Episode #397: Four Superheroes of Coaching for Leaders

We have seen Hollywood pumping out comic heroes as movie franchises to get the money flowing into the studios. The premise is always the same. The super hero comes to the rescue and saves everyone. What about for leaders when coaching their team members? Fortunately, we have four super heroes we can rely on to help us do a better job as the leader. They are Encourage, Focus, Elevate and Empower.

Encouraging our team sounds pretty unheralded and straightforward. But do we actually do it? Leaders are busy people and have tons of pressure on their shoulders. Life is a whirlwind of meetings and pushing the plan’s execution. Expecting people to do what they are being paid to do, can easily supplant the encouragement vibe from the leader. Telling people you recognise their strengths, means taking the time to audit and then communicate those strengths. Being supportive means taking the time to be across what is happening at the individual level. Do we do that? Giving positive reinforcement means having the right conversations at the right time. The word “time” keeps popping up, because that is the deadly enemy of good intentions.

If we flipped open your calendar from last week and we added up how much one-on-one encouragement you gave to the members your team, would we be talking in terms of hours or milliseconds of conversation? Time management is a key to people management. You can’t manage people if you are not in control of your time and if you have not made certain choices about where you will prioritise your time. We see this in family time being sacrificed on the alter of getting the results. The employees can easily be in the same group as the family, missing out on the leader’s attention.

The second super hero of leadership coaching is Focus. Managers manage processes, budgets, timelines and the execution of results. The machinery of the firm runs flawlessly. There are no defects and no delays. Leaders do all of that, plus they set the direction for the firm and they build the people. The building the people part is where there has to be intentional focus on the individual. All of the other components of executing and gaining results can means the focus is not on the people development. We need to track the assignments we have given people, to make sure that we are there for them, if they need help. We need to offer up our undivided attention to listen to our people. No thoughts of what needs to be done scrambling around in our brain, while we sit there half listening to what we are being told.

Elevate is probably the most difficult of the super hero leader coaching efforts to pull off. We can tell everyone what to do and how to it. We can do it all by ourselves. Neither of these choices develop our people though. We must coach them by asking what they need to do. We need to push them to operate with the mindset of the leader. We need them to self discover things that will guide them around what needs to be done and how they should be done.

We have to challenge them in ways that inspire, as opposed to crushing them. There is a fine line between applying the right dimension of push and crushing someone.

We all get into a rut in our work. As the leader coach if we can have our people challenge typical ways of thinking or doing, then that potentially unleashes a tremendous opportunity for creativity. It means we need to allocate the time to interact with our team and that time may not be very easy to find. We can also suggest they do less of or more of something. We can challenge them to consider doing the opposite of what they are currently doing. All of these “more”, “less”, “opposite” alternatives are there to get the team thinking in a different way about our business. If we see an opportunity for improvement, we can push for immediate change. This can become an issue though if we push too hard at the wrong time. Getting the balance right is the equation we need to solve.

Our fourth super hero is to Empower. There is no word in Japanese which can easily capture this idea. That makes the communication of the idea a bit tricky. We know that the Johari Window describes leadership blindspots. We need to work on our high potential’s awareness of what everyone knows, but they don’t know about themselves. Doing 360 surveys and educating them on how to get feedback are positive actions that will build the leadership bench. Having an improved perspective enables them to make the changes necessary to become a more effective leader.

Getting them to think about how to transfer experiences from one environment to another is a stretch that is needed. We all tend to be trapped by the limitations of our previous experiences. The issue becomes that, “to a hammer everything looks like a nail”. We need to educate our people about not falling into that leadership trap.

Engaging emotions is a powerful driver of commitment and accountability. Understanding what is important to each person is the necessary key to the door of change. That means spending the time and making the communication effort to uncover the trigger emotions, the drivers for positive change. We need to model it for them and then encourage them to do the same, when they have the responsibility of leadership.

The four drivers of coaching composed of Encourage, Focus, Elevate and Empower make for powerful leadership precepts. These take time and the best time to start using them was yesterday. The second best time is today.