Though no single individual can claim to have created the GROW model, writers Graham Alexander and Alan Fine together with racing car champion John Whitmore played a significant part in developing the framework during the 80s and 90s. The GROW model is a simple way to set goals and solve problems during coaching sessions through four stages: goal, reality, options, and will (way forward).
The GROW model was developed by business coaches Graham Alexander, John Whitmore, and Alan Fine in the 1980s.
The model, which is used extensively today, features four steps:
Goal (G) – the coach first works with the client to develop a clear vision of where the latter wants to be.
Current reality (R) – for the client, this is their starting point. In other words, where are they now and what is happening to them?
Options or obstacles (O) – in the third step, several paths forward are devised and possible obstacles or challenges are clarified.
Way forward (W) – where both parties decide on a clear plan of action with defined steps. In most cases, the client has “homework” they must complete before they next meet with the coach.
The flow model
The flow model is a framework that enables individuals to reach a mental or emotional level where performance is optimized.
This level, where the individual is energized, focused, and fully engaged is known as flow state.
Goals – these must be objectives that will consistently motivate and inspire the client.
Balance – the above can be facilitated by objectives that strike the right balance between challenge and perceived skill. Too hard, and the individual becomes overwhelmed and quits. Too easy, and the individual becomes bored and does not grow.
Feedback – to accelerate the client’s development, the role of a high-performance coach is to give effective, insightful, concise feedback.
Action-centered leadership
Action-centered leadership is a simple model that was developed by British leadership theorist and academic John Adair.
It provides a tried and tested blueprint for the management and monitoring of teams, groups, and organizations.
Adair believed that individuals could be coached to become good leaders. In other words, the ability to lead was not simply a trait one was born with.
Adair’s coaching model is illustrated with three circles that represent various leadership responsibilities:
Achieve tasks – this includes defining tasks and activities, creating strategies and plans, and establishing parameters for timing, reporting, and quality.
Manage individuals – leaders are effective when they understand subordinate motivations, needs, and fears in detail. Management entails support, encouragement, coaching, rewards, praise, and constructive feedback. It’s also important for leaders to spend time with more reserved individuals who are reluctant to contribute.
Create teams – leaders must also be coached on creating and managing teams. They must ensure teams remain cohesive and prioritize values such as unity and collaboration. Adair also noted that superiors could be coached to establish the right culture, anticipate (and resolve) conflicts, evaluate and modify team composition, and establish standards of individual and team behavior.
Additional Coaching Models
The OSKAR Model:
Purpose: The OSKAR model is often used in solution-focused coaching. It helps clients identify and work towards solutions rather than dwelling on problems.
Components: OSKAR stands for Outcome, Scaling, Know-How and Resources, Affirm and Action, and Review. Coaches help clients define a clear outcome, scale their current situation, identify their strengths and resources, affirm their capabilities, and create an action plan. It’s a forward-focused model.
The CLEAR Model:
Purpose: The CLEAR model is used in coaching to enhance communication skills and understanding. It’s particularly valuable in coaching executives and leaders.
Components: CLEAR stands for Contracting, Listening, Exploring, Action, and Review. Coaches first contract with clients to clarify objectives, then actively listen to their concerns. Exploration involves delving deeper into issues, and together, they define actions. Finally, they review progress.
The SMARTER Model:
Purpose: The SMARTER model is useful for setting and achieving specific goals. It helps individuals define their objectives more effectively.
Components: SMARTER stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound, Evaluate, and Reevaluate. Coaches work with clients to make goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The “E” and “R” steps focus on evaluation and reevaluation to ensure ongoing success.
The TGROW Model:
Purpose: The TGROW model is an extension of the GROW model, adding a “T” for “Topic.” It’s used to define the topic or issue to be addressed in coaching sessions.
Components: TGROW stands for Topic, Goal, Reality, Options, and Way Forward. It starts with defining the topic, then follows the GROW stages to explore the issue, set goals, assess the current reality, generate options, and establish a way forward.
The 5D Model:
Purpose: The 5D model focuses on coaching for career development and transitions. It helps individuals explore their career paths and options.
Components: The 5D model comprises Discover, Dream, Design, Decide, and Do. Coaches guide clients to discover their interests and strengths, dream about their ideal careers, design a career plan, make decisions, and take action steps.
