CHAPTER 9

Strategy 7: Approach as a Coach

Something was wrong. I had never felt such an extreme need to breathe on one of my ascents before. As my safety diver–coach came down to meet me at 50 feet, I signaled that I was not OK. When I finally broke the surface to take a huge breath, I coughed, felt a warm liquid in my mouth, and tasted the iron tang of blood. I grabbed the flotation buoy but couldn’t see the boat. I felt the darkening tunnel vision that precedes passing out—death in deep water. I applied the free-diving tools I’d taught myself to relax my body, calm my breathing, and slow my heart rate. Shifting the focus to my breath and away from the panicked situation I was in, I told myself, “Focus right here . . . one breath at a time . . . exhale . . . 5 . . . 6 . . . 7 . . . 8 . . . inhale . . . 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . slow this breath . . . extend this exhale . . . one breath at a time.”

Over what seemed an eternity, my vision slowly began to clear, and the urge to cough lessened, but I hardly had the energy to lift my arm, let alone swim. My coach had dismissed our boat to save some money, so we were alone in the deep blue. He managed to wave down a passing local fisherman, and the two of them wrestled me into his rickety boat and back to shore. After arriving in an underdeveloped local hospital that would never pass American accreditation standards, my coach left me to fend alone with only a few nouns and the present tense to help me communicate. After a couple of terrifying hours, the bleeding in my lungs abated. I was safe, although wary of getting back into the water.

I was learning to free dive: going deep under water on a single breath of air. That day, I experienced a bad case of what free divers call a “lung squeeze,” which usually happens when competitive free divers go particularly deep, but it’s rare to have such a severe case at the depth I went that day (150 feet). My coach had told me I could prepare my lungs more quickly for the deep dive with a couple of shallow 30-foot exhale dives. But he was so focused on preparing for his own dives that he left out a key part of the exercise: that I was only supposed to partially exhale, not fully exhale in those warm-up dives. To my lungs, each of those “warm-up dives” was the equivalent of diving to a depth of 200+ feet. And I had done three of them in a row.

There are some important lessons I learned about coaching that day. The first lesson: Care about your people as human beings, not just as cogs in a wheel to meet your goal. The second coaching lesson: Ensure that your people have clear goals, adequate resources, and the key information they need before launching them. The third coaching lesson: Take responsibility for your team’s actions, and be available to them when they face obstacles and challenges.

While the coaching you provide in the workplace may not have such life-or-death implications, it still matters to each of your team members. This chapter will help you learn how to be a better coach for your direct reports, to support them, provide important access to resources, and let them find their best way to get their work done.

DEFINING MANAGER-COACHING

Manager-coaching happens during one-on-one meetings with your direct reports where the focus is on their development. It creates opportunities for you to support them in their progress on a regular basis, make goals clear, remove obstacles, help them tap into resources, provide recognition and encouragement, guide them to find meaning in their work, and support their success and well-being.

Manager-coaching, at its best, consists of having regular conversations getting to know each of your team members as individuals: better understanding their skills, signature strengths, goals, core values, and individual motivations and helping them apply that learning to meet the organizational needs and team goals. When done well, manager-coaching builds trust and strong working relationships, and it allows you to tap into each of your employees’ expertise and creativity, which is essential when your team is facing the more complex challenges of today’s work environment. Manager- coaching also gives you an opportunity to show you care about your people as more than interchangeable parts to get work done.

Manager-coaches are different from the traditional model of directive managers. Manager-coaches hold people accountable while facilitating their growth and understanding. Directive managers, on the other hand, operate through authority and personal expertise. The two styles are different in the ways listed in Table 9.1.

TABLE 9.1 Differences Between Directive Managers and Manager-Coaches

Directive management is often faster or more efficient in the short run, particularly for task-based activities, but it comes at the expense of autonomy and motivation (key drivers of engagement).

Coaching conversations are different from annual performance evaluations and more effective at increasing performance and engagement. In annual performance reviews, feedback typically comes far after the learning opportunity has passed. In a shocking slam on a hallowed tradition in many organizations, 66 percent of employees say their organization’s performance review process actually interferes with their productivity and engagement, instead of enhancing it.¹

Functional MRI brain imaging studies show that the critical and directive feedback typical in performance evaluation conversations is often seen as a threat. It activates the fight-or-flight system that “inhibits access to existing neural circuits and invokes cognitive, emotional, and perceptual impairment” according to the psychology and business professor Richard Boyatzis.² In contrast, in subjects who were being coached on how to achieve valuable personal goals within the job, researchers saw activation of the system that “stimulates adult neurogenesis (that is, growth of new neurons) . . . a sense of well-being, better immune system functioning, and cognitive, emotional and perceptual openness.” Manager-coaching is much more effective at encouraging growth and learning than directive feedback.

