Coaching as Tool to Develop Leadership Potential in Your Directs

Music. Welcome to the Manager Lab, where we delve into the increasingly dynamic world of talent management.

In each episode, we will unravel key insights, break down the most relevant books and articles, and provide actionable tips to optimize your approach in developing and retaining top talent. Stay tuned for a deep dive into the art, science, and strategy of unlocking your team's full potential. Let's enter the Manager Lab. I was looking for an article today, and I ran across this classic. I shouldn't say classic. Classic is my definition of an article that I've just used a lot over the years.

And I ran across this article. It's entitled Coaching as a Tool to Develop Leaders. It's by Lauren Parkhill from Flashpoint Leadership Consulting. It's from December of 2021. So not too long ago, but I have used this in several situations where a manager comes to me and really wants to develop their coaching prowess, their coaching skills. The subheading here, Developing Leaders by Developing a Powerful Coaching Model.

So when we think about all the various ways that we, you know, we have at our disposal to develop leaders, the usual suspects come to mind. So we have training, we have webinars, special projects, stretch assignments, documents, books, articles. I mean, I can list a dozen more.

But when we really think about what is the most effective way to develop people. Usually coaching is somewhere in that mix. An experienced coach, a qualified coach can make all the difference in the world in driving results and return on investment from your leadership development efforts. Now, whether it's you coaching, which I think this article would say, yes, we're not talking about external coaches here, although external coaches can be extremely valuable.

This is talking about you as a manager becoming a better coach. Coaching builds mastery and directly supports greater employee engagement and on-the-job performance through your leadership. All right, so coaching for leadership involves helping the leader or the direct report, in this case, develop a greater capacity to learn from their actual on-the-job experiences. So through coaching, you're making them better each and every day.

So while coaching is certainly a way to reinforce knowledge acquisition from other means, the real learning comes when your direct reports apply a newfound knowledge or theory or assumption to their real-life applications. A coach also helps leaders focus on an experience, helps them reflect, help them consider different behaviors and actions that they might have taken or could take next time.

What this really is talking about is coaching helps you really craft a way for learning to become a very iterative process for. That can be transferred to your direct reports. Now, this process takes intention on your part, it takes focus, and it takes some time investment. You're not just going to be able to read an article or listen to this podcast and be able to do it.

Coaching really requires an iterative practiced approach. And the primary tools of the trade for all coaches are powerful questions. These questions positioned at just the right moment with your direct report. So let's look at an example really quickly of eight different powerful questions that this article kind of brings out for you to focus on as a coach. The number one concept or concept number one, I should say, is focusing. So the question is, what do you want to achieve?

By when? And so the combination of that, those two questions, what do you want to achieve? When do you want to achieve? It really gets the direct report to focus on taking action. So that's one way to use powerful questions in your coaching approach by focusing. The second one is on means. How might you approach that situation differently? So that just kind of opens up the space to explore the means to the end, Right. Could you have approached that situation a little bit differently?

This is particularly effective when maybe something didn't go as well as planned. And so this provokes novel ways of problem solving for your direct approach. Another question focuses on outcomes. So the question is, what will be different and what will you get out of taking this action? What will be different? What will you get out of it? So this asks the direct report to really consider a couple of things.

Number one, the value and the benefit of a specific action, thereby increasing motivation and engagement. So when you can ask them what will be different, it really gets them into the visioning aspect. And when we get into the visioning aspect with our direct reports, they become more creative, they become more motivated, you become more effective as a leader. So I love this particular type of questioning. The fourth one here is value, the concept of value.

Why is this important to you? Why is this important to other people on our team? Why is this important to the organization? So this really solicits both individual and organizational values. Fifth one is analysis. So for instance, based on your 360 feedback report, what does this information mean to you now? How are you going to use this information to plot a different course, to do something different? What's the most important thing to focus your attention on right now?

So, again, analysis, as you would expect, focuses on synthesis, therefore creates greater meaning sometimes for your direct reports. Next one is on action. What steps will you take and when will you take them? So this is kind of similar to the very first one, but it's more, it more focuses on specificity in action. So you're helping them really come to a really clear next step, if you will. And the last one here is experience. What happened and what do you think about that experience?

What would you do differently next time? So again, kind of getting them into a creative space. This aids in reflection and pre-planning for the next action. I love David Allen's work, getting things done, the power of the next action. It's so, so powerful to make sure that you know exactly what the next action is. because that's where you can really eliminate procrastination. Sorry, we don't want to get rid of proactivity. That was silly.

All right, so obviously there are many, many more questions a coach can ask a leader in support of their learning. Ideally, after a period of time, hopefully by using this methodology, the direct report will start to incorporate the attitude of learning from experience, and then starts to coach themselves, right? They begin to ask themselves great coaching questions and they're coaching themselves all the time.

You probably have a lot of direct reports that might do this already, and they're probably the most effective employees that you have. But in this way, they start to actually embody how to learn from their experiences and just need to occasionally sometimes check in with you in terms of having you coach them. So, learning in the classroom, learning through print media, learning about webinars on the internet, all that's important.

But what makes a real difference between a book smart and a street smart leader, I really like that, is one's ability to learn from experience. And you, as a coach, can really catalyze effective learning and great leader development for your direct reports. And engaging with an experienced coach like yourself may be a very essential part of your leadership development strategy for your team. So hope you enjoyed that classic from 2021. And until we meet next time in the Manager Lab... Music.