Learn Coaching Skills - Change Your Life as a Leader
If you are a leader, you are thinking about how to get your team from here to there, from a place of preparation to a place of victory and success.You have so many tools to help you do this:Vision. Mission. Values.Relationship. Community.Job Descriptions. Org charts.Trainings.Meetings.Goals. Metrics. Accountability.For many years, I emphasized the importance of defining vision, and then I endeavored to learn the other skills in this list to help a team of people reach whatever vision that our team had defined.But I found that as I refined and worked on my own ability to cast vision, define job descriptions, set goals, and hold people accountable, that I kept running into a barrier that I didn't know how to solve.People in any organization have thousands of problems in accomplishing their job.I found that there are two approaches to dealing with people's problems that were equally unsatisfying.
- Solve all of their problems - Every time a person has an issue, they call you. You ask questions for the sake of gaining understanding about the situation in order to make a well-informed decision. Then you think, maybe pray, and deliver a brilliant solution.
- Let people solve their own problems - Set clear goals and metrics and let people figure out how to solve all of the problems themselves.
Internally as a leader, you probably shift between both of these options, trying not to be a micro-manager (doing too much of #1), but making sure that you don't abdicate responsibility and check out of your team (doing too much of #2). Both of these strategies are necessary at different times, and most people spend their days trying to figure out the right balance between these two opposing options.This is where I was, constantly going back and forth between solving problems and letting people figure it out on their own.
But there is another strategy, a keyI learned that has revolutionized my ability to engage people on their problems: Coaching.Coaching is using powerful questions to help people effectively solve their own problems. In other words, you don't tell people the answer, and you don't just let them do it on their own. Instead, you engage them in such a way that they come up with a solution that is often better than if you had told them what to do or offered them no help at all.Let me give you an example.I was working with someone in my team who I wanted to increase her numbers in a certain area of her job. I internally felt that she could do more. This woman was doing a fine job, but I knew that she had a higher capacity. I had prayed for her, created metrics and accountability systems to help her stay on track, and given motivational speeches.But one day, I engaged her in a long coaching conversation in which I asked questions to help her think through how to be more successful in her job. As she spoke, she solved a key problem that kept her from success. Then she began to get a vision for the breadth of impact that she could have, and she identified key mental barriers of fear and unbelief that were keeping her from going to the next level. She was moved to tears as she realized that there was so much more that she was capable of if she pushed through these barriers.Since then, she has pushed her numbers to another level, and she is realizing the potential that I have seen in her.Coaching helped me as a leader to truly empower someone I lead to realize her potential in our organization.If you have only heard of coaching, and you assume it is relegated to paid specialists, then I encourage you to reconsider. I will be writing about the power of coaching in future blog posts, and I invite you to learn a skill that will dramatically increase your ability to influence and lead.