Strategy 7, Approach as a Coach, is the final strategy because coaching conversations are a setting in which all the other tools can be applied. To be effective, engagement efforts must be individualized; there is no one-size- fits-all program. A true one-on-one environment allows you as a manager to engage each team member with the strategies that best fit each one. Some people may be more interested in applying their strengths or finding meaning through their values (Strategies 4 and 5); others might be more motivated by recognition or connection with their colleagues (Strategies 1 and 2); and some might be hijacked by their stress or strong negative emotions (Strategies 3 and 6). Coaching provides the venue to apply many of the tools from those other strategies.

The previous strategies were designed so that beyond initiation, the success of a strategy did not rely solely on you. But coaching falls squarely on your shoulders; it can’t be delegated.

HOW COACHING DRIVES HAPPINESS

Hosting regular conversations about your employees’ development helps them feel valued and supported, that they belong, and that someone is looking out for them and cares about them as individuals—all of which also drives happiness. An extensive international survey led by BlessingWhite consulting firm showed that 68 percent of employees who had received coaching said that it boosted their satisfaction at work.³ The Gartner Group led a research program of over 7,000 employees across industries, and it showed that employees who reported to effective manager-coaches were 20 percent more likely to stay at their organization, creating significant time and cost savings for hiring and training.⁴

A feeling of self-efficacy—that a person believes that what they think or do matters—is another positive emotion that can result from good coaching. Obviously, not all the ideas team members come up with can (or should) be implemented, but a couple of minutes spent listening to those opinions, appreciating that your team member is sharing them, and thoughtfully considering them is important. Coaching meetings give space for this positive interchange.

Coaching can help surface and address potential issues and challenges in your team’s work much earlier, while they are still minor. This can significantly decrease frustration, anxiety, confusion, disappointment, and other negative emotions, opening space and opportunities for more positive emotions.

HOW COACHING DRIVES ENGAGEMENT

As discussed in Strategy 2, Cultivate Connection, your relationship with the people you manage is the most important relationship they have in the organization, accounting for nearly 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement scores.⁵ Employees who believe their supervisor has their back, is looking out for their development, and listens to their ideas are more engaged at work. They feel empowered and are more proactive in generating ideas and moving them forward effectively. The Gartner Group found that employees who reported to effective manager-coaches were 40 percent more engaged and exhibited 38 percent more discretionary effort than those who reported to ineffective coaches.⁶ Some recent data:

•   54 percent of employees who strongly agree their managers are open and approachable are more engaged versus less than 10 percent of those employees who strongly disagree that their managers are open and approachable.

•   69 percent of employees who strongly agree their managers support them in setting performance goals are engaged versus only 8 percent of those who disagree.

•   Employees whose managers hold regular one-on-one meetings with them are almost three times as likely to be engaged as those who don’t.⁷

Google’s Project Oxygen set out to prove that managers were unnecessary and found the opposite to be true: teams with great managers were happier and more productive. But what makes a “great” manager? Using Google’s big-data analytics in 2008 and 2018, the company found that the number one attribute of great managers is good coaching skills. Other key attributes included coaching-related elements such as “empowers their teams rather than micromanages,” “supports career development,” and “shows concern for success and well-being.”⁸ Research by Deloitte showed that organizations with leaders who coached effectively improved their business results by 21 percent as compared to those who never coached.⁹

Dan Pink, the author of New York Times bestselling book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, has said, “Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance, but if you want engagement, which is what we want in the workforce today as people are doing more complicated and sophisticated things, self-direction is better.”¹⁰ Manager-coaching is a great way to reap the benefits of self-direction, while still supporting your people and guiding them to the endpoints you need as a team.

WHY SOME MANAGERS RESIST COACHING

If the data is so obvious, why aren’t all leaders already having regular coaching conversations with their employees? Here are some themes I hear from resistant managers.

“There is not enough time.” The only way to tap into the value of coaching is to spend the time needed to get to know your employees: their goals, strengths, values, and ways of thinking. There is no shortcut to good coaching besides regular one-on-one meetings. When done well, coaching can save you time by:

•   Empowering employees: Empowered employees can bring potential problems forward earlier, preventing bigger time-consuming headaches in the long run.

