Coaching is about what’s possible
Coaching is all about allowing what’s possible to emerge. It’s moving a person out of being stuck in a mindset where they think they are limited. The coach maintains what the Zen masters call a “beginner’s mind” in which nothing is impossible.
Because as an effective coach you never want to seem to be saying “I’m better than you, I’m your superior, and that’s why I’m coaching you and telling you how it ought to be.” That would be the expert giving advice, not a professional partner delivering coaching. Expert advice will not bring change. It is more likely to bring humiliation. And that’s only because we are dealing with human beings.
Lasting behavioral change is always the ironic specialty of the hands-off manager. By not micromanaging, more things change. By keeping your hands off the process, the process improves more quickly.
Would you pull a flower up from the ground with your hands to help it grow?
Why try to do similar things to an employee?
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When you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
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The hands-off manager has the added benefit of time. She is not spending all of her time looking over the shoulders of her employees. She has hired good people, she is passionate about what her company is up to, so her people feel inspired. She addresses problems as they occur.
She uses this time to stay up to speed on market trends, to monitor the market, to move her people in strategic ways that anticipate what is coming next. She has a clear mind and can access new ideas easily. The market is always changing. In today’s world, those changes can be dramatic and devastating to those who will not listen to the marketplace.
Listening to the marketplace is as important as listening to your people. A true leader and manager simply must have a sense of what is ahead and be prepared to change to address it. If you don’t, your organization has little hope of withstanding the test of time.
A salesperson we knew named Trina was down on herself for not making enough cold calls during the day. She said, “I just need to prospect more. I don’t do enough prospecting. I know that’s my greatest flaw, I don’t enjoy it and I put it off and handle things that I think are more important, and then the prospecting never gets done.”
“Great. So how does that look to you when you come to work?”
(We asked that because we really wanted to see how prospecting looked to Trina. Why it looked a little scary, unpleasant, and uncomfortable, and why the other work Trina did looked really fun and enjoyable. A coach seeks to understand how a thinking system—“this is the fun part, this is the not fun part”—is leading to low performance. In fact, it’s guaranteeing it.)
When we were with Trina for a while in the coaching session, we had a few breakthroughs. She began to see that if she were to create an interesting routine for cold calling, she wouldn’t have to try to decide whether she “felt like” doing it. She would simply follow her routine. She wouldn’t have to feel that pit in her stomach as she drove to work, wondering if she was going to be able to get herself to prospect. She would now have a rather fun routine to cover that for her.
A system at play in every workplace
In the uncoached, micromanaged organization there is an unconscious default system of judgment and reprimand.
We learned it in families when we were growing up. We surely learned it in the military. Most people in American corporations default unconsciously to a 1940s system of military management combined in some unhealthy way with parent-child discipline.
And hands-off coaching is the way out of that.
Because hands-off coaching is a mature partnership—two grown-ups with a common goal—not Mad Dad criticizing Bad Child (how most teams are run).
A great coach is more committed to the success of the team than he is to the success of any individual. So his mission when coaching his people is to show them that success comes from what they can contribute to the whole, not from how they can stand out as individuals. And this allows him to apply some very tough love to the individual in the name of the team win.
“The hands-off manager has to be absolute,” says Duane. “He or she can’t be wishy-washy when it comes to excellence. There must be an unwavering commitment to everyone becoming the best they can be at what they do.”
And these results are not numbers or money (although they will be nice side effects, in the long run). These results are the ever-improving quality of work. They are the process of great work, not just the financial outcome.