Chapter 15
Principles of Good Coaching (and Good Living)

Here’s your reward for reading this book: power principles that will raise you from the ranks of the merely excellent to the brilliant, whether you’re coaching, managing, or just living.

The Principle of Getting Started

It doesn’t matter where you start. It only matters that you start. Take action!

Action sometimes must precede understanding and almost always comes before certainty.

Don’t wait for a problem to develop and grow before you start applying the techniques we’ve explored here. Don’t wait to be inspired. Don’t wait for insight. Don’t get paralyzed by collecting data and information. Don’t wait, period. Start anywhere. Work your way toward inspiration and insight. Look ahead to the future to create powerful solutions.

On any given project, get involved with coaching right up front, helping your employees define the issue, develop the approach, and create the action plan. It’s much better to start out strong, smart, and together than to try to untangle the problem later. The time you spend at the front end of the project will return to you twofold in the problems you don’t have to solve and the explanations you don’t have to make later.

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The Illusion of Control

You can’t control anybody. You might be able to motivate them (if you know them well). You can direct their energies. You can teach them, lead them, praise them, and guide them.

But you can’t control them—and you wouldn’t want to if you could. You don’t want compliant slaves. You want effective, independent workers. Throughout this book we’ve reminded you to focus on what you can control, and that does not include other people.

When you evaluate workers’ performance and related workplace behaviors, put your perceptions to this test: “Is what they’re doing wrong, or is it just different?” Remember that “different” doesn’t necessarily equal “worse” or “bad.” Let go of your judgments. You’ll waste a lot of time and energy and engender a lot of anger and resentment making people undo and redo things they did fine but differently than how you would have.

Too many supervisors manage by the “my way or the highway” standard. They generally view differences as a threat to their authority.

Part of your job as a coach is to learn your employees’ individual work styles and allow as much as possible for people to do it their way—as long as you get the result you want, when you want it.

The Principle of Decisions

“Not to decide is to decide,” theologian Harvey Cox said.

If you fail to make a decision, or hem and haw until it’s decided for you, you decide by default. You also abandon your role as leader and turn the fate of your project over to the prevailing winds.

Deciding not to act may be a valid choice. But failing to decide never is. Get as much information as you can, but remember to make the decision promptly. Cast your net wide for possible courses of action. Weigh carefully but quickly. Then decide. That’s your responsibility as a manager.

Haste makes waste? Sometimes. But waiting makes nothing. Waste is a natural result of productivity. Throw away the waste, and you’re left with a solution.

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The Principle of Change

Change is inevitable and inexorable. When positive, it leads to growth, transformation, and whole new worlds of opportunities. When embraced, change can be a good thing. The whole idea of coaching is to create positive, sustainable change. People, groups, companies, industries, and the whole world change.

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Change may be good and it’s certainly inevitable, but that doesn’t mean you have to change for change’s sake. Change wisely. Refusing to change at all will leave you behind, but constantly changing just because something is new makes you lose any consistency and momentum you had going. A wise business manager evaluates and learns from the new buzzwords, trends, tools, markets, techniques, and movements before getting on the bandwagon. A good manager gets buy-in from his or her team, as well as support from executives, when instituting a major change.

The Principle of Time

Don’t waste time—yours or theirs. Sure, that’s easier said than done. Time is a resource everyone needs to get their tasks done. And it’s a limited resource at that. Respect others’ time and your own. You can make a big difference in the workplace by avoiding certain pervasive time eaters.

Memo Mania

Are you sure you have to write it down or type it out? If you really have to—no doubt so somebody can file it—be concise and clear. Don’t assume your employees have read it just because you sent it to them.

Online communications have made it fast and convenient to fire off a note to all employees at once, but if you’re sending out 50 messages a day, or marking them all “FYI,” you’ve deluged your workers and wasted their time. You’ve also positioned yourself as someone who talks a lot but doesn’t have much to say. Important messages will get lost in the shuffle.

Make sure the message is worth the ink and paper or electrons in the e-mail, then follow up to make sure employees got it and understand it.

Info Glut

Computers have made it possible to access virtually any information source in the world, if you can find it (and it’s easier and easier to find it). We’re all drowning in information, learning to put off decisions while we gather ever more data.

Don’t mistake information for knowledge.

Don’t mistake knowledge for wisdom.

Don’t mistake wisdom for an informed decision that gets the project moving.

Just because you can get the information doesn’t mean you have to get it. Apply commonsense, reasonable guidelines, and set a time limit for your research.