•   Reducing distractions: When your employees know they will have regular meetings with you, they will often hold their small questions until those meetings, rather than seeking you out immediately.

•   Sharing leadership: When you know your employees’ signature strengths, values, and development goals, you will likely find more opportunities to share leadership for tasks that don’t fit your own strengths, values, or goals.

The most effective styles of coaching don’t take as much time as you might expect. The Gartner Group led research from over 7,000 employees across industries that concluded, “There is very little correlation between total time spent coaching and employee performance.” It matters less whether managers spend 36 or 9 percent of their time coaching. What matters is their coaching style:

•   The most effective style of manager-coaching is the connector-manager style, which increases employee performance by 26 percent and triples the likelihood of that employee being a high performer. These manager-coaches create a positive environment, provide targeted feedback in their areas of expertise, focus on building quality relationships rather than providing high quantities of feedback, and connect employees to others for development when the managers lack expertise in a given area.

•   The least effective style is the always-on manager-coach, which degrades performance by 8 percent. These coaches are constantly looking for ways to coach their employees, take personal responsibility for teaching all the skills necessary, and regularly give in-the-moment feedback. This “helicopter-parenting” model of manager-coaching doesn’t give room for the employees to experiment and learn on their own, to tap their own strengths and best ways for them to accomplish tasks, or to find help from others who may have more direct or recent experience.¹¹

“Some of my people are uncoachable.” Some of your people may not take to coaching right away. Some may have gotten into the pattern of just doing what you tell them. Others may not be interested in engaging in their development. Autonomy, and the responsibility that goes with it, can be scary for some people at first.

When you notice resistance, focus on those who are coachable first, and learn with them. Then try again with the “less coachable” members of your team; as they see the benefits for some of their colleagues, they may get on board. Adapt your coaching style to best fit their individual needs.

“Coaching is just for employees having problems.” This is an old stereotype about coaching. While coaching can be very effective with employees with performance challenges, it is in applying this proactive tool with your high and medium achievers where you can find the best results and tap into the intrinsic motivations of all your people.

“They will do things wrong if I don’t tell them what to do.” Coaching conversations will generate opportunities for changing how your team does their work. Some will be good ideas, and some won’t be. But giving your team some freedom to find their way through challenges will allow them to learn for themselves, and they will feel empowered to continue to suggest improvements you might never think of.

“But I don’t have all the answers.” One of the biggest fears managers report about coaching is that they “don’t have all the answers.”¹² When it comes to coaching, not having all the answers is actually a good thing. Coaching can fall apart because the managers have years of experience in their direct reports’ roles, which leads to much more directive communication: “You should do it this way because that’s what always worked for me.”

But this overtly directive approach is the opposite of coaching, and it often induces resistance if the idea doesn’t fit the strengths, skills, or work style of the employee. Not knowing the answer, or not knowing the answer for this person, is a great way to build a collaborative relationship where the coach-manager can connect the employee to other resources in the organization, where they can work together to experiment and test out other ways to accomplish goals. The honesty about not knowing the answer builds trust, and collaborating to find a way forward strengthens bonds.

“Too many people on my team are remote.” While coaching is great to do in person when you can, some of the best professional coaches in the world meet with their clients only remotely. In this post-COVID-19 world, we’ve all become better at connecting through remote tools. What matters is the time, care, and engagement you make with the coaching effort, not whether it is in person or virtual.

PREREQUISITES FOR SUCCESSFUL COACHING CONVERSATIONS

Deloitte Consulting is an organization that fully integrates coaching into their management expectations. Coaching is built into their work teams that change on a project-by-project basis, plus every manager has four to five people they coach long term whether or not they work on projects together. Maureen, a senior manager in Deloitte’s Healthcare group, was brought forward as an exemplar of great coaching.

When Maureen takes on a new project, she is proactive about getting the new team’s members together to share their individual goals, work styles, and what’s important to them outside of work. This creates a good basis for social connection within the team. In these initial meetings, she specifically asks about important self-care and social issues—when do they like to exercise, how often do they want to gather as a team for dinner when in the client city, and so on.

