Carla Miller [00:00:02]:
Hi. Welcome to the influence and impact podcast for women leaders, and thanks for tuning in. I have a super practical episode for you today because we all know that we should be coaching our teams, but it's hard to know how to actually do that without going on a coaching for managers course until now. In this week's episode, I interviewed Jude Slater about her book, think like a coach. Now I have been recommending this book to all of my coaching clients. I think every manager should read it because it's a wonderfully practical step by step guide that you can use to become a more coach like manager. Jude simplifies coaching for us, defining it as giving someone your attention whilst they think out loud. And she emphasizes the importance of listening and asking questions.

Carla Miller [00:00:55]:
So I made sure in this interview to get some of her juiciest best practical tips so that you can listen to this podcast and immediately go out there and implement some of these really simple, but super effective coaching tools with your team members. So Jude is gonna share her three principles to help you become more coach like with your team. We're gonna talk about when to coach your team and when not to coach your team because there are times when coaching isn't the right approach. Jude shares her 2 step approach, which is gonna get you coaching straight away. And we also talk about the role of psychological safety, how this links to coaching, and the number one step that you can take to create psychological safety in your team. Finally, we talk about how you can coach in 5 minutes or less. That's right. You don't have to sit there and set aside an hour in order to be coach like with your team.

Carla Miller [00:01:56]:
And we talk about how you can support a team member experiencing strong emotions because I know that that's something that many of us are quite sure what we're supposed to do to handle that. My name is Carla Miller. I'm a leadership coach, author, and trainer, and this is the influence and impact podcast for women leaders, helping you confidently navigate the ups and downs of leadership and feel less alone on your journey as a leader. In fortnightly episodes, I share practical tools and insights from myself and my brilliant guests that will help you to succeed in your career. Now, a little bit more about Jude. Jude is a coach, an author, and a trainer. Over 20 years, she has worked in audit, project management, and learning and development for large companies such as Deloitte, Pearson, and Penguin Books. She draws on this vast experience to coach and train managers from consulting, legal, and financial service industries, guiding them from individual contributor to great team managers.

Carla Miller [00:02:56]:
And I'm sure you'll agree that that's a journey that we all have to go on at some point from really focusing on what we, as an individual, contribute and bring and how we get things done and how we deliver through a team, how we build a great team. So I think this is really, really important stuff. So I'm really excited to share this episode with Jude with you. Now just a quick heads up, if you enjoyed this, if you want to find out more about working with me, I would love to have a chat to you. I have a number of different programs, number of different ways to work with you whether as an individual or in your organization. You can always jump on a call with me and have a chat about how I might best be able to help you. So you can always just head over to my website, carlamiller.co.uk, and book a call to chat there. So if you are sitting on the fence thinking, oh, I've been thinking about getting a coach for ages, or, oh, I've been thinking about going on a training course.

Carla Miller [00:03:57]:
I don't know which is the right one for me. Let's have a chat. I love getting to know podcast listeners, and I will happily signpost you to either the best thing that I offer for you. Or if I can recommend someone else that's a better fit, then I will happily do so. Okay. Let's roll this episode, and let's get you growing your coaching skills as a manager. Hi, Jude. Welcome to the podcast.

Carla Miller [00:04:25]:
I'd love to start by hearing a little bit about you and why is you're so passionate about the role of coaching within the workplace.

Jude Slater [00:04:34]:
Oh, absolutely. And Carla, thank you so much for inviting me on, as well. I think my passion came from my first experience of coaching. So I had a 30 minute session, it was a free session with a a coach who was using that as a way to to get more clients. And I was trying to make a really massive decision between staying in New Zealand and continuing my role at Deloitte or moving to the UK. And I had been agonizing over this decision for months months and 20 minutes with this coach, and I had my answer. And I was super confident about it and I knew exactly what it was that I wanted to do and that was to to come over to the UK and I couldn't believe it. How could months months of indecision have been solved in 20 minutes? And I think just that experience sort of stayed with me and I got kind of quite curious about that.

Jude Slater [00:05:29]:
And it's something that I wanted to be able to do for other people. And now I'm at a stage where it's something where I want to help other people be able to do that for their teams.

Carla Miller [00:05:39]:
Now in your excellent book, you share your own definition of coaching and three principles. And I thought it would be really useful if you could share that with the listeners.

