Coaching for Critical Thinking, Part One

Does your job seem excessively rote, tedious, and repetitive?

If so, automation threatens your job security.

According to Brookings, 25% of all American jobs are at risk of elimination from automation and artificial intelligence. While automation will first disrupt low-wage tasks such as food service, it will also change or eliminate jobs in high-tech fields like information technology and web design.

When we are reminded of this imminent automated future, it is natural to feel some anxiety and apprehension. Many stable jobs that exist at the start of 2020 will not exist at the start of 2030.

Yet many, myself included, believe that such disruption in the labor market will create more benefits than it eliminates. That's because these technologies create more jobs than they eliminate. The jobs they create will not be rote or tedious. Rather, they will require critical thinking, creativity, and innovation. They will allow us to be consultative, rather than transactional. These technologies will change the focus of our labor from task completion to problem-solving.

As an instructional designer for Zendesk's customer experience teams, I'm well aware of how automation and AI have changed the customer service space for the better. As automated bots and self-service content have reduced transactional customer contacts, customer support professionals have pivoted towards solving bigger, more audacious problems. The end result is that customer support agents spend less of their time repeatedly answering the same questions, and more of their effort experimenting, seeking to solve previously unanswered questions. The role of the customer support agent is becoming more dynamic, more fun, even more human.

As jobs evolve into more meaningful work, managers must evolve as well. Gone are the days of the task-master manager, focused on delegating to-do lists and enforcing completion. Today's workplace is the domain of the workplace coach who can empower their teams with critical thinking skills. The most effective leaders in this new economy are those who can coach their teams to pause and reflect and to consider many possible solutions. They are those who can coach their teams to be detectives, to find new solutions to questions that were previously unasked!

The manager in an age of automation must be a coach of critical thinkers.

What is a critical thinker? It is simply one who carefully aligns their thinking in service to a goal.

That might sound simplistic, even easy to do. In fact, it's incredibly difficult. Critical thinking requires the suppression of bias, implicit and explicit. It involves a commitment to slow and steady analysis in a world that expects velocity. It demands consideration of feedback and even pushback. In this age of 240-character thoughts and 24-hour news, it turns out that critical thinking is deeply counter-cultural.

In this blog series, we'll explore what it means to coach for critical thinking. In upcoming blogs, we'll look at:

• What it means to coach critical thinkers

• How to ask powerful coaching questions that lead to critical thinking

• How to determine whether your coaching is, in fact, creating critical thinkers

Together, let's hit the pause button on the rapidity around us. It's time to think, about thinking.

Football and workplace coaching, part four: Don't be a coach of players, be a coach of coaches

Those unfamiliar with American football might not realize that there is more to the game than size and strength. Toughness and force are important to a player's success, but limitations in size and strength can be overcome through technique, precision, and cinematic montages.

I spent my playing career on the offensive and defensive line, positions that I now coach. The best players on the line are those whose first steps are quick and decisive. I've always found that the best linemen are the players whose hand placement and pad level are calibrated to maximize leverage, and whose attention spans are capable of constantly critiquing the minutiae of the form. The adage "the low man always wins" remains true in the sport of American football - but being the "low man" requires a decisive mastery of a surprisingly complex skillset.

It's my belief as a coach that to be successful in the most physically demanding position in the world's most physical sport demands a commitment not just to aggressive play, but to consistent execution, evaluation, and improvement.

Yet despite the necessity of great technique, most football teams have only one coach to work with dozens of players in a given position group. In a fast-moving sport where up to five linemen can take the field on one side of the ball, the best coaches quickly realize that there's far more coaching than one person can realistically provide. There are too many movements to watch, too much technique on which to focus, too many moving pieces in the system. As a linemen coach, I am responsible for watching more than my eyes can take in.

In the workplace, people leaders are increasingly finding their coaching efforts limited by time and space. As remote working arrangements and geographical distribution of employees become normative in the digital workplace, people leaders have fewer opportunities to coach their teams, aside from a few minutes set aside for a weekly Zoom or a bi-annual performance review.

That's why the most influential coaches, in football and in the workplace, are not the best coaches of players. Rather, they are the best coaches of coaches. The most effective coaches build a culture of coaching, erasing the arbitrary demarcation between coach and contributor so that all are empowered to coach in the moment.

To be a coach these days is about training others to become coaches themselves. Coaching is about upskilling others on the team to ask powerful questions. It's about encouraging others to provide realtime, contextually relevant feedback. It's about helping team members to step back from subjective judgments and to lean into conversations about actions that will affect performance outcomes.

I regularly remind the linemen I have the privilege to work with that my role as their coach is to put them in a position to coach one another. When we get into a game and I stand on the sidelines, some 80 feet away from the action, I and the other coaches don't have a great vantage point. In these moments, there's not much that I can do to affect the outcome of a game. If I want the unit's performance to improve throughout the course of the game, I need to empower the players to make themselves better. I need to be a coach not of players, but of coaches.

Football and workplace coaching, part three: Coach different players differently

I discovered how most people managers approach coaching in 2006 while stocking Beerfest DVDs at the Grand Chute, WI Best Buy. "We have to hold everyone to the exact same standard," the manager barked at me on my first day of the job. "We have to treat everybody exactly the same."

With this comment, the manager, who oversaw an operation of CD and DVD shelf re-stockers during the holiday season, expressed a commonly held yet ultimately misplaced theory of people leadership. The idea that everyone should be treated the same has its place in a Kindergarten classroom, yet falls apart when applied to the workplace. And like most of my insights about people development, I discovered an alternative way to lead while out on the football field.

Football coaches, many of whom work with dozens of players at vastly different skill levels, quickly learn that you cannot coach everyone the same. To coach a sport is to realize that you must coach different people differently. Individual contributors require individualized standards, unique goals, and specific plans for attaining those goals.

As a football coach, it's my job to understand what each player needs in order to achieve a personalized performance standard. An under-sized freshman requires a different performance target and a different approach to coaching than a senior all-state athlete. A talented player who struggles with motivation and consistency requires a different approach than a struggling player who brings energy and commitment day in and day out. And as is increasingly the case in football's new landscape, players who are concerned about the game's physicality need something different from their coaches than players who love the collision aspect of the game.

In the workplace, it's a leader's job to recognize what team members need in order to realize individualized performance goals. A basic skill/will matrix would suggest that high skill and high will performers should be held to different objectives and ought to approach those objectives differently than would a low skill and low will contributor. The role of the coach is to be aware of the variable skills and motivations on their team and to facilitate different coaching conversations based on this distribution.

With that said, there are some commonalities with which to approach all coaching - whether on the football field or in the office, for a seasoned All-American or a new junior associate.

• All team members require coaching from a trusted source.

• All contributors need a coach who knows how to collaborate on goal setting and action planning.

• All players need a coach who won't tell them what to do, but who will ask powerful questions so that the coachee can self-discover.

As a workplace coach, you should be coaching different people differently. What matters most is that you coach all of your people, not to be the same, but to be themselves.