Then she kicks off each project with one-on-one sessions with each of her people so she can go deeper. Everyone does a formal strengths assessment (CliftonStrengths®), which she reviews in advance. She mixes up the venue for these kickoff coaching meetings when she can, going on a hike or talking over breakfast together. And because authenticity is important to her, she often shares stories of her husband and kids, hobbies, interests outside of work, and struggles to find work-life balance. This helps her team feel comfortable sharing their personal interests, which helps her understand what drives them and makes it safer for them to share challenges they may be struggling with. All of this helps her proactively understand the strengths, values, and work styles of her team to figure out how they can best work together.

Maureen exemplifies a lot of what makes a great coach. So before diving into the specific tools, we’re going to talk about what the research shows are some clear prerequisites for being a successful manager-coach.

Prerequisite 1: Care About Your Employees as People

An essential element of successful coaching is that you want those you are coaching to learn and develop not only because it will help with your team’s productivity but also because you care about them as people. Mercenary coaching, when the exclusive focus is to reach the team’s goals, can be sensed by your people and will limit the success of the coaching. If this is an area where you need some work, see page 58 for the connection medita-tion habit in Chapter 4 that you can use to shift your approach and work to be more caring.

Prerequisite 2: Ask More and Tell Less

Many leaders think their job is to know all the answers and to tell people what they are supposed to be doing, and these assumptions pervade their communication style. Yet this dominant influence style limits connection and kills autonomy, which is essential for motivation. It also causes your people to constantly look to you for decisions on how to do their work, which severely limits the team’s ability to move work forward without your say-so and leaves their creativity untapped.

In the book Give and Take, author Adam Grant recommends a very different approach that he terms prestige influence style.¹³ Here are some of the key elements applied in the manager-coaching context:

•   Ask more questions. Ask, and then shut up and listen. A general rule of thumb in your coaching sessions is to aim to talk for 20 percent or less of the time. Keep the conversation targeted with focused but open-ended questions like “What are your long-term goals for working here?” Or “How can I most support you in your work?”

•   Proactively prep for these conversations. For a recommended framework, see the section entitled “Anatomy of an Effective Coaching Session” later in this chapter. Take five minutes before your coaching session to read their precoaching email, and have some questions at the front of your mind.

•   Admit your shortcomings. For example, admit what you know and what you don’t know. Get them connected to other resources when you don’t know.

•   Use tentative instead of assertive speech. For example, ask how they would handle a situation, or share what has worked for you while being open to the possibility that your ideas might not be the right path for them.

Prerequisite 3: Shift to a Positive Focus

The core of manager-coaching is to be supportive of your team and help them learn and develop. While there is no exact formula for the ideal ratio of positive to constructive feedback, organizational positive psychologists have settled on a suggested ratio of about 80/20 positive, supportive, growth-oriented time to constructive criticism and concerns time.¹⁴ You need to make sure these manager-coaching conversations are not dominated by ongoing criticism or a focus on weaknesses. Instead, focus these sessions on what employees do best and how to build on those successes.

If you find your balance is off this 80/20 ideal, focusing your energy on the tools in Strategy 1, Hardwire Authentic Appreciation, and Strategy 4, Activate Employee Superpowers, can help you find more of the positive to bring into these meetings.

These manager-coaching sessions can also create a space for your employees to vent to you about the challenges they are facing. There is value in giving space to these issues in these sessions to help them feel heard. And it’s also important to move from venting to creative problem solving, generating suggestions for how things could change, and helping connect them to the resources needed. Working through the circles of control and influence described in Chapter 8 on page 186 can sometimes help you put these challenges in perspective and move forward in a proactive way.

Prerequisite 4: Act as a Resource, Not a Fixer

When your employees are facing a challenge that they don’t know how to address, one of the hardest things about coaching is to let them work out how to solve the problem themselves, rather than jumping right in with how you would fix it.

Herminia Ibarra, a professor at the London Business School, trains many leaders to be better coaches and finds that even when the most competent and well meaning leaders are “asked to role-play a coaching conversation, . . . [they] demonstrate much room for improvement. They know what they’re supposed to do: ‘ask and listen,’ not ‘tell and sell.’ But that doesn’t come naturally, because deep down they’ve often already made up their minds about the right way forward, usually before they even begin talking to the employee. So their efforts to coach typically consist of just trying to get agreement on what they’ve already decided. That’s not real coaching—and not surprisingly, it doesn’t play out well.”¹⁵

In your coaching interactions, keep a constant vigil on whether you are helping them find their answer or being prescriptive about how you would solve it. These are some specific questions that can help:

•   What have you tried?

