For many leaders who are overwhelmed by the never ending COVID-19 situation, coaching has mostly defaulted to two main actions, namely telling people what they should have done and attempting to fix their problems. The result is a weakening of the supervisory relationship and the possibility of creating active disengagement by the employee.
I understand why a leader would be choosing to act in this manner. He or she has reached their limit of how much chaos they can tolerate around them so their goal is to reduce disequilibrium and restore a degree of control, predictability and order in their circle of influence. However, the price of this choice is quite high because the person being coached can perceive these actions by their supervisor as signaling that they do not matter and that their job does not matter. As Patrick Lencioni points out in his book, The Truth About Employee Engagement: A Fable About Addressing the Three Root Causes of Job Misery, formerly The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (and their employees) (Jossey-Bass 2007): “people want to managed as people, not as mere workers.”
When successful coaching takes place, a leader will focus on two categories, namely skills and knowledge based coaching or mindset based coaching which directly impacts their willingness and commitment levels as an employee to move forward through a challenging situation. Yet, upon significant reflection, I have observed that the best coaching happens when the person being coached feels the support of their supervisor and when the supervisor helps the person being coached put things back into perspective and subsequently understanding. Many times this act of support and realignment of perspective by the coach involves a tremendous amount of concentrated listening with the goal to create an in-depth understanding of how the person struggling comprehends what is happening around and within them.
The other part of this successful coaching process involves listening and giving feedback rather than constructive criticism. However, we as leaders and coaches need to remember that right now people have a limited bandwidth for receiving feedback. Most employees are barely coping with the amount of on-going disruption and chaos in their work and home lives. They are are doing their best in a COVID-19 centric world and feeling exhausted by the constant lack of structure and normalcy in their day to day lives.
During this global pandemic, the best coaches I have visited with by phone understand one small but significant fact about coaching people. It all begins with the building and maintaining of trust. In the May-June 2020 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss wrote an exceptional article called “Begin With Trust: The first step to becoming a genuinely empowering leader.” As Frei and Morriss explain, “In our experience, trust has three drivers: authenticity, logic, and empathy. People tend to trust you when they believe they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgement and competence (logic), and when they feel that you care about them (empathy). When trust is lost, it can almost always be traced to a breakdown in one of these three drivers.” The article points out a variety of strategies if you are experiencing problems in any one of the three drivers of trust.
At the same time, Frei and Morriss also point out one more important thing about trust. As they write, “We’ve argued that the foundation of empowerment leadership is getting other people to trust you. That’s certainly true, but there’s one last thing you need to know. The path to empowerment leadership doesn’t begin when other people start to trust you. It begins when you start to trust yourself.”
This is a major insight into great leadership and empowerment. And the best leaders recognize that the pathway to trusting one’s self is to have a variety of allies and confidants who can hear you, help you, and ask you thought-provoking questions so you are constantly creating a greater depth of internal clarity and understanding. When we as leaders want to unleash the creativity, talent and commitment to learning and subsequent action within our companies, then building trust at all levels of the organizations begins with creating a greater level of internal clarity and integrity.
I encourage all of you to read the above article during the coming days. I also encourage you to coach more, be more supportive and to be open to being coached more. With all that is before us right now, we need allies and we need confidants as we process our own thoughts, feelings and struggles during these most unique times.
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