The coaching (improvement) circle model

‘What a beautiful day’ I remember Gerard O’Donovan saying about the last cloudy and rainy Sunday in Sofia. And the day was beautiful indeed, mainly due to the very well prepared and delivered coaching training by the Noble Manhattan experts.

Gerard presented a coaching model I would call ‘improvement circle’. It is useful to coaches, leaders, managers and individuals and supports improvement of a specific task or activity. The ‘improvement circle’ works by identifying issue or task to be improved, then describe the best possible performance, retrospect the good and not-so-good when it was executed before, and consider details to change in the future. Only one list of paper divided into 6 boxes is needed to do it and it takes roughly about 30 mins.

Box 1 :: I ask the person to think about a specific task, issue or problem he/she would like to work on.

Box 2 :: should describe the best possible performance of the specific task or the resolution of the problem. The questions to ask there are

• Picture and describe what the good execution of the task is?
• If somebody looks at you – what would they see when you perform well?
• What are the elements you would do well?
• Write down a couple of adjectives to describe your performance?
• The last question is more of a checkpoint ‘Is what you described your best possible performance?’, and if not, go over the questions again.

Box 3 :: looks into the past to find out what worked well. Good questions are

• What worked well and what supported your last good performance?
• What specific elements you were really happy about?

Box 4 :: focus on potential elements to improve. The questions to ask are

• What did you do, that you could have done better?
• Was there anything you did or said that you would really want to do in a different way?

Box 5 :: is about lessons learned and focus on the present

• What did you learn so far?
• What is the meaning of the lessons for you?

Box 6 :: is all about actions in the future. You may ask

• Looking at what you have written so far – what would you do to improve your performance?
• What would you like to do differently in the future?
• And the last question is another checkpoint ‘If you act on your findings, do you believe you would improve next time?’, and if the answer is negative then the boxes 3,4,5 and 6 have to be rethought.

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Have tried the model a couple of times and it works well, especially for simple tasks or issues without dependencies. The crucial part is that as per usual coaching session the coach should not provide any answers or ideas, it's up to the coachee to define the issue, think about improvements and commit to actions. The more complex scenarios require commitment and actions from the other participants too and definitely would propose we try with the teams over the next retrospective sessions.