•   Where did it fail?

•   What did you learn?

•   How could you do it differently next time?

And if you find you are asking leading questions to get them to your preferred answer, slow down and ask in a more open-ended way, or find some other resources they can tap into. If they ask, it’s fine to share how you would do it or how you’ve tackled a similar problem in the past. But leave it open that their way, while different, may work as well or better for them than anything you come up with. Brainstorming other potential paths and letting them decide which path to take is where the best learning will come from and allows them to find their own way. And when they are stumped by a problem in the future, they will be more likely to keep persevering on their own.

Ironically, when stress is high, it is even more important not to provide solutions. But do give them more structure, help them break the problem down, and figure out the first thing they need to tackle. Giving them more structure but not the answer will help them develop their own style of problem solving under pressure.

Prerequisite 5: Keep Track of Key Information for Each Team Member

Create a development folder or file for each of your people. This is a place to keep track of key information about each of them—their goals, next steps, skills, strengths, values, and what they are specifically working on in their development from the coaching session. Be sure to review this file before your scheduled session.

Prerequisite 6: Make These Meetings Sacrosanct

Because coaching meetings are important but rarely urgent, it is easy to put them off. Try to avoid canceling or rescheduling these meetings. If an urgent emergency comes up, make sure this session gets rescheduled. Nothing degrades trust like expecting regular supportive meetings with your supervisor but having them routinely deferred or canceled.

ANATOMY OF AN EFFECTIVE COACHING SESSION

There are several helpful steps to set up your coaching sessions in ways that can keep them focused and most helpful for the employees.

Step 1. Request a Premeeting Email

Request a simple email from each of your team members to be sent the day before your scheduled coaching session with them. Make this an expected part of each meeting. This will get them in the coaching mindset and thinking specifically about how they want to use their time with you. It helps them set their part of the agenda and lets you know what is on their mind as you prepare. It also allows a quick check on accountability without taking precious one-on-one meeting time.

Have them send you short answers (two-sentence or shorter responses are fine) to the following questions:

•   What follow-up got done from our last session?

•   What didn’t get done?

•   And pick the most appropriate of the following questions to help set the agenda:

   What is the most important thing we need to discuss?

   How do you want to use our time together?

   What is the one thing you want to walk away with from our meeting?

   What challenges or problems are you facing that I can help with?

Step 2. Prep for the Meeting

Spend a few minutes prepping for the meeting. Review your notes from the last meeting and their preparation email, lay out a few questions to ask, and review their development file at a top level. Write out a top-level agenda, focusing on their development. Make sure at least half of the agenda is based on what your employees want to discuss. The rest can be about building your connection and increasing your knowledge about their goals, signature strengths, core values, and connecting them to other resources to help them reach their goals.

See the section “Put Coaching to Work” on the next page for specific topics and questions. Be reasonable about what you can accomplish in the time together. It’s difficult to thoroughly engage in more than one or two significant agenda items.

Step 3. Stay Attuned to Them During the Meeting

Take a minute to review the agenda together, and adjust as necessary if something has come up for them that is more topical. Some quick reminders during the session:

•   Be conscious of the time and that their section of the agenda gets first priority. Come back to the agreed agenda whenever you notice that the conversation has wandered away.

•   Stay aware of who’s speaking. Remember that for most sessions you should be talking 20 percent of the time or less. Go back to your questions if you find yourself dominating the conversation.

•   Use the deep-listening skills described in Strategy 2 (Chapter 4) page 73.

These conversations can be awkward at first. Showing you care about their development and connecting them to the resources they need will help them see the value in these meetings, and they will likely start to develop their own pattern. Stick with regular meetings through this initial awkward stage.

Step 4. Get to Action Steps and Accountability

Make sure you end these conversations summarizing what each of you has agreed to do as next steps. Make sure you’ve put any of your commitments into your calendar.

PUT COACHING TO WORK

Each person holds so much power within themselves that needs to be let out. Sometimes they just need a little nudge, a little direction, a little support, a little coaching, and the greatest things can happen.

—PETE CARROLL, head coach of the Seattle Seahawks

Use Coaching Conversations with Your People

When Bryan, the recently promoted manager I mentioned in Strategy 5, started bringing his interpersonal values into his work, he focused on getting to know his team members including their strengths, interests, and what they wanted out of the work they do making compliance training videos. He started having regular one-on-one meetings with his team to support their development. In those meetings, he encouraged them to come up with ways to change how they did their work and focus on specific areas of interest.

