Leadership has traditionally been synonymous with authority: leaders give orders and employees execute those orders. Unfortunately, by leaders taking on too much of the responsibility for the team, and not allowing others to excel in their own ways, this traditional leadership style can handicap an entire team and and leader themselves. A better approach to leadership that is often overlooked is leader as a coach.
Approaching leadership as a coach requires leaders to shift away from being the sole decision-maker and instead take on the role of a mentor and facilitator that helps guide their teams to make decisions on their own and take more ownership of their work. The leadership as a coach style enables teams to more fully utilize their own critical thinking, take on more ownership of projects, and sets a culture of trust and continuous growth.
To make the point of how important coaching is in leadership, let’s take a look at the traditional top-down leadership approach.
The Pitfalls of Traditional Leadership
“The more you help your people, the more they seem to need your help. The more they need your help, the more time you spend helping them.”
Michael Bungay Stanier in The Coaching Habit
The traditional leadership model operates under the assumption that the leader is the primary decision-maker and problem-solver. The buck stops with the leader, so by God the leader needs to own every decision. This approach has quite a few major downsides:
- Increased Stress on Leaders: When a leader is expected to have all the answers, they become a bottleneck for decision-making. Maybe you feel this now. Do you feel overwhelmed by stress and the need to make all of the right decisions for your team? Do you feel like you have to “hold their hand” to get them to complete their work? Do you not trust your team members to make the right decisions?
- Lack of Ownership Among Employees: Employees who are simply told what to do are less likely to take initiative or go beyond what is asked of them. It’s a huge demotivator to feel like you don’t own your work. Employees who lack a feeling of ownership are far more likely to be disengaged with their work.
- Reduced Creativity and Flexibility: When all of the decision making of a team comes from one person, there is a huge missed opportunity to tap the creativity and intelligence of the rest of the team. Sure, the leader may have more experience, but does that mean they always have the right answer? Most likely not!
This is where leaders as coaches can make a huge difference.
The Power of Leaders as Coaches
A leader who coaches their team shifts from being the sole decision-maker to enabling their team to make and own decisions. Instead of dictating every move, they ask the right questions, guide team members toward solutions, and encourage team members to think on their own and learn as they go.
How Coaching Team Members Benefits Leaders
By adopting a leader coaching mindset, leaders experience:
- Reduced Pressure: Instead of being the sole decision-maker, problem-solving responsibilities are spread across the team.
- More Time to Focus on Strategy: With team members capable of handling challenges independently, leaders can focus on higher-level goals and strategic planning. This is where many leaders currently lack time and energy because they are too ingrained in the minutia of the work their teams should be doing on their own.
- Improved Relationships with Their Team: Coaching fosters trust and respect that goes both ways. By showing that you trust your team to make decisions, and help them get to those decisions through asking them the right questions, you build them up and give them confidence. In return, the team knows that you trust them, and they will return that trust in kind.
How Coaching Benefits Teams
As much as this could just be about how coaching helps leaders, the real power in it is how it helps teams excel. Well-coached teams experience:
- Empowerment and Ownership: Employees take greater responsibility for their work when they are given ownership and autonomy over their work.
- Increased Creativity: With more freedom to think critically, teams develop innovative solutions to challenges that the leader may have never thought of. Some of the best decision-making will come from your team if they feel ownership over their work.
- Higher Morale and Engagement: Employees feel valued and trusted when they are given autonomy and ownership.
- Increased Learning and Development: By taking ownership and driving their own decisions, teams will be more likely to learn new skills and make on-the-fly adjustments to their projects. They will devote more of their time to the issues and learning from them than if they were simply given a solution and implement it.
How to Coach as a Leader
Coaching is a skill set that isn’t terribly hard to start, but is something that takes a long time to master. Some of the best leaders have decades of coaching experience. But if you’re like many leaders, you may just be starting out and have little to no experience with coaching. That’s okay! Even incorporating some of the simple best practices below can help you and your team right away.
- Ask questions: This is the #1 thing. As a leader, our default may be to tell people what to do. Instead, ask your team questions to get them to think of solutions to the problem. Check your ego and the answer you have in your head and get them to think through the problem.
A key is to not ask closed-ended questions that result in a “yes” or “no” answer. Instead, focus on open-ended questions that allow the team to think creatively.- “What do you think we should do?”
- “What impact would that have?”
- “How do you feel about it?”
- Listen Actively: Let your team members talk through their thoughts and try not to interject or add your own judgement to them. Really pay attention to what they’re saying and ask meaningful follow up questions. You can try to guide them to certain answers, but also be aware that the answer you may have in your head may not be the right one, so let them really think through the problem and pay attention to what they are saying, not what’s in your head.
- Focus on the Vision: Your role as a leader is to help set the vision for your team, and that team’s vision should align with your company’s vision. If the team understands where it needs to go and why you all do the work you do, they are more likely to understand how to approach problems and come up with solutions that support those visions.
- Provide Constructive Feedback: Don’t criticize decisions that end up being “sub-optimal.” 🙂 Instead, focus on guiding team members to other solutions if they’re having trouble or if a decision has already been made but didn’t work out well. Walk through their decision making process and if you see flaws in the process, ask questions about them.
- “Who do you think could give you more information on this?”
- “Where do you think the issues arose?”
- “What would you do different?”
- “What would happen if X happened?”
- Remember That it will Take Time: You may not get immediate results when you implement coaching into your team. In fact, it may be a shock to the system at first. Your team will learn with you, but if you keep up leading as a coach, you will be fundamentally be changing how your team approaches problems.
Implement Coaching One Step at a Time
If you’ve relied on traditional leadership styles, your team has probably come to expect that from you, so transitioning to a leader as a coach style may be a bit of a learning curve. You don’t have to upend your entire leadership style overnight. Start implementing some of these coaching strategies in your 1 on 1s with the team and on smaller projects to start. This will help you get your feet under you and also slowly introduce this new style to the team.
Over time, add more coaching until your 1 on 1 meetings are mostly coaching-oriented. Again, this will take time, but you should be actively listening to your team as they work through this change with you, and you will get a feel for when they’re ready to add more ownership and decision-making to their own plates. You may even be surprised by how quickly they embrace it.
And if you need any help implementing this leader as a coach style, I’m also here to help.
