QALMS (summit)

QALMS is a coaching system that helps leaders effectively coach their team members. The system is based on four components: questions, activities, learning projects, and motivators. The use of open-ended questions helps stimulate self-awareness and understanding. Activities drive positive change by providing knowledge and skill development. Learning projects tie conversations together and serve as a starting point for future discussions. Motivators help individuals connect their goals to the coaching process. Supplemental coaching techniques, such as peer coaching and mentoring, can also be used to enhance the coaching experience. The system aims to keep coaching conversations focused and impactful. This is going to be somewhat of a lengthy overview of QALMS. QALMS is Q-A-L-M-S. And let me share with you the foundation of QALMS. Now, obviously, we would like to have a word that was a better acronym. Yet, let us give you each component and the why. For 30 years, we've been teaching leaders how to coach. And for 30 years, even though it's changing recently, yet for 30 years, it was really a nice-to-do type of initiative. Now, coaching has morphed from a nice-to-do to we've got to do this. The number one objection we always got was time. The second thing is we believe that most leaders don't coach because they don't know what to do and they don't know what to say. It is a different language. That's the foundation of why we built this system. So, for 30 years, we've taught this and we've updated it, we've edited it, we've added things. Yet, we've always gone back to the foundation of these components. QALMS, the Q, questions. It prompts us to go from telling to asking. It prompts us to go from telling to asking. Asking what open-ended questions, not why questions, what questions, stimulate people differently. See, the funny thing is we can get lulled into giving feedback and telling somebody something and they're nodding and we're convinced they're agreeing with us. No, they're nodding off. People don't like to be talked to or at or told what to do over a lengthy period of time. That's just human psychology. Number two, when you ask a question such as, what do you love about your job? When somebody starts talking about what they love, they feel different. When you ask a self-actualized question, what are you going to do to successfully embrace and you fill in the blank, it frames their mind. Questions stimulate a response. It does something that is fundamentally at the core of why we coach. Number one, for the person you're coaching, it drives self-awareness. It has been estimated 80% to 85% of all people lack self-awareness. So when you ask a question such as, what are you going to do to positively engage with your teammates, Charlie? That frames him out to think about, I've got to do something positive with my teammates. And let's say he's negative. Charlie's not going to knock on your door and say, I need some coaching. I'm pretty negative. Questions drive self-awareness for the person that you're coaching. Yet, it also gives you clarification as the coach. It gives you better understanding of your own people. Now, recently, I had a conversation with somebody where somebody had their teammates talking about he doesn't care about his job. And we were having a conversation. We were going through an emotional intelligence assessment. And through a lot of questions, I found out he served the United States in the military. And I said, what did you do? He said, I detonated bombs in the Middle East for 12 years. And my jaw dropped. I was rarely caught off guard, but I was very surprised. And I said, wow. I said, now you're in tech support. So when you think about stress, he goes, this isn't stressful. So he was just a calm guy. But his teammates thought, you know what? He doesn't care about his job. That wasn't true. His perspective was, I dealt with some stressful situations. Yet nobody ever sat down and asked him questions, including his supervisor. Nobody in the company knew that he had detonated bombs. Questions build self-awareness, and they build clarification for you as the coach. Activities. Activities drive positive change. If you have somebody who's struggling being positive, or they are confrontational, and they don't know how to have thoughtful conversations, yes, we need to ask questions. Yet the activity is twofold. The first form of an activity should be knowledge. Do they know what to do? You might have to teach them, or you might have to find out a step-by-step process, whatever you're coaching to. Skill. Then they have to practice that knowledge. You cannot improve what you don't practice. So it could be attitude, having conversations of difficulty. It could be public speaking. Knowledge. Do they know what to do? And then the skill. Have you as a leader facilitated practice? That's why the A, the activity of qualms, is critical. See, if we just have conversations filled with questions, we'll have a lot of understanding and self-awareness, yet we haven't really facilitated specific change and improvement. Now the L, the learning project. The learning project ties the conversations together. So let's go back to our hypothetical scenario. Charlie, negative attitude, needs to be a much more positive, influential teammate. Now when he sits down, the conversation I have with Charlie is going to be really the Q and the A. I'm going to ask him questions. I might facilitate an activity where we practice a positive conversation he needs to have with a teammate. The learning project does something that we believe might be the most valuable component of the system. It ties the conversations together. The learning project is tied to the area that you're coaching. In this case, Charlie being a positive teammate. The learning project would be next week, Charlie, I want you to come in with two more examples of where you positively inserted yourself with your teammates and what you specifically did and what do you think the positive outcome was. Now what the learning project is, is something tied to something they're already doing, like engaging with their teammates. With that being said, that learning project will be how you start the next conversation. So the learning project, Charlie leaves the coaching session and goes off and does that learning project on his own. Knowing he has to come back, report to his coach, his leader, you in this case, what happened. Notice I also framed it out. Two actions of positive interaction and what you positively learned from it. You're also framing the learning project through questions. When he comes in the next coaching conversation, that's how you start the conversation. So let's go through your learning projects. What happened? What did you do? What did you learn about yourself? What are you going to do to maintain that momentum? What can I do to assist you? What were some of your challenges? When you do that, what happens is it ties the conversations together. So inside the conversation is the Q and the A. The outside the conversation is the L, the learning project, and that's what ties things together. Now the M, the motivator. If you find out what motivates someone, where they want to end up, their ideal state, you bring it into your conversation. Let's go back to Charlie. Now let's say Charlie has aspirations of becoming a future team leader, first-time manager, what have you. We'll make it simple. Part of the conversation could be, well, Charlie, let me ask you, what if you became, hypothetically, a really sought-after teammate, someone that people love to work with and you just really raised your game when it came to influential positivity, interactions with your teammates, what would you do? You raised your game when it came to influential positivity, interactions with your teammates. How will that serve your goal of becoming a first-time leader? So I presented the statement of what was possible, the change that is needed. So it's called a state and ask technique. You give a statement, what if, and then the question. How will that serve you well as it relates to your goal of becoming a team leader or a first-time manager? So when you understand what motivates someone, it's a game changer. Because what you're bringing into the context of the conversation is the whiffed. What's in it for them? What's the whiff tied to? The area that you're coaching. It also prompts them to have an emotional attachment, a positive emotional attachment, to this thing called change. Most people don't have a positive relationship with change. Last, the four-step coaching conversation model is something that the QAL represents. And we're going to talk about that in another piece, but this is really for qualms. The QAL is the four-step conversation model. The M is the motivator, the emotional attachment. Now the last component of that is the S, the supplemental coaching. Let's go back to our friend Charlie. Supplemental coaching are techniques that do not take any of your own impersonal time. So Charlie, I might pair him up with Lisa, who's a really positive teammate, and set up some conversations where they can discuss maintaining positivity. I've got Bob in another department who might be willing to serve as a mentor. Then I might actually send out a positive video every single week to Charlie and have him email back two things he learned from the videos that he'd seen. Supplemental coaching can be observing others. It can be peer-to-peer coaching. It can be mentoring. It can be reading a book. It can be watching a video. It can be listening to a podcast. It could be journaling what they learned from those things, and maybe an email summarization to you, the coach and the leader. The great thing about supplemental coaching is it scales your time. So when you're coaching with the QAL, the four-step model, which we're going to talk about, that is an eight- to ten-minute conversation. It is typically tied to one area of improvement, not five or six. You're going to become too scattered. You will have someone fractured in their mind. They won't feel the traction. That's why you coach to one thing. That's where QALMS will serve you very well.