Coaching high performers, part one: Why leaders overlook their greatest coaching opportunities

In today's workplace, how much time do you think a typical manager invests in coaching their highest-performing team members?

With all of the hours spent by people leaders in meetings, project updates, and planning sessions, there just aren't many hours left in the week for workplace coaching. And the hours that are available for coaching typically go towards those who are struggling to meet the expectations of their role.

This imbalance is nothing less than a squandering of talent, an utter waste of opportunity. And through my next four blog posts, we're going to explore how we can do better.

But to consider why it's such a problem for our highest performers to receive little to no coaching, it's useful to consider the wide world of sports.

I'm a football fan, specifically a fan of the Green Bay Packers, and an admirer of the G.O.A.T, quarterback Aaron Rodgers. Who do you suppose receives more coaching throughout a week of practice: Aaron Rodgers, the star quarterback (QB) and former league MVP, or Tim Boyle?

For those who do not follow the Packers, Boyle is Aaron Rogers' incapable backup QB who will be fortunate to make the team next season. While Aaron Rodgers led the Packers to a 13-3 season, it's likely that had Boyle started all 16 games, the team's record would have been closer to 3-13.

Even if we know nothing about sports, we know intuitively that Rodgers, one of the most successful and highest-paid players in league history, receives far more coaching than Boyle. The coaches build their gameplan around Rodgers. Rodgers receives nearly every repetition with the first-team offense. Rodgers receives constant attention, feedback, scrutiny, and encouragement from the Packer coaching staff. The staff of the Packers knows that their ability to achieve the team's goals is inextricably connected to Rodgers' success. They know that when Rodgers elevates his game, the whole team is more successful, so they direct their coaching energy accordingly. Meanwhile, Tim Boyle stands on the sidelines and takes an occasional repetition with the scout team.

But if the Packers were coached by today's archetypal workplace manager, journeyman backup Tim Boyle would receive the overwhelming majority of the coach's attention.

Boyle's performance would be observed closely, the coaches would work with Boyle to set goals and develop plans to achieve those goals, they would hold planning sessions to get Boyle to a serviceable place, and would regularly check-in with Boyle to discuss progress towards developmental milestones. The coaches would go to extreme lengths to improve Boyle's performance.

All the while, Aaron Rodgers would stand on the sidelines, making impressive throws that largely go unnoticed by his staff of workplace coaches. These workplace managers would put almost all of their coaching energy towards Boyle, mistakenly believing that if they can elevate Boyle's performance, the team will have greater success. In this hypothetical scenario, Rodgers would likely decide to leave the Packers for a more appealing career opportunity, putting the fate of the organization in the hands of Tim freakin' Boyle. But hey - he's been coached up, so surely he's ready to lead the Packers back to the Super Bowl!

When workplace leaders fail to invest significant time and energy in coaching their highest performers, they miss out on opportunities for team growth, innovation, and shared performance improvement.

In the next blog posts, we'll look at why workplace coaching efforts should be almost exclusively focused on high performers. We'll explore how coaching high performers leads to innovation, how it provides a competitive advantage, and how it drives engagement and retention with the team members you most want to engage and retain!

I wrote this post the week before the Super Bowl. I certainly watched. And predictably, we didn't see Chiefs backup, journeyman Matt Moore, at any point during the game. That's because Patrick Mahomes, a true rising star, was leading the Chiefs to victory in their biggest game in decades. As the new face of the highest-level performance in the league, Mahomes receive the highest-level coaching in preparation for the big game. To build championship organizations, we should follow in this example.

Critical thinking, part four: What critical thinking really looks like

Our present-day, project-based work culture is predicated on hustle and hurry.

In this project-based workplace, our sense of value (as understood by oneself and one's employers) is increasingly determined by task completion. The most highly-regarded team members are those who get the most done: the reps that close the most deals, the agents that take the most tickets, the engineers who complete the most tasks (eg, cards) in a time period known as a "sprint."

The indicators of hustle and hurry are widespread, particularly in the words we use to describe our work. Much of the business blogosphere is dedicated to improving efficiency and helping employees to work faster. Much, if not all rhetoric from business leaders is focused on increasing velocity. We use terms like "accelerator" to describe organizations that help firms get their start, and adjectives like "rapid" are used to define everything from prototyping to feedback.

But there's a problem with the need for speed.

Speed and efficiency come at the expense of our ability to think critically. When we are moving fast, we are unable to systematically sort through evidence and data and to make well-reasoned decisions.

When we are moving fast, we are depending on System I mental processes related to intuition, assumption, and emotion. Meanwhile, we are suppressing the System 2 processes defined by logic and problem-solving. Daniel Kahneman, in his best-seller Thinking Fast and Slow, describes our aptitudes for reason and logic as strong, yet somewhat lazy. Most of the time, our mind is content to trust the rapidity of System 1, and to let System 2 lie dormant in a state of blissful slumber. And the consequences of this can be severe: we make mistakes in planning, we are overly-beholden to initially positive impressions, we make decisions to mitigate loss but not to actualize gains, we are beholden to unconscious bias.

In the automation-driven workplace, AI has eliminated mindlessly transactional jobs. If the demands of the workplace are indeed shifting from that which requires the rote and repetitive towards that which requires the complex and consultative, we don't need more speed. What we need is the space to think critically about the depth of change around us.

