07 Nov ONE CEOs SECRET. HOW TO CREATE OPPORTUNITY FOR YOUR PEOPLE IN EVERYDAY MOMENTS.
Bill was a student of mine when I was delivering qualifications in workplace and business coaching. He came from an extensive corporate leadership career. Ultimately, being the CEO of a very large financial services organisation.
In his second act, he was an executive and leadership coach building his new business. He wanted to become qualified as a coach to have a level of credibility in the coaching space. He believed he was already a great coach, and he had a lot of experience behind him that would really offer value to his clients.
So, Bill came to the first day of this 12-month program, very excited, energised, and ready to share his lived experience in the space of coaching. I noticed as this first day progressed that Bill became very reflective, quiet, and contemplative.
At the end of the day, Bill came up to me and said, “Would it be okay if we had a bit of a conversation?”
“Of course,” and what he shared next was interesting.
He said:
“I was a CEO for more than 10 years. And an executive and senior leader before that.
I thought I was pretty good at all this coaching stuff.
I had a lot of people thrive under my guidance.
I thought I was a great coach.
What I learned today is that I have never coached a conversation in my life.”
He went on to say,
“Today has been a revelation
I’ve been mentoring the whole time.
I was reflecting on how much easier my life would have been, and how much more of a difference I could have made with all the people I worked with if I had done less mentoring and more coaching.”
And this is what I see time and again when I work with leaders in organisations. They often believe they are coaching, and yet the opportunity they are missing is the coaching opportunity. Leaders with great intentions are doing a combination of mentoring, micromanaging, and consulting approaches rather than adopting a coaching approach.
The coaching approach, relieves the burden of knowing the answer to all the questions, relieves the burden of being the expert of everything, and allows you to ask the right questions to bring out the best in everybody around you.
Mentoring and coaching are two different approaches. Both are fantastic, but what I notice is leaders using mentoring as their primary approach, rather than coaching.
There are similar skills involved, yet coaching is quite markedly different as you can see in this Fairley slide below.
Coaching is about drawing on the other person’s expertise, on their experiences, on their strengths, so they can apply them to finding a solution, a way forward, or a goal that they can take ownership of.
Coaching builds capability and accountability, ensuring team members take responsibility for their individual portfolios, rather than leaders having the burden of everything.
When you coach, you release the potential in the people around you. When you coach, you scale your leadership impact. You make a bigger difference by enabling and empowering your people.
Good for you. Good for your people. Good for your organisation.
Both mentoring and coaching are opportunities to build communication, connection, and trust, so essential in the world of AI, and work from home. But it is coaching that allows you to foster your people’s independence from you, to create learning moments every day.
Almost every conversation is an opportunity to coach.
Stacey Ashley
ICF studies have found:
- that coaching activities, including one-on-one coaching, team coaching & work group coaching, are rated as the most helpful in achieving the goals of change management initiatives.
- organisations with strong coaching cultures indicate recent revenues above that of their industry peer group and report higher employee engagement. 61% recent revenues above that of their industry peer group. And 53% higher employee engagement.
- the impact of coaching reported increased productivity across multiple factors including: 70% improved work performance, 61% improved business management, 57% improved time management, 51% improved team effectiveness.
What is the level of leadership coaching capability and practice in your organisation?
I’d love to know your thoughts.
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