Jude Slater [00:05:49]:
Yeah. So I define coaching as giving someone your attention while they think out loud and asking questions to help them discover their own solutions to act on. And it's that last little piece around discovering their own solutions to act on that I think really sums up the essence of coaching. It's it's about helping somebody else really think through, what's going on for them at the moment because you're always gonna be more energetic about a solution that you come up with first. And so the the three principles really support that. So the the first one is listen, don't fix. And this is one of those ones where I think a lot of people will recognize sometimes you just want to vent to someone, just talk through what's going on. And it is so frustrating when that person then jumps in and tries to fix that problem, for you.

Jude Slater [00:06:40]:
And yet that's kind of what we try to do, when somebody does comes to us with with an issue that they're grappling with. So the first thing to remember if you're taking this sort of coach like approach is just listen to what someone is saying. So many of us are used to being interrupted while we're talking and so just having that space to be able to really finish a thought and and to be able to get out everything that's been going on. Often someone will come up with their own solution just in the act of doing that, and as a manager what that does is it sends a message to your team member that their thinking is important and that you value the things that they've got to say. So it can be a really great way to build that psychological safety and that relationship, with your team, which then sort of follows on quite nicely to the the next principle, which I call Ask First, Tell Last. And throughout our lives, we're really used to being told what to do, like you would have been told what to do, in childhood, at school, and the jobs that you've had. So when you become a manager, the logical thing is you just tell everybody what to do. Right? But what that does is it makes your team reliant on you.

Jude Slater [00:07:54]:
They're not consciously thinking this, but there'll be a piece of, well, why should I think for myself or come up with the answer myself when I can go to you, my manager, and you're just going to tell it to me? And it makes my life so much easier. So really, this principle is about about just interrupting that sort of natural helping part of yourself that just wants to tell people what to do and instead just ask some questions. Get them talking a little more. It's a little bit like sort of what you're trying to replicate here is when those times when you might have had a problem, you couldn't work it out. You were trying to work out the answer. So then you go and talk to a friend or a colleague. And as you're saying sort of talking through the problem, the answer pops out in your head. Right? And and part of the reason that happens is that you're processing that information in a different way.

Jude Slater [00:08:49]:
First, you were thinking about it in your head, and now you're saying it out loud. So just in that different way of processing that information, often the the solutions that are going to be right for you will come up. So as a manager, if you can just ask a few more questions and keep that person talking and thinking, they might not need to get the answer from you. The other thing is that it also means that what they do come up with isn't influenced by anything that you might have to say, as well. So even if you have a really flex structure, you get on really well with your team, actually you're more like kind of friends than that sort of hierarchical manager employee sort of structure. The thing is there is still an authority gap in there, right, and you are still the manager. So the things you say are gonna hold a little more weight and it will color and influence the thinking of your team members. So by asking them questions first, you get a much better understanding of what's going on with them.

Jude Slater [00:09:55]:
And as the manager, you're always going to have an opportunity to give your opinion, but just hold it back for a little bit longer. The 3rd principle, in the book, I call it your team member leads the conversation. Carla, I don't know if you had this experience with your book, but now I've written it. There's all these little bits where I'm like, oh, I could have called it this or I should have tried this example in instead. So I'm now calling this, but you follow, they lead, which I think is a little bit a bit snappier. But what I mean here is when you're having a coach like conversation, and it it links back to what I was saying before that as the manager, if you're starting, if you're telling people what to do, then their thinking and the actions are likely to take are going to be influenced by that. And so what you can do is just keep in your mind that you're letting your team member lead all of that thinking, and I'll give you sort of an example of what I mean by that because I think of all the principles, this is the one that sometimes is, harder to kind of get your head around. So when you're asking questions, it's quite common for us to use what I call questions, which is where you actually tell someone what to do, but you're doing it in the form of a question.

Jude Slater [00:11:10]:
And so that might be something like, you know, your team members come to you. They've been emailing a client over and over. They haven't got the responses that they need. It's impacting on the deadline. And so you might say something like, have you thought about calling them? Which is, you know, a really lovely, very innocent kind of a question. But actually, in that question, you're telling that person what to do. So that's why I call that a question. So if you were to think about the if you were to use the you follow they lead principle, then the kind of question you might ask instead is, you know, they're talking about all these emails, and you might say something like, what other options do you have? Which is really nice and open.

