People Skills, Coaching Leadership, and a School of Fish, Oh My
How often does someone get promoted to a leadership (or C-level) position because they’ve produced amazing results in their technical role but do not have a clue how to actually lead?
The answer: all the freakin’ time.
And this promoting people into leadership without leadership development often is the reason behind that old (but true) adage, “People don’t leave companies. They leave bosses.”
People skills aren’t “soft” skills; they’re critical skills
We often hear people refer to someone’s inability to lead effectively as “lacking soft skills,” which basically translates to not knowing how to work with people. I hate this phrase.
To say that people skills are “soft skills” is to diminish the complexity of individuals and what it means to lead them. In other words, there’s nothing “soft” about being an incredible leader. This takes a great many things that require intentional effort, perseverance, determination, and active participation.
If they grew to be a top performer in their technical role, they can also learn and grow into a dynamic and powerful leader. Leadership can be learned. And situational leadership should be the type of leadership that’s taught.
Situational leadership is adapting your style to people and circumstances to influence your team’s performance and achieve the best results. With solid situational leadership, you’ll probably reduce turnover and the proverbial revolving door while getting fabulous results.
There are four situational leadership styles (delegating, directive, visionary, and coaching). Each has its benefits and drawbacks, but all of them can be learned. Here, I’m addressing coaching leadership–the most people-centric one there is.
Coaching leadership is like leading a school of fish.
The coaching style of leadership is all about empowering and enabling your employees. It’s about employee development, increased engagement, and therefore increased performance. The coaching leadership style is great when you want to develop individuals who also need to understand better they are part of a bigger team. This style is effective when you want to get your people moving in the same direction as a team working on a new project. Think of a school of fish.
A school of fish swims in a group, but there’s at least one fish up ahead of the rest, coaxing, cheering, and guiding the rest forward. That leader fish knows they’re one part of a whole, and if they “just keep swimming,” as Dory might say, they have a better chance of getting where they want to go.
The people skills that make coaching leadership more impactful
A recent HRB article stated, “Gone are the days of the heroic individual leading from the front. Instead, in most corporations, decision-making has become decentralized, and leaders are now supposed to empower and enable their people….” HBR has done an analysis to back this up. They studied 75 CEO successions, including 235 candidates, which took place across the U.S. and Europe from 2009-2019.
While the whole article goes into depth about their findings, what I found notable were the three people skills they identified as necessary for leaders to work effectively with people in small groups, across networks, and across the organization. These three people skills are critical to a successful coaching leadership style.
1. Asking good questions, listening, empathizing, and empowering
This allows leaders to draw wisdom, insight, and creativity from their people, solve problems as a team, and foster a sense of psychological safety.
2. Collaborating and influencing
The ability to be agile and innovative depends on the cooperation among people both inside and outside the organization and the ability to build informal relationships
3. Culture-shaping and aligning
This is the ability to enable, motivate, and inspire people; to be able to communicate direction or purpose; to ensure the organization’s processes and culture support the goals and objectives; and to act as a role model.
When to use coaching leadership and its benefits
If you have a team working on something new, which means they have a fresh slate and several directions they could go, or ways to approach their objective, using a coaching style of leadership benefits the entire group. This coaching style facilitates discussions, encourages participation, and provides feedback and support. This coaching style also empowers the individual team members to share their ideas, influence the direction of the projects, and take ownership of the following steps and the final results.
This coaching leadership style is also beneficial when identifying the leaders within the team and empowering them to take on a more significant role. Sure, a school of goldfish swims in a group, but there's gotta be one or two little fishies ahead of the rest of the class who might eventually take over for Teacher and lead the whole damn school (we call that ‘promotion’ and long-term business sustainability).
“Meet me in the Fish Bowl for a curiosity lab”–A Story of Coaching Leadership
My client, we’ll call her Christine, recently discovered an issue with a piece of software that the technical people on her team understood but that the customer service reps didn’t. Why? Because the issue was described in tech-speak instead of laymen’s terms.
Christine could have handled this in any number of ways, but she chose a coaching style approach to empower her team to be a part of the solution while giving them new skills to tackle future problems with more autonomy. Or, in other words, to give them what they needed so they could make more decisions without always involving her. Win-win for Team Goldfish!
Christine set up something I call a curiosity lab and she led the first one, teaching her team the flow and format so they could replicate future labs for future problems. She gathered the team.
She named the problem that was identified and addressed why they thought it was an issue. Then, they recognized what was already attempted to solve it.
