The morning I started writing this month’s newsletter, I was having a learning/supervision call with one of the participants on our coaching and mentoring training course for leaders. The participant is a senior manager in a large utility company. During our conversations he said something along the lines of: It is difficult to find the time to coach. I am running from meeting to meeting.
This is a regular concern of many leaders. However, there are three important aspects to consider:
- Coaching gives leaders a great return on investment
- You don’t need to find time to coach
- Coaching is very effective (when you know how)
1. Coaching gives leaders a great return on investment
I will argue that coaching the team will give the leader a handsome return on his or her time. If the leaders style is directive, telling the team members what to do and how to do it, and approving many of their actions and decisions, then he/she reinforce the team members dependence on him/her and their feeling of helplessness and being disempowered.
Through coaching you can help them grow, build new competencies, gain confidence and increase their motivation; all of which makes them more independent, empowered and higher performing. An important benefit of this to you is that you can reduce their dependency on you, reducing the time you need to get involved in daily details and allowing you to focus on thinking ahead – and maybe even to get a better work/life balance, wouldn’t that be great 🙂
2. You don’t need to find time to coach
Coaching should not be seen as adding more work to a busy leaders schedule. Instead look at changing how you use your time in your 1:1 and team meetings, as well as your daily conversations with your team members and colleagues.
Most enlightened leaders will have regular 1:1s with their staff. You don’t need to call these conversations “coaching” to take a coaching approach. When your team members bring a problem to you, be it technical, relationship or a question of prioritisation, instead of giving them solutions, use coaching to help and challenge them to take ownership and solve their problems themselves.
A good way of thinking about this is: How can I help Joe to learn, so he can solve this sort of problem or issue himself without coming to me in the future? Every time you succeed, you have helped Joe grow, motivated him, reduced his dependency on you and reduced his demands on your time. You are both winners 🙂
3. Coaching is very effective (when you know how)
Last but not least: Are you effective when you are coaching? There is a big misconception that coaching is a slow process. This is clearly borne out of people trying to coach without the mindset and skills to do it well. Too many attempts to coach with little or no training in the “art”, but if your skills are not up to scratch the process will be slow, clunky and ineffective. Typically when the leader-turned-coach struggle, they will revert to a telling approach, only reinforcing that the team member is helpless and can’t think for themselves. At the same time both parties get a sense that coaching isn’t working.
Coaching when done well can be very fast indeed! During our training courses we will practise Water cooler coaching as we call it. We teach the participants to use coaching to respond to a throw-away comment and in less than 5 minutes turn it into an opportunity to help the other person take ownership and move forward. This is always a great demonstration of how powerful coaching really is – when you know how!!
Conclusions
- You cannot afford to not find the time to coach!
- Coaching will give you a great return on investment.
- Incorporate coaching into your normal meetings and conversations
- Build a strong set of coaching skills so your coaching is effective
Author: Jan Bowen-Nielsen
From August 2011 Newsletter