Coaching Conversations in 2025
Coaching Conversations with Tim Hagen, where we teach leaders and managers how to coach their employees. This is the ideal podcast for leaders, managers, and aspiring leaders to improve their coaching and leadership skills to create a more positive coaching culture within their teams.
In 2025, we're doing weekly podcasts on various coaching topics and strategies that will rotate throughout the month, as opposed to 2024 where the weekly episodes featured a monthly theme. Coaching Conversations will continue to have four episodes per month and we're going to sprinkle in masterclasses, which will be lengthier, workshop-style formats.
We also invite you to join the new FREE e-publication, the Workplace Coaching Times founded by Tim Hagen. This weekly newsletter contains expert insights on coaching strategies on specific topics like sales coaching, leading with empathy, and self-awareness techniques, and much more. We're a community of leaders, managers and coaches transforming workplace challenges into coaching victories—one conversation at a time. Subscribe here: https://coachingtimes.beehiiv.com/subscribe
Coaching Conversations in 2025
"That's Not Coaching!" - A 32-Year Veteran Sets the Record Straight
Welcome to Coaching Conversations
We have created a NEW and Innovative line of books called Workplace Coaching Books. These books use QR codes with embedded audio and video lessons speaking directly to the reader. Each book comes with assessments and journal based coaching pages where they document what they've learned and what they've applied. In addition each book comes with the self analysis link that prompts them to share what they've learned and what they've put into action leading to greater learner application a
Coaching Talks is a dynamic leadership development speaking series customized to your needs. Need help spreading the value and application of workplace coaching? Let us help:
We provide many styles of speaking services:
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So what is coaching? You know, with everything going on with artificial intelligence, you know coaching and training and instructional design, learning and development, lms platforms everybody is going through really fast-paced, rapid, transformational change. Yet I go back to one fundamental we're going to have to talk to each other, so how is this affecting coaching? What is coaching? You know what's really amazing to me After 32 years, we do something very unique as human beings I do it, you do it, everybody does it and that is, we tend to put our own spin, our own definition on things. I want to just share with you just a quick reference point. This is not in reference to everybody, it's just in reference to this situation.
Speaker 1:I was talking to somebody who was telling me what they were doing and they kept putting the phrase coaching in there. They said, well, I was coaching him, I was trying to provide coaching, and I said, well, walk me through what happened. And the person started to tell me how they felt and their frustration and their anger, and then they shared some comments they made to their coworkers and even management above them. This was not coaching everybody. This was frustration and feedback and then even more anger that the people didn't receive it. Well. So think about what I just said. Fundamentally, if I come to you and I say, oh, I'm angry, you know you're really frustrating me. I need you to be a better teammate, does anyone in their right mind hearing that, say, yeah, you know what? I could be a better teammate? It does not happen that way. So what's so interesting to me is how we put the title of coaching or leadership or mentoring on things when we're actually not doing that.
Speaker 1:So let me give you my three definitions of coaching. Number one we have something called situational coaching. We have to coach to a situation, and this is where we make a mistake in the workplace. We've got two employees not working together. We bring them in. We say John, you got to get along with Susie, susie, you got to get along with John, and we walk away from that meeting thinking, oh, I provided wonderful coaching. No, you didn't. You had a command and demand. That will not behaviorally have any type of long-lasting change. The next day might be better, but it does not facilitate change. Now, in the moment, do we need to situationally coach? Absolutely.
Speaker 1:The second type of coaching which is very popular and that is called observational coaching. We call it spot coaching. We tend to spot something, we see something. We want to coach to it. So we have to be really honest Are we triggered? Do we spot things that are positive or are we triggered by things that are negative? Typically, when I ask that question, most people will say well, yeah, you know, negative things we want to fix and correct. So now we got to think about the psychology of that. If, out of every 10 times, we provide spot or observational coaching and it's correcting and fixing, even though we might be right, what is the impact on the people that receive that? Is it inspiring, is it motivating? Do we even know how they're taking that insight, that spot coaching, that observational feedback?
Speaker 1:Then the third, which is something we subscribe to at Progress Coaching, and that is continuous coaching Scheduling time every week, every two weeks, focusing on a specific area and driving improvement and using what we call a coaching framework. Now we have something called qualms. There's grow coaching, there's other frameworks out there, and the reason I think a framework is so important to mention is if you don't have a framework, it's a lot like getting up in front of 500 people and doing a speech with no outline and no clue what you're about to say, coaching is just a different stage, but it still deserves people's attention. So why do I share this At your companies? If you're coaching, create a definition. Coaching is fill in the blank by doing what and then list the attributes and actions. That's a methodology we teach called defining coach. I promise you, if you do not have a definition at your company, you will have vastly different interpretations of what coaching is.
Speaker 1:So I was traveling out to a client site about six months ago and I was riding along and we went to a couple locations and one of the gentlemen that was driving me was telling me of his coaching and his visits. And by the time we got done, I thought to myself wait a minute, none of that was coaching, it was all feedback. Now, intentions were good, there was a lot of strength-based feedback, yet there wasn't a lot of coaching. See if we go back to some fundamental statistics. Number one the Gallup organization reports people engage eight times more. Eight times more when we lead with their strengths.
Speaker 1:Come on, let's be honest. When we call someone into our office and say, bob, I need to see my office right away, what's the employee's first response Every time I ask that question? For 32 years I've never had a positive feedback, never had a positive response. Typically people say, uh-oh, I must be in trouble. Why? Because we've conditioned that. In addition, tasha Urich reports 85% of people significantly lack self-awareness. So if we're giving feedback, 8.5 out of every 10 people are discounting it, they're dismissing it, they're rolling their eyes, even if they're not physically rolling their eyes. So what happens is we have to ask questions. So what's going on? What are you going to do to positively engage? What are two things that you're doing well and what's that one thing that you have an opportunity to raise your game. Notice, I did not say the word constructive feedback. Coaching is by doing what. Make sure you define what coaching is. Don't leave it open for interpretation or you're going to have extremely inconsistent application and inconsistent results across the organization.