Harvard Business Review’s management tip of the day recently was around coaching conversations: you can’t be a great manager if you're not a good coach. We could not agree more.
Many of the people coming into IECL Coach Education are managers who want to “take a coaching approach” in their leadership style. They want to be more “ask” and less “tell”, moving away from the old “command and control” model of management towards a collaborative and empowering style that, frankly, most people now expect, or may even demand.
HBR suggests deep listening on the part of the manager, and restraining the impulse to provide the answers.
This is probably the most important and the hardest element of coaching for managers; how to tread the fine line between managing (where you do tend to give firm advice, answers and even directives) and coaching (where ideally you are asking your people “What do you plan to do next?”)
For the manager, it can involve some (possibly quite scary) letting go of their perceived “control” of their team, and a willingness to open up to a more more trusting relationship.
Ultimately, your team becomes more engaged and satisfied at work because they feel “I did it myself”, as opposed to “I did what I was told”.
To quote Lao Tzu:
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”
By the way, where HBR suggests “give him a deadline” we would suggest more of a coaching approach, for example, asking “What would be a realistic timeline for this?”
Mandy Geddes, ACC, AICL
Director Coach Education, IECL
Read More: "Did you plan your career?"
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