For instance, he found that one of his team members, John, had a knack for animation and loved to bring it into the videos he created. When they discovered this signature strength, Bryan asked him how he would like to develop that skill further. John found an Adobe Illustrator training he could take and a new animation software package that he wanted to learn. Bryan encouraged him to set specific goals around this interest. Now John is the go-to animation guy on the team and gets energy helping his colleagues think about how to better integrate more animations into their videos. Bryan’s group also saves outsourcing money by having an in-house expert.

Two of the women on Bryan’s team noticed how ineffective their internal onboarding system was, with each new person simply tagging along with more experienced people for their first couple of weeks to learn the ropes. Not surprisingly, their training was inconsistent, and skill and process learning varied widely. The two of them wanted to make it more efficient, so Bryan helped them set development goals around it. Over the course of a year, they documented the core process and made training videos about how to make training videos. The onboarding process became much more consistent, and not only did Bryan’s team benefit but this also became something useful for the whole division Bryan worked in.

Both of these improvements were a direct result of using coaching conversations to find overlap between the team’s interests, skills, and motivation and what was needed by the group.

Now that we know the prerequisites for a successful coaching partnership and the four steps of a coaching session, it’s time to learn seven ways we can best use that one-on-one time to support their development and build stronger teams.

Coaching Tool 1: Get to Know Your People as Humans

People are wonderfully weird. We all come with a unique set of useful and interesting skills, strengths, passions, and values as well as a set of fears, anxieties, and personality quirks that guide how we react and respond to various stimuli in our work and in our world. Everyone’s path to excellence is different. As a leader, we can learn to motivate and engage our people only when we understand some of this weirdness. Regular one-on-one coaching meetings over time are about peeling back some of those layers of protection and adaptation that the individuals on our teams have built up to make their lives and their work environment functional for them. It’s about understanding and finding ways to work within their individually varied motivations. It’s these one-on-one times that allow you to individualize their programs and key steps.

There will be people where your weirdness and their weirdness synergize, and it’ll make it easy to work together. With other people (or even the same people at different times), clashing weirdness will make your working relationship feel awkward and ineffective. That’s OK. We’ve got to try things out, adjust them, and learn as we go.

When starting up any kind of coaching, it can be overwhelming to figure out where to begin. We want to see results quickly to help justify our time investment. But to do coaching well, it’s essential that we spend that time up front, getting to know their weirdness and how it effects their work style. Kicking off coaching is about asking good get-to-know-you questions. Here are some areas to begin.

Get to Know Their Goals

The primary purpose of these coaching sessions is to create a space to understand what the employees want out of their work. These can get more refined as you get to know them better. Recognize that the initial answers you get will depend on the level of trust your team members have in you (and the organization).

Start with the “softer” questions at the top and, as you sense trust building, move on to the others:

•   What skills are you particularly interested in developing?

•   What opportunities would you need to help you get there?

•   What do you want to learn this month? This year?

•   What challenges and problems excite you?

•   What would you do if you left this group or organization? Or left this field altogether?

•   What types of work do you want to do less of and more of?

•   What are your job and career goals?

•   How do you see your current work helping you reach your goals?

•   Where do you see yourself in 5 years? In 10?

•   How does this job align with your career goals?

Get to Know Their Needs

It’s also important to ask questions about what’s not working for them—that is, questions that probe at their pain points or challenges they can’t figure out:

•   How are you feeling about your work right now?

•   What would make you happier in your role here?

•   Is there anything that would cause you to leave?

•   What are you doing to try to address these issues?

•   What can I do to help you?

While these can be difficult conversations, it is the understanding of what they are really thinking that can give you the power to support them in their development, get them connected to resources that can help them, and try to address these concerns before they grow into larger problems. If you uncover strong negative emotions, tap into the tools of Strategy 6, Embrace the Negative, with them. Even if the issues cannot be solved in the short term, you have awareness of what they are struggling with and how it might influence their work. Regularly asking these types of questions provides invaluable information to help retain your team and motivate them in a forward direction.

Get to Know Their Signature Strengths and Core Values

A powerful way to feed these conversations is through the signature strengths or the core values process in Strategy 4, Activate Employee Super-powers, and Strategy 5, Mine for Meaning. While the strategies are built around the whole team doing them simultaneously, the reflective process at the heart of both strategies (page 115 and 148, respectively) can be done individually with the results brought to coaching. These conversations can be a powerful way to build insights into their current work and to help them craft their work to better tap into these motivating tools in the future.

