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Leadership is about developing a group of people to where they are at their best. As Jack Welch famously said, “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself, when you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” It’s important though to recognise that lasting changes in a person’s behaviour, which will ultimately lead to bigger successes, need to come from within. So… how on earth can you lead people to be better, whilst making sure the suggested improvements come from them…not you?!?! Enter… Coaching your team for success!
What’s in it for me?
Becoming a great leader requires that you build the talent of the people that report to you. Their successes are your successes. Nothing will accelerate your career quicker than being able to nurture talented people to deliver on the organisation’s and their own goals.
On top of that, coaching your team for successful outcomes is extremely fulfilling and rewarding. The coaching process gives you an opportunity to get your creative juices flowing. In some leadership roles, the opportunity to be creative is sadly missing. How many innovative and new ways can you think of to inspire your team to greatness?
There may be times when as the leader you need to define the objectives and the expectations – accountability is at the heart of this process. If you are going to commit the time to develop their career with them, they need to agree to being held accountable. Make sure the goals link with those of the organisation and help the team member to see the importance of that. The process needs to make sense from the broader perspective of the whole team.
The organisation you work for will be extremely grateful to you, even if they don’t know it yet. By developing your team, you will give them a new motivation to achieve, and change their perspective of the organisation. Instead of just being a cog in a machine, they will see that their development is now part of your focus. By showing them that you have seen something in them that is worth nurturing, you will inspire them to double up on their efforts to achieve. All this means they become highly productive, positively engaged, higher performing and ultimately, you will increase employee retention. Got to be worth a go hasn’t it?
Isn’t coaching just mentoring or training?
No, it isn’t. Some definitions will help here.
Training – this is either formal or informal instruction which aims to provide the student with the skills they need now, to do their current job.
Mentoring – This is where you provide high level support to an individual, guiding them through their career by giving them the benefit of your previous experiences.
Coaching – this is a combination of training and mentoring with the aim of making your team member successful. Through asking questions and prompting alternative thought processes, you are facilitating the team member to identify what they want to achieve, and then identifying how to get there. You are using your influence, authority and position to remove roadblocks in their way and give them every possible chance to succeed. They must make the journey though.
Coaching itself comes in a variety of flavours. You may be coaching a team member to improve their current performance. This short term aim focusses on identifying their current position, perhaps through performance reviews and aims to address behaviours or problems they may be exhibiting. From here, after clarifying the expectation and the consequences of inaction, you help them to identify their own route to success.
Alternatively, you may be looking at developing their performance through a long-term strategy. By establishing their current strengths and weaknesses and then identifying longer term goals, you can develop an action plan. By developing a professional relationship, stretching assignments and utilising mentoring techniques, you can prepare them for higher level roles, or even leadership.
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Until it comes naturally
The best leaders are coaching the members of their team every day, imperceptibly and informally, without their team members even realising it’s happening. We are all aiming to reach a level of influence in our teams, where a subtle but directed comment hits home with someone and inspires them to excel.
But, that level of influence takes time, and we need to build trust. So, to do that, we need to rely on the more structured and practiced approaches. Since the 1990s leaders have been using a technique which formalises the coaching approach and makes sure that the coaching conversations cover the essential topics and provide a structure to work to. The aim here is to help your team members to visualise and realise their own path to improvement that they identify themselves.
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Time to grow
John Whitmore developed the GROW Model of coaching and it is awesome, plain and simple. It allows you to sit with someone and help them to contextualise their aims and objectives with what is achievable if they apply themselves. Often, if lacking in confidence, they will struggle to see how the steps to success are possible for them. This is one of the few situations where your seniority in the hierarchy of the organisation should come in to play. By using yourself as an example to aspire to and assuring them that you are not superhuman in any way, they can see you as a role model for their success.
The coaching experience needs to be viewed like a journey. You are establishing with the team member where they are now, or the point of origin. From here you determine where the destination (the goal) is and finally, you establish a route to get there.
The model looks like:
Goal
Help them to establish their own goal. Through asking directed questions, help them to identify a goal that follows the SMART model (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely).
The areas you need to help them explore are: What they would like to achieve from the sessions? What goal is ideally at the end of the journey? How will they know when they had reached their stated goal? What would need to change to achieve the goal? Why do they want these changes? How would all this benefit them? By when do they want to have achieved this goal?
You need to be the catalyst for creativity here. I have been in many 1:1 meetings where I have started to ask these kinds of questions. If your team member lacks confidence or worse, has had the stuffing knocked out of them through a career full of disappointment, you might be met with shoulder shrugs and eyes that start to show a hint of moisture. But mostly silence.
Here is where you show them that there really is a different future for them if they want to create it. Help them to see that the limits they see in front of them can all be changed with enough willingness to leave their comfort zone. The biggest challenges I have faced here, are when you are working within large bureaucratic organisations with non existent career structures. Dead men’s shoes is the only way progression can happen, and the team member knows it.
I have learned through my own experience, and through coaching others that there is always a way. Through this first task of goal setting, help your team member explore all the options for where they want to be.
Reality (the situation as it is now)
Here you are looking to help your team member realise the starting point, the context and how far they need to travel to reach their destination. It is important to keep this section light and breezy, establishing the length of the journey needs always to be contextualised as achievable, so as not to discourage them.
