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Coaching as a Critical Leadership Capability
Are your key people leaders or a managers?
I want you to challenge your key people to critically explore their own approach to leadership. Being totally honest with themselves for a minute, how much of their working week do they spend working as a leader and how much simply managing? Are you happy with this?
If you were to put them on the spot right now and ask what it means to be a leader, what would they answer? Do we really need leaders? Does it really matter that these critical individuals spend too much of their time just managing and that they sometimes struggle to know what exactly it means to be a leader and what is required of them?
What does it take to lead?
I would argue that strong leadership is critical in that it enables people to take the action required to deliver excellent business results.
To be a leader you need to have a clear view of the opportunities and challenges facing your business and to be able to articulate these constantly in terms of a vision, a purpose and goals. You also need to be able to build relationships and facilitate interactions that result in outstanding team performance. Essentially, however, leadership is about producing results, results that are obtained through the direct effort of others rather than your own.
Models of leadership
Do you know how to act as a leader? Do you know what you are required to do? Do you know what works and what does not? Where would you look for your inspiration?
Clearly, over the last 100 years or more, the most prevalent model of leadership has been the hierarchical military model of command and control. More recently, this has in some areas been replaced by the American lone hero model, with often equally damaging results. The drive to be a transformational hero often leads to the Russian peasant style reaction in those that are being led. That is: Sit back, let them get on with it, and wait for the next inevitable regime change because it will not be long in coming.
Leader as coach
Thankfully, there are now many other more useful models of leadership available to us and the one I would particularly like to commend to your attention is that of leader as coach.
A coach is someone who uses support, challenge, passion and energy to inspire people to achieve superior performance. I would like to explore with you how as a leader can and should do this, and what it could mean to your business when you successfully engage with your people in this way.
Lets be clear at the outset, this is not a soft, undemanding or potentially weak way to lead a business. If you are tempted to think of coaching in this way, hold the image of Alex Ferguson on your mind for a moment, and think again.
Three themes
In rigorously exploring together the value of coaching as an underpinning model for leadership, we need to:
o Rethink our assumptions of leadership by examining what we know about behaviours that deliver results in challenging situations
o Consider the leadership capabilities required to deliver sustainable business and cultural change in uncertain conditions, and
o Explore some of the practical skills required to make this happen.
Theme one – rethinking leadership
Why should people bring their brains to work?
We have for a long time relied on the idea that power and knowledge hierarchy is the best way to structure and control organisations. What could be more straightforward or logical? The people at the top make the decisions and those below implement them, changing them as little as possible.
Expecting a few at the top to do all the thinking and the rest to simply do as they are told is slow, expensive and wasteful. There is a clear inbuilt assumption that people can not be trusted, they must be closely monitored and bounded by procedure and process.
The hero and transformational leader models challenge this notion, but still see the leaders as a loner, standing outside the organisation and doing things to it. They are like rodeo riders, seeking to impose their will on the organisation.
What does the latest research tell us?
There is probably more written about leadership than almost any other subject, and the volume of words is increasing all the time. The problem is that just about everything and its opposite is said. Equally, the robustness of thinking and validity of the research surrounding much of it is flimsy to say the least.
So, given the vital role that leadership plays, the confusion about how it should be exercised and the desperate need from those at the front end for some clarity about what they need to do for the best to be effective custodians of a business, how do we navigate through this minefield of leadership formulas and hot tips.
The first thing to say is that not all the research and writing of recent years is of equal quality. There are a handful of thinkers who stand either by the depth and rigour of their research, or through the application of a robust and objective methodology to find out what actually works on the ground. When we critically sift through the research in this way a clearer and more consistent pattern starts to emerge.
I would like to briefly share with you what is of necessity a personal selection of some of the most genuinely useful illuminating and helpful findings about leadership in recent years.
Ralph Stacey is one of the most challenging and original thinker on leadership and strategy to emerge in recent years. He describes leadership as, “Participating in interaction with others in reflective and imaginative ways” (Stacey 2007).
In 2006 Goffee & Jones did a thorough review of leadership capabilities that was widely published. They observed that: “Effective leaders can empathise with those they lead, step in their shoes, get close to them. Yet they also seem to be able to communicate a sense of edge, to remind people of the job at hand and the overarching purpose of the collective endeavour” (Goffee & Jones 2006). They also argued that: “Those aspiring to leadership need to discover what it is about themselves that they can mobilise in a leadership context. They must identify and deploy their personal leadership assets and use them to build an effective system of relationships with followers”. (Goffee and Jones 2006)
Ket de Vries has been an internationally respected thinker on leadership for the past two decades and more. His take on the subject is that: “Healthy leaders are able to live intensely. They are passionate about what they do. That’s because that are able to experience the full range of their feelings – without any colour blindness to any particular emotion.” (de Vries 2004).
Towards a model of leader as coach – two defining studies
There are two specific in depth studies, however, that stand out from all the others in terms of the rigour, breadth, robustness and objectivity of their research. The first is the “Living Leadership” research undertaken jointly between Ashridge Business School and the HEC Grande Ecole in Paris. A team of researchers spent 4 years observing 700 managers and leaders from day to day to discover what they actually did and how they delivered results. The second is “Good to Great” by Jim Collins and his research team. They researched all those US companies that had traded for 15 years bellow the stock market average, followed by 15 years of average returns at 3 times the market average. They also read and coded 6,000 research papers and articles.
Living leadership
The Ashridge and HEC researchers concluded that effective leadership can be reduced to three factors, the abilities to:
o Connect with, relate to and energise those around you
o Work with and adapt to context
o Come alive in the moment, being authentic, spontaneous and human
They found that people were most effective when they brought themselves to leading. Effective leaders came across as real people. They were appreciated as being flesh and blood, not needing to wear some sort of mask or pretend. They drew on their humanity, their intelligence, their emotions and their intuition. Of particular importance was that they remembered what they knew from all their life experiences and made use of them in their work.
An important finding was that the success or failure of leaders is dependent on their ability to work with context. They approvingly quote Warren Buffet as saying: “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for poor fundamental economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact”.
In writing up their findings, they strongly urged that we consider leadership as a social process, it happens between people. You do not have to be a superhero to be a leader, indeed in their view this was more likely to damage the business. What works is to get connected to the real, to acknowledge your limits and value who you are, and that takes time.
Good to great
As with the Ashridge and HEC study, Collins’ team found that successfully leading a business is first and foremost about people. As a leader, they maintained, you must start by making sure you have the right people. This comes before strategising, operational planning or anything and it might mean you making some difficulty decisions.
Once you are sure you have the right people it is then essential to invest time and effort in constantly developing them. Also, a leader must above all learn to ask the right questions and then listen intently without prejudice. Effective leaders engage people in vigorous debate. They value and cherish people, but apply exacting standards. Leadership is about vision, persistence and sensemaking, but it is also importantly about putting people in the biggest opportunities and creating a climate where truth is heard, dialogue and debate are encouraged and the leader is constantly seen to be trying to understand.
All the qualities we are describing here, and which we would argue strongly deliver value to an organisations bottom line, are qualities closely associated with the role of coach.
In my second article on this important subject, I will go on to consider the leadership coaching capabilities required to deliver sustainable business and cultural change in today’s uncertain conditions.
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