The Coaching Manager

Developing Top Talent in Business

James M. Hunt, Joseph R. Weintraub

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781483391670
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Coaching Manager provides guidance, tools, and examples needed to develop leadership talent and inspire performance through an innovative coaching model that the authors have researched and tested among thousands of managers through the renowned Babson College Coaching for Leadership and Teamwork Program.Unlike coaching books that focus on performance problems, The Coaching Manager presents a developmental coaching methodology that managers can use to guide employees to achieve higher levels of skill, experience greater engagement with organizations, and promote personal development. Key Features

• Covers the concept, processes, and strategies involved in developmental coaching, providing real-world strategies for developing people in any organization.
• Offers self-assessment tools to prompt students and managers to explore their existing notions of coaching and to what extent they or their organizations might be prepared or ready to create and sustain a coaching environment.
• Twenty real-world cases illustrate coaching in action across different organizations and environments.
• Action checklists to deepen skills and provide experiential learning opportunities in the classroom and on the job.

1 Whither the Coaching Manager

Do managers really deliver anything of value to their companies and their teams, or do they just get in the way? This is a question that has crossed the minds of nearly everyone who has worked in an organization for even a brief period of time. Depending upon the manager, sometimes the answer is all too clear. They just get in the way. But seriously, can we stop there? Luckily, Google didn’t.

Google actually did try to avoid having managers for a brief period early in its history. As a company with a strong cultural value of autonomy, a belief in technical expertise, and a belief in the ability of people of good will to work things out, perhaps managers were really not necessary. However, it didn’t work terribly well. Things seem to go a bit more smoothly in many cases when an effective manager is involved. But, what does that mean? That what they do actually adds value? They did what Google does best, set about the task of rigorously studying a question and gathering hard data to determine the answer (Bock, 2015; Garvin, 2013).

In fact, they did confirm that “good managers” indeed have a positive, measurable impact on their teams. They made a sufficiently convincing quantitative argument that Google’s data-driven engineers bought into the notion that management is indeed a valuable role in the company, as long as they were not micromanaging. To make sure that doesn’t happen, each manager may have as many as 30 direct reports (Garvin, 2013). Managers really don’t have time to meddle too much under such circumstances. They have to give their people real autonomy, but that does not mean that they can just ignore the people who report to them. So what should they do? Box 1.1 tells the story.

Box 1.1 What Good Managers Should Be Doing at Google

1. Be a good coach.
2. Empower the team and do not micromanage.
3. Express interest/concern for team members’ success and personal well-being.
4. Be very productive/results oriented.
5. Be a good communicator—listen and share information.
6. Help the team with career development.
7. Have a clear vision/strategy for the team.
8. Have important technical skills that help them advise the team.

Source: (Bock, 2015)

The most important attribute Google found was that of being a good coach. Bock (2015, p. 195) goes on to say:

We now had a prescription for building great managers, but it was a list of, quite frankly, pretty dull, non-controversial statements. To make it meaningful and, more important, something that would improve the performance of the company, we had to be more specific. For example, of course the best managers are good coaches! Superficially this seems obvious, but most managers, if they have regular one-on-one meetings at all just show up and ask “what’s going on with you this week?” Most don’t hold regular one-on-one meetings where they partner with the employee to diagnose problems and together come up with ideas tailored to the employees’ specific strengths. Most don’t combine praise and areas to work on. The specific prescription for managers is to prepare for meetings by thinking hard about employees’ individual strengths and the unique circumstances they face, and then use the meeting to ask questions rather than dictate answers.

It is important to note that Google explored the question of whether or not managers have value by taking the null hypothesis approach of trying to prove that they don’t. They couldn’t do it. However, again, we know that most of you, including ourselves, from time to time have felt as though managers have little to add. We would submit that just as Google found, too many managers don’t do what is described above by Laszlo Bock (2015). When they do however, the results can be quite powerful. We would submit that the power of that effect is likely to be growing. Why?

Coaching in an Uncertain World

Look carefully at Bock’s description of what coaching actually is, as practiced at Google. Several key points stand out. First, it is a normal and frequently practiced activity that takes place between a manager and a direct report. It happens. We’re not talking “lip service” here. Second, it involves a sense of partnership. It is not strictly speaking a “top-down” based activity. Responsibility for it is shared between the parties. Third, it involves thinking about the employees’ strengths and the circumstances they face. Fourth, the meeting is used for inquiry and exploration, rather than the dictating of answers. We would like to explore the last two points in a bit more detail.

