Miriam Gosling Gage

When you take up a role at work or change the way you perform an existing role, you naturally face many challenges, including expectations laid on you by others.
These come with the role, but you have much choice in how to behave. Roles involve the obvious tasks but also potentially provide opportunities, power, and, yes, occasional drama.

Taking up a new role requires thoughtful engagement, beyond superficial presence, and key to success is the ability to listen. By attending to the role of listener, we can hear and respond in ways that engage with and modify mutual expectations and improve co-operation overall.

The objectives for today’s topic are to:

• Clarify the process of taking up a role;
• Improve your listening skills;
• Realise the value of emotional as well as factual communication;
• Understand how to work with the mutual expectations that come with role-relatedness.

This session allows you to expand your listening skills into your role as a coach.

By shifting the focus from solutions to genuine curiosity, you will support a peer in clarifying a current work challenge. Through active listening and open-ended questioning you can facilitate illuminating their preconceptions, blocks, and concerns. With this approach, coaching becomes a reciprocal process whereby the coach also gains new perspectives on their own work issues.

This topic asks you to:

• practice coaching by using a prescribed set of questions;
• focus on curiosity and wonder;
• challenge your concept of what it is to coach someone.