Stop Coaching for Results; Coach for Growth Instead

“A vast untapped human potential is lost as a result of treating people as followers” – David Marquet, “Turn the Ship Around”

“Should I just tell them what to do, or should I invest the time and energy to teach them how to do it?”?

It’s a classic dilemma for busy leaders.

Consider Alex, the marketing director at a fast-growing tech startup. He prides himself on his hands-on approach, often diving into projects to ensure they meet his high standards. While the team appreciates his expertise, they've become overly reliant on his input and direction. Alex remains more tactically focused than strategic, limiting his value to the business and–citing a lack of growth and autonomy–one of his highest performers recently left for another opportunity.

This scenario plays out more frequently than most of us would care to admit. On the one hand, you know you can’t scale yourself or your firm without scalable structures and you risk losing top performers if you don’t engage and develop them. On the other hand, when you’re facing a high-stakes approaching deadline, it’s all too easy to dive into the details and tell people what to do because you usually get the results you need.

...it’s all too easy to dive into the details and tell people what to do because you usually get the results you need.

LIke Alex, when you tell people what to do, you’re getting the work done but not teaching your team how to think. This stunts their learning, growth, and independence while simultaneously preventing you from elevating your contributions and value to the business. My term for this overused, non-scalable leadership trap is coaching for results.

Let's talk about how to coach for growth instead.

Coach for Growth, Not Results

The term "coaching" is often misused as a synonym for any one-on-one meeting between a manager and a subordinate. However, not all coaching builds capability in others. Many well-intentioned managers like Alex create the opposite–increased dependency–instead by focusing solely on getting things done.

Coaching for growth sustainably builds capability, independence, scalability, and ultimately more freedom for you, the leader. To shift your approach, start by rethinking how you provide feedback to your team.

Master Feedback

Research shows that most feedback doesn’t work because it isn't "brain-friendly.” Feedback givers tend to err in one of two directions:?

1) Too Indirect: They provide indirect, nonspecific, soft feedback to save themselves the discomfort of a hard conversation. While comfortable for the giver, it can be unclear to the receiver, who may not even realize they’re getting feedback!?

2) Too Direct: They provide abrupt, overly direct feedback. Perceived as a social threat, this can trigger a defensive response, hindering effectiveness as the receiver focuses on clearing their name (and their ego) rather than hearing the message and changing their behavior.

So, what should you do instead??

Based on extensive research into “great feedback givers” across organizations, cognitive psychologist LeeAnn Renniger and her team developed a four-step model to deliver highly effective feedback:

1) Get a micro yes: Prime the other person's brain to expect feedback with a simple statement paired with a question that generates a “yes” response. For example, "I have some thoughts about today's meeting. Do you have a moment?"

2) Use data: Be specific about what you observed or heard. Avoid vague terms like "less defensive" or "more proactive." Instead, provide concrete examples to help the other person understand and then change their behavior moving forward. For instance, instead of saying “You’re not reliable,” use a specific data point like “You said you’d get the client report to me by noon yesterday and I still haven’t received it.”

3) Show the impact: Describe how the behavior affects you and others. This imparts a sense of purpose to the feedback. Here’s how this can sound: “Our clients rely on us to meet our commitments and when we don’t, we risk losing them to our competition. In this case, I promised to send the client your data analysis by the end of the day today, but now we’re going to miss the deadline.”

4) Ask a question: Engage the receiver and gain commitment. This final step relays the feedback giver’s expectations, generates dialogue, and helps pivot the conversation to action. For example, "What are your thoughts about this?" or “How do you see it from your perspective?”?

The same four-step model applies to giving positive feedback as well. It’s important to:

1) Prime the brain for positive feedback;

2) Be specific;

3) Show the positive impact of the behavior; and?

4) Encourage even more of it.

When you’ve mastered feedback, you’ll be far better positioned to coach for growth to accelerate your team’s development, independence, and impact.

How to Coach for Growth

Although Renniger’s feedback process is fantastically effective, I’ve worked with leaders who provide feedback using the process, yet remain unsuccessful accelerating the growth of their people. Here’s what’s missing: It turns out you have to pick the right behaviors—patterns of behaviors, actually—to effectively coach for growth. You also need to speak plainly, even if it’s somewhat uncomfortable for you or for the other person.

To effectively coach for growth, focus on behavioral patterns and speak with radical candor.

Coach Behavioral Patterns

Pattern recognition is an evolutionary capacity modern humans developed because we were a prey species for millions of years. Think about the survival advantage of being able to notice life-saving pattern changes like a rustle in the distant grass or a snapping twig amid the background noise of the day. As a result, humans are able to identify repeating patterns and anomalies to patterns with relative ease, whether visual, auditory, or tactile.

Growth-minded leaders constantly look for and identify behavior patterns hindering each employee's results or growth. Common workplace patterns include being disorganized, unreliable, late to meetings, or slow to ask for help. Other pattern scenarios to coach might include helping a salesperson see that they’re too quick to accept an objection, helping a supervisor realize they do most of the talking while meeting with their team, helping a project manager see they shy away from holding more senior team members accountable, and more. Each of these patterns left unresolved diminishes productivity, performance, results, and, in some cases, team morale.

Growth-minded leaders constantly look for and identify behavior patterns hindering each employee's results or growth.

Use patterns like these as the foundation for your feedback by providing specific examples of the behavior(s) involved to illustrate your point, then pivoting to suggest an alternative behavior or way of thinking. These conversations are the seeds that sprout into growth and increased capacity.

Speak with Radical Candor

Technology executive and author Kim Scott coined the term “radical candor” and outlined her methodology in a book of the same title. Radical candor requires two simultaneous actions: caring deeply and telling the brutal truth. Scott’s premise is that we owe our people the truth about how they show up, how they act, and how they come across to others. If not for that, how can leaders have any reasonable expectation of people on their team to improve?

As long as you’re not a jerk about it, shoot straight and tell people the hard truths they need to hear, giving them a fair chance to become more self-aware, learn, grow, and improve.?

As long as you’re not a jerk about it, shoot straight and tell people the hard truths they need to hear.

Together, Renniger’s feedback process, pattern recognition, and radical candor unlock the full potential of coaching for growth.

Conclusion

American author, salesman, and motivational speaker Zig Ziglar once said: “Successful people use their strength by recognizing, developing, and utilizing the talents of others.” Coaching your team for growth does just that.

You’ll expend less energy managing and coaching your team with far greater positive impact. You’ll retain more top performers who love to learn and grow. And you’ll more sustainably build capability, independence, and scalability within your organization.

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Live Online Class – Creating a Culture of Accountability

The best strategies and market opportunities in the world mean nothing if you’re not able to execute our plans and get things done. And yet, accountability remains a recurring, frustrating issue for business leaders around the world. Organizations with an accountable culture execute smoothly and without drama, retain high performers, and have an improved sense of collaboration, accomplishment, and fun at work.

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• Identify the 3 building blocks of accountability.
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• Expose the #1 mistake leaders make to destroy accountability and engagement

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