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?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC5RuhKT12w

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.

Leadership training that won't annoy people, part three: Don't use leadership styles

What is your leadership style?

Are you a challenger? Or are you maybe a bit of a lone wolf? Maybe you're always on, or maybe you are a connector. For your sake, I hope you would identify as a "connector," given Gartner's recent finding that "connector" leaders are, always and forever, objectively the best. You might be authoritative, you might be command and control, you might be a servant leader.

Perhaps you have attended a workshop at your company, led by a highly-paid consultant, who hands you a twenty-item questionnaire and in return reduces the complexities of your work into a single, snappy categorization. An aggregation of the breadth of my own participation in these workshops would suggest that I'm some combination of a type 3-red-challenger-servant leader-ENFJ-collaborator-facilitator. You know, the most common leadership style.

But here's the problem. Whatever leadership style you think you identify with is likely not the leadership style that others would use to define you.

Our leadership styles, which is to say, the way we engage others in the collective pursuit of a shared goal, is highly situational.

Many working parents would attest that the way they engage their kids to get them to bed on time is considerably different from the way they manage their direct reports at the office. The way that I coach my high school football players to be better defensive linemen is vastly different from how I coach my co-workers to be better managers. The way a senior executive directs their team through an intense budget negotiation would look much different from how that same leader would mentor a group of aspiring future executives.

Marcus Buckingham, in his recent bestseller "Nine Lies About Work," concludes that leadership styles are among the most pervasive myths of the workplace. Buckingham writes:

"The only thing that the best leaders share is followers. The best leaders are able to give their people the confidence to follow them into the uncertainty of the future. They all have that in common. But the way in which they instill this confidence varies, leader by leader. Which means that “leadership” isn’t something we can define in isolation of the leader doing it."

-Marcus Buckingham, 9 Lies About Work

The data increasingly suggests that something as complex and context-dependent as leadership cannot be reduced to a set of traits akin to a personality style.

So, if we bring leadership styles into our leadership development efforts, we're wasting time and resources. We're also patronizing our learners by ignoring the nuances of their skillset.

But if we were to cut leadership styles from our leadership development programs, what would we put in its place?

The answer to that question is found in the reason why leadership styles are problematic. Leadership styles don't add value to our work because our work as leaders oscillates wildly from one setting to another. So instead of understanding leadership styles, we need to understand the setting in which our leadership takes place.

True leadership development is less about aligning one's habits to the best of a personality style, and more about attuning one's attention to the particulars of your environment. In other words, true leadership development is a process of thoughtful reflection about an organization's culture, or the processes by which an organization constructs meaning.

To develop leaders, we don't need to categorize individual styles and teach what it means to lead within those styles. We need to help leaders think about the organizational culture in which they operate, and the leadership skills they need to thrive within that environment.

How does our organizational culture inform the interpretation of data? How does our organizational culture facilitate collaboration? What challenges does our culture present to effective communication, clear goal setting, and nimble execution? These are just some of the questions that leaders should be asking when they get together for leadership development. Because when our leaders increase their awareness of their culture, they can identify the skills they need to thrive.

At that point, leadership development ceases to annoy people. At that point, leadership development becomes a joy.

Remember, leaders: Keep it simple. Unless, of course, it needs to be kept complex.

Leadership training that won't annoy people, part two: Don't use models or frameworks!

The history of leadership training likely can be summarized as follows:

Once upon a time, we started to do 'leadership training,' which was mostly a series of lectures on abstractions and philosophies about an imprecise and undefinable quality. One day, we decided to make our leadership development less abstract and more "actionable," so we converted our content into a series of catchy acronyms like GROW, personality inventories like MBTI, and decision-making frameworks like 9-Box. For years, our learners nodded along and politely considered using such tools during their day to day, before they left their training session and went right back to doing things in exactly the same way.

Sound familiar?

Managers suffer from framework fatigue and acrostic apathy, conditions that we can only cure by jettisoning models and frameworks from our leadership development programs.

Frameworks and models fail for two reasons. First, they aren't applicable to a specific enough task. In their "scalability," we lose track of why we would want to use them in the first place. Second, it's unclear how we might apply them to the development of a specific skill. How would we use a personality inventory if our task is to manage engineers? Why would we use a coaching framework if our top priority was to lead a team of financial analysts? Frameworks and models exist for their apparently wide usability. Yet because of their wide usability, it's unclear what we should use them for.

But there is another way.

Our task as leadership developers is not to build programs around models like DiSC or Enneagram.

Our task is first to understand the skills our leaders need to succeed, then to isolate tools for the development of these skills.

A tool is that which can be concretely and meaningfully applied to the completion of a specific task. Whereas a framework is defined by its versatility, a tool is defined by its singular ability to be repeatedly used for a clear purpose. The solution to framework fatigue is to ensure that we don't use frameworks: we only use tools.

Contrast this to many contemporary leadership development programs, which attempt to build costly and resource-intensive programs around frameworks like Strengths Finder 2.0 or True Colors. Each of these frameworks could be used as a tool. If leaders identify career planning as a skill need, Strengths Finder 2.0 becomes a viable tool. If leaders identify team facilitation as a skill need, True Colors becomes viable as well. But all too often, we begin with the framework, we don't clarify its relationship to specific skills, and we end up wasting time.

I once knew a leadership developer that was attempting to build the coaching skills of several customer support managers. They had read about the GROW model of coaching, but rather than simply training their leaders on the model, they found a way to connect it to a specific skill: holding regular 1:1 check-ins with direct reports.

The leadership developer worked collaboratively with their managers to develop a new template for employee 1:1s, a template based on the coaching questions found within the GROW model. After holding a brief kickoff training and launching the new 1:1 template, the leadership developer continued to meet with the managers to understand the extent to which leaders applied GROW. They built a team of successful, committed workplace coaches - not because they trained anybody on a coaching framework, but because they identified needed skills and provided a tool that perfectly aligned to that skill.

So let's stop subsidizing the Gallup corporation by mindlessly purchasing Strengths Finder. Let's start to identify what skills our leaders need. It's only then that we can turn our frameworks into tools. It's only then that our leadership training will cease to annoy people.

In the next blog post, the third of this series, we'll turn to the third problem of leadership development: falling for the latest trends while losing sight of one's unique context.

Remember, leaders: Action - not reaction. Because actors win awards. Reactors melt down.