Coaching to lead

Mention the word “coach” and your mind may immediately turn to the world of professional sports. Sports coaches train, develop and mentor their athletes to become better at the physical components of the game. But in the corporate world, coaching takes on a slightly different form. There, communication skills are what set the players apart from each other; it’s also through communication that leaders can get the best out of their employees.

According to Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind – Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, a shift is now under way in much of the advanced world’s workplaces. The world is moving from an economy built on the logical, linear, computer-like capabilities of the “Information Age” to one that is built on the inventive, empathetic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place: the so-called ‘Conceptual Age’.

Merely managing people is not enough in this complex work environment. Evidence suggests training and development are just as important, if not more so. Many upcoming managers want to be stretched, supported and nurtured in their development toward their next role.

The most recent Hay ‘Leadership Crisis’ Survey asked professional-level employees what the best practices their employer could provide were. It found the Number One best practice was leadership development opportunities for managers. The survey also found that employees respected companies where managers were held accountable for their leadership behaviour and the work climate that it creates.

The more ‘at-ease’ style of management has evolved. Managers are now keen learners, initiating and steering conversations to draw out and harness knowledge and ideas from a diverse group of others, and thereby adopting a coaching style of leadership, observes Denise Wright Facilitator, Coach and CEO at Xtend Coaching International.

Tony Latimer, Master Executive Coach at the Asia Pacific Corporate Coach Institute echoes similar thinking. “This is quite a departure, for some, from the fairly common ‘all-knowing’ management style of the past,” he says. “In line with this, education for managers has shifted in recent years to include a significant focus on coaching as a core leadership skill.”

Coaching versus managing

There is a fine distinction between what most of the world know as “managing” and the relatively new art form of business “coaching”. According to Latimer, the process of coaching involves a different level of thinking; resulting in behavioural change. “When you get leaders to coach, they learn to suspend judgment and provoke thinking and innovation in their teams.

“The faster an organisation takes managers away from ‘functional expertise’ to ‘leaders of people’, the better the organisation functions,” he notes. “This paves the way for succession planning.”

One distinction between these two styles of leading people is that ‘managing’ is more transactional and focused on driving task execution and results. Wright observes that it has more of a “push” energy to it. Comparatively, coaching tends to be more developmental and transformational in focus and has more of a “pull”-type energy, she says.

Resurrecting a team

Wright says one of the best ways to explain the differences is through a real-life example. She tells the story of a new senior banking executive arriving on board to find a depleted team that had been working around the clock for many months.

Their energy reserves were dry, and the bank was in serious deficit when it came to asking more from these staff. The incoming executive put the brakes on, took time to restore some ease and made connections and relationship building a priority for all.

He carved out some space for his whole team to spend a few days together to create a truly shared vision – a compelling picture of their preferred future – that could help steer their decisions, actions, and behaviour over the next six months and beyond. He participated himself but as a guide, seeking to draw out and understand the opinions and ideas of all present, and ensuring every voice was represented

This type of leadership, Wright says, is coaching. It is the process that allows staff the time, space and resources to find answers and solutions for themselves.

Wright used this same senior executive as another example of “managing” to get results. When the leader came on board, he took each team member aside and worked out a set of agreed objectives.

Once a challenging set of goals had been negotiated and agreed to, the leader could then switch to a coaching style to support the team member in achieving those objectives and also moving forward in their longer term career.

This is where the fundamental shift in coaching lies, Wright says, where “one becomes a leader of people rather than a manager of an expertise”.