The last two blogs have been introductions to what you will read today. Over the course of the next few weeks I will explain in detail the GROW method. 
When it comes to coaching, if you are not working from a proven model it’s very difficult to be effective. More often than not, when you’re “flying by the seat of your pants," you'll end up directing and prodding and have little success as a result.
As I mentioned last week, the GROW acronym stands for:
Goal
Reality
Obstacles and Options
Way Forward
I'll describe each step of the model briefly this week, so you can begin to mull it over. Then, over the course of the next few weeks I'll delve into each phase of this model, so that you can begin to practice it with those you coach. I truly believe that if you learn and practice this model, others will experience you as an excellent coach guiding them to greater heights of performance.
Goal - This is the end point. What the person would like to achieve. The goal must be concrete, verifiable, measurable, and clear. A person needs to be able to easily recognize when they have arrived. If for instance, the goals were around recruiting, we would set an exact number of New Agent Hires and Experienced Agent Hires a manager would like to achieve by years end.
Reality- This is the current reality of where you are now and how you arrived there. The more this can be boiled down to specifics the better. To carry over from my recruiting example above, Reality might be how many experienced and/or new agents did you recruit last year, in exact numbers. How did you accomplish that? How many interviews did you have? What percentage of those new agent interviews were converted into licensing school? How many of those converted into hires? How did you build a supportive relationship during the pipeline process?
Obstacles- These would be the variables that might hinder the person from reaching their goals. Be sure to list them all specifically.
Options- After the Obstacles have been thoroughly explored, begin to brainstorm a possible list of options to overcome the obstacles; this is where the previously described Inner Game questions are applied and achieve their magic.
Way Forward- Once the options have been identified they can be translated into very specific monthly, weekly, daily and hourly action steps that will lead them to their goal.
Keep in mind that knowing the above model isn't enough. What makes this model work and allows the results you want is how the coach presents the questions throughout each step. This style of questioning is initially presented in Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game methodology. The GROW model takes the Inner Game premise and expands it to make an extremely powerful coaching tool. Next week I will begin to dissect each of these steps in detail, especially focusing on how to ask the questions?
Because the Inner Game and the GROW model in my mind will be forever linked; here is another principle of the Inner Game that could be applied to the GROW model practice:
“If the person being coached focuses on what the coach or their peers want, or focuses on appearances or the agenda of others, this will invariably distort every piece of this process and lead to poor results if not failure.”
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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.
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