Sometimes my clients, or business owners who are considering coaching, ask me if I will coach their team. My first response back to them will usually be, “In what areas do you want to see your team perform better? What would you like to see different with your team?”
The usual response will be something like, “I want my salespeople to sell more.” Or, “I want to improve the culture in my business.” Or, “I want my managers to be better managers and delegators.”
These are all natural and valid aspirations for business owners and leaders. The results in a business are a reflection of the quality and performance of the team and its leaders; when the people improve, the business improves. So of course it’s natural for managers and leaders to want their team to be coached.
But I think it’s important for us to look first at how you – the leader/manager/owner – are leading and managing your team. A team is a reflection of its leadership, so for the team to get better, first the leaders and managers must get better. In other words, you don’t want to “abdicate” leadership to a coach. If you have tried to get more out of your team members (or if you haven’t tried!), but you’re still not getting the results you want, then hiring a coach to do that for you probably won’t work. As the business leader, you have created the culture in your business that you currently have. As ActionCOACH chairman and founder Brad Sugars says, “Your team are your own fault.” You hired your employees, you manage them, you train them, you keep them, you pay them. An external entity, such as a coach, probably shouldn’t be your first port of call to “fix” or improve your team by working directly with them.
When working with my clients, I first seek to identify how the managers and leaders are growing and developing their own leadership skills. How are you communicating with your team? How are you delegating and following through with tasks that you assign to your employees? Great leaders are not born; great leaders continually learn and grow their leadership skills. Leaders are readers!
Having said that, a lot of value can be had by getting a coach to work directly with team members and managers. For one thing, you are limited by your own skill set and experiences, and a coach can fill in the gaps by bringing different skills and strategies that they have gained through their own experience and learning. Secondly, it often helps to hear things from a different person, with a different voice, a different way of saying things. Clients often tell me this: “I’ve been telling them the same thing for years, you tell them one time and they do it!” When you’re hearing the same things again and again from the same person, there can be a tendency to tune out; broken record syndrome kicks in and even though you’re hearing it, you’re not really hearing it (if you know what I mean).
When I first start working with a client who wants to improve their team’s performance, I usually recommend that we spend some time – maybe a few weeks or months – looking at how the leaders of the business are guiding and managing their team. There will always be opportunities for improvement, as a good coach can always see and highlight opportunities and challenges that you can’t necessarily see because you’re too close to it. You’re on the inside, you’re busy, and you don’t always have the time or head space to really reflect on how you can lead your team better.
Once I have worked with the leader/s to improve their own skills and consistency with how they manage their team, we then start looking at 1-on-1 coaching with various team members. This is important, because you don’t want the team member seeing the coach as a “surrogate manager,” in other words, you don’t want them thinking that they answer to the coach now, rather than the actual boss. Your own authority with your team could deteriorate, and you will then forever rely on the coach to manage and grow your team, and to hold them accountable.
Every situation is different. I therefore start every coaching client off with what we call an “alignment.” An alignment is an in-depth analysis of what is currently going on in the business, the goals and aspirations of the business owners, the challenges that are getting in the way of those goals, and the strategies we need to begin employing straight away so the business can move forward. The question of whether you or your team needs coaching, and when to begin your team on coaching, should be answered in that alignment session. But the short answer is, make sure you get the coaching you need to be a better leader first, and then get your team on board so they get the very best coaching they need to achieve their greatest potential.
Find out more about what ActionCOACH can do for your business. Or if you simply have a question about something you’ve read here, don’t hesitate to get in touch. Email me at andrewgoldberg@actioncoach.com.
