Four things I learned from coaching that made me a better leader

About two and a half years ago, I finally completed CTI’s coach training courses – about 18 months after I started them, and much longer thinking “I think this would be useful and one day I will take it”. I find some people conceive of coaching as being a professional advice giver, or asking questions, but for me it’s been a fundamental mindset shift that changed the way I approached my role as a leader. Here are four core things that I use day in day out.

1. Articulate what is going on

How often have you been in a meeting, and listened to people talking, and lost the thread of what’s actually happening? How many of those have you thought it was just you, and stayed quiet? One of the skills of coaching is to listen to a garbled word salad, and summarize it back. “It sounds like you’re saying you will only meet the deadline if someone else can take this piece of work and ensure it’s completed. Is that correct?”

It may or may not be correct, but the skill of succinct summarization – or “bottom lining” can help you extract core points from chaos and move things forward. Whilst – bonus – making people feel heard.

2. Meet an argument with a question

Have you ever found yourself in the middle of an argument and not been sure how you got there? People tend to match other people’s energy, so if someone comes in hot you might – naturally, no judgment here – meet them hot in return. Learning to replace reaction with a question can diffuse a heated reaction and make sure you’re having the conversation that will actually move this forward.

The next time someone seems annoyed, take a deep breath and get curious instead. See what you can learn – rather than what you can win.

3. Let go of control

You’re ultimately responsible, and you need things to be done to your standards, therefore you need to enforce your standards by getting in all the details. Right? No! This approach is not just exhausting – it’s also ineffective. When you’re controlling, you steal other people’s responsibility. This erodes people’s ownership, making them less effective, whilst your workload will only increase.

In coaching training, you learn that people are naturally creative, resourceful and whole. And it turns out, the more you operate from that belief the more effective they are. This makes sense – research shows that students live up or down to the expectations their teachers have on them.

4. Sometimes the answer is doing less

Often we think we fix things by doing more, but sometimes what is needed is space, and learning how to give that space and let things play out can be a huge adjustment – especially for your average type A overachiever! Creating systems that force you to look at things in a different way, or asking more fundamental questions can help you move things forward.

An example from my own work – I was pushing my leads to think about how to scale their teams, and it wasn’t moving as quickly as I wanted. Eventually, I flipped the question. I gave them the scenario that I went to the spa and never came back, and was replaced by “Dave”. I told them, Dave does half as much for you and expects you to do twice as much for him – what do you need to survive Dave? After we all agreed how much we hated Dave, we all got more creative and many scaling issues started to shift.

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A core part of all of these lessons is boundaries – I expected coaching to teach me some skills, and it did, but the thing I am most grateful for, a topic that I come back to again and again as both a coach, a manager and a person, is boundaries. The knowledge of what is my work, and what is someone else’s – and the wisdom to tell the difference.