If passing information on to your employees, don’t overload them. They may need some information, but empower them to find out on their own, or provide what they need with resources for more learning. There’s no need to send 10 pages of background info when all a person needs is one or two statistics.

Meeting Menace

People don’t hate meetings. They hate nonsense. They hate wasting their time. They hate listening to someone read a list of announcements to them, when they could have selectively read (and skipped) them much faster themselves. And they really loathe spending a precious hour discussing an issue that matters to them, only to find out that a decision has already been made.

Hold meetings only for necessary interactions that can’t take place any other way. Don’t call for a meeting when a memo will be sufficient. Plan every meeting by setting an agenda. Circulate discussion items and needed information ahead of time. And run meetings tightly to respect time and tasks.

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Multiple Management

To the extent that you have the power to make it happen, make sure workers report to one and only one supervisor for any given project. Having to report to two bosses is a sure time waster. Define lines of responsibility and authority clearly and publicly. Don’t pass the management buck, and don’t let anybody else pass it, either.

Marilyn Monroe Complex

Don’t make people wait. It’s bad manners, and it’s inefficient and ineffective managing.

Don’t make appointments you can’t keep. Don’t show up late for a meeting, especially if you’re running it. Don’t make anybody wait on the phone while you take another call.

Making people wait wastes their time—and insults them. It conveys the clear message that you consider what you’re doing to be a lot more important than interacting with them.

If you can’t help being late, make sure you apologize to the group, quickly and sincerely. If you must explain, keep it short.

Trivial Pursuit

Effective time managers learn to ask themselves the Lakein Question (named for Alan Lakein, the progenitor of modern time management techniques): “Do I want or need to be doing this right now?”

Ask this question on behalf of employees, too. Don’t give them something to do just so that they have something to do. That’s how adults treat children—and it’s a quick way to send a strong message about how you really view your employees. Find meaningful tasks that build to something. Remember to connect their tasks to larger goals—for them individually, for the department, the company. Empower your workers to get proactive in finding tasks so they aren’t constantly coming to you for the next assignment.

Yes, the word business means the state of being busy. But there’s no profit in simply keeping busy. Take the time to create meaningful work plans, as you coach employees toward being independent self-starters who solve problems without you.

The Principle of Questions

Ask lots of questions. As we mentioned early on in this book, asking questions taps into your employees’ knowledge, shows them that you value their opinion, and helps bring forth many options for change and growth. Asking questions that probe for deeper meaning and creative responses is absolutely essential for good coaching.

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What’s the worst thing that could happen if you ask a dumb question? You’ll reveal your ignorance, which may be a little embarrassing—an occasional price to pay for not being perfect. However, by asking you show your willingness to learn. What’s the worst thing that could happen if you fail to ask questions? You remain ignorant.

The answers to a lot of questions may seem obvious, but they often help us gain insight and initiate creative breakthroughs.

The Principle of Mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes. Failures are inevitable. Admit them. Learn from them. Grow, and move on.

The folks who work with you know you’re human. They’ll have a lot more confidence in you when you show them that you know it, too.

If the notion of making a mistake bothers you, call it something else. Call it a learning opportunity.

The story of Thomas Edison and the light bulb is worth retelling in this context. Edison tried hundreds of materials, trying to find a filament that would heat up when an electric current passed through it, giving off light without burning up. After seemingly endless disappointments, there was still no guarantee that the idea would work at all.

When asked how he was able to endure so many mistakes, Edison reportedly said that he hadn’t considered any of his attempts to be failures. He was simply learning what wouldn’t work.

Mistakes teach us what doesn’t work. That’s valuable information. From that, we can start to figure out what does work. Failure gives us the opportunity to learn and grow. We become larger than the failure.

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When you fall short of your goal, learn and go on. Redefine your goal, alter your approach, and get help. You only truly fail when you don’t get back up after being knocked down.

The Principle of Anger

When it comes to anger, follow this guideline: Feel it, but don’t act on it. A worker screws up and you lash out, administering a vicious public reprimand. It’s only natural. You’re righteously mad. All your hard work is wasted in a stupid, careless second. The worker had it coming. Besides, if you try to bottle up all that anger, you’re courting a heart attack or a stroke. Let it all out. Vent that spleen. It’s better for you, right?

Feeling anger—along with frustration and disappointment—is natural. But you don’t have to let the feeling dictate or control your actions. Ride out the adrenaline rush with a few deep breaths and some calm self-talk. Feel the anger, acknowledge that it’s valid, and then release it. If you can’t handle the situation yet, walk away until you can. Then do the right thing, instead of the natural thing.

