Follow on TwitterAt the core of great coaching is a fundamental desire to help people grow. Coaching leaders derive a real sense of pride and accomplishment when their team members overcome obstacles, master skills and succeed.
If for any reason you are simply trying to get the most out of people to make money, I would suggest that coaching is not the right leadership approach for you. I believe that when we help people grow and produce at a high level, the financial success will follow.
People are not going to stretch nor are they going to go the extra mile unless they really believe that you care about them. Remember the old saying, “People don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care!” This is so true in coaching. If you do not have a genuine care for others, people are not going to give you their best effort.
As a business leader, and an executive coach for more than 25 years, I have found that there are 20 qualities that emerge as the most critically important to be an effective coaching leader.
As you review each of these qualities think about whether or not the quality is:
As your coach, I believe you can develop any of these qualities. I also believe that you will need to be aware and practice all of these qualities to achieve greatness.
Let’s listen in to my coaching conversation with a senior executive at a large utility company early in my coaching career. I was developing my thinking about how when leaders transition to become coaching leaders it would impact their relationships with their direct reports.
Listen in
Coach Pete – “So it sounds like you know Mary is capable of more yet she doesn’t seem open to your suggestions. Is that correct?
Client – “Yeah, she seems a bit defensive whenever we try to discuss some of her performance gaps.”
Coach Pete – “Have you ever asked her point-blank if you could “coach her? ”
Client – “I have been trying to work with her with a coaching style but I’ve never actually asked her if I could coach her.”
Coach Pete – “Would you be willing to make that explicit request of her? I would be interested to see what happens when you do that.”
Client – “Okay I’ll ask her in our one-on-one meeting next week.”
(at our next coaching session)
Coach Pete – “Did you ask Mary if you could coach her?”
Client – “I did.”
Coach Pete – “What happened?”
Client – “It was almost like the whole energy in the room shifted. It was like all of the sudden she (her direct report), was listening to me from a whole different place. It was like suddenly she became more open to what I had to say and receptive to new ways of approaching things.”
That lesson hit me right between the eyes and reinforced what I had instinctually believed. When she was able to explicitly call out a different relationship with her direct report it created different energy, different openness and different results. That is what is available with coaching.
Tamara Woodbury, the CEO of Girl Scouts, Cactus Pine Council says, “One of our greatest sources of renewable energy is the human spirit.”
As the coaching leader, that is the energy you are trying to tap into! Have you noticed how on workdays people tend to hit the snooze button twice and drag themselves out of bed to go to work? On weekends, we just jump out of bed and get going toward something we love to do.
What difference would it make in your business if people came to work with that kind of energy every day? That is the kind of energy that is available and can be brought out by a great coach. The mission of Coaching is to help people uncover what matters most to them and identify their greatest strengths.
When you learn what matters most to people, you begin to tap into a new level of energy that is not often found in the work setting. Couple that energy with a higher degree of personal accountability, a clearer focus on results, and you begin to get a sense of what coaching can bring you as a leader.
As people get clear about what is most important to them, and what their greatest gifts are, one possible scenario is they decide they are on the wrong team or in the wrong position. As a leader running a business, it is better to have people who are fully committed and engaged in what they are doing.
Most people are not in this state of renewable energy, they are in various states of sleep walking, resentment and discouragement. This energy has incredible productivity and morale value to corporate America every day. Coaching can tap into this renewable energy.
Lou Holtz, the famous Notre Dame Football coach, did a wonderful job of answering the “why coaching” question:
He writes, “Coaching gives one a chance to be successful as well as significant. The difference between those two is that when you die, your success comes to an end. When you are significant, you continue to help others be successful long after you are gone. Significance lasts many lifetimes. That is why people teach, people lead, and why people coach. As I leave the field of play, I enjoy the feeling of being a winning coach. But more important, I hope that I have been a person of significance in the lives of those young men.”
Coaching creates a stronger and deeper connection to people and their willingness to work hard and stretch for extraordinary levels of business results. But, as Coach Holtz says, “Even more important is that I believe the impact you have as a coaching leader runs deeper and wider into how people live their lives and in turn impact others.”
Look at the media, internet, etc. We pretty much know all there is to know about everybody. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, it’s all right there to see. Part of the story that a coaching leader conveys is that there are no secrets. Coaching leaders say “Let’s get our performance out in the open so we can see it, be accountable, and find ways to improve.” One of the cornerstones of a great coaching leader’s organization is that everyone is accountable for their piece of the puzzle and we can all see each other’s pieces. Not that we want to make anyone wrong or find blame, on the contrary if we are going to be a great team it is critical that we all know what everyone is doing.
