Sounds rather painful doesn’t it? And believe me for the person you’re coaching, it really is agonizing.
Let me explain.
I teach a coaching feedback tool based around SPAM – it involves:
- S – self-discovery. Allow the person you’re coaching to figure out for themselves what they did well and could do differently next time. Be patient with this part, it’s easy and quick to skip it.
- P – positive feedback
- A – alternative way to improve the performance, just one piece, but top priority.
- M – meaningful overall impact of the observation.
So if you’re just PAMing then you’re missing out on the most valuable and rewarding piece. Be genuine and curious with the S. Ask in different ways. A favourite of mine is to ask them to imagine they have a Sky TV remote control device and press rewind to do it again, what would they do differently. Or imagine a time machine and whiz back 10 minutes in time. On occasions, I’ve taken my watch off and physically rewound the clock to 10 minutes, once I jumped up and adjusted the clock on the wall to make my point.
After a few times of encouraging self-discovery, you don’t need to say anything, just go silent and look at them – they’ll soon fill the silence with their self-discovery.
Self-discovery builds long term improvement because it motivates people to become self-sufficient in improving their performance, which is the ultimate goal of any coach…isn’t it?
So make sure you SPAM not PAM and you’ll help your salesperson to self improve their own performance and make your life so much easier.
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