Jude Slater [00:11:52]:
And what you're doing there is you're sending a message to your team member that says, I believe that you do have the answer. We've just got to get there. You've just gotten a bit stuck on this email thing. And they'll give you a they might give you 1 or 2 options. You might then ask them, what else do you have? Like, just keep them generating those ideas, coming back to their ask first sort of principle, keeping them talking. And then from that, they'll have this whole big list of options, at which point you can ask them, well, which of those do you think is going to give you the result that you want? They might come up with an answer, and often I bet it will probably be something like, I probably should pick up the phone and call them. At which point, you can then ask them what support they need from that. So going from have you thought about calling them and they'll probably go away and do that and maybe it will be successful, but maybe it will fail because maybe there's a reason why they don't want to to call them and you don't know that yet, to just asking those couple of extra questions in there.

Jude Slater [00:12:48]:
Now you have an insight into what your team member is thinking, why it is that they keep using email rather than something like, trying to use the phone, and, critically, if there's anything that they need for you to do to support them in taking a different course of action.

Carla Miller [00:13:05]:
I love those principles and that definition of coaching and just also just giving someone your attention, your full attention is such a gift in itself anyway, isn't it? Because it's quite hard to give someone your full attention. It takes effort. And it's also quite hard to break those default modes of helping. I'm using, inverted commas where, and the fixing side of things. I used to use this metaphor about spoon feeding your team where if they are coming to you all the time and it just feels quicker or easier or boosts your ego to give them the answers, you think you're being helpful, but actually you're spoon feeding them. They're never going to learn how to feed themselves. And it's the same with babies. Like, you could spoon feed them for ages.

Carla Miller [00:13:46]:
It's less messy. However, you don't want to be doing that when they're 15 years old. So Exactly. We want our team members to be empowered and to learn and grow from their interactions with us rather than going, well, she has all the answers. Now in the book, you talk about being a coach like manager. What does that mean, or what does that look like?

Jude Slater [00:14:08]:
So I like to use a a cooking analogy, for this one. And there is an amazing chef, Simone Nosrat, and she wrote a book called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. I think there's a Netflix series around it as well. And what she's doing is she's explaining to you how those four elements, help make your food much more flavorful. And every time I read the book, I take away a different technique that I want to try. So in that way, I'm I'm being chef like. I'm not a professional chef by any means, but what she's done is she's helped me understand how I can use the different elements of of those four things to help make my food taste that much better and also make cooking even more enjoyable. And it's the same sort of analogy that I take to meaning coach like.

Jude Slater [00:14:58]:
So what I mean by coach like is that you can take some of the knowledge that professional coaches have and use those in your interactions with your team, and that's gonna make those interactions so much more enjoyable. You'll be finding out so much more about what's going on with your team. You're helping them develop critical thinking and confidence, and also they start taking on a lot more responsibility, as well. Because when an idea comes from you, you're much more likely to want to see it through. So that's what I mean by coach like. It's just taking some of the skills that professional coaches might use and using and sprinkling, I suppose, a a little bit of that over the way that you're interacting with your team.

Carla Miller [00:15:40]:
Brilliant. What happens if your team member comes up with an idea and you're sat there thinking, I don't think that will work? How do you deal with that in a coach like way? Do you just keep doing because they need to learn that for themselves, or do you provide some input at that point?

Jude Slater [00:15:56]:
So I think this one's one where you really gotta know your team member. So sometimes, I suppose it is a good idea to let them give things a go, fail safely so that they can learn, from that. I'm not completely with that school of thought because, really, I see part of the role of the manager is really making sure that you're setting your team up for success. So I think of something if you think something isn't going to work, it's okay to say. So while I think being coach like can be really beneficial as a manager, it's not your only style by by any means. You're a manager because of all of your knowledge, because of your experience, and all of that stuff, you know, you want to impart that to your team members. Absolutely okay to tell them some things to do from time to time. Give them your reasoning behind that.

Jude Slater [00:16:45]:
Really fully explain it. Give them the space to also ask you questions about why their, approach might not work and, you know, why it is that your approach might not, your approach will will work better. It's definitely not an either or. I think really and I I talk about mentoring and coaching being at each end of one line. And then as a manager, I think it's going to be very rare that you're having a conversation where you're completely stuck at one end and that's it. You're going to be dancing up and down that line all the time. What I do in the book and and in the workshops that I deliver is, you know, one of the things I say is if you feel like you're doing a lot of the talking, it kind of will give you a sense that you're more on that mentoring telling side. And if that's not really where you want to be right now and you'd rather be more on the coaching side because you're trying to get your team member to do more of that thinking themselves, then the easiest way to get there is to ask a question.

