A nifty little coaching tool to use with your team.

You might have heard of the GROW model before. 

GROW stands for:

G = Goal

R = Reality

O = Options

W = Will 

Most of us think of the GROW model as a good one-on-one coaching tool, and it is. But it’s also a great model to help you frame up any type of conversation with your team – whether it’s at the beginning of a project, when you’re forming a new team, or for improving the way you work together. It can also be useful when you need to lift the performance of a team or change the team culture in some way. 

Think of it as the plan you’d make for an important journey. You start with a map (which requires deciding where you’re going – a goal), and then establish where you are currently (the reality). You might look at the various routes (or options) before committing to (or establishing the will for) the path that you’re going to take.

A leader I know used it to help improve team cohesion and culture soon after she started leading them. She started by acknowledging how tough things had been for her team lately, and stating her clear intention that they could turn things around if they all put their heads together.  The goal was to create a team and a working environment that they all loved and could be proud of. 

She introduced her team to the GROW model, and what each letter in the acronym stands for, before drawing from her coaching skills with great questions. 

To establish their goal, she asked: 

• Let’s imagine we’re three months down the track and we’re on fire – we’re succeeding, we have each other’s backs and we’re a team that we all enjoy being part of – what would we be seeing if that were the case?
• How would we know we are nailing it? 
• What would success look like?
• If you were a fly on the wall watching a team like this, what would you be seeing?
• How would we be acting with customers, and with each other?
• How would it feel for us as members of this team?
• What would our stakeholders - like our customers, or other teams in the organisation -  be saying about us?

She captured all their answers under ‘G’ on the whiteboard and moved on to looking at the team’s current reality – where they were starting from.

They explored that with questions like: 

• What are we noticing now that’s different from the picture we’ve just described?
• Where are the gaps?
• What are our current frustrations?
• If we look at X (one of the points from the Goal column), what is it like now?
• How do you feel about being a member of this team now?
• What might be contributing to where we currently are?
• When we look at these things, what is within our control to solve?

Again, she wrote everyone’s contributions up on the whiteboard. Next, it was time to list some potential solutions or options that could get the team closer towards their goals. She reminded everyone that ‘no idea is a bad idea at this stage’ and they focused on capturing every possibility with a view to sift or sort them later.

Questions that were helpful here included:

• What are your ideas for HOW we could reach our goal and that picture of success?
• What are our options?
• How about X (pulling one of the points from the Goal list)? What are some potential solutions or ways that we could trial?
• What do you want me as your manager to keep doing, stop doing or start doing to help us? 
• If this was your team, what ideas would you have for solving the problem?

Once they had a list that everyone had had a chance to contribute to, they were able to decide on some clear next steps – the W part of the model. In other words, who was going to do what and by when as a result of their conversation? What was the first step?

Extra tips for facilitating a GROW conversation in your team:

• Allow about 6-8 minutes maximum for each section. At this stage, you don’t want to get into discussions or disagreeing; it’s more of an ideas-capturing/brainstorming session.
• Facilitate don’t dominate. Your role is to try and draw out ideas from everyone in the team.
• If you have something to add to any of the sections, go last with your opinion. Once you say your idea or opinion, ask: “what do you think? Agree? Disagree?”
• If you notice common themes in their ideas, it can be helpful just to summarise and note this by saying: “so it seems like many of us think X, is that right?” “Does anyone feel differently?”
• If when you first start, there’s silence, wait longer (up to 5-6 seconds) before jumping in. Someone is likely to come up with something as they get uncomfortable with the silence and then when they do, say “great stuff! Thanks Mary…. What else?”  If everyone is still silent, maybe use another of the bullet point questions – asking the same sort of thing in a different way. If you’re really desperate, give an example and pop that up on the board and then ask: “what ideas do you have?”
• If you have a larger team, break into groups of 3-4 for the discussion and then gather themes from each group. This approach is more likely to get engagement and contribution because it’s psychologically safer to contribute in a small group.

The GROW model is a super effective, yet simple tool that reminds us that coaching doesn’t need to be another thing that we do on top of our responsibilities as a leader. Rather, it’s merely a slightly different approach to conversations that we’re already having.

By all means, use the GROW model in one-on-one coaching, but also think about how else you could use it in your leadership practice. I’d love to hear how you get on with some other experiments with it too.