforcement, talking about all of that before they get into the coaching room. You don't want it to be completely unaware of the relationship they're about to enter into, which is very different than scripting. And so the answer to the second part of your question, a lot of the one on ones, the partnerships come in knowing each other, having been in a coaching relationship already. J.R. Flatter [00:29:00]: But a lot of them come in, it's their first session of their relationship. Both work. It depends on your comfort level as the student coach. Are you comfortable starting a coaching relationship in front of me? Or would you be more comfortable coming in front of a 1 on 1 mentor in the middle of a relationship? If you don't have a strong relationship, being too intimately familiar with your leader might inhibit your coaching. If you can't have Frank open in the discussions with the leader that you're bringing into the room, be it your life partner, be it your brother, a coworker, the ICF doesn't allow us to coach direct reports in formal coaching relationships. And I kind of see the rationale there. There's a potential conflict of interest. But then on the other hand, they ask us to be ethical. J.R. Flatter [00:29:57]: So that's one that I'm kind of on the fence about, but that's the rules as we stand. But anybody in your workplace, absolutely, you can coach. You can coach as a style of leadership, and I would strongly encourage you to do that. But in the 1 on 1 sessions, it can't be a direct report. I don't know if that answered your question or not. Lucas Flatter [00:30:16]: Yeah. Totally. I think it's interesting how somebody might choose somebody. So I think that gives some background. J.R. Flatter [00:30:22]: Yeah. I've seen that. As I said earlier, I've seen very successful coaching relationships with people who knew each other very well. A husband and wife come to mind, but they have the strength of relationship that would make it valuable. I've also seen it not work. When you're in your mentor coaching, we get feedback from our mentors to us. Hey. This person's struggling. J.R. Flatter [00:30:47]: And I think it's because of the leader they've brought into the room that they can't have genuine coaching conversations. And then, you know, we figure out what to do about that. You know, they don't share any of the confidentiality of the conversations. But the fact that they're struggling is something we wanna know and take action on. Alright. Any parting thoughts as we head out? Lucas Flatter [00:31:10]: No. I mean, I think there's always some apprehension or anxiety around what do I have to do to get this certification. And I think this tackles one of the big of the 5 that we mentioned. So it's good stuff. J.R. Flatter [00:31:25]: Roger that. We'll see you soon. Well, that concludes this episode of building a coaching culture.