Coaching is an accelerator for learning and development. If it is, in fact, a very competitive world, and we must continue to get better, then we must find the best tool to help us get better. That is coaching. Coaching is all about:
Technology and systems are important, but the most important resources in an organization is human capital. It is one of the resources that is the trickiest to impact and again why coaching is so critically important.
Opportunity for a New Form of Leadership
By now we have a clearer picture about the world in which we lead. In every crisis is an opportunity. People are looking for teachers and a beacon of light in this tumultuous world. Leaders who can understand this opportunity and adjust to the new form of leader will create the most competitively vibrant teams and financially successful organizations. In my new book you will learn about the coaching leader. This new form of leader knows how to inspire, engage and hold people accountable to higher levels of performance and business results. But more importantly, in the coaching and development process, both leaders and team members experience a much higher level of personal satisfaction and reward for their work. Coaching is deeply rooted in helping people understand their true talents, gifts and how to use those to reach their potential. This new form of leadership will create higher business results and greater levels of personal satisfaction for you and your team’s needs.
Competitive World
It is a competitive world. Just look around, you see new organizations popping up all of the time and at the same time you see old stalwarts like General Motors, that we thought were unbeatable, falling to the wayside. It is an extremely competitive world. Survival of the fittest is really what it comes down to in our economic system. Believing that there is room for charity or keeping organizations around for sentimental value is unrealistic. Only the most effective, competitive and profitable organizations will succeed. The sooner we understand that as leaders, and the sooner we can convey that message to our staff in a way that they can hear it; the better off we are all going to be.
Average equals extinction is reality. Think about it, if you are only maintaining the status quo; you are probably not going to survive. So the challenge from a leadership perspective is to continually have your organization staying ahead of the pack.
How do you do that? That is why coaching is so critically important. Coaching focuses on performance, improvement and potential. Getting better and higher levels of performance really isn’t an option anymore. It is the only option! I am not saying that the highly competitive world is the right world, but it is the world we live in as business leaders today. To deny that reality would be poor business strategy.
You would be better off to understand that this is the world we are in and the sooner you can create a highly effective and competitive team, the sooner you are going to enjoy success, profitability, loyalty and retention.
Great coaching leaders always seem to have a way of knowing how to motivate their employees. As a business coach I’m always working with CEOs to further develop their emotional intelligence so they can understand and connect with their player’s deepest aspirations and emotions.
Let’s look at Vince Lombardi, one of the greatest coaching leaders ever. Jerry Kramer, an All-Star guard for the Green Bay Packers tells the following story:
In one of the practice sessions early in his career Kramer missed his blocking assignment on a play. On the very next play he jumped offside. He said “Lombardi really jumped on me and reamed me out; he had me feeling awful! I felt like smacking him in the mouth!”
“I was in the locker room after practice, ready to hang it up and do something else. Vince came up to me and patted me on the back and said ‘son, don’t you know that someday you’ll be the best guard in this league?’ “Those words lit a fire!”
This little vignette is a great lesson for aspiring coaching leaders. Lombardi knew in a moment on the field Kramer needed a swift kick in the pants. He also had enough emotional intelligence to know that Kramer was in need of a pat on the back in the locker room.
Had Vince Lombardi not had that level of emotional intelligence or intuition about the player, one of the greatest guards of all time may have gone down a different road!
So how many times during the day are your employees at a fork in the road relative to their attitude, motivation or performance?
If you’re going to be a great coaching leader you are going to be tuned into your team’s emotions and know whether they need a swift kick in the pants or a pat on the back.
The beauty of what Lombardi said to Kramer was the fact that it “lit a fire” in Kramer’s words. So how important are words?
I’m reminded of a story of one of my clients Scott. He was a young aspiring insurance salesman. Scott and I reviewed his aspirations and his plans but given what I had seen in terms of his work ethic, balance, and consistency I wasn’t sure he was going to be able to execute on this plan and reach his goals. In the coaching session I said, “those look like great plans and wonderful aspirations”. But I followed up with “honestly I don’t think you’ll get there. Based upon what I’ve seen of your work ethic and your inconsistency, I don’t foresee you reaching that goal, but I could be wrong”.
Scott came back to our coaching session 2 weeks later and reported “that really pissed me off! And I’ve been in my highest level of focus and production over the last several weeks as a result of it.” I said to him, “good then it served its purpose”.
With some clients if I made the assessment that they’re not going to make it, it would send them down a hole or crush their confidence. In that moment with Scott, I had a sense that he was tough enough that he could take it in and that was exactly what would motivate him to succeed.
Scott and I have remained close over the years and that’s still one of his favorite stories about our relationship.
So what’s it going to be today? What does your staff need?