Jude Slater [00:17:40]:
Right? So going back to their ask first, tell last principle. If you have been coaching, but you realize, oh, actually that's not gonna work. I I need to tell you some things here. Absolutely okay. One of the things I often suggest to people is you could, ask for permission. You know, I hear what you're saying there. I'm not entirely sure if it's gonna work. Can I share some of my thoughts on this? And then, of course, your team member is always gonna say yes because you are the you're the manager, but that's just paving the way.

Jude Slater [00:18:10]:
Now you're gonna share what it is that you're saying. So you've got these little bridges that you can use to take you from one side to the other. And in a conversation, that's gonna be happening all the time.

Carla Miller [00:18:20]:
I love that idea of bridges. Okay. So we've just talked about sort of building that bridge where if you find yourself doing more mentoring than coaching, that's how you bring yourself back. Overall, how do we know when it's best to coach a team member and when it's best to mentor them? Are there any principles we can apply for that?

Jude Slater [00:18:39]:
Absolutely. Actually, there's a a bit of a a a joke among coaches that if the building is burning down, you don't coach someone out. Right? You tell them, to get out of the building. And so where you've got those critical time pressure moments, those are moments where you're probably gonna take much more of a mentoring approach. Just a couple of little challenges that I'd make to someone around that would be firstly, if you are going to do that, make sure that there is a debrief afterwards where you're explaining why it is you made the decisions that you did. Again, giving your team member a chance to ask you lots of questions because people can learn through mentoring. That's why, you know, having a mentor is is such a valuable relationship to to have. Also, if you're looking at building more of that psychological safety with your team, you can talk them through what didn't go quite so well and what you wish you had done differently.

Jude Slater [00:19:32]:
So again, showing that you're not this perfect super person manager, but that actually, you know, you're human. You make mistakes too and and now enabling your team to to know that and to and to bring them into that is something that can really help build their confidence and develop them. And I suppose the other piece on that is often we think we don't have time, but actually we do. And I always sort of use the analogy of, you know, if you think of surgeons, trainee surgeons, they've got to get in there sometime. Right? And all surgery has a lot of risks attached with it. So really sort of challenge yourself sometimes on on that timing piece. But otherwise, I think on the mentoring side, you definitely want to mentor if your team member's feeling really strong emotions, so they're tired or upset or panicking, trying to coach them in that moment and I've done it myself with with a friend when I was sort of a a new coach, tried to coach them out of this this situation, that they're not in a position to think. Really, what they need is to be able to express those emotions, and sometimes just telling someone what to do in that moment is the right thing to do there.

Jude Slater [00:20:38]:
And if things have to be done in a really specific way, like there's a set process in place, of course, you're just going to tell someone to do it. On the coaching side, when do you coach? Well, any opportunity is a great opportunity to coach. And I think looking at a lot of the managers that I've worked with, there's a misconception often around what coaching means. They are thinking about a professional coach who's taking someone off for, you know, an hour and 90 minutes every month, and they're sitting there going, well, there's not enough time, to do this. And what I'm saying is, again, we're not asking you to be professional coaches. We're just asking you to be coach like. So where you're interacting with your team, just hold yourself back a little bit from trying to fix the problems, giving them all the answers, and instead start asking some more of those questions because that's where you're going to help them develop those critical thinking skills. If you're asking questions like what other options are there? Or what else do you think you could do? They will start asking those questions of themselves, which means they don't need to then come to you as often because they're starting to do that.

Jude Slater [00:21:49]:
And, I had when I was writing the book, someone who I used to manage years years ago, so probably more than I'm going to say 4, but it might have been 5 years, out of the blue sent me a message telling me that, she'd realized she wasn't really happy where she was in her career. She'd found a new position and thought it was amazing, and she just wanted to let me know that the questions I used to ask her when I was managing her have stayed with her and she was asking those questions of herself and that enabled her to make the shift.

Carla Miller [00:22:20]:
Love that.

Jude Slater [00:22:21]:
And that for me is kind of the the true power of of of coaching. It might not always feel like it in the moment, but those questions do stay with people.

