Before becoming a practice consultant, I was the manager of a large GP practice for 11 years with around 50 staff and ten GP partners. After I left this practice, I decided to train as a performance coach so that I could offer coaching to colleagues in general practice as well as to family and friends. I’d already trained as a facilitator and coaching seemed a similar skill. Over the past 12 years, it’s been a privilege to coach many practice managers, GPs and other people outside general practice.

So what is coaching and how can you use these skills with your staff? And what are the benefits of being coached yourself?

Coaching others

There can be some misunderstanding about coaching and the term is sometimes interchanged with mentoring. Although both terms can be used in similar situations, for me there’s a distinct difference. Mentoring is more about showing people how to do things, through training or other instruction, and then giving them continued advice. It’s something we often do to help staff learn new skills. Coaching is more about encouraging someone to work out what they want to achieve and to help them find their own solutions without influencing them with your own ideas. Both mentoring and coaching are extremely useful in different situations. Many managers find mentoring to be second nature. However, managers can struggle when it comes to coaching as it requires letting go and encouraging the other person to find their own way of doing something. It also takes more time as it’s not a quick fix. Coaching is very useful to help develop another person’s confidence when there’s no right or wrong path, so long as an outcome is achieved. It’s more subtle and requires excellent listening skills. It also requires a sense of neutrality – so if it works for them, fine.

A coach will start by helping the other person identify what it is they want to achieve and by when. This creates the goal. The questions then turn to finding out about the reality of where they are now. Coaching questions are mostly open questions starting with how, what, when and who. Once the goal and the reality are established, the coach helps the person plan their steps to achieving the goal by identifying larger stepping stones and then breaking them down into smaller actions. A coach will ensure commitment from the person about what they’ll do and when they’ll do it. Coaches can offer suggestions, but should keep this to a minimum.

The following illustrates the difference between mentoring and coaching. Say, one of your team comes to you with a problem and asks you what to do. You know what you would do. A mentor would explain that and the team member would go away and do it. It’s a quick solution but it doesn’t encourage the team member to think for themselves and it doesn’t develop their confidence. It can also create an environment where people expect to be told what to do rather than working on their own initiative. A coaching approach would be to ask the team member what they think they should do. This would initiate a discussion where the manager keeps asking questions such as: What outcome are you trying to achieve? How will you measure success? What did you do last time? What have others done? Did it work? What would you like to happen? Who could help you? What resources are available? What would the benefits be of doing it this way? What might be the disadvantages? How do you feel about the problem now? What do you need from me? What’s stopping you? You can see how this takes longer, so it won’t be appropriate in every situation, but I’m sure you can also see how this helps your team member to develop their skills and confidence.

Some members of your team will resist a coaching approach, wanting to be told what to do, but with perseverance on your part this can be changed, especially if you explain that you’re trying to support them to make their own decisions.

Being coached

Most managers spend a lot of time developing, training, mentoring, coaching and helping others in the practice – the staff and often the GP partners – but they often miss out on being properly supported themselves.

Many practice managers find it difficult to focus on their own needs, putting others before themselves. The stressful pace of managing a practice and the responsibility can lead to a feeling of being out of control and an inability to see a way forward. Being able to talk this through with a non-judgemental coach provides clarity about the key areas that need to change and helps to create a road map to achieve that change. Coaching can be challenging as it breaks down limiting beliefs which are not serving the coachee whilst keeping the coachee on track to reach their goals. The results can be life-changing and truly inspiring.

A course of six coaching sessions is undertaken, usually over the phone at intervals of one or two weeks. The first session focuses on what the person wants to achieve, creating a really inspiring goal. Further sessions develop an action plan and reviewing actions. Sometimes the actions will be to improve self-confidence or perhaps to manage the behaviours of others. At every session, the coachee will review their goal and how much they’ve moved towards it.

The benefits of coaching include:

• Helping you to work out where you are at the moment in your life
• Identifying the important areas where you need to make changes
• Creating some exciting goals and helping you to achieve them
• Supporting and encouraging you to take action when needed
• Helping you to feel more in control of your life
• Helping you to become more positive
• Developing self-awareness and self-confidence
• Helping you to deal with situations rather than ignoring them
• Improving your work-life balance
• Helping you to do different things, or just to do what you do even better

Practice manager coaching can be funded by the practice as it’s recognised that it’s a useful resource for the manager’s personal development.

For further information about Patricia Gray’s coaching, click here

Patricia provided a few sessions of free coaching to ten Practice Index members during the lockdown period. To read their feedback, visit her page here