Although the coaching leadership style has gained in popularity over the past several years, a recent study by Harvard Business Review shows that most managers don’t understand what coaching really is. Many managers believe coaching is about providing advice and recommendations. They think they are coaching when they are just telling their employees what to do. By clearly understanding what coaching leadership is, and how it differs from other management styles, you can start to develop a coaching mindset that will help your team members thrive.
Some managers associate coaching with external consultants who are hired to help executives and managers develop their leadership skills. Other managers may associate coaching leadership with methods similar to a sports coach. However, there are key differences between sports and leadership coaching.
Coaching Leadership Involves Asking Questions
A coaching leadership approach involves asking questions to provoke insights from your team members. It’s a discovery process where you guide the coachee in arriving at their own insights and potential solutions.
Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is about helping them to learn rather than teaching them.
– Sir John Whitmore
A coaching leadership style runs a bit counter to much of what we’ve learned as managers over the years…the traditional command-and-control approach. We feel that we’re promoted into management for our expertise, and we should use this expertise and experience to provide answers and instructions to our team members. While there are frequent situations where your expertise is needed, coaching is more about having a conversation and asking probing, open-ended questions. The goal of coaching is to guide the coachee in arriving at their own insights and solutions.
Listen More and Talk Less
Slowing down to ask questions to help team members arrive at their own solutions has been a challenge for me. I often found myself too impatient to engage the team member with questions, and I would jump in to provide answers and directions for them. This was particularly challenging when I was trying to coach low performers. I would often say “do this and then do that”. I found myself confusing consulting with coaching. I was anxious to share my expertise and knowledge by offering up advice to team members. It wasn’t until I received formal training on coaching that I began to understand the difference between coaching and other leadership methods that I had been trained in over the years.
“If we were meant to talk more than listen, we would have two mouths and one ear.”
Mark Twain
Companies often establish goals to transition to a coaching approach with their management team. However, there usually is a significant gap between aspiration and the daily practice of coaching. The gap is often due to a lack of understanding of what coaching is. There are frameworks you can follow to help you in the coaching process, but focusing first on understanding what coaching leadership means is a good start to building a coaching mindset. As you develop this mindset, you can engage your team members more effectively in coaching them for performance and career development.
Fighting your well-developed management muscle that provides direction will probably be challenging for you…but you can start by asking simple questions to help your team members arrive at their own solutions. Like …“What ideas do you have to address this issue?” To learn more about the coaching leadership style, check out the book “The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever” by Michael Bungay Stanier.