Carla Miller [00:22:31]:
I get that. And I think, like you talked about, the the psychological safety underlying it is so important because if you just go through the motions and you take a coach like approach, but people don't feel safe suggesting something that's different from what you would come up with or don't feel like they can take risks, then it's a bit counterproductive, isn't it? You talk a little bit about psychological safety in your book. Any suggestions on, like, one thing we could do to get better at creating psychological safety in our team?

Jude Slater [00:23:01]:
I really think it's the admitting mistakes. So let your team know when you've made a mistake and how it's happened and how you recovered from it because that's letting them know that things are, you know, that you can do that and things will be okay. One senior manager that I an IT senior manager that I used to coach, he said one of the first things he did when he was a new member of of the team come in is he would tell them about the time that he accidentally reset every production server in the business. And you know, this was a a this is when I was at Deloitte. So really, really big organization. And he said he wanted to do that because he wanted them to know that it's if you make a mistake, everyone in the team has got your back, that it's absolutely okay. He didn't want people making mistakes and not telling him and then then getting a lot bigger. So he always made sure to kind of share that story.

Jude Slater [00:23:55]:
And and for me, I think that's really powerful. When you understand that your manager has gone through some of the same things that you have, it's so much easier to open up to them.

Carla Miller [00:24:04]:
I think that's really interesting, actually. As you say that, I think I wonder if a woman did that, if it would actually have the same effect. Because we know, for example, about modesty that if a man is modest, everyone thinks or if a man says they're not very good at something, everyone thinks that they're being modest and it's very charming. And if a woman says they're not very good about some at something, everyone takes them at their word. So I don't know that I would a 100% suggest to every woman leader unless you're very confident in your authority and your experience to lead with that in a induction. However, I would 100% recommend sharing mistakes that you have made in context and admitting when you've made a mistake. I agree. It's such a powerful thing to do.

Carla Miller [00:24:48]:
Now as professional coaches, you and I contract with our coachees, don't we? So we and by contract, we mean agree some kind of agree how it's gonna work at the beginning and how to make it work for both of us. How do you do that in a different context? So it's much easier when you're like, I've got 6 sessions with you, and this is how we're going to run them. But it's really not that formal at all, is it? So how do we use managers contract with our team members?

Jude Slater [00:25:14]:
So I mean, I did use the word contracting in the book, which is I know is a very kind of coaching sort of a term. Really, what you're doing is you're setting expectations, and this can be done at any time. So I suppose the perfect opportunity, if you could have it, is you've got a new person into your team or you're new into the team, and you're having a conversation about the way that you want to work with each other. But this can come up at any time. I mean, you can even use me as an excuse. You can say that you've listened to this podcast or you've read the book and you and you want to try this thing. The way to go about doing it is to think about what is it that you yourself want to, get out of the way that you're working with your team, and you can do this one to 1 or with the team as a whole. So for example, you might have some things around when you want to have meetings, when you want to be notified about things, you know, when things should be escalated to you.

Jude Slater [00:26:09]:
So what are the things that are really important for you as a manager? Because it's Okay to ask for those things, and I think something that a lot of, especially new managers find hard as they think that they shouldn't be imposing all of these things on their team. But you know you as the manager, your relationship is is not just with the team as a whole, but with each individual person and you're trying to balance all of those things. So it's okay to say, look, this is the way I need you to work with me. So, for example, you know, for some people, it might be come and ask me a question as soon as you've got it. For others, it might be, you know, we've got weekly one to ones, so save the big questions for them. So just anything that's going to help you to enable you to to really manage your team. The question that I think is probably the one that and even I still find this the most awkward, but is the most important is to talk about upfront what happens if things go wrong or I've got really difficult feedback that I need to give you. It's weird and it's strange, and I can absolutely tell everyone that anytime I haven't asked that question and talked about that in a coaching, scenario, if something goes wrong, and it usually does, it's really hard to work out how to come back from that.

Jude Slater [00:27:29]:
So having that conversation up front not only often means that those weird, awkward, sticky situations don't even come up, it means that even if they do, you now know what to do about it. And I was doing some work with a group of partners at a law firm that were on track to sort of move up to the to the executive, of that firm. And they had a group piece of work that they had to do with each other. It was part of a development program. And I had 2 groups. One group absolutely flat out refused to discuss that. They said that they were adults, they were partners, and they would know how to deal with this if anything came up. The other group, they indulged me and they did it.

