In the context of change processes, such as digital transformation, team members, leaders, or even entire teams repeatedly find themselves in situations where they cannot get ahead themselves. One way to take the next step is to seek advice. In this process, the affected persons approach an expert who makes recommendations for action based on his or her own experience. “Why don’t you just do …” or “It worked … for me” can help. worked for me” can help. However, such recommendations also carry the risk that those affected will think to themselves “If it were that easy, I would have done it already!” and feel an inner resistance. One’s situation is unique at any point in time and cannot be compared to the experiences of others.
In the solution-focused coaching approach, the people involved are the experts – not the coach. They know best their own framework and have the comprehensive knowledge of what has worked or not worked in the past. In doing so, the coach uses questions to help the coachee focus on finding a solution instead of dealing with the root cause of his or her issue. True to the principle “the solution usually doesn’t care how the problem arose,” the problem as such is valued, but it is not given more space than absolutely necessary. This is made possible, among other things, by the coach paying attention to possibilities for finding solutions in his coachee’s statements and directing the focus of the conversation to what is positive and what works. This leads the coachee to use solution language, which is consciously maintained to follow a second principle of solution-focused coaching: Solution language creates solutions – problem language creates problems.
Veronika Kotrba and Ralph Miarka from sinnvollFÜHREN describe in their model that coach and coachee go through a total of four levels during a solution-focused coaching conversation after the topic of the conversation has been clarified: Goals and Impact, What Works, Next Steps, and Confidence. They have visually represented these four levels with the solution pyramid and have put together a set of twelve questions that even beginners can use to guide them through a solution-focused coa- ching conversation.
Important: For a successful implementation of solution-focused coaching, an appropriate inner attitude of the coach and the adherence to solution-focused principles are essential. Kotrba and Miarka describe six attitudes and eight principles. Experienced coaches go through a long training in which they systematically build up their coaching competence and acquire the numerous questioning techniques and formats. The coaching approach has its roots in solution-focused brief therapy, developed by Insoo Kim Berg and Steve de Shazer, and incorporates the various influences of numerous therapists and scientists.
