It is really common to discover managers and leaders who want to win the hearts and minds of their people and engage the talent they know they have in the workforce.
But very frequently the ways in which organizations function seem almost designed to work against this and how this all fits into the current climate with remote work becoming increasingly common.
Telling people what to do does not cause them to become more proactive or more self-reliant, nor does it give them an understanding of the potential they have within. This is where I find myself quite often talking about the value of a different kind of approach I call “The Coach Approach”.
Why the coach approach? Because fundamentally coaching is built on the assumption that people have skills and talents that simply need to be drawn out. The way you draw them out is not by trying to shove things down people’s throats. You get the best from people when they are able to access it themselves. This is a process of internal exploration followed by action.
1. Ask Better Questions
The art of good questioning involves partly: timing – because you can ask the same question at different moments and get wildly different responses.
It also involves understanding that you don’t know and are, therefore, engaged in an act of genuine inquiry and are provoking thought. Whenever you ask a question, you send a person on an internal search.
There is an interesting aspect even in the word ‘question’, with the word quest built into its fabric.
Very often I will say to people the really important question is “what is the quest in your question”? Where are you directing attention? What is the journey you are sending people on when you ask them a question and send them on that internal search?
2. Stop Telling and Start Listening
This is just one of many coaching skills which seem to be far too important to be left exclusively in the hands of people known as “Professional Coaches”.
This is why I’ve spent a lot of time making these skills available in a learnable format to people who frankly have very little interest in being coaches but really do want to know how to adopt a coach approach – which means stop telling, start listening.
Start a different kind of working relationship with people, which will be characterized not by a loss of authority, but creates a clear managerial position in the way you engage with people, enabling them to do more than they’ve done in the past.
This approach is almost like designing an alliance where the two of you, three of you or even a team begin to have a way of engaging what already exists as latent talent. It seems to me that this is a skill pretty many would benefit from knowing how to utilize.
I have taught this to people all over the world, and while they come from very different backgrounds, they have one thing in common: they want to draw on the talent they know is already there.
For these reasons, coaching skills are something anyone would benefit from becoming proficient in. Strong leadership is a skill, and skills require practice.
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