The Wheel of Life Model:
Purpose: The Wheel of Life model helps individuals assess their life satisfaction and balance in various areas, such as health, career, relationships, and personal development.
Components: Clients rate their level of satisfaction in each life area on a wheel chart. Coaches use this visual representation to identify areas that need improvement and help clients set goals for achieving balance and fulfillment.
Key takeaways:
Coaching models are structured frameworks that assist people with moving from where they are currently to a desired future state.
Two examples of high-performance coaching models include the GROW model and the flow model. The former was developed in 1980 by a trio of business coaches and remains popular today.
Another high-performance coaching model is John Adair’s action-centered leadership framework. Adair believed that individuals could be coached to become good leaders and it was not a skill that one was simply born with.
Key Highlights
Coaching Models: Structured frameworks to help individuals move from their current state to a desired future state through coaching sessions, maintaining focus on future improvement.
The GROW Model: Developed by Graham Alexander, John Whitmore, and Alan Fine in the 1980s, the GROW model consists of four stages – Goal, Current Reality, Options or Obstacles, and Way Forward.
The Flow Model: A framework to optimize performance and achieve a state of full engagement called flow. It involves setting motivating goals, finding a balance between challenge and skill, and providing effective feedback.
Action-Centered Leadership: Created by John Adair, this model is a blueprint for managing teams and organizations. It focuses on three key leadership responsibilities – achieving tasks, managing individuals by understanding their motivations and needs, and creating and managing cohesive teams.
Coaching Model Variety: Various coaching models exist for different purposes, including individual coaching, executive coaching, team coaching, career development, and leadership development.
Leadership Model
Description
When to Use or Apply
Key Components
Advantages
Drawbacks
GROW Model
A coaching model for goal setting and problem-solving, consisting of four stages: Goal, Reality, Options, and Way Forward.
In coaching and mentoring sessions.
Goal, Reality, Options, Way Forward.
Clear structure, goal orientation, and focus.
May oversimplify complex issues.
Flow Model
A framework for achieving a mental or emotional state known as “flow” for optimized performance.
In performance and motivation coaching.
Goals, Balance, Feedback.
Enhances performance and engagement.
Requires a deep understanding of flow.
Action-Centered Leadership
A leadership model by John Adair, focusing on achieving tasks, managing individuals, and creating effective teams.
In leadership development and management.
Achieve Tasks, Manage Individuals, Create Teams.
Provides a blueprint for effective leadership.
Assumes leadership can be taught.
OSKAR Model
A solution-focused coaching model with components including Outcome, Scaling, Know-How and Resources, Affirmation, and Review.
In solution-focused coaching and therapy.
Outcome, Scaling, Know-How and Resources, Affirmation, Review.
Promotes a forward-focused, solution-oriented approach.
May not suit all coaching scenarios.
CLEAR Model
A coaching model that focuses on Contracting, Listening, Exploring, Action, and Review to enhance communication and understanding.
In executive coaching and communication improvement.
Leadership styles encompass the behavioral qualities of a leader. These qualities are commonly used to direct, motivate, or manage groups of people. Some of the most recognized leadership styles include Autocratic, Democratic, or Laissez-Faire leadership styles.
Agile leadership is the embodiment of agile manifesto principles by a manager or management team. Agile leadership impacts two important levels of a business. The structural level defines the roles, responsibilities, and key performance indicators. The behavioral level describes the actions leaders exhibit to others based on agile principles.
Adaptive leadership is a model used by leaders to help individuals adapt to complex or rapidly changing environments. Adaptive leadership is defined by three core components (precious or expendable, experimentation and smart risks, disciplined assessment). Growth occurs when an organization discards ineffective ways of operating. Then, active leaders implement new initiatives and monitor their impact.
Authors and strategy experts Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne developed the idea of blue ocean leadership. In the same way that Kim and Mauborgne’s blue ocean strategy enables companies to create uncontested market space, blue ocean leadership allows companies to benefit from unrealized employee talent and potential.
Developed by business consultants Kenneth Blanchard and Paul Hersey in the 1960s, delegative leadership is a leadership style where authority figures empower subordinates to exercise autonomy. For this reason, it is also called laissez-faire leadership. In some cases, this type of leadership can lead to increases in work quality and decision-making. In a few other cases, this type of leadership needs to be balanced out to prevent a lack of direction and cohesiveness of the team.
