Troika Consulting

Get practical and imaginative help from colleagues immediately

Overview

Peer to peer coaching helps with discovering everyday solutions, revealing patterns, and refining prototypes. This is a simple and effective way to extend coaching support for individuals beyond formal reporting relationships.

How to use it

• Refine skills in asking for help.
• Learn to formulate problems and challenges clearly.
• Refine consulting and listening skills.
• Generate wisdom that helps you work across disciplines and functional silos.
• Actively build trust through mutual support.
• Create conditions for unimagined solutions to emerge.
• Begin and end staff meetings.
• Give participants time to formulate and sift next steps after a presentation.
• At conferences and large group meetings.

How to apply it

Start:

Participants are asked, “What is your challenge? What kind of help do you need?

Setting:

Groups of three, seated, knee-to-knee is preferred.People with diverse backgrounds and perspectives are most helpful. Everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute.

Materials:

• Meld with 15% Solutions: each client shares their 15% Solutions, asking for coaching.
• Invite the client to face away from their consultants once the question has been shared and clarified (this deepens curiosity, listening, empathy and risk-taking for all).
• Generate only questions to clarify the challenge: no advice giving (aka Q-Storming).
• Link to Helping Heuristics, Heard Seen Respected (HSR), Five Whys.

Time/Steps:

• 1 minute: Participants reflect on a consulting question they plan to ask (when they are the client).
• 1-2 minutes: One participant (the ‘client’) shares their question with the others, who are ‘consultants’.
• 1-2 minutes: Consultants ask the client clarifying questions.
• 4-5 minutes: Together, the consultants generate ideas, suggestions, coaching advice.
• 1-2 minutes: The client shares what was most valuable about the experience.
• Switch to next person and repeat.

Tips

• Invite mixing of roles within each Troika.
• Try to notice the pattern of support offered. The autopilot is to lovingly provoke by telling the client “what you see that they do not see”.
• If the first round is weak, try again.
• Questions that spark self-understanding or self-correction may be more powerful than advice about what to do.
• Try to stay focused on self-reflection by asking, “What is happening here?  How are you experiencing what is happening?”