Different leadership styles are appropriate in different situation. Recent research says that when it comes to improving performance, coaching leadership gives best results. As we are often very much in love with our experience, expertise and advice as leaders, colleagues or parents, coaching is not necessarily our spontaneous response to someone asking for help. ‘Reality is not always intuitive’, says astrophysicist Carlo Rovelli, ‘hence we need to make an effort to understand it’. Let’s look at how and why coaching gives better results in leadership than straightforward advice.
Let’s start with the presumption that the people you lead are true A players. Either they are already better in their field than you or they are excellent learners, which is why you have decided to invest your time and energy in helping them become best. If you don’t have A players, first ask yourself why you have hired a team of B or C players. Then consider whether it makes more sense to build a new team, or to invest more time and energy in turning your team into A players. Sincere intention and honest effort go a long way, as people are generally talented, although often in a position or led in a way that does not support their talents. If job-person match is your problem, deal with that first. You will find hints on how to approach that in this article.
So, you have A players in place. They are willing to take on ever greater challenges and perform ever better. You can coach them to stay on top of their game, and help them become even more awesome. But it’s not only about personal awesomeness, it is about the bottom line. Leadership has a direct impact on your business results and success. Great leadership reaps the rewards of peak performance and loyalty.
Coming back to how and why coaching helps cultivate peak performance, we will look at four aspects:
- Peak performance requires peak state
- Negative outweighs positive by 5 to 1
- Everyone’s thinking patterns are unique
- Learning is felt not thought
- Peak performance requires peak state
A lot of performance can be attributed to state, instead of capability. Highly capable people may fail to perform well, because their state does not support it. Any kind of stress prevents access to peak state. You can think of effects of stress in the framework of Maslow’s basic human needs. Let’s consider your people have shelter and food and feel physically safe. (If not, you need to deal with that first.) Most likely the stressors are related to belonging and esteem. As our lives are holistic, our mind does not separate work life from private life. As a leader you will need to deal with your people’s private life stressors as well.
How is coaching related to creating peak state? When you give someone advice, their subconscious may register a confirmation of their inability to solve the challenge. They may go deal with the situation according to your directions, but that does not support their self-esteem nor will they step into peak state to learn to solve similar situations independently in the future. Their stress of low esteem remains. Not only will they come back for more advice soon, but their results hardly ever exceed satisfactory level.
Do what you can to first lower the stress, so your people can step into peak state. Physiological factors of peak state include posture, breath and body language. Cognitive aspects of peak state include confidence, creativity and curiosity. So, get your potential peak performer to regulate their breath, sit or stand up straight, and adjust their body language from stressed to relaxed. Affirm your faith in their capability by bringing a few examples of past peak performance and invite them to play with imagination. This redirects attention from the pressuring issue at hand to possibilities and solutions – an entry to peak state.
2. Negative outweighs positive by five to one
As a leader who is looking to unlock peak performance in their A players, do not give in to temptation to give corrective feedback. Over the past couple of decades, we have been taught to seek feedback, especially corrective feedback, but our psyche is not adjusted to receive it without some stress response. Even when a team member directly asks what they can do better next time, opt to emphasise their strengths and talents and encourage them to refine these even more, instead of advising to work on something that they are not good at. Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall explain in their book ‘Nine Lies About Work’ how little sense it would make to encourage Messi to learn to dribble better with his right foot, while he has become the world’s best football player impeccably dribbling with his left.
Research shows that negative feedback may outweigh positive by five to one. Regardless of the accuracy of these exact numbers, you get an idea of the tenderness of our psyche. Our brain is built to notice danger much more sharply, so as a leader you need to make extra effort to notice, what is being done well, and intentionally focus on it in your communication. You can think of it this way that when you provide corrective remarks, you have cancelled out five previous supportive, encouraging and affirmative pieces of feedback. This is not to say that when a mistake is made it must not be corrected. Of course, relevant action must be taken, but to build for peak performance, refrain from corrective remarks.
3. Everyone’s thinking patterns are unique
As a seasoned leader you may have encountered numerous challenges and know how to solve hundreds of situations. But you have hired a team in order not to have to do it all by yourself. So, you need to let them do it, and do it their way. Every thought you have is connected to maybe hundreds of other thoughts that are part of your backstory. When you give advice, you vocalise only a fraction of these thoughts, subconsciously hoping that your team member gets the whole story. But they have their own story. When they hear a thought they connect it to hundreds of other thoughts, experiences, fears and desires that are part of their backstory. Your beliefs, values and principles are part of your backstory, and everyone’s story is unique. The advice received is connected to a different set beliefs, values and principles than which they came from. This is often the reason why your perfectly good advice is not actioned upon. It does not hook properly.
Coaching allows your team member tap into their belief system and develop a solution that hooks with that. They may come to the exact same solution than you would have provided, but since they have talked and walked themselves through the process the solution hooks and can be put in action. Since our brain is wired to look for shortcuts everywhere, it may seem like a waste of time not to jump into solutions, but this is where reality is counter-intuitive again. When it comes to working with people, fast is slow and slow is fast.
4. Learning is felt not thought
We have come to interpret learning as acquiring or memorising information. This is largely due to how our school system is built up. However, we all know how much of the information we really learnt at school – some less, some even less. Learning is much more than acquiring or memorising information. It is a feeling. We know what learning really feels like. An a-ha is a true indicator of learning; the feeling of amazement, surprise, conviction and understanding. This a-ha recodes the structure of current knowledge. It breaks up previous neural connections and creates new. This is why we feel it – it is a physical process, not a merely cognitive one.
When you give advice, you provide information. When you coach to a solution, you allow your people feel the path, feel the change and help them learn.
Coaching taps into the persons talents and internal resources, allowing them to truly learn and perform. In the end everyone is after personal gains – connection, appreciation and self-actualisation according to Maslow’s pyramid’s top three needs. The better you support these as a leader, the better you and your team feel, the better they perform, and the better your bottom line. It may take time to build such relationships with your team members, but if you don’t take the time, they are unlikely to peak perform. In this sense leadership is about going against your intuition, which is why it is called the work of leadership.
PS! Who coaches the leader?
Leaders are no different from their people. They also need to access peak state to peak perform, they have come thus far thanks to their talents, not their shortcomings, they have a unique mind, and their learning is felt not thought. Just like they coach their people, they need coaching to flourish and grow. A good coach will help a leader see, where they are compromising their peak state, see the talents they have neglected, recognise their uniqueness, and guide them to keep learning.
#coaching #leadership #leaderascoach #peakperformance #performance