Jude Slater [00:28:12]:
The first group, 3 months down the line, came to me cause they had a member of their team who weren't pulling their weight. I suspect because they didn't go with an idea that that he had, suggested and they came to me for help to work out what to do. So it doesn't matter how senior you are or how much of an adult you are. Things happen. And if you can talk about some of that stuff up front and work out what's our way of gonna be able to deal with it, then it makes it a lot easier when you get there.

Carla Miller [00:28:43]:
Brilliant. Now your book is so practical. I I really recommend every manager has a copy of it, gives it a good read. And you share some foundational things within that, including what you call the coaching 2 step. And I think this is something would be really valuable for listeners to learn. Obviously, they can read more detail in the book, but what is the coaching 2 step? And how do we start to put that into action?

Jude Slater [00:29:11]:
So the coaching 2 steps, a model that I came up with to enable new managers, but really anybody, to try coaching in any conversation that they're having. What I wanted to do was strip coaching all the way back to just its absolute foundational parts, and I use this kind of dance metaphor because it's a really good analogy for sometimes what it feels like when you start coaching. You know, you can feel like you've got 2 left feet. It's a little bit awkward. It doesn't quite feel, natural to begin with. And if you can persevere with it and just keep experimenting with with parts of it, it will start to feel natural and you'll add your own style and flair to it. But let me sort of talk you through it so you can understand what it looks like. So most dancers have a starting position that you're in and for this one it's it's attention, and I talked about that in the definition.

Jude Slater [00:30:07]:
I purposely use attention rather than listening because I think all of us have had those situations where you're on your phone and someone's talking to you. Yeah, I'm listening. I'm listening. But you're still sort of scrolling through or you're doing something else. It's really easy to think that you're listening to what's going on when actually your attention is divided. And I use attention because when you're giving someone your best quality attention, you can only give that attention to one thing. And I've started using this this phrase, best quality attention, because I've begun to realize that neurospicy people, you know, sometimes they do need to fiddle with something, or do something else to enable them to have their full attention on something. So it looks like their attention is divided, but actually what they're doing is they're doing something else to enable them to have the best quality attention on someone.

Jude Slater [00:31:05]:
And and you'll know, you know, everyone's had an experience where they're talking to someone and they know that they are not getting the best quality attention from that person. And it really does affect your speech, your thinking. You start sort of tripping over your words. It doesn't enable you to do your best thinking. And so for me, that's probably the most important element of the coaching 2 step. If that's all you did is with your team more often than not because you know as you said at the beginning Carla giving someone your full attention all the time that is really tricky like it's quite tiring. But if more often than not you just stop what you're doing and you give your best quality attention to people, that's already going to transform the the conversation. And and you will see in the way that some people are speaking because they feel valued and they feel listened to, that really increases their confidence to keep generating more ideas.

Jude Slater [00:32:02]:
So somebody comes to you, on your team that they've got a a bit of a problem, you get them to ask them to tell you about it. You're giving them your full attention. Once they've finished speaking and then really let them get to the end, of their thought, then you've got these 2 options. So these are your 2 steps that you have. And the first one is to ask them to tell you more, and that's really replicating that idea that I was talking about in the principles of keeping somebody talking because that will enable them to access some of the other ideas and and thoughts that might lead to the solutions that they need. And in the book, I talk about a number of other ways that you can potentially ask that question. I chose tell me more because it is everywhere. You know, you fill in a survey, it says tell me more.

Jude Slater [00:32:52]:
If you're interviewing someone for a job, you often ask them to tell you more. It's a phrase that that we're used to. It's not sort of too coachy, but there are other alternatives to that. And then the other thing that you can do is you can just summarize back some of what it is that you have heard. And what that does is it actually enables, 2 things. It enables the person that you're talking to to hear back what it is that they've said. So this is a third way of them processing that information. They've thought about it in their heads, they've said it out loud to you, and now you're saying it out loud to them.

Jude Slater [00:33:30]:
So that might unlock some different thinking, but it also helps increase that psychological safety because you're showing that you are giving them your best quality attention. You are hearing what they're saying and you're saying some of that back. You never have to worry that your summary is not bang on absolute word for word. In fact, sometimes you know you give a summary and it hasn't it hasn't quite encapsulated what the person was saying. That can be really helpful for them because now they're saying to realize, oh, I've been explaining this, you know, in this way. That's why people aren't getting it right. And now that sort of enables a little more thinking. So, you know, thinking of it like a dance, you're starting with that that attention.