Distributed leadership is based on the premise that leadership responsibilities and accountability are shared by those with the relevant skills or expertise so that the shared responsibility and accountability of multiple individuals within a workplace, bulds up as a fluid and emergent property (not controlled or held by one individual). Distributed leadership is based on eight hallmarks, or principles: shared responsibility, shared power, synergy, leadership capacity, organizational learning, equitable and ethical climate, democratic and investigative culture, and macro-community engagement.
Ethical leaders adhere to certain values and beliefs irrespective of whether they are in the home or office. In essence, ethical leaders are motivated and guided by the inherent dignity and rights of other people.
Transformational leadership is a style of leadership that motivates, encourages, and inspires employees to contribute to company growth. Leadership expert James McGregor Burns first described the concept of transformational leadership in a 1978 book entitled Leadership. Although Burns’ research was focused on political leaders, the term is also applicable for businesses and organizational psychology.
Those who lead by example let their actions (and not their words) exemplify acceptable forms of behavior or conduct. In a manager-subordinate context, the intention of leading by example is for employees to emulate this behavior or conduct themselves.
A leader is someone within an organization who possesses the ability to influence and lead others by example. Leaders inspire, support, and encourage those beneath them and work continuously to achieve objectives. A boss is someone within an organization who gives direct orders to subordinates, tends to be autocratic, and prefers to be in control at all times.
Situational leadership is based on situational leadership theory. Developed by authors Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard in the late 1960s, the theory’s fundamental belief is that there is no single leadership style that is best for every situation. Situational leadership is based on the belief that no single leadership style is best. In other words, the best style depends on the situation at hand.
Succession planning is a process that involves the identification and development of future leaders across all levels within a company. In essence, succession planning is a way for businesses to prepare for the future. The process ensures that when a key employee decides to leave, the company has someone else in the pipeline to fill their position.
Fielder’s contingency model argues no style of leadership is superior to the rest evaluated against three measures of situational control, including leader-member relations, task structure, and leader power level. In Fiedler’s contingency model, task-oriented leaders perform best in highly favorable and unfavorable circumstances. Relationship-oriented leaders perform best in situations that are moderately favorable but can improve their position by using superior interpersonal skills.
In the context of an organization, cultural models are frameworks that define, shape, and influence corporate culture. Cultural models also provide some structure to a corporate culture that tends to be fluid and vulnerable to change. Once upon a time, most businesses utilized a hierarchical culture where various levels of management oversaw subordinates below them. Today, however, there exists a greater diversity in models as leaders realize the top-down approach is outdated in many industries and that success can be found elsewhere.
Action-centered leadership defines leadership in the context of three interlocking areas of responsibility and concern. This framework is used by leaders in the management of teams, groups, and organizations.
Developed in the 1960s and first published in 1973, action-centered leadership was revolutionary for its time because it believed leaders could learn the skills they needed to manage others effectively.
Adair believed that effective leadership was exemplified by three overlapping circles (responsibilities): achieve the task, build and maintain the team, and develop the individual.
High-performance coaches work with individuals in personal and professional contexts to enable them to reach their full potential. While these sorts of coaches are commonly associated with sports, it should be noted that the act of coaching is a specific type of behavior that is also useful in business and leadership.
When most people are asked to define power, they think about the power a leader possesses as a function of their responsibility for subordinates. Others may think that power comes from the title or position this individual holds.
Tipping Point Leadership is a low-cost means of achieving a strategic shift in an organization by focusing on extremes. Here, the extremes may refer to small groups of people, acts, and activities that exert a disproportionate influence over business performance.
The Vroom-Yetton decision model is a decision-making process based on situational leadership. According to this model, there are five decision-making styles guides group-based decision-making according to the situation at hand and the level of involvement of subordinates: Autocratic Type 1 (AI), Autocratic Type 2 (AII), Consultative Type 1 (CI), Consultative Type 2 (CII), Group-based Type 2 (GII).
Likert’s management systems were developed by American social psychologist Rensis Likert. Likert’s management systems are a series of leadership theories based on the study of various organizational dynamics and characteristics. Likert proposed four systems of management, which can also be thought of as leadership styles: Exploitative authoritative, Benevolent authoritative, Consultative, Participative.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
