Professional coaches spend weeks and even years attending training courses, honing their skills and pursuing recognised accreditation. All of which can be useful and perhaps essential to be a proficient, credible and skilful coach.
 
But what about professional trainers, who deliver content? They don’t want a career as a coach, but know that coaching techniques will enhance the impact of their interventions. 

Global mobility specialists BGRS have a pool of highly-skilled intercultural trainers. They provide training on cultural norms and practices for managers relocating to a new country. Whilst trainees are strangers to their new cultures, they also bring with them a wealth of know-how that could be put to work. 
BGRS wanted their intercultural trainers to develop coaching skills, so as to harness trainees’ know-how.

The Challenge:
How to help these skilled trainers to be confident and effective at incorporating coaching into training interventions without having to attend lengthy training programmes themselves.  
 
The Answer:
Solutions Focused Micro-Coaching Tools (MCT’s) - a set of sequenced solutions-focused coaching questions related to a specific topic. BGRS trainers use these question sets to guide trainees to make significant progress faster.
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Our colleague Regina Reinhardt, herself an experienced solutions focused practitioner and intercultural coach, identified the topics that relocating managers most frequently raised in training sessions which lent themselves to coaching.

One of the most popular is ​'Switching between Direct and Non-Direct Communication Styles'. ​

Here's the MCT - the questions which the trainer asks those managers:

1. ​What are you aiming to achieve through your communications?
2. Which style is most appropriate here (direct/non-direct)?
3. How do you know?
4. What would be the benefits to you of adapting your style?
5. On a scale of 1-10 where 10 is expert and 1 is you know nothing, how skilled are you already communicating in a non-direct/direct way?
6. What’s got you that high? Please share examples...
7. What else do you know about this communication style?
8. What would be the first signs to your colleagues/boss/others that you were communicating more in a non-direct/direct way?
9. Where else in your work and/or life would it be useful for you to adapt your communication style?
10. What’s the first thing you can do to take this forward?

 
We compiled a short MCT handbook to help trainers be aware of the tools and to know when and how to use them. We've introduced them with 1 hour large-scale interactive webinars and smaller practice groups, and voila - BGRS now have a bunch of trainers who have started their coaching journey. All equipped with the confidence and tools to switch between training and coaching modes.

​Please feel free to test this coaching conversation structure, and let us know how you get on. Share with us how you encourage trainers to take a more coach-like approach.

Nice to see the number one story in the Observer this week was ‘Viruses save a man from antibiotic-resistant bacteria’, in which a 69-year-od American is brought out of a coma and has his life saved by an injected cocktail of bacteriophages.

The story appears just 16 years after we wrote about phages in the first edition of The Solutions Focus, as an illustration of the SF principle, ‘Every case is different.’  

Each phage will attack only one virus, so you have to find the right one to be effective. The trouble with the broad brush approach of antibiotics is that certain viruses become immune to their effects. 

That’s rather like different approaches to organisational problems.  Broad-spectrum approaches can be applied, often with good effect - but not always.  We recommend taking care to find the solution that works uniquely for you.

Read more in The Solutions Focus, Making Coaching and Change SIMPLE, by Paul Z Jackson and Mark McKergow.

And you can find the Guardian article here.

The problem might be hard, but the solution can be easy. That’s a central insight of a solutions-focused approach. If we get too tangled up in thinking about the problem, analysing it and talking about it, we might miss the simplicity of doing something different – which may well be unrelated to the problem in any obvious way, yet improve things quickly. A nice example here, in this Guardian Weekend column by Oliver Burkeman.
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​Here are 6 thoughts about goals:

1. It’s unethical to hold people to goals that they have set, because much of what happens after you set a goal is unpredictable.
2. Watch out for when goals turn counter-productive. Like prescription drugs, they can have unwanted side-effects.
3. It’s important to give yourself permission not to stick to goals when circumstances change and you need your wits about you to deal with uncertainty.
4. Perhaps if goals are modest and short-term, they will not be so delusional. 
5. A deadline by which you have to produce a piece of work can be very productive. I write here as a trained journalist. 
6. If you work with others, instead of setting goals ask them what they would like to achieve. Then when you meet again, ask them what progress they have made.​

In SF coaching sessions, we start by asking what the client wants. That’s the plan, and that’s as far as the plan goes. The rest depends upon the answer you get and whatever is needed to get a more detailed description of what’s wanted, descriptions of resources and descriptions of progress.
 
And the value of that? These questions will produce change. And they will keep you as the coach in the moment and on your toes.