Ask them what the current situation is, who is involved in it, how often it happens and importantly, how they are affected by these current conditions. Help them identify what is positive about the current situation and how to retain those positive elements. Then identify the areas that need to change to reach the destination.
As the leader it is your job to help evaluate their current skill sets and just how far away from their goal they really are. Use performance review data, ask colleagues that have worked closely with them all with the aim of establishing the baseline. Make sure to get their agreement, through discussion, of where they are right now.
Cover in some detail what has already been tried, and what resulted from that. Through this approach they can identify stumbling blocks and then steps that they could take to prevent similar obstructions in the future.
Options
Now start looking to the future. This section invites them to explore their options, what positive steps they need to take to reach their goal. Talk about the stages of the journey, the milestones and the specific actions needed to reach each stage. What are their options? What can they do alone who can they turn to for help? This is not about giving them the answers, rather prompting them to look at all the different routes to get them where they want to be, the direct routes and the routes that might be a little more off the wall.
Remember to bring forward the things that have already been identified as successful from the reality section and keep those in the mix. Perhaps look for ways to expand those actions as well as finding new ones. Put the actions in to a workable order and identify which ones the team member feels will be the most difficult to achieve. Try and encourage them to look at the pros and cons of each action, and where they are reluctant to try things, talk about the worst- and best-case scenarios resulting from each.
Identify the barriers and stumbling blocks here. As the leader, you can work with them behind the scenes to help remove as many of these obstacles as possible. You may have the funding for training or have connections where you can arrange mentoring. Be their advocate, but remember, this process is about the team member developing themselves. You can help them, but ultimately, they must commit to taking the necessary steps and be willing to be held accountable for the progress.
Way forward
Here you are consolidating the actions they have identified into an ordered plan of attack. Straight out ask them how they are going to approach each action, when they are going to have undertaken the action by, and if there is anything stopping them starting straight away.
Ask them to explore thoroughly any perceived roadblocks at this stage, so they are identified early, and in a rational conversation help them see that most of them will be surmountable. This is to prevent the process halting or stalling before your next session.
Through this coaching, keep in mind that the end goal is to help the team member improve and to show them that you are in their corner, and genuinely want to see them succeed. By giving them this solid attention, you’ll start to build a solid relationship with them, and its likely they’ll give you good press with the rest of the team. (this article discusses the importance of giving team members individualised attention, you may find it helpful).
Coaching skills – learn to listen
The most important skill you will need to develop, if you haven’t already got it down is, well, keeping your mouth closed. In the early days, I found an overwhelming temptation to wax lyrical and expound my pearls of wisdom all over the place. This is not coaching.
I had to learn how to actively listen to people. This article covers this in depth, here are the basics:
Be patient – finishing other people’s sentences or filling silences is a very quick way to crush their confidence and ruin trust. You need to be in the right mindset from the outset of the session. Yes, you are busy. Yes, there are a million things rushing through your head and clawing for your attention, but – this, here, right now is as important as any of them. Be their advocate but let them lead the discussion and identify the solutions.
Demonstrate that you are listening – Give them your undivided attention. We have all been in meetings with people where they are sneakily glancing at their phone, and have left it on vibrate, so your conversation is punctuated with unwanted percussion. And yes, this includes glancing at your smartwatch. Switch them off. Use body language and eye contact to show you are interested in what they are saying too.
Ask open ended questions – Listening is about understanding on a deeper plane. Ask them how they arrived at their conclusions and what options they discounted before settling on their final thoughts. Use open questions and then let them play the conversation out to its conclusion, without interrupting.
Clarify and summarise – Any vague or incomplete points should be probed for clarity, by repeating what they have said and asking them to expand on the point a little. Make sure you understand what they actually meant, not what you thought they meant. Then, at the end, paraphrase and summarise the conversation back to them, and ask them if you have understood them properly.
The case for coaching
If you aren’t already convinced think about just how awesome the advantages of a coaching culture are.
You will be developing yourself as a leader with every session. The more you listen and focus on ways to open doorways and remove blocks for your team, the more you are developing your own emotional intelligence.
With practice, even if this doesn’t come naturally to you, strong coaching relationships will develop, and you will find your team’s trust in you deepens. If you are genuine, you will quickly see that their successes become your successes.
Team members will now realise that they are important to you, and to the organisation. This changes their focus. No longer are they just turning up, but this new dimension of development starts to mean something. Performance and development meetings stop being a box ticking load of old tosh, and actually become valuable. Nothing helps a team member develop their own motivation quicker than feeling valued.
Your bosses will notice soon enough too. A team full of motivated and dedicated people stands out like a sore thumb. When conversations in the canteen between you and a team member are over heard, you know, the ones where they are excitedly telling you about how they smashed their latest task, bosses notice. Highly motivated employees, who aren’t moping around with the jobs page open all the time make for thriving organisations… sounds good right?
Over to you!
Have you got any suggestions for the best ways to coach team members for success? As you can see from the post, at letsworkhealthy.com we are giving simple practical help to leaders wherever we can. We would love to hear your thoughts on the tips in this article, so it would be great if you could leave some comments below!
See you for the next article!
Greg Bennett is a Public Health Professional and
Leadership Coach
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