WMBA 6633 Week 3 GROW Coaching Model Application Example

One Coaching Conversation Taken Through the GROW Model: What Each Stage Asked For, What a New Shift Supervisor and I Actually Said and Where the Conversation Skipped a Stage It Needed

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6633: Personal Leadership: Mentoring and Coaching

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

One Coaching Conversation Taken Through the GROW Model: What Each Stage Asked For, What a New Shift Supervisor and I Actually Said and Where the Conversation Skipped a Stage It Needed

The Conversation and the Model

This paper examines the second coaching session I held with D. R., a newly promoted second-shift supervisor at Tri-County Logistics, a composite fulfillment center in central Indiana. The topic was his end-of-shift handoff to the first-shift supervisor, which she had described as incomplete. The session lasted about thirty minutes, at 2:30 a.m. after his shift, in my office. I wrote down the exchanges below from notes within an hour.

The model is GROW, which Whitmore (2017) describes as four stages: setting a Goal for the session and the longer term, exploring the current Reality, generating Options and establishing the Will, what the person will do and when. Each section below opens with a few lines from the conversation and then asks whether the stage did what the model requires.

Goal

"What would you like to get out of the next half hour?"

"Honestly, I'd like her to stop complaining about my handoffs."

"What would she need to see for that to happen?"

The model asks for a goal the coachee owns and that is specific enough to know when it is reached. D. R.'s first answer was about the other supervisor's behavior, which he does not control. My follow-up turned it toward something he could produce. By the end of this stage we had agreed on a session goal, a handoff format he would try that night, and a longer goal, a handoff the morning supervisor would rate complete on at least nine of ten shifts within a month. The stage worked, though the goal was still framed around her approval rather than his own standard.

Reality

"Walk me through last night's handoff."

"I caught her at the time clock, told her dock 4 was jammed and that we were short on the Peterson orders."

"What did you leave out?"

"Probably the temps. Two didn't show. And I didn't say which Peterson orders."

The reality stage asks for facts before interpretation. My questions kept him describing a specific night, which surfaced two gaps he named himself: absent temporary workers and unspecified orders. This is where the conversation was strongest. He arrived at the gaps rather than hearing them from me, which matters because, as Whitmore argues, awareness the coachee generates is more likely to lead to change than awareness the coach supplies.

Options

"What could you do differently tonight?"

"Write it down, I guess."

"What else?"

"Maybe use the same list every night."

The options stage should generate several possibilities before choosing one. We produced two, and they were really one idea: write it down, in a fixed format. I moved to the next stage too quickly, partly because it was late and partly because the idea was good. A fuller options stage might have asked whether the handoff should happen at a fixed time, whether the morning supervisor should help design the format or whether some information should go into the warehouse system instead of a note. Any of those might have produced a better solution than the one he chose. Looking back, this is the stage the conversation skipped.

Will

"So what exactly will you do tonight?"

"I'll write down five things: open orders by customer, dock problems, who didn't show, safety issues and anything she needs to call about. Email it by 2:15."

"How will you know it worked?"

"I'll ask her tomorrow."

The will stage asks for a specific commitment with a time and a way to check. He produced all three. Asking how he would know it worked put the measure in his hands rather than mine, which kept the commitment his.

What I Would Ask Differently

If I ran the session again, I would change two questions. At the goal stage, instead of asking what the morning supervisor would need to see, I would ask, "If nobody checked your handoff, what would you want it to cover?" That question keeps the standard inside D. R. rather than in another person's approval. It might have taken longer to answer at half past two in the morning, but the goal he reached would have been his from the start, and the later ratings would have confirmed his own standard rather than defined it.

At the options stage, after he said "write it down," I would ask, "What are three other ways she could get this information?" Asking for a number forces more than one idea, and the third idea is often the one people have not yet considered. In this case, it might have produced the idea of entering open orders and dock problems directly into the warehouse system, where first shift would see them without anyone sending a note. That option would have outlasted D. R. himself, since a new supervisor would inherit a field in the system rather than a habit.

I would also mark the transition between stages out loud. In the original session I moved from reality to options without saying so, and D. R. may not have noticed that we had stopped describing the problem and started solving it. Naming the shift, with a sentence like "We have a good picture of last night; now let's look at what you could do," gives the coachee a chance to add a fact he held back before the conversation moves on.

What the Test Shows

The model held up as a structure. Each stage asked for something the conversation needed, and the stage I rushed, options, is the one whose weakness I can see in hindsight. Two lessons follow for my coaching. First, my own judgment that an idea is good is a reason to slow down at the options stage, not to speed up, because the coachee's ownership grows with the number of choices he considered. Second, goals framed around another person's approval, as D. R.'s was, should be reframed toward the coachee's own standard; I could have asked what he would consider a complete handoff if no one were checking.

Coaching research supports taking the structure seriously. Theeboom et al. (2014) reported that organizational coaching improved outcomes ranging from performance and skills to well-being and the ability to steer one's own goals, and Jones et al. (2015) found positive effects of workplace coaching across learning and performance outcomes. Neither study isolates the GROW model, but both suggest that structured coaching conversations of this kind produce measurable change, which the handoff ratings in later weeks bore out.

References

Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A., & Guillaume, Y. R. F. (2015). The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta-analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89(2), 249-277. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12119

Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., & van Vianen, A. E. M. (2014). Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2013.837499

Whitmore, J. (2017). Coaching for performance: The principles and practice of coaching and leadership (5th ed.). Nicholas Brealey.