And even if they aren’t ready to step into the whole process of Strategies 4 and 5, here are some questions that probe some of these themes:

•   What motivates and excites you about your current role?

•   What are your strengths, and when do you get to use them in this role?

•   Which of your strengths are underutilized?

•   What makes you proud of the work you do?

•   How do you think this job aligns with your personal values?

•   What motivates you in your life outside of work?

•   What other kind of work and types of projects interest you?

•   How could we adapt your job and responsibilities to better utilize your strengths or align with your values?

Coaching Tool 2: Believe in Them

Maureen (the Deloitte consultant we met earlier in the chapter) was faced with a challenging situation. Due to a personal tragedy, one of her lead managers had to take an unexpected leave of absence and a more junior manager, Taylor (whose name has been changed for this story) stepped in. In their first meetings, Maureen saw some red flags from Taylor’s experience base, but she also saw a sense of grit and readiness to learn.

After a couple of weeks it became clear that Taylor was in over her head and didn’t have the skills to handle the new role. The status quo wasn’t going to cut it; something had to change, and quickly. Maureen knew it would take an unbelievable amount of effort for Taylor to succeed. Rather than deciding for her, Maureen let Taylor decide what she wanted to do. Maureen was clear and transparent: Taylor’s skills were insufficient, but if she was willing to fully commit to this job and get those skills in a short time, Maureen would be there to support her. Taylor jumped at the opportunity and committed herself to the hard work it was going to require.

Once that decision was made, Maureen believed in Taylor’s determination to make a positive change, and she invested the time to provide consistent and direct feedback that allowed Taylor to try, fail, learn, and try again. Over the following two months, Taylor got the experience—and support—she needed to move toward a positive outcome for the client. Maureen had been willing to find someone else to step in because of Taylor’s initial performance, but by being transparent, believing in her, and coaching her, Maureen was able to get Taylor where she needed to go. Now Taylor is one of her most dedicated and engaged managers.

Numerous classic studies across the K-12 and college education spectrum and in training across fields (new managers, military recruits, salespeople, and so on) have shown that people will rise or fall to the level where their leaders believe them capable.¹⁶ In those studies, the trainer, manager, or teacher treated those who were designated as “high potential” differently by setting higher expectations, giving more attention, speaking more warmly, providing more feedback, or attributing failures to the specific tasks rather than the people doing them. This led to a self-fulfilled prophecy as the leaders’ beliefs got transferred to the learners, and they performed at a higher level than others not designated high potential. What was most compelling about these studies was that the high potential learners in each study were chosen completely at random.¹⁷ Believing that your people are high potential and treating them that way will help them see the possibilities and step into their own potential.

At the same time, you can’t let too much positive focus dilute conversations concerning important performance issues or significant challenges. Many managers like to bring in what Adam Grant calls a “feedback sandwich,” where the manager makes sure to find something to praise first, then delivers the criticism, then ends with something positive. But the praise can be seen as insincere, which reduces trust, or the performance concern gets lost if the employees focus only on the positive feedback they heard. Instead, preface this type of constructive feedback with the words, “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations, and I know that you can reach them.” Research has shown this simple change can make the feedback 40 percent more effective.¹⁸

Of course there are times when employees are assigned to a team or a task for which they simply don’t have the talent, skills, or ability. But if you can be explicit about your high (but achievable) expectations with clearly stated measurable goals, get your team the resources they need to do it, and believe in them, you will likely be surprised at what your team can do.

Coaching Tool 3: Encourage Job Crafting

A big part of believing in your people is providing the freedom to work out the best way for them to get their work done. Autonomy—having control of what you do and how you do it—is an essential driver of human behavior. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan developed a central theory on personal motivation called the Self-Determination Theory (SDT). In summarizing decades of research on what motivates people to act, an individual’s ability to choose how to do something is essential in maintaining performance.¹⁹

One process that fits well into the manager-coaching structure is to encourage your team members to job craft. This concept was developed by organizational psychologists Amy Wrzesniewski of Yale and Jane Dutton and Justin Berg of the University of Michigan.²⁰ Job crafting involves inviting your team members to look at their work as a whole and see how they might redesign it in a way that better utilizes their skills, knowledge, strengths, needs, and values. It encourages them to take proactive steps in suggesting how they might redesign the work they do.* When you give them that freedom in conjunction with clearly laid out organizational needs combined with willingness to experiment, surprising efficiencies can be found.

