Hi, it’s Stacey Ashley with another workplace coaching tip for you.
Today, it’s all about how to look for opportunities to improve, to learn, to grow. Now, for some people that might be called feedback. But this is another way of being able to assess your own performance or you could actually use it in conversations with others just to see what you could do better.
There’s two stages to this process and the first stage is a little bit of reflection. Reflection, and it could be about a project, it could be about just a piece of work that was done, it could be about doing a presentation, is just to reflect on ‘what went well’.
I find that starting here really helps people to move into a positive place. To reflect on what went well is a great thing to do because we don’t do enough of it. We don’t give ourselves acknowledgement for the effort that we’ve made, the successes that we’ve had, we often just tend to go straight into the oh this didn’t work or I could have done that better.
Let’s really focus firstly on reinforcing the things that did go well because we can learn from that. Of course, we can do more of that going forward so that’s the first part. We can obviously self-assess or we can ask somebody else what went well.
Then the second part, rather than going on what didn’t go well or what was bad or those sorts of things, is let’s ask the question in a slightly different way. Actually, what I’m going to ask when I work with people is I’m going to ask them to finish this statement ‘it would be even better if….’ and then they finish the statement.
I find by using that approach, even better if, it keeps people in that positive place, that resourceful place that we started with when we used the ‘what went well’. For my resourceful place, then we’re looking for opportunities for the future to make things even better. For me, when people come up with those ideas they really own them because, firstly, they’ve generated them or if I’m self-coaching I’ve generated them. They get excited about the opportunity that’s presented to them, which is really, really different I guess from a traditional feedback technique.
The two stages, what went well, great reflection, and even better if, options and opportunities for the future.
Try that out and I’d love to hear how you go.
AND: Whenever you’re ready… here are 4 ways I can help you grow your coaching and leadership:
