A leadership coach’s role is to help team members unlock potential
A good team leader or manager boosts productivity by helping his charges to overcome their natural fears and to take on more challenging tasks. File
I’ve recently been spending time coaching individual clients (the part of consulting I find the most rewarding), and while doing so I decided to browse through some of my books on the subject.
In one, Coaching for Performance, by John Whitmore, I came across the example of Fred. Fred, writes Whitmore, feels safe only when he operates well within his limits, which act as a shell and prevent him from fulfilling his potential. His manager only trusts him with tasks within that shell, and only gives him a jobif he feels that the self-limitingFred will feel confident enough to perform it. But he will hold back from allocating Fred one he reckons is beyond his capability.
He will bypass it to the more confident Jane instead — which is quite understandable and expedient — the manager reinforces and validates Fred’s shell, increasing its strength and thickness.
Fred’s story looks remarkably like a situation in the home of friends of mine, who for some years have employed the steady Philip as their cook. Philip is solid but unambitious, keeping firmly within his limited and static comfort zone. He churns out his standard unchanging menus, and is uncomfortable with experimenting or taking initiatives of any kind. A few months ago my friends decided to provide Philip with an assistant, and along came Dorothy.
Dorothy knew next to nothing about cooking, and could hardly read or write. But she was bright and keen to learn. She watched everything that Philip did, and soon outdid her teacher. Before long, not only did her competence more than match his but my friends also witnessed a complete reversal of their roles. Slowly but surely the assistant became the boss, with Philip not making the slightest move without first seeking Dorothy’s blessing.
As I reflected on what had transpired in my friend’s home my mind turned to the image of the two concentric circles, an inner one which represents a person’s sphere of influence and the outer one their sphere of concern. What we saw with Dorothy and Philip was the relentless expansion of her circle of influence, matched by the corresponding shrinking of his. The circumference of Philip’s circle had never been that great to start with, but now it risked disappearing altogether.
Our friends tried to encourage Philip to assert himself, but his influence — and along with it his confidence— continued to diminish. A new opportunity to help Philip break out of his shell came when Dorothy took her leave.
“Now that you are on your own,” his employers encouraged him, “you must make your own decisions. Consult us whenever you feel you need to, but try out some new dishes and be bolder as you go about your work.”
Philip was coached precisely in the way John Whitmore advocates in his book, with his employers helping him to believe his potential was greater than what he’d been revealing through his recent minimalist performance. Sure enough, Philip regained some of his former spark, uninhibited by the strong presence of his colleague Dorothy. Yet, as surely as night follows day, as soon as the bustling, confident Dorothy returned to work Philip’s circle of influence again contracted and the previous lopsided dynamic returned. What Whitmore described with Fred and Jane and their manager, and has happened between Philip and Dorothy and their employer, plays itself out in many workplaces— and in many families too.
In what becomes a zero sum game, the strong inexorably get stronger while the weak just fade away. The more one grows the more the other declines. Not because anyone plans it that way, and perhaps even with the weaker player happily resigned to their position of risk-free dependence. Sadly though, the strengths of the weaker of the two stop being fully utilised.
This leads us to ask what characterises such win-lose, sub-optimised relationships. Surely we should be able to identify Philip’s natural talents and preferences and have him focus on jobs that take advantage of them. For through doing so his confidence would grow and his circle of influence would expand.
But life is not that straightforward. Philip gets psychologically overawed by Dorothy and her more assertive personality, and he does not have the strength of character to overcome the resulting inhibitions. He just doesn’t.
This takes me back to Whitmore’s book on coaching. In acknowledging those who have helped and influenced him, he first recognises Harvard educationalist Tim Gallwey, the creator of The Inner Game of Tennis. I have that book, and it greatly helped me to strengthen my own game. Its central thesis is that the opponent within one’s head is more formidable than the one on the other side of the net. And, he therefore suggests, the prime role of the coach is not so much to advise players on the finer technicalities of the game, not to watch the ball until it hits the racket, or to adjust the way that racket is held, but to imagine themselves hitting great shots that go exactly where and how they should.
For Whitmore and Gallwey, coaching is about unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is about helping them to overcome their natural inhibitions and seeing them go forth with new confidence… imagining successful outcomes. So when confronted with the Freds and the Philips in your organisation or your home, understand that it may not be lack of competence that holds them back. But rather it is a nagging negative voice in their own minds, one which wrongly tells them what they cannot do.
In my next article I’ll try to explain another not unusual phenomenon, where some folk insist on continuing to behave irresponsibly even when it is abundantly clear that they are seriously jeopardising their prospects.
