Many new leaders think they need to have all the answers. You don’t, and more to the point you can’t.
But what you can do, is develop an approach that helps your team members find their own answers - coaching.
One of the best things you can do when you are new to leadership is to develop a coaching mindset.
I should make it clear that this is not about new managers instantaneously developing formal coaching skills that can take hours of structured training and practice to learn.
But it is about recognising when a coaching opportunity arrives and adapting your approach accordingly.
A coaching approach works because coaching is:
“the art of facilitating another person’s learning, development and performance. It raises self-awareness and identifies choices. Through coaching, people are able to find their own solutions, develop their own skills, and change their own attitudes and behaviours.” (Rogers et al, 2018)
So developing a coaching mindset will do two things:
accelerate the development of your team; and
take the pressure off you.
When to adopt a coaching approach
Tony Grant’s Quality Conversations framework (Grant, 2017) can help us conceptualise the kinds of coaching new leaders can quickly master.
On the right hand side of the model are formal coaching and informal coaching. These types of coaching do rely on structured coaching training and frameworks, such at the GROW model (Whitmore, 1996). Formal coaching would be a session arranged in advance and likely to last 45 minutes to and hour. Informal coaching would occur when an experienced leader recognises the opportunity for a structured goal focused conversation that might last 15 to 20 minutes or so.
New leaders can comfortably build the skills for this type of coaching, but it is a longer term endeavour than what I am advocating here.
Where new leaders can more easily take a coaching approach is on the left hand side of the framework.
Collaborative conversations are those conversations we have all the time in our day to day work life. Some of these may be with others outside our teams - stakeholders, customers, other leaders perhaps. So, these may be operationally focused, but the key point is that they are collaborative, rather than directive. So they promote ownership and buy-in to the outcomes agree upon.
But, the real coaching opportunities that are accessible to new leaders come with what I have re-labelled ‘coaching moments’ in my revised version of the framework above.
So what are the coaching moments? These are the times when:
team members come to you for an answer - what should I do about this? How do I progress that? How do I solve this problem I am having?
team members are being asked to do something new and they don’t have any prior experience or analagous examples of other activity to refer to.
Leaders should recognise these situations as potential “coaching moments” and take the opportunity to coach and develop team members when these moments arise.
These don’t need to be lengthy conversations, but they can be highly effective.
How to seize the coaching moments
Here is what you do.
Evaluate the moment: Take you re time understand what the situation is and what is being asked. Make a decision as to what you need to do – is this a collaborative conversation, or a directive moment (sometimes being directive is necessary) - or is it a coaching moment?
Listen to hear: Listen carefully to hear what is being said (and not said), rather than to prepare your reply.
Wait: Don’t jump straight to solution mode. You may well have the answer, or what you think is the answer, but if you give it up straightaway your team member learns nothing, except to become more dependent on you.
Ask, don’t tell: This is the nub of the coaching approach. Ask questions that help the team member work out the next steps for themselves
It is worth remembering, that even if you think you have the answer to the problem being presented, it might not even be the optimal one.
A better solution is quite likely to emerge once you have dug deeper with some exploratory questions and answers and your team member has been encouraged to look at the problem more deeply and from different perspectives.
Coaching questions
Of course what you ask, will depend upon what the situation is and what is being asked of you. But the important point is to ask open questions to get the team member thinking through the possibilities themselves. Here are some examples:
What are you thinking about this?
What else?
What are you trying to achieve?
What have you considered about already?
What don’t you know that you need to know?
What assumptions are you making and how might they be wrong?
What are some of the options that you could take here?
What else?
Which option(s) do you think are worth pursuing first?
What resources do you need (eg, training, introductions, systems access?)
How confident are you feeling about that on a scale of 1 to 10?
What would make you more confident?
What might be a back up plan if you learn that isn’t going to work?
What are your next steps then?
What can I do to help?
Taking this approach drives ownership, autonomy and motivation. It boosts incremental development and it makes the team member feel heard.
It also represents genuine leadership.
Other resources
See also my post on 65 effective leadership questions.
References
Manager as Coach by Jenny Rogers, Karen Whittleworth and Andrew Gilbert (2018)
Grant, A. M. (2017). The third ‘generation’ of workplace coaching: creating a culture of quality conversations. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 10(1), 37-53.
Whitmore, J. (1996). Coaching for performance: Growing people, performance and purpose. London: Nicholas Brealey