Jude Slater [00:34:12]:
You're always coming back, to that. You've got those options of asking, tell me more and to summarize. And I suggest you try each option at least once and then just let your intuition move you into what other questions you might be asking. And after you ask some of those questions, you can come back to asking to tell me more or, to summarise. You've always got that sort of basic dance there that you can keep coming back to as your touch point.

Carla Miller [00:34:41]:
Okay. So that's something that people can go and put into practice starting with that attention. I'm gonna go and pay more attention to my child. See? I need to coach him.

Jude Slater [00:34:52]:
And, you know, it's funny that you say that. Some of my friends have started using some of these approaches with their children, and they're saying, yes. It's really helpful. You know, instead of jumping in and fixing every problem, just ask them to tell you a little bit more about what's going on. And, you know, you don't have to use all three of those pieces in the coaching 2 step either. You know, today, you're thinking about using a bit more of attention. Someone might decide, actually, today, I'm just gonna make sure I summarize back what I've heard before I I continue on. You can experiment with any element of that.

Carla Miller [00:35:29]:
Excellent. Now one of the chapters in your book really caught my eye because it seemed super relevant to the rushed pace that we work at, which is coaching in 5 minutes or less. What do we need to know to be able to do that?

Jude Slater [00:35:47]:
So in the chapter, I talk about creating a container. So there's that adage work expands to fill the time. Right? And I always know this is when I'm facilitating programs. If I give a group 10 minutes or 20 minutes, I'm basically going to get the same result from that. And so some things to remember around this are to be really clear on the time that you have, what's the topic we're discussing, and where is it that somebody wants to get to, what is it that they're looking for, what kind of answer do they they want to get to. But I think actually, and I talk about how to create that container in the book, but I actually think the big thing to remember here is for coaching to be effective, for it to, I suppose, work, someone doesn't have to come up with the answer in your presence. And that's something as a coach that I've really had to get my head around and and to learn. What you're doing in that 5 minutes, sometimes someone will come up with the answer and I've I've had it happen numerous times.

Jude Slater [00:36:49]:
You know, when I do a demonstration, it's usually only for about 5 or 6 minutes. But what you're doing is you're starting that process for someone. You're getting them to tap into their own ideas and thoughts and experiences. So it might be in that 5 minutes you don't get to an answer, and that's okay. And I think that's probably the thing that people, myself included, can find really, really challenging. The other thing I would say on this is if you've given a time frame, keep to it because it's really easy to say I've only got 5 minutes and then 20 minutes later you're still having a discussion. And it sounds sort of odd to say, but in some ways that erodes psychological safety because you're not keeping to your word. You've said you've only got 5 minutes, but we've been talking for 20.

Jude Slater [00:37:40]:
Right? So you're not quite keeping to what it is that you said you would. It's a sort of an odd one. It will sit in people's subconscious. If you've got 5 minutes, give that 5 minutes. It's okay to interrupt and say, oh, actually I've got to go in one more minute because you've already said upfront that that that there were only 5. And then you can always say, you know, what do you need from here? Do we need to catch up a little bit later on? And you will be surprised just from that short interaction if you were then to catch up with someone, you know, at the end of the day or a couple of hours later, how much more their thinking has come on. And they'll probably will have come up with with some answers themselves before they meet up with you again.

Carla Miller [00:38:22]:
I think that's really interesting, isn't it? Particularly with reflective thinkers. So I am not a reflective thinker. Like, you ask me a question, I will give you my answer, and I have no interest in revisiting that thought as late to date at all. But reflective thinkers, yeah, they you don't want them to feel the pressure of being put on the spot. You want them to you wanna almost seed the question, I guess, and then make it okay for them to come back. And the the better you know your team members, the better you'll be able to judge what's the right approach for them because there will be others who'll get frustrated if they don't get to an answer quite quickly.

Jude Slater [00:38:57]:
Exactly. And in and in that instance, maybe then you are gonna tell them what it is that they need to do next. Right? Or maybe you're gonna let them go. But if you can take a little more time just to ask those questions, then you're making sure that you're answering the right or you're giving them the answer to the right problem. Because often someone will come with something and as they start to explain it a bit more and talk about it a bit more, you know, looking at that example around somebody really should be picking up the phone rather than than emailing, You know, once you get underneath it, you might find that that person has a real aversion to calling people on the phone. They find it really difficult to do that thing. Or maybe it isn't that at all. Maybe it's, you know, they don't wanna call because the client is someone that once you get them on the phone, you know, you can't get them off the phone for 2 hours.

