Coaching for Growth and Performance

As a manager have you ever wondered in what ways and in what situations you can develop and coach people around you best?

In many organizations people get promoted because of their stellar solo results and not because of their potential. Sadly, this is true not only for individual contributors, but also for people on a leadership career track. When we started our career as an individual contributors in our domain each of us achieved results to a large extent on our own. As an effective leader, however, you achieve results with and through others. Being assigned to a managerial position, having a fancy job title does not make you are a leader. It is not your position in an org chart that makes you a leader. Leadership is non-hierarchical. You can be a leader at every level of the organization, if your mindset, skillset and behavior make people follow you and inspire them to aim higher, learn more, do more and become more, … even outside your reporting line. It is rather a choice, a matter of mindset, skillset and toolset. Transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager and eventually to a leader (from I to WE) require you to challenge and reinvent yourself. It requires you to let go some of the skills, beliefs and behavior that made you successful in the first place and redirect others.

Some years ago I was asked for some assistance with an executive who got the challenge to foster 'empowerment and accountability' instead of 'command and control' in his next level managerial level. Two of his direct reports were very experienced manager who had been in comparable managerial roles for many years and got trained in several internal leadership programs. Before they got promoted in managerial positions, they had years of experience in expert roles and knew their jobs of their direct reports inside and out. Yet they were struggling to let go and to empower their experienced experts on the next level. In fact, they expected their direct reports to do everything the way they would and dictate the smallest details.

As a consequence some of the direct reports became complacent, almost indifferent. They played safe, replicated the past and avoided risks almost at any cost. Others got frustrated and decided to leave the team. Hoping to make a change the executive sent them yet to another intensive, external leadership training program, just to discover that the investment did not lead to any visible improvement. When he called me the executive was frustrated and told me that he did not know what to do anymore.

When we jointly analyzed the situation we found out that the executive had decided for the wrong tool to tackle the problem. Each of the manager had good intentions (“Empowering my team would help me to focus more on strategy, talent development and culture." "It would unleash the potential we have in the team." "I know that I need to delegate more in order to achieve all of our ambitious objectives”), yet they did not show the desired empowering behavior.

As a development tool trainings work best when the employee or manager is not able do the work (properly) and needs additional technical knowledge and methodologies. However, this specific situation was different. Thanks to their on-the-job and off-the job experience in our case the managers knew how to foster empowerment and accountability with their experts, but for any reason they were not doing it.

I suggested that it might make sense for the executive himself to coach the managers instead of sending them to another expensive training or mentoring program. We decided to work on and in the system at the same time. I spent some time to equip the executive during the next one-on-ones with simple, yet powerful coaching tools. Those short, personalized trainings proved to be an effective way to enlarge his leadership tool box and to enable him to lead and coach his managers effectively.

During the coaching process with his next-level manager the executive found out that the major issue with his managers was not a lack of knowledge, but rather a mental barrier. Even though those managers had been in managerial roles for many years, they had not succeeded in making the successful transition to becoming leaders. They still considered themselves as super subject-matter-experts, as the ones who should have all the answers to a challenge. In doing so they were not willing to let go. Along the coaching process they learned that today's world has become too complex for anybody to have all the answers to a challenge. Certainly keeping the top-down culture would slow down decisions significantly, create unnecessary dependency and transactional monitoring costs. Those managers learned during the coaching process with the executive that their deep technical expertise should help them as a leader to ask better questions instead of giving better answers.

'If all you have is a hammer, you treat everything as if it were a nail that needs to be hammered.' What is true for surgeons and parents, is also true for managers. If you as a manager only know how to develop your people through formal trainings, you tend to treat every issue your direct report addresses (e.g. mental barriers, conflicts, work-life issues) as if it were to be solved with more training and outsource your leadership task to an external consultant. Even more importantly, as a manager you need to learn that you can use the same hammer (your own technical expertise) differently (not only to give better answers, but primarily to ask better questions).

Every successful coaching is based on 5 powerful and interrelated practices:

• Connecting – to build trust and psychological safety - not imposing
• Observing – to notice, describe, form hypothesis - not judging
• Inquiring – to ask the right question in the right moment out of curiosity - not with the intention of sorting, analyzing and categorizing
• Listening – to understand with your ears, eyes and heart - not to answer
• Responding – to provide feedback, support, hold accountable and recognize success and learning from failure - not to tell the other person what and how to do it

Great leaders blend technical expertise, organizational insights and coaching skills to help employees go beyond their previously held internal and external boundaries. These practices have the power to significantly enrich your leadership repertoire and boost individual and collective performance. Over the years I have learned that two coaching models are very effective for managers:

• GROW
• 4 Is

Depending on the specific coaching situation you are facing you may want to use one or the other.

GROW Model

GROW stands for goal, reality, opportunities and will

Goal

• What’s on your mind today?
• What would you like to achieve by the end of this coaching session?
• What’s the challenge here for you? …

Reality

• What is your current status?
• Can you describe what happened when ..?
• Imagine I ask X. What would he tell me about how he had observed the situation? …

Options

• Let us put all the options on the tables, even the crazy ones.
• What have you seen work well in similar circumstances?
• If you had unlimited resources – time, money, people, information, technology – and you know you could not fail, what would you try? ...

Will

• Out of those options which one seem to be the best?
• What will you do in the next 24 days to move towards your goal?
• What support do you need, if any?
• If you say yes to this, what must you say no to? …

4 Is Model

The 4Is stand for Issue, Impact, Ideal, Ideas

 Issue

• How do you see the situation? What is happening?
• What is working well? What is challenging?
• How might you have contributed to this situation?

Impact

• How do you feel right now about the situation?
• On a 1-to-10 scale with 1 being “this is a small problem” & 10 being “this feels unbearable” how do you feel about this issue?
• What impact is this having on you? On others? On …?

Ideal

• What would the ideal state look like?
• If you could be the best version of yourself in this situation, what would that look like?
• What would you try if you knew you could not fail?

Ideas

• Imagine your issue is resolved. How did you get there?
• What criteria could you use to evaluate which path looks like the best one to take?
• What are the major barriers preventing this change from happening?

I constantly remind managers that almost any conversation on the basis of a trustful relationship is an opportunity to coach an experienced and growth minded employee. It’s not limited to scheduled, one-on-one meetings, but for those everyday interactions at work, too. And in fact, those are the most powerful because they build on each other more quickly. I remind managers that by demonstrating a coaching mindset and simply infusing a few coaching tools into daily, routine conversations with employees, they will indeed end up moving their teams towards greater productivity and engagement.

Coaching takes on a collaborative and empowering approach, pointing team members towards their own resourcefulness and insight. The idea is to make the unconscious conscious as the employee discovers blind spots and opportunities rather than being told what and how to do. When doing it right you inspire the self-directed willingness to try new things, make new discoveries and create ownership. When doing it right you stimulate empowerment and accountability. When doing it right you nurture an adaptable and agile organization. Unlike training and mentoring coaching helps when the team member has the relevant experience, knowledge and intention to solve the issue but has not succeeded so far (knowing-doing gap). Unlike training it promotes ownership, minimizes dependency from other people and fosters lasting change.

In his book, Masterful Coaching, Robert Hargroves notes, "When most people think of learning, they don't think in terms of having to change themselves. They tend to think learning as … acquiring ideas, tips, techniques, and so on. Seldom does it occur to them that the problems they are facing are inseparable from who they are or the way they think and interact with other people." Coaching helps the employee to step back to see more of the whole person and more of the whole situation, as well as the dynamics between the two.

What got you here will not get you there. If you have been appointed to a managerial position, start thinking and acting as a leader. Develop a coaching mindset.