"Our chief want in life is to find someone who will make us do what we can.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hands-off managers become excellent coaches.
They create an atmosphere in which their people receive coaching gratefully. So the hands-off manager becomes quietly masterful at the coaching process. It’s a perfect replacement for the old school micromanager’s habit of criticism, judgment and correction.
Hands-off managers coach their people so that their people’s talents are allowed to emerge, and they can do better work in the workplace, and they’re more harmonious with their own inner intentions.
Regis was a client at a high tech company who worked in a cubicle, working at a computer, working on his job. Regis had a series of really noticeable dysfunctions in many areas. He had become a human bottleneck. Regis had time management and priority management challenges. He was doing unimportant things with equal vigor as important things and we could see how that was slowing his productivity down and creating a problem for flow of work.
But Regis was a perfect candidate to enter a coaching conversation. Regis had a supervisor named Mark who had learned from us how to coach his people, but hadn’t bothered to tell his people what coaching was. So Mark went up to Regis and said, “Let’s get together. I need to coach you a little bit on this. I need to give you some coaching, here.”
But Regis didn’t really know what coaching was. He had no concept of how great it could be. He didn’t realize that the person who would be giving the coaching also receives coaching and values it as much as he values giving it. So Regis was defensive.
Regis immediately thought to himself, “Oh, coaching. Let me see, translate: criticism. Translate: I’m in trouble. Translate: I’m not doing it right and I’m getting called out.”
“Defense is the first act of war.”
Byron Katie
So this started Regis’ heart to race and it created butterflies in his stomach. Regis mentally began to create a defense. He was already creating what his defense was for behaving the way he does. And of course Regis became more invested in creating a really eloquent defense than he was in finding the solution to his problems.
Regis had no way of seeing that the system of two knowledgeable people giving and receiving coaching will always move things towards a solution. Because if you’ve got one person (Mark) who knows what coaching is trying to coach somebody (Regis) who has no idea what it is, you’ve got that person now investing in defense. It’s the human way.
For Regis to truly benefit, the stage must be set for what this conversation’s really about! And that’s the mission of the hands-off manager: to define the coaching process up front. Because unless the person receiving the coaching deeply understands that coaching will benefit him, it will backfire.
What we want Regis to immediately think is, “This conversation will benefit me. I appreciate this. This is the kind of attention that I didn’t get with the company I worked with before. I love this system.”
Once Mark saw that, he had a chance to talk to Regis about the coaching he himself had been receiving, and how it’s helped him.
You can help your team by first creating a clear concept of coaching itself. You’ll want a definition that’s easy for your people to understand and personal to them.
So that when you coach somebody, both parties know what they are doing.
But what is coaching, exactly? What’s the difference between coaching and leading? And what’s the difference between coaching and psychotherapy? A lot of people get confused about those differences. And so they’re hesitant to coach people because they’ve got a fear that it’s going to be like psychotherapy.
When we think about “life-coaching,” for example, we sometimes think of new-age, faux guru types who sit with people and do chants and channel spirit beings.
And that doesn’t sound like something that would be a good fit for a high-powered organization that really wants to move numbers forward and achieve proactive success.
But coaching really is effective.
In fact, the name “coaching” came from the world of sports. A world of performance and numbers. And sports provides a beautiful metaphor for what good coaching is in an organization.
In sports, coaching is what happens when a coach or a manager works with an athlete to increase that athlete’s ability to contribute to the team. That’s really what coaching is. It’s different than managing and it’s different than psychotherapy.
So let’s start with the difference between coaching and psychotherapy. Here’s a message that we received in an email from a long-time mentor and hero, Dr. Nathanial Branden. Dr. Branden has written a number of wonderful books on psychology.
I have actually used Dr. Branden and his brilliant wife Devers for psychotherapy many years ago; and that may shock some of you who know me, to think that I would ever be in such need (laughter here?), but I assure you I was just doing research for this eventual work.
Now, ironically, Dr. Branden has also now moved, in recent months, into the world of coaching, simply because he has seen how effective it is. He especially sees how effective it is compared to psychotherapy.
So let’s look at his message, because it’s a good place for us to begin building an idea about what coaching is, so that we’re comfortable with it and we can use it like a tool. So Dr. Branden said:
Recently, I announced that in addition to my practice of psychotherapy, I was now engaged in the practice of life-coaching. Almost immediately I received many requests to explain what life- coaching is and in what ways it differs from psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, traditionally, rests on the premise that the client has been damaged by some past event or past events and needs to be fixed or healed.
The concern is with the past and the present.
Coaching rests on the premise that the client possesses unrecognized resources with which he or she can develop strategies that lead aspirations to their fulfillment; the focus is on the present and the future. Traditional therapy is about excavating and neutralizing negatives; coaching is about liberating positives. It’s about putting the client in touch with his or her own wisdom and creativity. To quote one life coach, “Life coaching is about designing a future, not about getting over the past.” One’s relationship to a life coach is often a long-term project, because there need be no end to the process of learning and growth. This is why many champion athletes and high performing business executives retain coaches long after the time they have become successful.
If a person suffers from acute anxiety, severe depression, or low self-esteem, he or she needs psychotherapy, not coaching. However, if a person is basically healthy but is seeking greater fulfillment in or another aspect of life, coaching can be invaluable, addressing a wide range of issues, including work, finances, health, relationships, education, recreation. Coaching looks to close the gap between our dreams and the realities of our existence.
See: www.nathanielbranden.com
Studies show that people who do training get a certain amount of boost in productivity, but if they mix coaching in with the training, and people are coached on how to use the training, productivity goes way up.
“Once used to bolster troubled staffers, coaching now is part of the standard leadership development training for elite executives and talented up-and-comers at IBM, Motorola, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and Hewlett Packard. These companies are discreetly giving their best prospects what star athletes have long had: a trusted adviser to help reach their goals.” ---- CNN.com
The key element inside coaching is the coachee’s rational self- interest. We want to sit down with that person and appeal directly to their own self-interest, so that we can coach to lift their performance up to a level that harmonizes better with the team and is more productive. To do that, they have to see that what we are coaching them in is really in their own rational self-interest to do.