IceRace.
What’s an IceRace? Is it an Olympic event on skates? Iceboating?
Actually, it’s a mnemonic for an effective way to coach an employee. You can use it as a manager with your own employees. A trainer/coach can use it to help employees succeed at a task, or even to put newly learned skills into practice.
IceRace represents the steps to work through in a coaching session:
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Identification
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Clarification
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Effect
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Repercussions
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Aiding-and-abetting
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Conclusion
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Execution
(What do you call the person being coached? The “employee”? That’s fine if you’re the line manager, but it’s not useful from the perspective of an outside coach — who might be coaching the CEO herself. “Mentee” — as in the person being mentored — has some currency in HR circles; however, mentoring is very different from coaching, implying a long-term, non-directive, sporadic relationship. For this white paper, we use the inelegant but useful neologism “coachee.”)
The Seven Steps of IceRace
1. Identification
First, identify the issue. Make sure you are both talking about the same thing.
2. Clarification
Now help the coachee explore the issue. Ask clarifying questions. This step has three purposes:
- It helps the coachee start digging around in the problem in a nonjudgmental way;
- It lets you put the ball in the coachee’s hands; and
- It double-checks to be sure you really are talking about the same issue.
3. Effect
What is the actual effect of the issue? Is it really having an impact? On whom? Does it affect the coachee’s job? The client/customer? Work/life balance?
4. Repercussions
What will happen if the issue continues without taking action? If you ignore it, will it go away? (Sometimes the answer is yes; there is a subset of problems where waiting them out is the most effective way of dealing with them. Pick your battles.) If ignoring it isn’t the right answer, what will the world look like in a month or in six months of no action on the issue?
5. Aiding-and-Abetting
To what extent is the coachee complicit in the issue? Help the coachee recognize that he may be — and probably is — an accomplice. It’s rare that a coachee brings an issue without at least a bit of his own involvement, or without things that could have been done differently.
6. Conclusion
Where does the coachee want this to end up? What’s the preferred outcome? What would it take to reach it? What would the 80/20 version of the outcome look like? (The 80/20 principle states that in many situations, you can derive 80% of the value from the first 20% of the effort; sometimes that 80% is sufficient to declare victory and move on.)
7. Execution
The coachee should commit to an action plan at this point. What will she do? How will she execute against it? This agreement doesn’t always have to be a formal plan or a document. Sometimes the situation will ultimately call for a true “action plan”; other times, a verbal agreement with and commitment to the coach will suffice. If the execution plan does bear writing down, suggest the coachee write it after the coaching session concludes. Writing something up at this point, especially if the coach is doing the writing, will change the tenor of the session, and it may make the coachee less likely to approach you in the future.
Overall Guidance
The conversation should be dominated by the coachee. The coach’s job is to ask questions — sometimes leading questions, sometimes clarifying questions, sometimes even the psychiatrist’s all-purpose “Hmmm.” It is up to the coachee to work through the issues, identify what’s going on, and develop a solution and a way to get there.
The coach can help, sometimes a little, sometimes a bit more, but as subtly as possible. If the coach gives the coachee the answer, that’s not coaching; that’s treating the coachee like a task worker. Give the coachee a chance to succeed at her job, even if you think you can — for now — do the job better.
Utilize the Five Why’s, as detailed in Legal Project Management or any book about Six Sigma. In short, keep asking “why” until you both believe you’ve reached the root cause — of the issue, of the coachee’s aiding-and-abetting, of the solution. Again, subtlety wins; this isn’t the time to enable your inner three-year-old. In other words, don’t just say, “Why”? There must be 50 ways to ask that type of question, most of which don’t even contain the word “why.”
Coachee Awareness of the Coaching Process
Should the coachee know he is being coached? Here’s where there’s a big difference between coaching your employee and coaching “from the outside.”
As a senior manager and department head for many years, I rarely held formal coaching sessions, one-on-one meetings where the invitation said “coaching.” Sometimes an employee would come to me with a problem, and it was clear she was looking for coaching. Sometimes we’d just be talking and I’d recognize that she was talking about (or around) a particular issue. And often I’d simply ask, “What’s the biggest issue on your mind these days?” The last would often turn subtly into a coaching session on whatever issue the employee raised.
As a coach coming in from the outside, coachees are generally aware of my role. Even so, I don’t lay out the steps detailed here as a formal agenda; rather, I move through them as part of a directed conversation, ensuring that I’m truly listening to what the coachee is saying… and not saying.
Finally, although I’ve described the coaching relationship here as manager/employee or “hired gun” coach, you can use a similar approach with a peer, with someone you’re mentoring, even with your kid.
Move on down the course with the IceRace.