In Dan Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, he described the 4Ts as a framework for team members to consider as they craft their job:

•   Technique: How to get work done is an essential element of autonomy that we’ve hit several times in this chapter. Your role is to make the goals and outcomes clear and to share what you’ve seen work in the past but to let your team members decide how to accomplish their goals. Give them time and freedom to experiment with their own ways of doing things while you offer guidance and connect them to resources.

•   Task: While your team has a clear set of goals, there is often some flexibility in who does what tasks. As you and your team get to know each other’s signature strengths, core values, and what energizes them at work, express openness on possible task-swapping experiments they could try (see Chapter 6 on page 128 for more specifics). As new projects come into your team, rather than going to the people who always do those types of projects, ask how the projects might fit with the growth goals of one of your other team members.

•   Time: We all have different times when we are working at our best. While it’s important that every team have opportunities to connect with each other on a regular basis, how much flexibility can you give team members on when they need to be in the office and when they can work remotely? The COVID-19 pandemic experience has shown many of us how to successfully work remotely as well as what is better done in an office. Let those lessons guide what’s feasible on your team.

•   Team: Create opportunities for your team to choose whom they work with on specific projects. We all have different people who better complement our work skills or style. Having some freedom to decide whom we work with on some projects can provide a sense of autonomy.

As a manager-coach, your job is to set clear end goals for the team and organization while letting them explore how they can get their work done. The successful manager-coach tries to provide flexibility when possible. Give the team explicit permission to try out small experiments with the goal of adopting the experiment results more broadly if they are successful. The advantage of these ongoing coaching conversations is that you will have regular opportunities to hear from them on what changes are effective and which aren’t, and you’ll be able to create the opportunities to codevelop new ways of working.

Also be on the lookout for opportunities where your team members may be able to take the lead. Many people hold back because they don’t think they have permission. Ask them, “What would you do if you were in charge?” If they have a good plan, give them permission to go forward, and support them in executing the plan.

Coaching Tool 4: Find Their Intrinsic Motivation

People often resist what they are told to do even when that “telling” comes from a place of knowledge or wanting the best for them. This is what psychologists call psychological reactance.

Research from Michael Pantalon, psychologist and researcher at Yale and author of the book Instant Influence, has shown that when trying to help people change, it is always more effective to focus on any internal motivation they have, even if it’s small or latent, than to focus on their resistance. The key is to find that initial spark of motivation and fan it into a strong enough desire to move to action.²¹ Here are the key questions he laid out from his research:

•   Why might you want to change? It’s important to keep the autonomy here. It can’t be “Here’s why I want you to change” or “Here’s why you should change.” The “might” maintains the individuals’ autonomy.

•   How ready are you to change on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being “No way” and 10 being “Let’s do this!”? If they answer 1, it might be necessary to split the question into a smaller change, or you can ask what it might take for that 1 to turn into a 2.

•   Why didn’t you pick a lower number? This paradoxical question is the key because it will focus on the reasons they want to change. Then you can fan this spark of change with the final three questions.

•   Imagine you’ve changed. What would the positive outcomes be? This helps them focus on the why.

•   Why are those outcomes important to you? We’re not telling them why; they are telling us.

•   What’s the next step, if any? Help them move to action by figuring out the next small step they can take. Feed this into the accountability part of your coaching conversations, and give them the support and resources they need to get started. The more personal and heartfelt their reasons are, the more powerful the action plan will be.

Coaching Tool 5: Connect Them to Resources

Recognize that you don’t have to have all the answers, and proactively look for how to connect them with other resources on your team or elsewhere in the organization who might have more knowledge, experience, and ideas about a specific area than you do. Are there experts or contacts you have outside the organization who might be able to help? This is the primary differentiator between the performance-reducing, always-on coach-manager and the much more effective model of the connector-manager. Be on the constant lookout in your sessions for how to connect them with others who can help.

Coaching Tool 6: Pass It Down

If you lead a team of managers, as they settle into the coaching with you and start to find value in your work together, encourage them to play the same manager-coach role for their direct reports.

CONNECTING STRATEGIES

* If you or one of your team members want a more formalized process, the researchers who developed the job crafting concept have created some helpful tools that can be utilized by anyone on your team who is interested. These tools can be found at www.Jobcrafting.com.