“If you feel like you’re working too hard when you’re coaching, you’re working too hard.”
This instruction from a NeuroLeadership Institute brain-based coaching program I took has been one of my most memorable, practical and valued lessons. Moreover, I often pass along this advice to the executives I coach when they say they want to serve as leader/coach to develop their team members.
Three powerful points are embedded in this one lesson:
First, you need to adopt different actions for developing people than you use for managing their daily performance. Second, when you coach, you’ve got to be open-minded and curious about individuals and their interests, values and dreams, rather than being fixated on solving any problems they present to you. Third, you need to customize your interactions and coaching for each person you’re helping to fit them and their unique situation.
To help people learn and grow, you’ve got to let them do the figurative heavy lifting. Showing them what to do is out of place. And telling them or selling them on your preferred mode of development wastes their time and yours.
In other words, individuals require opportunities and space to think, act and feel on their own to reach their full potential.
To be more specific, your job as a coach includes helping individuals come to their own insights.
When someone experiences their own “a-ha” moment, seeing something new or in a different light, making a new association, or having a new realization or discovery, their brain actually changes. New connections are made between their brain’s neurons, the specialized cells that transmit nerve impulses as brainwaves.
These self-generated insights are an active potion in learning and changing, much more powerful than getting information or ideas from others, including you, their leader. That’s because self-generated insights stimulate the brain to remember and start thinking differently.
Even better, if the insight is strong, the individual is more inclined to start to take action.
As a leader, you can’t predict when the team members you’re coaching will experience these “a-ha” moments. The team members can’t either.
Adult learning is very individualized. Each person’s brain is unique. So is their desire to grow, their ability to focus and their personal experiences that they can use as a springboard.
However, you can set your direct reports up for success by providing guidance, putting them in a low-risk, supportive environment, and making other helpful resources available. This is akin to riding shotgun when a student driver takes the wheel of the car.
What leaders as coaches can also do to accelerate learning is to address each individual’s will and skill and then personally help them get over the hill.
Here’s what this means in action.
Will
As a leader, you can’t will anyone to change. Your team members need to have the motivation — that is, the will — to want to become a better version of themselves. However, you can help by showing you care for them as an individual and asking them thoughtful questions to challenge their assumptions, stretch their thinking and consider new actions. That helps your team members continue to come to their own insights about their growth and development, plans, and actions.
Skill
You can also help your team members get a clearer picture of their skills, especially their strengths and how they can best cultivate them and apply them in their current position and future roles they’re considering. You can probe about any gaps they’ve noticed or that you’ve observed that may hold them back as they pursue new opportunities. For instance, do they need to be more flexible and adaptable? Become more comfortable with ambiguity? Be more confident in leading people, not just projects?
Hill
Even when your employees are taking the initiative for their personal development, they may still need help dealing with real or perceived obstacles that may get in their way —– that is, the hill or hills that confront them.
As a leader, you may have to exert more effort here than you do with the will and skill. For instance, you may find yourself getting involved approving a special training or exploring whether they’d have to move to a new location for the next job they want in the organization. Yet your support signals to them that you care for them as individuals, which can increase their confidence and commitment to you, their development plans, and the organization.
In sum, when you encourage your team members to take as much initiative as possible for their growth and development, you’re empowering them to reach their full potential.
And at the same time, you’re conserving your energy while energizing them. Isn’t that a win/win?