Next, the team was asked to put their new ideas on Post-it notes. Those ideas were put up on the wall for everyone to see. They looked for duplicates and removed them. With what they had left, Christine invited everyone to vote on their top choices. (A good measure is to have them vote on their top two if there are five choices, or top three if there are 10.)
After the vote, they ranked the new possible solutions in order of importance and selected the top choice to try for a month to see if it resolved the problem. In a month, they could decide if the issue is fixed or if they move on to the next possibility.
Why is the curiosity lab effective as a form of a coaching style of leadership? First, it invites the whole team to participate in solving an issue, empowering them to think creatively and be a part of the decision-making process. Second, it allows space for all voices to be heard. Think about it. When you hold a meeting it’s usually the most extroverted people who tend to speak up first. This leaves the more introverted people on the sidelines not sharing those brilliant ideas swimming around in their brains. In a curiosity lab, you’re inviting all people to write their ideas down and have them considered.
The point of the curiosity lab is that they’re coming from a place of curiosity rather than getting it right. This (and the coaching style of leadership, generally) is a great way to enable your team’s critical thinking, foster their collaboration and teamwork, and nurture their creative thinking because everyone is coming from curiosity instead of getting an A+ for the right answer, or trying to be the teacher’s pet (goldfish, remember).
When it’s difficult to use coaching leadership
If you’re committed to coaching your team, you might blanketly apply this style to every situation. But that’s not situational leadership. There is a right time and place for the coaching style and there are also times when it’s not the best approach.
Coaching leadership is going to be ineffective or hinder productivity if you have an issue requiring an urgent, immediate, or time-sensitive response. If it’s a time-sensitive or immediate thing, you want to use a directive style. If it’s something the team has done before, use the delegating style.
Now, apart from the type of issue you might be up against, it’s also difficult to use a coaching leadership style if you’re within an organizational culture that doesn’t buy into the idea of leading others in this way. If you want to empower and enable your team, run curiosity labs, check in with each person individually, and provide monthly performance reports, and your organizational culture is antithetical to that approach, it’s going to be difficult to be effective working inside a vacuum. The whole organization needs to take on this approach (and situational leadership, generally speaking). The buy-in from the top is critical because “the fish always stinks at the head.” (Oh look, another fish reference. You’re welcome.)
And, to be perfectly blunt, if you’re not looking to be developed as a coaching-type leader, and you want to be hands-off and get shit done, and the idea of providing feedback or guidance makes you want to swim upstream against the current, you’re not going to get very far–as a leader or otherwise. You mine as well just be swimming in circles (in a very. small. bowl.)
The drawbacks to the coaching leadership style
That said, there are some drawbacks to this style of leadership as there are to any of the situational styles. One of these drawbacks is the idea that coaching leadership is decision-making by consensus. While that’s not true, it can be seen as slowing down the process and taking away the leader’s autonomy to make decisions.
Another is the time and energy required to truly grow your team members. This is especially true when you’re managing a really big team and if you’re caught up in too much doing and not enough delegating. This means that you’d be pressed for time to have those individual one-to-one meetings with your direct reports or to provide regular performance reviews. Yet, both of these are imperative to the goals of the coaching leader. This level of oversight and involvement makes your team members more effective, more engaged, and more empowered. So if the issue is one of timing, you need to find a way to deputize people on your team to help you carry the load of growing the individual members.
Learn to lead by being led
Let me repeat this line here: The coaching style of leadership is all about empowering and enabling your employees. It’s about employee development, increased engagement, and therefore increased performance. And, honestly, it’s the way of the future of leadership. Perhaps not 100% of the time because there are other styles to use at different times, but no matter what, you need to empower, enable, and engage your team members in order to achieve excellent performance and results.
Here’s my one word of caution and parting thought. Do not try to learn this from reading a book. If you’ve been promoted into a leadership position because of your results but you’ve never coached or have never been coached, reading books isn’t going to cut it.
There are too many ways and too many nuances (humans are complex beings after all) to learn how to lead simply by reading a book. You must be trained and developed. You must work with your own coach or mentor. If you have low emotional intelligence, leading others is not going to go well for you or for your team. So get coached. Learn about leadership. Develop your leadership skills. Add to your, your team’s, and your organization’s success by becoming an effective situational leader.
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Ready to share the load and lean into coaching leadership?
Join me June 20th from 4–5 pm EST for my new monthly series, "The Empower Hour." Each month, we tackle a different leadership topic, and someone will have the chance to receive live coaching. We’ll focus on Coaching Leadership in June. Bring a current leadership dilemma to the call and leave empowered.