Most companies are very interested in creative innovation these days. By its very nature, the process of innovation will make at least some of our skills obsolete. Things change, we have an existing set of competencies, but because things changed, that set of competencies has to change. We can predict that this is likely to happen based on past experience, but we can’t know for sure what form those changes and needed skill sets are likely to take. The specifics are not knowable.

We’re fortunate to have been influenced at Babson College over the past few years by a set of ideas, initially proposed by Sarasvathy (2008) and subsequently elaborated by a variety of other authors (Brown, Kiefer, & Schlesinger, 2014; Neck, 2011) that can help us better understand why the importance of the coach role is likely to be growing.

As we just proposed, it is very difficult any longer for us to cling to a linear or predictive notion of career and skill development (Brown et al., 2014). Yes, we can predict that certain professions and jobs are likely to continue to be with us. We can predict with some certainty many of the requirements for entering the professions of accounting and engineering. However, can we predict the kinds of skills these professionals are likely to need 5 to 10 years in the future? Given the pace of change in these two fields, as well as many others, it is very difficult to predict. And of course, building skills in a college program in engineering is not sufficient for individuals headed for careers in engineering consulting, management, or entrepreneurship. Technological advances in engineering are likely to greatly alter the way engineering is actually done in the future. Yes, we can’t know for certain what those changes will be like. How are we to come to grips with such a conundrum? Luckily, what is known as “prediction logic” is not the only way to go.

“Creation logic” evolved from the observation of entrepreneurs in action and others operating under conditions of uncertainty. Contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurs are less likely to “bet the farm” than one might imagine. Typically, entrepreneurs take a more measured approach. They start with an idea, experiment with the idea, reflect on what they have learned, and iterate. Their experiments tend to be modest and involve “affordable” loss. “Betting the farm” can be a ticket for disaster if one places the wrong bet. Further, the notion of a massive risk implies that one is ready to take it. Yet, under conditions of uncertainty, that makes no sense. Small actions accompanied by learning from those actions allows for continuous refinement of one’s ideas.

Brown, Keifer, and Schlesinger (2014) propose that the same logic applies to people and their careers. Many people may have passion and a sense of personal direction. Yet, they still have to link those passions with opportunities, which are evolving if not being disrupted. At the same time, they have to connect their skill development with opportunities that may not be fully clear at any given time.

We suggest then that both companies and people need to be innovative and constantly learning if they are to thrive. Classroom learning, though very important (to us in particular since we’re teachers) does not readily adapt itself to either challenge. The classroom can help, but the classroom is not well suited to harvesting the immediate lessons from experience that both require. It is also the case that the classroom, even a well-run, one can’t deliver quite the sense of reality and urgency that we experience when trying to get something done at work. At work, you are quite likely to try your best if you are in the right job. Even if you are working for a very supportive manager, the stakes are still high. Learning while at work, from work experiences, can provide very memorable opportunities to confront oneself, one’s strengths and weaknesses, and learn how to make the most out of both. Experience tells us that the best way to learn from those compelling experiences is through conversations to help make sense of what is happening and what they are learning. In other words, the link between innovation and personal development is … coaching. We’ll now look more closely at the mechanism of learning in coaching.

The Coaching Manager Model and Developmental Coaching

Before delving further into the coaching manager model we’re going to share, let us first tell you how we arrived at the conclusions that you’re going to see in this book. Over the past 15 years, we have worked with more than 7,500 practicing managers and entrepreneurs engaged in various sorts of coaching and talent development. (We’ve worked with an additional 5,000 or so since the first edition.) In addition, we’ve had extensive opportunities to talk with business leaders, human resource professionals, and learning and development specialists in some of our best business and not-for-profit organizations. (Some of those conversations, which are beyond the scope of this book, are described in Hunt & Weintraub, 2007.) We have continued to learn from them about learning from experience and how managers can build an organizational capability by encouraging a coaching culture in their teams and units.

At the core of this capability is the conversation, what we describe as the coaching dialogue. The coaching dialogue is far more than just an occasion for feedback for an employee: It is the cornerstone of developmental coaching. We say “developmental coaching” because the goal of the activity we’ll describe is to promote an employee’s growth in on-the-job effectiveness. This has two very positive outcomes. First, the employees get something out of it in that their skill base will likely grow, making them more employable and better candidates to achieve whatever their ambitions might be. It is also likely we would add to enhance their sense of satisfaction on the job. The second outcome is the enhanced ability of a team or organization to do work, to succeed. Developmental coaching builds the capacity of both people and organizations. It is far more than just telling someone where they stand or how they are doing.

