Faculty Coaching Skills - Part 2

We have pivoted from our blog on physician coaching and moved onto faculty using coaching skills. Last week, we walked through an overview of the coaching skills to incorporate as faculty and covered the first Creating a Safe Space. Today, we move on to Deep Listening and Developing Awareness.

As mentioned last week, most of you as faculty already have many of the skills needed to coach your residents – especially in skills-based or performance-based topics. It’s much like motivational interviewing skills. I want to push you more towards creating space for your resident to explore their perceptions and ideas in order to gain both the skill and the confidence to utilize metacognitive skills and stop over-relying on others for advice – especially in the more developmental areas. I will continue to highlight the aspects that may feel new, challenging, or uncomfortable.

Skill Outline:

• Create a Safe Space
• Deep Listening
• Develop Awareness
• Partner to Define/Design Progress
• Assist Internalization of Learning
• Assist Accountability Plan

Deep Listening. In addition to the coaching topic itself, initially make room to ask what’s going well and build the relationship as coaching is a relational activity – a partnered conversation supporting the educational alliance.

What does listening deeply mean? Well, some of these are basic but worth calling attention to:

• You want to be fully present.
• Talk less. (The old adage about having 2 ears and one mouth that my mom used to implore fits here.)
• Listen, not to judge, respond, or problem-solve. This is hard as we are problem solvers and to solve problems, we listen to define the problem.
• Listen instead to understand the person—not the problem—their experience and thinking. Focusing on understanding your trainee as you deeply listen will make it easier not to become problem-focused. When we become problem-focused, we become problem-solving advice-givers, robbing the residents of the opportunity to reflect and find solutions and strategies within themselves that may be a better fit.

Develop Awareness.

It may initially feel that if you aren’t helping solve the problem, you aren’t accomplishing anything. However, assisting the residents in seeing how they are thinking about a situation, finding broader perspectives or shifts, and self-directing empowers them to become Master Adaptive Learners, supporting them for the length of their careers.

So how can you help them make new connections in their minds? The following are helpful:

• Reflect back what they are saying. So often, when you give their words back to them they land differently. It’s not unusual have a coachee say, “that’s a great idea” – when I repeat what they said. It’s like they didn’t realize it was their idea until I point it out. Our brains are wild places.
• As quality questions – Open-ended, Not leading, What & How are you best coaching question starters.
• Suspending your own agenda for the conversation and not trying to problem-solve make it easier to avoid asking leading questions.
• Remaining curious, rather than making assumptions, also supports quality questions
• Clarify meanings – What does “efficient mean to you,” “What do you mean by make a difference.” So often we use terms in a general sense, but we can deepen our understanding by defining terms for ourselves.
• Silence – yes, I know it is helpful in listening, but also creating time for their minds to make new discoveries with silence also supports developing their awareness.
• Framing and Reframing is useful. “It sounds like you took an action that aligns with a core value of yours, what do you think?” “What would you say to a friend and colleague in the same situation?”

That’s all for this week. Next week, we will take on the next coaching skills and highlight where many of the more unnatural approaches will appear. 

Until then, have a joy-filled week!  Tonya

Residency programs can benefit from our Flagship 6-session hybrid coaching course for residents or faculty groups. Learn more here https://www.joyinfamilymedicine.com/residency-programs