Using Coaching Skills to Avoid the PMO Police!

We’ve been running our Coaching Skills for the PMO course for over six months now, to great success, but we still get asked why we think coaching skills are so important for PMO professionals.

We get it – when you think about developing your PMO skills, your mind doesn’t jump to coaching and when you look at the definition, it’s not hard to see why.

You might think that coaching skills are for senior practitioners in PMO or just not be responsible for coaching in your team. But it’s not about being a coach.

Coaching skills for the PMO is about understanding the tools and techniques used by coaches to get the best out of everyone they work with, and that’s something that everyone can use in their career, no matter what industry you work in or how senior you are in your organisation.

The PMO today is striving to be a trusted business partner, not the ‘PMO police’ or admin function.

To get there, PMO practitioners have to be more self-aware about two different aspects. One, understanding how you do what you do on a day-to-day basis and secondly, how you work with people.

Coaching skills help you to help others clarify their own thinking and provide practical tools and frameworks to help them work through problems, present options and gain successful outcomes.

For example, a better understanding of a stakeholder’s agenda; helping sponsors to clarify their requirements; challenging stakeholders and helping them to explore different options; and ensuring that your agenda is aligned with others around you are just some of those everyday situations that happen in the day of a PMO.

Being able to communicate effectively, empathise with others points of view and asking impactful, useful questions in a discussion can help you build strong and productive working relationships.

Being in a PMO, these tools can be especially useful as you can work with everyone involved in project delivery, from the Sponsor, right down to individual project teams. Using some of the techniques discussed in the course, like the Ladder of Inference and the GROW Model, you can not only start building stronger working relationships but also improve your performance in your role.

Coaching Skills for PMO Professionals

Take a look at Bekka Prideaux, creator and trainer of Coaching Skills for the PMO, explain how coaching skills can help, you no matter your role, from Project Support Officer, to PMO Director.

Just as we spend time developing the more technical side of the PMO job like creating better reports or improving delivery processes – we also need to ensure we develop our people capabilities.