In this coaching dialogue, two individuals, for our purposes a coaching manager and one of his or her reports, meet formally or informally to discuss a challenge/problem/task on which the employee is working. Rather than meeting only to discuss business results, the participants also talk about how the employee is going about trying to achieve those results. They talk about the process of getting there, as well as the ultimate goal. It is those conversations about process, actions, and decisions that the employee makes while trying to deal with the challenges from which the employee can draw the lessons of experience.

We’ll provide an overview of the Coaching Manager Model in Chapter 2 and then provide detailed discussions of its various components in subsequent chapters. For the purposes of this chapter, however, let’s describe it as follows. In a coaching dialogue, the manager seeks, often through the use of questions, to encourage the employee to reflect on his or her actions—to examine his or her actions critically with an eye toward understanding the gaps between actual and desired performance. While individuals can critically reflect on their performance in isolation, reflection in the company of another interested party is more powerful, as we’ll describe in some detail. Reflection by itself, however, may not be enough to give the employee a full understanding of his or her actions and their role in achieving the desired outcomes.

It may be necessary for the coaching manager to provide feedback to help the employee get a clearer sense of his or her actions, and at times, it may be helpful to provide some needed advice. The latter tactic, however, is used carefully so as not to undermine the employee’s sense of ownership for next steps and further improvements. You can see immediately that there is some art to this on the part of the manager. A good coaching manager develops a sense of when to jump in and provide feedback and advice and when to step back and let his or her employees think things through. (This dilemma will seem very familiar to parents, teachers, and athletic coaches.) In most instances, one might think that the manager’s own style and timing will dictate a response to that question. A skilled coaching manager, though, tries to make that judgment call based on the employee’s needs, not the manager’s predilections.

We are acutely aware that the preceding paragraph might already scare off some folks who are interested in improving their ability to coach their people. Please don’t be frightened! You don’t have to be perfect at this stuff to be effective. You have to be OK. Intent does matter here, along with your ability to receive feedback from those you coach. In reality, the relationship, as perceived by both parties, is just as important if not more important than the techniques of coaching. Recent research, which we’ll rely on later in this and in several subsequent chapters, has confirmed this (Gregory & Levy, 2011). If you are genuinely trying to help and you occasionally jump in too quickly, and if you’ve let your people know that you need their help to help them, you’ll do just fine. Yes, practice does help. Perfection, though, is not what you’re trying to achieve. This is a very human process.

As such, in addition to some basic skills, trust between the parties here is obviously a critically important enabling factor (Gregory & Levy, 2011). That’s why intent is so important. If you are really trying to help, not to punish, if you really do want to know what is happening with your people and their work, and if you behave accordingly (we’ll talk about this in great detail), sufficient trust will materialize in your relationships with your people for coaching to take place. (Of course, intent by itself will not be enough if you are inadvertently undermining your efforts to build trust by behaving in a fashion that contradicts that intent. This can happen without your awareness.)

The best way to learn to coach, and to build trust in your relationships with your people, is to try coaching. Acquaint yourself with the basics of developmental coaching and the Coaching Manager Model, let your people know what you’re trying to do, assuming you’re clear about what that is, and ask for their feedback.

But here’s where the anxiety begins to build. Why? Too many managers have the wrong mental models about coaching from years of being taught that coaching is a tool for dealing with serious performance problems. When an employee has a severe, persistent performance problem, the model of coaching we have described may not work. Such coaching is unfortunately often a warning, rather than a learning-oriented conversation. That is understandable. Sometimes that is the only tool left for even the best managers because the employee simply isn’t able to meet basic standards for a job. Something has to be done. But that is not developmental coaching. The employee in such a situation may be more motivated to cover up problems than talk about them. Trust may be minimal or even absent, since the manager naturally will have to represent the interests of the organization, not the employee. The employee would prefer otherwise. Tension builds. Communication breaks down. This is what most managers associate with coaching. Sounds like fun, right? Let us stress that we know you do have to provide such coaching from time to time if you’re a manager. The folks at Google might even disagree with our emphasis here because they view coaching poor performers as being a real opportunity for improvement (Bock, 2015)...