The Five Minute Coach

Improve performance - rapidly

Lynne Cooper, Mariette Castellino

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781845908003
• eBook ISBN: 9781845908065
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Lynne Cooper is an accredited coach and coach supervisor who works with individuals, teams and organisations and has co-developed the FIVE-MINUTE Coach as a tool for busy managers to transform the way they - and their teams - work. She is the author of Business NLP for Dummies. Mariette Castellino is a coach, team coach and facilitator in the public, private and voluntary sectors. She is one of the pioneers of the application of Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling in organisations, she co-developed the FIVE-MINUTE Coach and is currently using it to facilitate new thinking in businesses as well as all kinds of communities.

Chapter 1

Meeting the Five-Minute Coach

Changing the results you get at work by learning how to coach in as little as five minutes starts here. In common with the way most skills are developed, you begin with learning the fundamentals of the process – the principles, the structure and the conventions of the Five-Minute Coach. Then you’ll be equipped to run a full coaching session this way and you can choose when to use selected Five-Minute Coach questions in everyday conversations to create change for good.

It doesn’t take long to learn the basics and get practising. Chapters 3–7 lead you through what you need to do at each stage, as well as how you can use the questions in everyday situations to change thinking, behaviours and performance in as little as five minutes!

The Five-Minute Coach is one of the most non-directive methods of coaching around. It works to people’s own strengths and work styles rather than imposing solutions and approaches. Even if you have coached before with other coaching styles and tools, you’ll find this approach intriguingly different. This way of coaching generates fast, sometimes unexpected, always interesting and effective results.

The people you coach may be surprised at first, when they realise that you will not advise or suggest solutions to them, or even challenge their ideas. However, they soon come to understand that this style of coaching is all about them taking responsibility for resolving problems and achieving goals. They quickly learn to think differently, use initiative and take ownership.

We frequently receive feedback from people coached in this way that it’s amazingly powerful. They love the way it helps them to think through things very thoroughly and make considered choices. They experience it as respectful, energising and incredibly practical. The practicality comes not only from the clear structured path mapped out to an outcome, but from the fact that they have personally designed that path built on their own beliefs, strengths and working styles. It works.

In this chapter we introduce you to the Five-Minute Coach framework, the questions, a little about how it works and the principles behind it.

The five stages

The Five-Minute Coach is comprised of a series of structured questions. It has five stages, each of which is described in detail in Chapters 3–7. Each stage has a purpose, as follows:

Creating an outcome – what a coachee desires or wants

Stage 1 – Identifying an outcome

Stage 2 – Choosing the best outcome

Stage 3 – Discovering more about the outcome

Creating an outcome is fundamental to the coaching process, so it’s the starting point for anyone presenting a problem rather than an outcome. For those who know what they want, and those who are now thinking about an alternative to a problem, Stages 2 and 3 ensure the best outcome is explored and developed.

Generating action

Stage 4 – Action planning

Stage 5 – Motivating to act

Knowing what you want is very different from having what you want. This second part of the Five-Minute Coach leads a coachee to create an action plan and find the motivation to actually get started on making things happen.

The Five-Minute Coach questions

The Five-Minute Coach process is quite short – and once you have some experience, quite straightforward. Each stage of the process has its own distinct set of questions, as you will see in the summary of the framework below. No more than five questions need to be learned to complete each of the five stages.

The questions all have some similarities in their format, so once you’ve practised this slightly unusual style of asking questions, it quickly becomes second nature to ask them in this way.

You’ll see that almost all the questions contain square brackets – to guide you as to which words change and which stay the same.

Stage	Purpose	Questions
1	Identifying an outcome	And what would you like to have happen?
2	Choosing the best outcome	And when [outcome in coachee’s words], then what happens? And when [last answer], then what happens? (Repeat question, with each answer, until no new answers emerge) And [outcome] and [recap all answers], what are you drawn to most?
3	Discovering more about the outcome	And when [new outcome], what kind of [word or phrase from outcome]? And when [last answer], is there anything else about [same word or phrase]? And when [last answer], where is/are [same word or phrase]? And when [last answer], whereabouts [last answer]? And [last answer]. Given what you now know, what would you like to have happen?
4	Action planning	And what needs to happen for [final outcome]? And is there anything else that needs to happen for [final outcome]? (Repeat question until you hear first ‘no’) And [final outcome and recap every action point], and is there anything else that needs to happen for [final outcome]? (Repeat question until you hear second ‘no’) And [final outcome and recap every action point], and what needs to happen first? And can [previous answer]?
5	Motivate to act	And when [first thing], then what happens? (Repeat until coachee is in a positive state and seems keen to act) And is that a good place to stop? (Hand over notes)

You can see that almost all of the questions are structured to include a coachee’s previous answer. You may also notice that there is no place in the questions for any assumptions or suggestions from the coach. Indeed there are no opportunities for you as the coach to ask clarifying questions to help your understanding. In this style of coaching you don’t need to understand! The questions are designed to help the coachee, rather than you, understand and discover things about their own thinking. As a result they are known as ‘clean’ questions – they don’t muddy the waters by introducing new thoughts to the coachee.

Here is an example. Your coachee says:

I feel less stressed.

You ask a question which uses only these words, just changing from ‘I’ to ‘you’:

And when you feel less stressed, then what happens?

You may ask, is it that simple? Well, yes! And out of this simplicity comes the elegance of minimal intervention with maximum impact. This book guides you carefully through the Five-Minute Coach questions and process. You’ll find out how to use each of the five stages in much more detail in chapters 3 – 7. Read the book, start experimenting and practise, practise, practise!

The story of ‘and’ and ‘when’

You’ll have noticed that every question you ask in the Five-Minute Coach begins with the word ‘and’. This tiny word tells another person that you hear and accept what he has just said. In most Five-Minute Coach questions you follow your ‘and’ with some of the coachee’s words. This helps the coachee to think more extensively about what ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• A True Story
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 : Meeting the Five-Minute Coach
• Chapter 2 : Getting Started
• Chapter 3 The Five-Minute Coach Stage 1 : Identifying an Outcome
• Chapter 4 The Five-Minute Coach Stage 2 : Choosing the Best Outcome
• Chapter 5 The Five-Minute Coach Stage 3 : Discovering More
• Chapter 6 The Five-Minute Coach Stage 4 : Action Planning
• Chapter 7 The Five-Minute Coach Stage 5 : Motivating to Act
• Chapter 8 : Dealing with the Unexpected
• Chapter 9 : Coaching in Action
• Chapter 10 : Building Your Skills
• Chapter 11 : Getting Results with the Five-Minute Coach
• Chapter 12 : Developing as a Coach
• Chapter 13 : Exploring Further Resources
• Appendix I: : The Five-Minute Coach Framework
• Appendix II: : Full Five-Minute Coach Example Transcript – Amira and Chris
• Appendix III: : Association for Coaching’s Code of Ethics and Good Coaching Practice
• References
• Index
• Copyright