Coach them to excellence

So, it’s now obvious that the third requirement for coaching the right people is to be a great coach. But what does that mean? How can you be a great coach? And why would you want to be a coach—isn’t this about management?

The diagram we showed you previously indicates that an important role for an effective manager is to pick the right people for the position and to coach them to achieve their goals. That is the essence of the manager-as-coach. It’s a talent search followed by goal-setting, providing overall direction, and training so that the employee and the team reach their goals.

There are, of course, many styles and means of managing, ranging from a strict autocracy (“It’s my way or the highway, Sparky, just do what I tell you to do”) to a state of totally hands off (“You guys all seem like free spirits, and I don’t like managing, so just figure out what needs to be done”). However, if you are to attain your vision and goals, we think that you’ll want to take full advantage of the natural abilities of people who are best suited to the positions in your organization while also ensuring that they’re moving in the right direction.

This following diagram illustrates the match between employee and managerial styles that we believe best suits a coaching style of management. It takes full advantage of each person’s natural abilities, their desire to attain goals, and the manager’s desire to assist them in attaining those goals.

The Empowerment Sweet Spot

On the left side of the diagram, employee styles are on a continuum, ranging from a desire for a high degree of direction or control on the bottom, to a desire for virtually no management of any kind at the top. You’ve probably seen folks that span this entire range. The want-high-control individuals are the ones that say things such as “Just tell me what you want each day and I’ll do it for you.” The want-no-control folks say things like “I know what to do, and I don’t need any manager to tell me what to do.”

Along the bottom of the diagram, managerial styles range from autocrat to hands off, and you’ve likely seen this range as well. The autocrat is a micromanager, involved in all aspects of everyone’s day. The hands-off manager lets folks do whatever they want to do, with no goals or expectations of agreed-upon outcomes.

Somewhere near the mid-point of the employee and managerial ranges are two lines that intersect in the middle of a heart. We hope you’ll indulge our imagery, but we believe that there can be true empowerment in your organization when you have a proper alignment of employee and managerial styles. This occurs when both employees and managers agree that the employees should have clear goals to attain as well as the freedom to attain those goals in their own way. Thus, the hearts and minds of the employees and the managers are aligned.

For those managers inclined to provide very little direction, believing that folks will simply do the right thing, we caution you. Our experiences with clients, as well as polls and surveys of companies around the country, indicate that many employees do not know their goals or the company’s goals. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, it’s hard to reach your goals if you don’t know what they are.

And remember too that the company goals should represent progress in attaining the company’s vision. If you’re not attaining such goals, your vision will just be an unattainable dream.

For those managers with a tendency to micromanage, try this. Hold your hand up in front of you, as if you’re trying to stop traffic. Then ask someone facing you to do the same. Then press your hand against theirs, and push slightly against them. Then push harder. We can predict with virtual certainty that they’ll push back. No matter how hard you push, they’ll meet you with equal or even greater resistance.

Remember that you didn’t ask them to resist you or to push against you—you merely asked them to hold their hand up like yours. We believe that it is natural for a person to push back. They do it in this exercise (not once has a person failed to push back, in all the years we’ve done this), and they do it in the workplace, sometimes overtly and sometimes in more subtle ways. But people generally do not like being pushed.

So, as a manager, you have a choice. You can prove to them that you can push harder, or you can simple find a way to harness their natural abilities so that pushing is not required. In the later case, they’ll do what comes naturally and they’ll do it well and without much of your supervision. And you’ll be able to do things other than push.

There were two things here that we loved about Paul as a coach. First, he recognized his son’s natural abilities, including his great enthusiasm. Second, he guided Kyle in achieving his goals by coaching him rather than doing it for him or smothering him with directions. He allowed Kyle to learn and achieve in his own way.

So, is it always as straightforward as this? Just find a person who is struggling a bit, then do the horse whisperer routine to talk them onto a path to success? What about when there are several people involved, which commonly happens with an established functional team or working group?

Highly successful managers sometimes make a seemingly illogical choice when it comes to assembling a high performance team. They may actually choose people who don’t, at least according to the resumes, appear to be the “very best.”

They make this choice because sometimes those who appear to be the very best, as judged by their individual skills and abilities, don’t play well with others. Such folks may be soloists, prima donnas, or just plain uncooperative. Whatever the reason, their inclusion in the group is not as beneficial as the inclusion of someone who appears less talented but who works very well with others in the group.

We see this commonly, of course, in more public team settings, such as athletics. The best team may be composed of “journeymen,” “regulars,” or “no-names.” In the movie Miracle, which chronicled the gold medal success of the U.S. Olympic hockey team in 1980, the coach handed his list of desired players to his assistant. The stunned assistant said, “But you’ve left off some of the best players.” “I don’t want the best players,” said the coach, “I want the best team.”

So it is with your business. Sometimes the best combination of people includes someone who appears not to be the very best—they just help the group become the very best.

Here’s Mike again, talking with one of his new hires, Tony. They’re talking about how to create a high-functioning work team.