"Have you ever seen a winning team that had no coach? You cannot perform with excellence unless you have a coach. Even people who are the best, the top one percent or two percent in their field, still have a coach. Ironically, in business, we are expected sometimes to play without a coach. That's not the best way to play, either in sports or business. Business is a team event. Winning is about execution, so performance coaching always has a role. I can see people performing better because of the coaching." --Senior Executive, Global Manufacturer
"The Behavior Breakthrough: Leading Your Organization to a New Competitive Advantage," authored by Steve Jacobs and 19 co-authors, lays out a seven-step process that enables strategies, processes and technologies to work to their full potential by reducing the hidden human barriers that so often scuttle them. Build upon the four cornerstones of sustainable high performance--direction, competence, opportunity and motivation--Jacobs shows how new behaviors improve results, increase ROI and impact your competitive advantage.
Leadership is not just for people at the top. Everyone can learn to lead by discovering the power that lies within each one of us to make a difference and being prepared when the call to lead comes.
Leadership is applicable to all facets of life: a competency that you can learn to expand
yourperspective, set the context of a goal, understand the dynamics of human behavior
and take the initiative to get to where you want to be.
Effective leadership coaching can happen on the dance floor of conversation. Here are five guiding principles that guide respectful conversations:
1. When peers connect change happens. Effective coaching can happen on the dance floor of conversation.
2. It's OK to begin a conversation by confronting the other person with questions that seem awkward but set the stage for a respectful exchange. Why waste time on small talk? Just ask to-the-point information-seeking questions, like: "What are you here for? How do you wantto spend our time together?"
3. Conversations are not meant to be structured. Be open to conversations that you are unprepared for and focused on theinterests of the other person (not your purpose).
4. Don't get pulled into solving problems that may not matter to the other person. Allow time for the person to get to what's really important. Provide spaces where they can express their doubts and fears by being a thoughtful listener--without taking on the responsibility to fix or debate the issue. After all, you have invited the person to talk about what matters to her or him, not you, so allow time for the articulation of those thoughts and feelings.
5. Personal transformation happens when the right questions get asked--not by providing answers. When you focus on the solution, you are trying to sell the person something. When you allow people to answer their own questions, they discover what they were not aware of---and what is needed to move forward. Personal transformation leads corporate transformation--one person at a time.
That is why leadership development is not an event. It is a process of participating in respectful conversations where the leader recognizeshis or her own feelings and those of others in building safe and trustingrelationships.
Performance coaching is dialogue that recognizes excellence and achieves business goals by specifying areas for improvement and learning. Managers who coach others do so to help them develop new skills, initiate a desired competency or goal, stretch performance to the next level or redirect behavior to solve existing problems. Performance coaching must occur regularly and consistently, not just once or twice per year.
People who receive performance coaching usually look forward to it, knowing that it has the power to make them even better at what they do, thus opening up opportunities. Unlike other processes, performance coaching focuses explicitly on business results. Performance coaches spend most of their time discussing high-impact behaviors and linking them to results. They aim not just at addressing performance problems per se but more often at achieving high performance and reaching a person's full potential.
However, many executives, who have not been personally coached, have trouble understanding how to coach for high performance. With companies rarely observing the quality of performance coaching and managers sometimes exaggerating their time reporting on coaching activities, leaders often don't understand the nature of coaching actually taking place.
However, a single leader who coaches for elite performance can make a big difference within an organization. Yet, the real power comes when companies share high-performance coaching capability across all managers and leaders. Since most companies don't do this, scaling high performance coaching is a significant source of advantage, available for the taking.
The key success factor to integrate high-performance coaching across all managers and leaders is to strategically select a few emerging leaders for a six month engagement of weekly hour telephone coaching sessions with an outside executive coach; in order to understand, appreciate and be ready to implement with their team members the power of performance coaching.
These executive coached managers will then be ready, willing and able to structure performance coaching conversations with their direct reports to gain useful feedback and skillfully pinpoint the right workplace behaviors. Coaching can be hard to do and feel uncomfortable at first. But by being professionally coached and recognizing the benefits of their own personal development, these new leader coaches will begin to achieve exceptional team results within the organization.
Sources: Steve Jacobs: The Behavior Breakthrough: Leading Your Organization to a New Competitive Advantage