BlessingWhite recently posted an excellent article on why coaching (by workplace leaders and managers) doesn’t work.
The article focussed on the five main causes of failed internal coaching and a general direction for the remedy for each cause.
My previous post covered Cause 1 – Coaching to the Job Description, not the person.
This post covers the second cause and together with the following three posts over the next couple of weeks I’ll give you specific and actionable solutions for each cause for you to follow.
I’ll then wrap the solutions up into an easy to reference e-book and make it available to you with my compliments. This e-book will include many of the techniques I offer in my $7 e-book ‘Ask or Tell – the power of asking and the force of telling’
Coaching is a leadership and management essential, not a discretionary tool.
Cause 2 – Being the Hero
Coaching and leadership are not heroic functions. They are service functions. Helping others to be great.
Coaching is not providing solutions. Many leaders and managers think their primary responsibility is to solve problems for their people. Quite simply – they are wrong!
Beware also of the ego that make some leaders and coaches think they must be the rescuer.
Solving their problems by giving them solutions whether under the guise of coaching or assumed leadership/management teaches them to not think for themselves and in the long term dis-empowers them.
Instead the leader coach can ask a series of straightforward questions such as:
- “OK I see you have this issue, what do you think is the best way to resolve it?”
- How have you resolved challenges like this before?”
- “If you were to coach yourself, what would you suggest?”
If the person is heading down a path that is erroneous, you can always ask:
- “OK is there another way of looking at this?”
- “If we went down this path, would there be other challenges/issues/problems we’d be creating?”
Providing answers to problems is a last resort and offered only in an emergency – and not everything is an emergency or urgent!
Why don’t you practice it with your people now?
Please let me know how you go.
Standby for part 3 – Missing coaching opportunities
For an additional resource you could download my $7 e-book Ask or Tell- the power of asking or the force of telling. It has a coaching process, a conversation script and over 200 categorised leadership questions that can help you have very effective conversations, as well as other important leadership conversation solutions.
