The GROW Model

GROW is the best known coaching structure in the world and the most badly used. Four moves: Goal, Reality, Options, Will. Most managers who say they use it are doing the O and calling it coaching.

It came out of the UK performance coaching world in the 1980s and was popularised by Sir John Whitmore in his book Coaching for Performance, with Graham Alexander and Alan Fine involved in its development. You do not need the history. You need the discipline not to jump straight to move three.

The four moves

• Goal. What do you want, stated so precisely that you would both recognise it if it happened. There are usually two goals in play: the goal for the situation, and the goal for the next half hour. Ask for both.
• Reality. What is actually happening, with evidence, in numbers where numbers exist. Not "sales are soft". Quotes out, quotes won, average value, days to respond.
• Options. What could be done. Volume first, quality second. Three at minimum. Bad options are useful because they mark the edges of the field.
• Will. What will actually be done, by whom, by when, and what the very first step is. Then the honest question about whether it will really happen.

Where the time actually goes

Watch an untrained management conversation and the shape is always the same: a few seconds of goal, a minute of reality, then a long stretch of the manager listing solutions, then a vague ending. Something like five per cent, ten, eighty, five.

A well-run one looks closer to twenty per cent goal, thirty-five reality, thirty options, fifteen will. Those proportions are a guide, not a rule, but the direction of travel is the point. The single biggest improvement available to most owners is spending three times longer on Reality than they currently do.

Two reasons. First, a surprising number of problems partly dissolve when someone is forced to describe them precisely instead of in adjectives. Second, the manager's private version of reality is usually months out of date, and if you skip Reality you will spend the rest of the conversation solving a problem that stopped existing in March.

A conversation, start to finish

Take an owner of a design and print firm turning over around £900k, with a sales manager who has been missing target. The figures below are illustrative, but the arithmetic is the kind that decides these conversations.

Goal. "More sales" is not a goal. Pushed on it: the monthly target for won work is £62k, and the last three months came in at £44k, £51k and £47k. So the gap is roughly £14k a month. The goal for the conversation itself: leave with one change to the quoting process that starts on Monday.

Reality. Last month, 41 quotes went out with a total value of £186k. Twelve converted, worth £47k. That is 29 per cent by count and 25 per cent by value, on an average quote of about £4,540. Time from enquiry to quote sent was mostly four to six days, with a handful at eleven. Of the 41, thirty had no contact at all after the quote email. Establishing that took about eleven minutes and neither of them knew it when the conversation started. That is what Reality is for.

Options. He came up with five: send more quotes, convert more of them, raise the average value, cut the time to quote, follow up properly. Then the arithmetic did the choosing. At 25 per cent conversion, closing a £14k gap through volume alone needs roughly another £56k of quotes going out every month, which is about twelve more quotes and a marketing spend to generate them. Lifting conversion from 25 to 34 per cent closes the same gap on the existing quote flow, and the thirty unfollowed quotes tell you where the slack is.

Will. "From Monday, every quote over £2,000 gets a phone call, not an email, on day three. I will make the calls myself for the first fortnight and bring the number of calls made and quotes converted to the Friday meeting." Out of ten, how likely is that to actually happen? "Eight." What would make it a ten? "Blocking half an hour at four every afternoon." That block went in the diary while they were both sitting there.

The whole thing ran about thirty-five minutes. Note what the owner did not say: "you need to follow up better." He had already said that three times in six months and it had changed nothing, because it was his conclusion rather than the sales manager's.

The mistake most owners make

Skipping Goal because it feels obvious, then skipping Reality because they believe they already know it. That gets you to Options in about forty seconds, at which point the manager starts listing what they would do, and the conversation becomes a briefing with pauses.

The related mistake is options that are instructions with a question mark on the end. "Could you maybe chase the quotes?" is not an option, it is an order in a soft voice. It gets compliance if you are lucky, and nothing if you are not.

The last one is accepting a Will with no number, no date and no first step. "I'll focus on follow-up" is not a commitment, it is an intention, and intentions do not survive contact with a Tuesday. If the Will comes out weak, resist the urge to push harder. A weak Will almost always means the Goal was yours and not theirs, and the correct move is to go back to G rather than lean on W.

How to apply it this week

1. Take one conversation you were going to have anyway. A performance issue or a stuck project. Run it as GROW rather than as a briefing.
2. Write the four letters at the top of the page before they arrive. Then tick each one off as you genuinely complete it, not as you touch it.
3. Do not leave Reality until a number has been said out loud. If nobody in the room can quantify the situation, the finding of the meeting is that you do not measure it.
4. Ask "what else?" three times in Options. Say nothing between asks. The third answer is usually the one worth having.
5. Close with the ten-point check. "Out of ten, how likely is this to happen?" Anything under eight, ask what would make it an eight, and change the commitment rather than the person.
6. Diarise the review in front of them. Same day, same time, next week. If it slips twice, the problem is not the plan.

The questions to sit with

• Out of 10, how often do your management conversations end with a specific action, a name and a date rather than a general agreement?
• In your last three conversations about performance, how much of the talking was yours? Estimate honestly, then check with the other person.
• What is the number you have never asked for, because you suspect you will not like it?
• Which recurring conversation have you now had four times with the same outcome? What does that tell you about whose goal it is?

GROW is the spine of the coaching skills taught in The Leader Programme. It is not a script and it will feel mechanical for about a fortnight. Then it stops feeling like a model and starts sounding like how good managers have always talked.