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“Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more harmful than the wrong that provoked it.” That sentence is as true now as it was when Seneca spoke it about 2,000 years ago. You can’t undo a mistake or change the past. But if you act in anger, you’re probably going to make the situation worse.

If you hold on to your anger, you’ll fester in resentment and stop trusting your team members. Your negative emotion will drag your employees down into that anger pit with you, and then things will get really bad.

It’s natural to feel anger (it’s a valid emotion), and you shouldn’t bottle it up. But do know how to vent it appropriately and release it, so you can move on into positive action.

The Illusion of Objectivity

There is no such thing as pure objectivity. Managers are supposed to be objective, to view the situation without emotion, to judge dispassionately, to rule infallibly. Professional coaches work hard to maintain as objective a viewpoint as possible (knowing that pure objectivity isn’t entirely possible) to help their clients reach clarity.

The reality is, you don’t check your humanity at the door when you show up for work in the morning. You bring all of you to the task—your knowledge and experience, your empathy and understanding, your ambition and disappointment, your opinions and prejudices. So do your employees.

You’re going to like some workers more than others. You’ll find some a lot easier to talk with. You’ll appreciate those who seem most cooperative, most in tune with your philosophy and your ways of doing things, while resenting those who seem to fight you every step of the way. It’s only natural.

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In short, you’ll respond to people as a person. And that means you’ll be subjective.

Don’t hide your biases from yourself. Own up to them and then compensate for these “natural” feelings to be sure you’re being fair to all employees—whether you particularly like them or not.

The Principle of the Big Picture

Don’t sweat the small stuff. Conventional wisdom has this one half right. You don’t have enough physical, emotional, and psychic energy to squander on the dozens of daily (and sometimes inconsequential) crises that nip at you in the workplace. Keep your perspective, your priorities, and your balance. Your job is to think bigger anyway and provide that bridge between workers on the line and the upper management and goals of the whole organization. The small stuff can serve you, and be indicative of larger things going on below the surface. Remember to look deeper and make connections.

Your decisions really do matter—for your organization, the people who work with you, and your own sense of integrity and worth. You’ll face lots of big challenges that deserve all the sweat, all the concern and thought and effort you can give them. Make sure you’ve got enough resources in reserve when these challenges come.

The Principle of Fear

A Chinese proverb advises you to stop running and face the monster that is chasing you. When you do, you often find that the monster isn’t so scary after all.

Fear needn’t cripple you. Courage is, after all, acting in the face of your fear, not in the absence of fear. Trying to avoid the confrontation that frightens you only makes you incapable of right action. If you don’t face your fears, you allow them greater power over you.

Fear itself can’t hurt you. In fact, when you’re able to focus it, fear can keep you alert and give you energy. It’s a tool, a signal for you to be alert and wary. It’s not a stop sign.

Feel your fear. Then do the right thing anyway.

The Principle of Role Modeling

The workplace needs clear lines of authority, well-defined responsibility, and accountability for actions done and not done.

You want respect from your workers. Respect them. You want them to listen to you. Listen to them. You want them to withhold criticism when brainstorming for solutions to problems. Then stifle yours.

You can talk the talk, but to be truly effective, you must walk the walk. Treat others exactly as you would have them treat you. That rule truly is golden, and it’s the smartest advice on human relations you can ever give or get.

The Principle of Life

You are not your job. Your ultimate worth is not in your work or your paycheck. You don’t have to earn the right to exist. Who you are isn’t limited or defined by what you do. In fact, the reverse is true: What you do flows from who you are.

Devote time and energy to your life outside of work. Create a balance that respects all the aspects of your personhood and gives you a full life. It will make you a better worker. You can develop a profound sense of satisfaction, contentment, and joy.

Nobody ever said, “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.”

What if you died tomorrow? What would you most regret never having done? (We bet it’s not something from your work to-do list.)

Now you know the core skills and techniques to be an effective coach in the workplace. For that matter, you might have already known a lot of it when you started reading this book. You may have never seen it all put down in one place before, and you may have needed to have your own good instincts confirmed in print.

Coaching isn’t only about knowing. It’s about doing. Coach stops being a noun, a name for your relationship with your workers, and becomes a verb, the way you interact with your team every day.

The Coach’s Checklist for Chapter 15

Review the principles and concepts in this chapter. They will work for you on the job and in your life off the job as well.