And that is the most visible indicator of a workplace that thinks critically.

If we truly coach our teams to be critical thinkers, we will know it not through improved speed and efficiency. Our decision-making will be slower. Our execution may become less efficient. Time to project completion will increase.

But there's a tradeoff. We'll make fewer errors in planning and forecasting. We'll act less frequently out of inference, and ensure our behavior is consistent with the data. We'll make fewer mistakes, we'll engage more contributors in the collaborative process, and we'll continuously evaluate the efficacy of our processes. Each of these takes time and energy - but each is worth pursuing in and of itself. Each is necessary as our careers require more complex problem solving, and less button-pushing.

If you want your workplace to be more adept at critical thinking, you might take three specific actions. These actions may not gain you friends, followers, or a seat on the hot-shot panel at an upcoming conference. But they will defend your team's capacity to think critically against the ever-encroaching bias towards velocity. These three actions are:

1. Gently challenging leaders who demand increased speed. When a leader states that something must become faster, ask them to describe the costs of greater velocity. What may we fail to consider? What assumptions might grip us? What biases may become more pervasive? By asking this question, you aren't advocating for lethargy: you are promoting critical thinking about the trade-offs between speed and quality.

2. Encouraging your highest performers to slow down. Often, the most productive performers on the team move the fastest. Give them permission to pause, reflect, and do some critical thinking of their own. Encourage them to consider what they might gain by being more deliberate, analytical, and intentional - and how they could share those gains with the greater team.

3. Setting an example by narrowing your priorities. Critical thinking is essentially an exercise in elimination. We can't think critically about an endless to-do list. In the AI-disrupted workplace, we must learn to ruthlessly prioritize those tasks that will have the most benefit for our stakeholders: our colleagues, our team members, our communities.

Critical-thinking is becoming ever-more important. But our preference for speed is inhibiting our ability to pivot from task execution towards creative problem-solving. If a leader is really successful in building a culture of critical thinking, they'll know it by one visible indicator: their organization will be slower.

And that will make all the difference.

Critical thinking, part three: 9 coaching questions to develop critical thinkers

We become critical thinkers when we put emotions, assumptions, and biases (what Daniel Kahneman refers to in "Thinking Fast and Slow" as "System 1 thinking") into a constructive dialogue with data, evidence, and strategy (or "System 2 thinking"). Before we can think critically, we have to put ourselves in a mindset where our slow, deliberative reflection can overtake rapid, spontaneous reaction (or to paraphrase Jonathan Haidt, where the rider can guide the elephant). For more on the basics of critical thinking, check out part one and part two of this blog series!

As critical thinking becomes more of a sought-after skill, the workplace leader of today has a responsibility to bring out the critical thinkers within us, the rational minds that are often buried under heaps of unread emails, calendars packed with meetings, and to-do lists that never seem to clear. A leader can approach this in two ways: by taking their people away from their jobs to learn about critical thinking in a classroom - or, to be more efficient, by asking powerful, in-the-moment coaching questions. By asking the right questions, a workplace coach can inspire more constructive reflection than any book, seminar, or conference breakout.

Let's look at nine coaching questions directed at facilitating critical thinking. Each question can be asked as a one-off in a 1:1 meeting, and each should take no longer than a few minutes to discuss. I'll divide these questions into three categories: those that challenge assumptions, those that further contextualize our thought, and those that help us to step outside ourselves in order to increase objectivity.

To coach for critical thinking, we can challenge emotions, assumptions, and biases through the following questions (listed next to trendy descriptive names!):

• The decelerator: If I could give you an entire week to think about nothing other than this situation, how might your thinking and decision-making evolve?

• The rejuvenator: Imagine somebody was brand-new to our organization and faced a similar situation. How might a fresh vantage point lead to a perspective different than your own?

• The time-traveler: Tell me about a recent experience that informs your thinking about this situation. If you didn't have that experience, how would your thinking change?
  

We can also better contextualize thoughts with the following:

• The reminder: Think about your most significant, most pressing goal. If you only thought about the situation in the context of that goal, would it change your thinking or your decisions?

• The evaluator: Think about the last colleague to provide constructive feedback on your performance. How would your thinking or decision-making align with that feedback?

• The calculator: Can you provide three pieces of quantitative evidence in support of your perspectives? Can you provide three pieces of quantitative evidence that would challenge your perspective? What evidence seems stronger?

Finally, we can help our teams to step outside themselves to increase perspective with the following questions:

• The externalizer: Name one stakeholder involved in this situation - perhaps a customer, maybe a shareholder or another employee, maybe our local community. How would they perceive this situation? How might your current line of thinking affect them?

• The advisor: If you were giving advice to someone in the same situation as you, what advice would you give them?

• The helper: If you had a full-time assistant that could approach this situation for you and accomplish everything you have in mind, where would you tell them to start? How would they feel about that task?

Ultimately, as much as I might want to, we don't have time in the efficiency-driven workplace to give every worker a college-level course on critical thought. But we do have the ability to ask questions. Coaching questions create the training ground on which we build the skills of critical thought. It is only by asking such questions that we can prepare our workplace for the disruptions of the future.