How do you know when to coach to mindset, and how do you do it?

As a leader, you know when you’re asking someone to do something differently there are always going to be two things to coach to: skill and will. Coaching to increase capability is something most leaders are comfortable with, but coaching to ‘will’ or ‘mindset’ is harder. And the first hurdle to jump over is knowing when mindset needs to be addressed in coaching, versus a straightforward skill issue. So, how do you know?

Well, there’s two answers, depending on whether we’re talking about a team or an individual.

If you see the team lacking motivation, for example, or if you see a lot of ‘below the line’ behaviour like teams blaming others or making excuses for performance issues, that's often a pretty good indication that the team need a ‘mindset intervention’.

For an individual, a clear indicator of a mindset issue would be inconsistency of behaviour.

Let’s say you’ve coached a team member asking more questions in project meetings, so they have absolute clarity on what they need to deliver. You see them put this into practice on the next meeting you attend. But on subsequent meetings that you haven’t attended, you hear from the project lead that your team member has missed key tasks they were supposed to have completed. When you dig deeper, you realise that while your team member demonstrated the behaviour (asking questions for clarity) when you were there to observe it, they have stopped doing it when you’re not there. This inconsistency is the hallmark of a mindset issue.

Cat yawning while sitting on a bed looking at a computer tablet

It’s not necessarily someone openly resisting change (that’s pretty easy to spot!), it’s often that inconsistency of behavioural application that’s a dead giveaway that you have a mindset issue that you need to tackle with that person.

Another good indicator is when you’ve run a few coaching sessions on the same skill – you may have set some goals, but the team member isn’t actioning them and therefore, isn’t progressing.

How do you coach to mindset?

Coaching on skill revolves around observing a team member in action, spotting a skills gap, and then coaching to the behaviour that plugs that skill gap, ensuring your team member practices the new behaviour or skill enough till they get good at it and the skill gap closes.

Coaching mindset coaching is different. What you’re trying to do with is uncover the root cause of the performance issue. Whatever is causing the performance issue is not a skills gap, and the art of mindset coaching is being able to dig in and interrogate what that issue is, so you and your team member can take the steps to address it.

Two women in conversation, one holding a laptop computer

Let’s jump into what could be the root cause

One of the most common root causes is a complete lack of awareness in the team member that what you’re seeing as a leader or coach is actually an issue.

If you look at our ACDC coaching model, the key phase to build self-awareness in a team member is in the Current State. Here’s the behaviours you want to focus on:

Observations: present evidence that this behaviour is causing an issue with an outcome. These observations need to be your own. If we look at the example above – this would be sharing your observation that you’ve seen the team member put the ‘ask questions for clarity’ in action (you know they can do it) but you’ve also noticed it’s not changing their outcome. Give the team member space to explore this discussion and only bring in third-party observation as feedback (omitting any names) if you feel it’s absolutely necessary to progress the discussion.

Discuss the link: get the person articulate what are the behaviours they’re demonstrating and how they relate to the current outcomes they’re getting. Get them to dig deep into the impact the behaviour (or lack of behaviour) is having.

Spending longer in the Current State phase of your coaching conversation might feel counter-intuitive – you want this team member to progress! But ensuring you’re addressing any self-awareness issues thoroughly is key to then getting a commitment to change from your team member that you know will stick.

Self-awareness isn’t the only root cause of mindset issues – for another common one, see our next post on ‘unhelpful beliefs’ and how you can address them.

This post is an excerpt of key insights from our last coaching webinar on ‘mindset’ as shared by Mike Dunn, Director and Senior Consultant at GRIST. You can watch the full webinar here or learn more about our ACDC coaching model here.