NEW Coaching Method Saves Time: Asynchronous Coaching

The coaching industry is changing dramatically. I think we'll have many different approaches to coaching. One of my favorite magazines is Choice Magazine, which focuses on individual coaching and the practice of coaching. The gentleman who runs it is based in Canada. He's a really nice guy, and I love his perspective on our industry. We exchanged a few emails about where the industry is going, and one of the articles that just came out discussed the different types of coaching.

I'm in the midst of implementing two peer-to-peer coaching networks right now not only for emerging leaders in succession planning but also to actually strengthen teams. Several questions I ask and answer are:

How do we give feedback? How do we coach one another? How do we receive coaching from our peers when there really aren't titles?

One of the things we've adopted and cultivated into our methodology is Cadence Coaching, which we'll be launching as a software version. I started experiencing asynchronous coaching about three years ago. I was candid with my coach, Philip, when I said, "I don't know if I want to meet with you." He was taken aback, so I clarified, "I hate that 30-minute time frame we have to adhere to."

First of all, if you use calendar or scheduled coaching, which many people still do, please keep going. If it's working, don't change it.

Yet there are people out there who just need that immediate access, something available outside the standard 1-hour monthly coaching session. One of the things we do now is use content. When we train leaders how to coach, we also give them the cadence of coaching. After each module, we deploy some question sets. The question sets are coaching questions, such as:

What did you learn?

What do you think will work?

What are the challenges in the workplace?

Then we have visibility to what our leaders are experiencing on a regular cadence, not every two weeks when we get together and struggle to recall the prior two weeks to have a really productive coaching conversation. Cadence Coaching delivers content based on those question sets.

Then we do something called asynchronous collaboration. Our conversation goes back and forth between coaching sessions via chat, where we send videos, audio, and/or text messages within this platform. Ironically, one of our clients out in New York shared with me that he thinks he's coaching a lot more than he expected. He's an IT manager and uses Microsoft Teams' chat feature to have the kind of dialogue we just talked about. He said he loves it and it's powerful, and everyone in the room looks at us funny. They became curious as to what we were talking about and how the platform works.

One of our client leaders had to have a conversation with her boss on a Friday recently. It was a pretty important meeting where she was coaching upward, and it made her nervous. I gave her some tips and techniques on how to approach it, along with some of the language to really make sure her message wasn't viewed as adversarial or confrontational. We accomplished all this in our private dialogue using text, audio and video in the Cadence Coaching program. When I added up all the exchanges, it came out to about nine minutes between the two of us. She said by the time the meeting came around, she felt fully prepared. I got a message on Monday from her saying the conversation went great. "You're right," she said, "had I gone in guns blazing and emotional, it would have been really counterproductive." We only spent nine minutes on this Cadence Coaching platform.

The funny thing was we had a scheduled session two weeks from that date. Had she waited, there wouldn't have been that continuous dialogue between the two of us, and that's where I think we make a mistake.

If you're intrigued, reach out to us. We coach leaders, we coach individuals, individual contributors, and we coach teams. The whole concept of asynchronous coaching is spending about 40% less time than calendar-driven coaching. Our clients love it because they're getting immediate access to our coaches. When we get a message from our clients, we typically respond within about three to five business hours. So there's a constant flow of dialogue, whereas if we wait two weeks for our next calendar-driven session, we're trying to recall history and then we've got to fill up the 30-minute time frame.

What asynchronous coaching does is free up time, create a continuous dialogue, and allow us to have coaching conversations with immediacy to the present.

Interested to see how Cadence Coaching works, and to learn if it would be a good fit for you? Check out our overview video below and get more info here.