Now that you’re transitioning from managing your employees to coaching them, it’s time to talk about your coaching style. As a leader, what kind of coach are you?

Or, more accurately, what coaching style do you need to use with each of your team members? Just like you probably have a coaching style you’re most comfortable with, each of them also has a style of being coached that’s most effective for them.

As an outside leadership coach, I can often match a coach and a coachee based on their styles. You don’t have that flexibility. You have to coach the people who report to you, so as a leader and a coach, you may have to get comfortable with different styles of coaching.

Compare it to parenting — you may have two different kids who respond very different to the same parenting approaches. That’s how it was for me. I was the same parent for both of my kids, but I couldn’t parent them the same way due to their differences.

So let’s talk about the most common coaching styles, when to use them, and what techniques you can incorporate to be the most effective.

See: The Coaching Process: Coaching Your Team

Autocratic coaching style

Ever had a personal trainer or a nutritionist?

They most likely used an autocratic coaching style. “Here’s a regimen, and I’ll work with you on your adherence to that regimen.”

The autocratic coaching style is particularly useful for team members who are inexperienced and lack confidence or who are very passive. Often, they need a framework so they can build up their confidence.

From the team member’s standpoint, a framework provides a structure that lets them know where they are in the process. They can begin to build their trust in themselves by trusting the process you’ve created for them. Each time they reach the next step in the framework, they see they’re making progress. They gain a little confidence.

This technique was used very effectively on me when I went rappelling on a family vacation. I’ve written about the experience before.

My family and I went on a rappelling outing while on vacation in West Virginia. The kids would go down first. I thought knowing my children had already rappelled and were at the bottom of the mountain would be enough to overcome my fear of heights. I was wrong.

Instead, I was frozen at the edge of the cliff, my knees buckling.

Nothing the guide did or said could get me to back up to the cliff, sit and push back. Until he broke everything down into the smallest possible microsteps. Turn around. Move your left foot back a half step. Bend your right knee. And on.

With every step back toward the edge of that mountain, I was closer to my goal of getting down the mountain.

The guide couldn’t focus on the end game because the fear of the outcome was what kept me from moving. So instead he gave me a single instruction at a time — microsteps — a prescription for what to do next.

Laissez faire coaching style

The other end of the spectrum from the autocratic coaching style is the laissez faire coaching style.

It’s just what it sounds like. You as the coach provide very little direction and mostly let the coachee guide the process.

As you may guess, I work with many clients who are highly dominant. They often just want to talk.

My job as a coach is to nudge them forward so their talking becomes productive. It’s like you have a cannon, and you just have to aim it in the right direction and light the fuse with your question. Then you let it explode.

How?

With loaded, open-ended questions. Say I notice that a particular leader is having trouble retaining employees, perhaps because of their dominant, autocratic style. I may just throw out an open-ended question: I’m seeing a lot of my clients have excessively high attrition right now. What are you seeing in your organization?

If I’m getting feedback that an employee is struggling with other employees, I might just say, Tell me about your relationship with your peers.

While coaching is never therapy, the laissez faire coaching style can be very therapeutic. Especially for higher-level employees, their coaching needs may be more about having a space to talk through their ideas and issues rather than to be guided through a particular set of goals.

This isn’t to say that goals aren’t important — they do anchor the coaching relationship. For this type of coaching style, we’re using questions to facilitate movement in the direction of their goal, perhaps without a specific path.

See: All Employees Should Have a Professional Development Plan. Do Yours?

Democratic coaching style

What if you have an entry-level employee who’s over-confident and has a dominant personality?

You can’t be autocratic — they wouldn’t respond well. And you can’t be laissez faire — they need more guidance, even if they don’t realize it.

That’s when the democratic coaching style comes into play. It’s what people most often think of when they think of coaching.

As the coach, you work with your team member to set some goals, figure out what their path is, hold them accountable, talk about their progress, and give them feedback.

An interview-style technique works well in the democratic coaching style. You come with a set of prepared questions and actively listen to the responses. Then you ask follow-up questions about the answers you heard. You can control the outcome to some extent with the questions you ask, but you have to be listening carefully.

The democratic coaching style is heavily anchored in setting goals and creating paths to meeting those goals.

Accountability is also a key element, so you’ll check in and provide feedback along the journey. You’re not holding them accountable in a managerial way. Instead, you’re helping your team member learn accountability by being the person who knows whether they do what they say they’re going to do.

The coachee takes responsibility, and the coach helps them validate those decisions with an outside-in unemotional voice.

See: These Are the Four Things You Need to Develop Your Leadership Team

Holistic coaching style

The holistic coaching style is focused not only on the coachee as a professional but also as a person.

I do a lot of holistic coaching with my clients because I work with business owners, and they need alignment between the visions for both their company and their personal life.

Inside a workplace, though, it’s not always as appropriate. If someone is my direct report, I care about them as an individual, and I have to be careful about making it personal.

We have to account for our team members’ personal lives, but we shouldn’t get involved in them or coach them. If one of your employees has a demanding child at home that’s distracting them in their work-from-home setting, you’re not going to give them parent coaching. You have to focus on the work and professional elements of the issue.

I admit it can be a fine line, especially if you see something getting in their way.

What do you do? Well, if one of your team members has a personal obstacle that inhibits their effectiveness — say they have narcissistic tendencies — your role is not to coach them to be less narcissistic. You can’t change their personality.

What you can do is nudge them toward identifying specific behaviors that are reducing their effectiveness at work and make a plan to address those behaviors.

In situations where I really believe a coachee needs additional support, I might guide them toward an employee assistance program.

The good news is that most people’s personal lives don’t get in the way of effective workplace coaching. In fact, I’ve seen many clients organically apply the coaching they get in a business setting to their personal lives.

I’ve done it myself. When I was getting leadership coaching in my career, no one was trying to teach me how to be a better parent or a kinder person. That didn’t keep me from bringing what I learned into those contexts. It helped me to evolve to become a better person, a more effective human being holistically.

Final thoughts

In my recent article on giving feedback as a coach, I shared a variety of techniques that are useful in the coaching process. Establishing a rapport with your team member and remembering to offer consistent feedback — positive as well as negative — are critical tools for any coaching style. They’ll look different depending on your style and who you’re working with.

I’ve also effectively coached clients using techniques that come from neuro linguistic programming. NLP obviously doesn’t do all the things its creators claimed. Even so, some of the techniques continue to be useful when you’re coaching — like checking in with your coachee and paraphrasing what they said or reframing an issue in a more positive light.

Keep in mind that the style you use to coach a particular individual may need to change over time as they evolve. For instance, if they become more confident, they may benefit from a democratic rather than an autocratic style.

If you want to learn to better coach your team, contact us to find out how we can support your goals.