No time to coach? Five minutes is all you need

Coaching: isn’t that always a matter of hours? From a few sessions to entire coaching programs that take weeks or months? Nothing could be further from the truth: coaching can happen almost anytime and anywhere, and it doesn’t have to be time-consuming. Discover how just a few minutes of your focused attention can make a difference.

Misunderstanding coaching

It all starts with understanding what coaching really is. Despite the volumes written about it, there can still be confusion.

Coaching is not advising. It’s not about listening to your conversation partner, analyzing, and then proposing your own solutions. That’s advising, relying on your own expertise.

Coaching is about getting the other person to think. Asking the right questions to draw them out, engaging their brain, and supporting their learning. Learning, not in the narrow academic sense, but as in applying what you know, being open to new ideas, relational learning, and adopting new attitudes.

A practical example

Recently, business manager Nancy came to us with a dilemma. One of her teams of commercial advisors wasn’t securing enough appointments to meet their ambitious targets. When she confronted them, the response was simply: “Too busy!”

Initially, Nancy proposed several solutions, asked where things were going wrong, and gave advice. Unfortunately, this didn’t yield the desired results: the appointment book remained too empty for her liking.

Nancy could have taken a more coaching approach. In a short conversation, she could have prompted her team to think for themselves:

• What exactly are you busy with?
• Who sets the priorities?
• How would focusing more on calls help?
• What has worked in the past to secure more appointments?
• What are you dreading?
• What could help make it less daunting?
• Where are you stuck?
• What would be the first step to get unstuck?
• What other ways can you think of to secure more appointments?

A coaching approach focuses on finding solutions and seeing possibilities rather than dwelling on problems and the past. Guiding her team to find their own good solution would literally take just five minutes.

Are five minutes always enough?

Of course not. We don’t want to give the impression that coaching is always a quick fix for all problems. However, we firmly believe that you don’t need more than five minutes to take the first step.

That first step can be a quick scan, helping you decide whether a follow-up meeting is needed to delve deeper or to direct your focus more positively. And yes, sometimes you can solve the problem in just five minutes.

Practical: How to coach in five minutes

There are many good structures, but the NLP coaching model below is a great guide.

CURRENT SITUATION

• What do you want to move away from?
• What are you struggling with?
• What do you want to strengthen?
• What do you want more of?

DESIRED SITUATION

• What do you want instead?
• What would you like to achieve?
• What result do you want?

BLOCK/RESOURCE

• What’s holding you back?
• Who or what can help you?
• What do you need?

MOTIVATION

• What will it bring you?
• What would it do for you?
• If it works out, what will you see?

ACTION

• What do you need to do?
• What’s the first step you’ll take?
• How will you concretely approach this?

Use this model as inspiration for both short and long coaching sessions, but don’t get stuck on it! It’s like baking a cake: all the ingredients need to be in the bowl, but not necessarily in the same, fixed order.