The Better Leadership Team Show
The Better Leadership Team Show
5 Ways to Coach Your Team Instead of Managing Them
In this “Mike on the Mic” episode of The Better Leadership Team Show, I dive into one of the biggest traps leaders fall into: constantly managing their team instead of coaching them. If you ever feel like you’re putting out fires all day and doing work that’s not yours, this episode is for you. I walk you through five specific strategies to coach your team, empower ownership, and finally free yourself up to lead the way you’re meant to.
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leaders feel like very often feel like they need to be the smartest person in the room. They need to have all the answers. And it does take time and maturity to understand that, man, you're much better off if other people around you have those answers. So there's, you know, one, one. So one trap is feeling like you need all the answers. The second trap. Is people think coaching is too slow. What you'll find out as we go through this episode is, coaching is much more about asking questions. You made it to the better leadership team show, the place where you learn how to surround yourself with the right people, doing the right things. So you can grow your business without losing your mind. I'm your host and leadership team coach, Mike Goldman. I'm going to show you how to improve top and bottom line growth, fulfillment, and the value your company adds to the world by building a better leadership team. All right, let's go. How often do you find yourself solving the same problem for your team over and over again, feeling like you're constantly putting out fires that your team ought to be able to handle. In fact, feeling like you're doing the job or jobs one level below you so you can't do the job you need to do as a leader of your team or a leader of the company. What I find is there's a skill that many leaders lack that can take us to a whole new level in making sure our people could solve their own problems and making sure that we could focus on. What we need to do from a vision, from a strategy, from an accountability, from a culture standpoint, and we're not constantly doing the job one level down. And the skill I find most leaders really need to improve is coaching. Coaching instead of managing. So I wanna share with you on this episode, five ways. To coach your team instead of managing them. And let me talk about the difference first, or at least my definition of the difference. For me, managing is a focus on delegating tasks, measuring outputs. and I'm not saying you don't need to do that. You absolutely do need to delegate you absolutely do need to measure outcomes and hold people accountable. But coaching is different than that. not instead of, but in addition to coaching is more about guiding and asking questions and empowering others. To take ownership coaching, the way my coach taught me is coaching is about helping people surface the right action for them. And by the way, the right action for them might be very different than the right action for you. We all have different styles, we have different personal values. We have different goals in mind. So the right action for you in a certain situation and the right action for someone else, for someone on your team may be different. So let me give you some reasons why I see leaders default to managing as opposed to coaching and. One is leaders feel like very often feel like they need to be the smartest person in the room. They need to have all the answers. And it does take time and maturity to understand that, man, you're much better off if other people around you have those answers. So there's, you know, one, one. So one trap is feeling like you need all the answers. The second trap. Is people think coaching is too slow. What you'll find out as we go through this episode is I believe coaching is much more about asking questions. Well, managing or directing is about telling people what to do. It's a whole lot faster for me to just tell you what to do than it is to ask you a bunch of questions. That guide you to figuring out what the right answer is for you. And it is slower, but as I think you'll see, it's only slower initially. It's only slower when you think about it in the short term, but in the long term, if you are allowing your team to work more independently, that's gonna save you a bunch of time and a bunch of frustration. And you'll be able to go away for three weeks on vacation and your team will keep moving without you. So the first common trap is feeling like you've gotta be the smartest person in the room. You need all the answers. The second is feeling like coaching is too slow, so people default to managing. And the third is believing your way is the only way. And again, the right. Action for you may be different than the right a action for someone else. And by the way, what you believe is the right way may not be the right way, and it may be that coaching brings out a better way. So let's talk about five ways to get you out of this problem of teams becoming dependent on you, failing to develop and waiting for you to solve the problem. So five strategies. First one I'll call, ask, don't tell. And the idea of this strategy is to transition from, from giving direction, giving advice, telling people what to do to coaching by asking open strategic questions. Questions like, you know, what options have you considered so far? Someone comes to you with a problem, we can give them advice right away. And by the way, if we give them advice right away, we may actually be solving the wrong problem. But what options have you considered? What do you recommend we do? I love this question and I'm stealing this from Michael Bungay Stanier. And if you wanna get better at asking great coaching questions, read the Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier. And my favorite question that he asks is, what's the real challenge here for you? Now let me get give you an example of how powerful a question that is. If someone comes to you and says, Hey, you know, I really need some help. I'm having so much trouble managing this project. Automatically we wanna give advice. So we might give people a whole lecture. On project management, on gaining buy-in, on using project management tools and understanding, you know, predecessors and dependencies and you name it. But when we ask a question like, what's the real challenge here for you? And we dig deep and he likes to Michael Bungay Stanier likes to ask that question, get the first answer and say, and what else? And what else? But if you ask the question, what's the real challenge here for you? Before giving advice, you may find out the real challenge is this person doesn't believe there's gonna be value in the end result of the project. You may find out this person is having a. Difficult time in their relationship with their co-lead on the project. So by asking that question, you get to the heart of the problem versus potentially solving the wrong problem. So, so we wanna ask, don't tell that strategy number one. Strategy number two is let them own the