Jude Slater [00:39:50]:
But until you've really gotten someone to talk that through with you, you you're not gonna understand what the nub of that problem really is.

Carla Miller [00:39:57]:
Excellent. And then another thought that's just occurred to me in terms of the challenges of being a coach like manager is, like, sometimes coaching or asking people how what they think or really feel about something can bring up some really strong emotions, can't it? And how do you, as a manager, I guess, can create a container, be clear about what you can and can't support with? Like, any advice on that? Like, if you take a more coaching approach and people suddenly start sharing a lot more about strong feelings or things going on outside work that are impacting them, how how do we handle that responsibly?

Jude Slater [00:40:38]:
So if you're in a bigger organization, you probably have an employee assistance program. And so I think signposting that and being really honest about, you know, we're now delving into an area that I just don't have expertise in or I'm I'm I'm not able to support you, but here are the ways in which, you know, there is other support that's available and just checking in on that as well to see how it goes. You know, nobody's asking managers to be therapists, but I think especially in these post COVID years, managers are are so much more involved in well-being and they are hearing a lot of these extra things and it can be a lot. And I think sometimes maybe that causes some managers to shy away from asking sort of more questions because they're a bit scared about what that might actually open up. And so what I would say is, you know, when those things do happen, firstly, if if a strong emotion does occur, just remember that all emotions are okay. They're absolutely natural. I think there's often a a sort of a a presumption that if someone's crying, they're sad or depressed or broken, and and that's not always the case. Trying to remember both things, but Molly West Duffy and Liz Fosselin, who wrote a book, No Hard Feelings at Work.

Jude Slater [00:41:57]:
Some of your listeners might recognize if they see the kind of blue cartoons that that come up on LinkedIn a lot. You know, they talk about how often, you know, when somebody bursts into tears, it's not because they're sad, it's because they're angry or frustrated or annoyed, and that's just how that emotion has come out. And so in the book, I recommend, you know, just sit with someone while they have their emotion. Let them know that it's quite natural and that it's okay. And then just ask them what it is that they want to do about it. And if they're asking things of you that are well beyond the realms of your expertise, then help signpost them to other help. If you're in a smaller organization and there isn't an employee assistance program, you know, reminding people that they can go and see their GP as well. Or, you know, again, you can almost use that coaching approach around asking them, you know, where where do they think they can get some help other help from? What kind of help do they, need? And I would always say, remember, you do have your HR departments to lean on for advice.

Jude Slater [00:43:02]:
You might not necessarily be able to break confidentiality because someone might want want you to keep that confidential, but you can always consult. And this is where I think having you're really building strong relationships across your peers is so important because I suppose coming from from Deloitte, sort of that order and consulting background, we will always sort of talk, consult, consult, consult. And and that's something that I think is important for all managers. Have that group of people around that you can talk to even if you can't divulge who it is in your team. At least you're getting that support that you need to to be able to help you.

Carla Miller [00:43:38]:
That's super helpful. Thank you. So loads of really practical tips there. Thank you so much for sharing those with us, Jude. If people want to find out more about how to work with you or how to get in touch with you, where should we send them?

Jude Slater [00:43:53]:
I suppose the easiest place to begin with is LinkedIn. I'm Jude Slater, on there, or my website, think with jude.com.

Carla Miller [00:44:02]:
Excellent. And how do you work with people, whether it's individuals or organizations?

Jude Slater [00:44:06]:
I mostly work with organizations, although in saying that I do have some, self playing one to one clients that, I work with. With organizations, I offer 1 to 1 coaching. And at the moment, I also have a whole, learning program that's based around the Think Like a Coach book. The core workshop is around teaching people the coaching 2 step and how to use it. And then there's other modules that are built around the other chapters on the book around how to lead using that coach like approach.

Carla Miller [00:44:38]:
Fantastic. Well, so many resources there. Lovely to have you on the show. I'm really passionate about managers becoming strong at coaching as well. And, hopefully, it's gonna be a super useful episode for people. Thanks, Jude.

Jude Slater [00:44:51]:
Thanks so much for having me.