solution. Instead of directing team members to implement your ideas, help guide them to, to implement their ideas, and here's an example of that. So let's imagine one of your team members comes to you. And says, you know, I'm trying to recruit for this new position on my team and I'm having all sorts of trouble. Can't find the right people. I don't know what to do. If you give them advice and give them the answer, so you tell them, okay, what I want you to do is, you know, post a job on LinkedIn, call this recruiter, you know, talk to people on your team and, you know, find out who they know. Um, if that person does those things and hits a brick wall, what are they gonna do? They're gonna look at you and say, okay, genius. What's next? if you follow the first strategy and ask questions and then guide them to implement their ideas, what happens when they own that idea and they hit a brick wall instead of looking back at you, they've got ownership. They're gonna climb over it, go around it, go underneath, break the brick wall down. Stop trying to own everything and be the smartest person in the room. Let them own the solution. A great book, another great book for asking questions. It's Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier for allowing a team member to take more ownership of a solution. Read Multipliers by Liz Wiseman. That's one of the best books I've ever read on. leading and coaching and guiding other people. So number two is let them own the solution. Number three is spot and nurture strengths of your people. The more you could amplify your people's strengths rather than focusing on their weaknesses, the more you can amplify your team's strengths. The more you are gonna have to dive in and do things for them. Solve every problem. Jump in and put out every fire. Figure out. When you look at your team, understand, identify the strengths of each member of your team, and you're probably gonna find each member of your team. And some very different strengths and maybe some very different weaknesses. But if you look at those together, you're gonna find that there are people on your team that are really strong in areas where other people on the team are pretty weak and vice versa. So by, by amplifying strengths together, you can actually make weaknesses unimportant by individual. Because in total for the team, you are shifting roles and responsibilities to better amplify people's strengths. Now, I have a whole episode on that, pretty recently called Turn Your Strengths Into a Superpower. So check out that episode. But a great book to read on spotting and nurturing strengths is Strengths Finder 2.0. So read that book, spot and nurture strengths is a great way to start doing more coaching than managing next. and the fourth of five is focus on growth, not perfection. Encourage your team at times to take calculated risks as long as you, and they are learning. From those mistakes build a process and a culture of feedback that emphasizes kind of iterating through a plan. Versus just beating people up and having them shift that plan. Um, a great example from a book called Measure, measure What Matters, talking about, Google's, OKR structure, objectives and key results. And when Google creates an OKR, which is another word for a priority or a goal, they don't want leaders. To achieve a hundred percent of their goals. As weird as that sounds, that's not their target. Their target is 70%. Now, why would they target anything less than a hundred percent? Well, they feel if people are achieving a hundred percent of their goals, they're probably sandbagging at some level, or they're not doing things that are a little scary. They're only tackling things they know that can complete well to focus on growth and not perfection. For an individual, for your team and for the company, you wanna encourage people to try things they've never done before. Take a shot at something they don't even know is possible now without a culture of feedback. We don't learn from those things without the right planning and communication rhythm of annual planning and quarterly planning and education, and monthly check-in and weekly accountability and one-on-one meetings with your direct reports. if you don't have that in place, you're not gonna learn from those mistakes. So we need a planning and communication rhythm, to, to really, help us accomplish this fourth strategy of focus on growth. Not perfection. Let's go to the fifth strategy, and it's setting aside the time, to have real coaching conversations. Now I recommend and I have a previous podcast episode. Man, I'm forgetting what it's called, but it's about a one-on-one meeting framework that I recommend for all of my leaders. and without taking you through all of the details, the idea, the one-on-one, a specific framework for the one-on-one, and doing that, I believe it should be weekly at worst, biweekly. Is you have two different types of one-on-one meetings, one, one-on-one, and this is the typical one-on-one I call the feedback and accountability meeting. That's where you're doing exactly what it says. You're giving people feedback on how they're doing behaviors, productivity, and you are holding them accountable to those things they said they were gonna do. And that kind of sounds like the typical one-on-one meeting, but then every other meeting is the coaching meeting. And the idea of the coaching meeting is as a leader, that's not your agenda, that's your team member's agenda. They're coming to you with a problem a challenge, an opportunity, a question they have. And your job is not to give them advice. Your job is to ask questions, as we've said, ask questions and coach them through. And by the way, not only is that good for them, but it's great practice for you to become a better coach. So let me wrap up and, you know, talk about some, some takeaways and summarize the five strategies we've talked about. But really, you know, what we're talking about is shifting from managing to coaching by asking better questions, inviting ownership, spotting, and leveraging strengths. Fostering growth, not perfection, and build building coaching into your rhythm, into your weekly rhythms, and even into your daily rhythms. When someone knocks on your door and says, I've got a problem, coach them. Don't give them advice. So here's my challenge for you in your next one-on-one meeting. Or even in your next team meeting, try coaching your team or an individual through a challenge rather than telling them what to do and see what changes. Not just what changes in that moment, but afterward may take some time. What changes is your, is the team member building new habits where they're. they're using your questions as a model to think through challenges, issues, problems themselves. And remember, the best leaders are not the ones with the most answers. The best leaders are the ones who multiply the brain power, the talents, the capabilities of their team. And always remember, if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. I hope the idea of doing more coaching and maybe a little less managing will help you get there. Talk to you soon.