#004 Coaching and Leadership with Mark Crouter

Welcome to the Six Domains of Leadership Podcast. In this episode, host Sim Sitkin is joined by Mark Crouter, an experienced leadership coach, to explore how the Six Domains of Leadership framework can help coaches and organizational leaders turn self-awareness, feedback, and reflection into meaningful behavioral change.

Drawing on Mark’s experience coaching leaders across roles and organizational settings, Sitkin and Crouter examine why effective coaching cannot rely on titles, generic formulas, or static models. Instead, it must account for each leader’s experience, responsibilities, strengths, weaknesses, and readiness to grow.

Whether you are a leadership professor, executive coach, senior leader, or organizational-development professional, this episode offers practical and research-informed insights into delegation, feedback, contextual leadership, continuous learning, and the transition from technical expert to effective leader.

Key Topics Covered in This Episode:
• The “Goldilocks” Framework: Why the Six Domains model provides enough structure to guide coaching while retaining the flexibility and depth required for different leaders and circumstances.
• Coaching the Individual, Not the Title: Why a leader’s experience, responsibilities, challenges, and organizational context matter more than whether they are called a CEO, manager, or emerging leader.
• From Expert to Leader: How technically accomplished professionals can move beyond being the person who solves every problem and begin building capability throughout their teams.
• Delegation and Leadership Identity: Why letting go can be difficult when a leader’s authority and sense of identity have been built around specialized expertise.
• Leadership as Learning: Why effective leaders must model curiosity, acknowledge what they do not know, and create an environment in which others feel safe doing the same.
• Exploration vs. Exploitation: How leaders and organizations can balance discovering new possibilities with applying and benefiting from what they already know.
• The Feedback Triad: Understanding the distinct purposes of appreciative, coaching, and evaluative feedback—and why combining them carelessly can diminish their value.
• Start, Stop, Continue: A practical, behavior-based exercise that helps leaders request useful feedback while reducing defensiveness.
• Clarity in Complexity: Why leaders must create context without oversimplifying uncertainty or mistaking premature conclusions for genuine clarity.
• Contextual and Supportive Leadership: How explaining intent empowers people to act independently, challenge flawed assumptions, and contribute information leaders may be missing.
• Developing Your Successor: Why preparing others to take over your responsibilities can expand your leadership impact and create opportunities for your own growth.

About the Speakers:
• Sim Sitkin is a professor and leadership scholar whose decades of research focus on understanding what leaders actually do that makes a structural difference in their organizations, communities, and the world.
• Mark Crouter is an experienced leadership coach who helps leaders understand their challenges, use feedback constructively, develop their teams, and translate leadership insights into practical action.

Learn More & Connect:
To explore specialized 360 leadership assessments, academic certification programs, and executive coaching workshops, visit: http://DeltaLeadership.com

#DukeUniversity #LeadershipCoaching #SixDomainsOfLeadership #ExecutiveEducation #OrganizationalBehavior #LeadershipDevelopment #DeltaLeadership

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:00

I'm kind of in a rut and I can't tell anybody about it because they think I'm doing great. Who are you if you don't do the thing that you were always great at? Right. And so yeah, it can be very hard to let go. My first job out of college, I was a Navy officer. And uh military officers are expected to be leaders without knowing what the people they're leading are doing. You're never going to learn all the stuff that they know, but still you have to lead them and manage them. And there's this 20th century mechanistic model of organizations that is so outdated, but it's still in operation, right? There are still managers that think I could just tell them what to do and they'll do it. It wasn't true then and it's not true now.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Because otherwise you get in that rut. And you're digging that rut deeper and deeper and deeper. Everybody has to be continually learning. That's scary. Welcome to the Six Domains of Leadership Podcast. I'm Sim Sitkin. For decades, my work has focused on understanding what leaders actually do that makes a difference in their organizations, their communities, and the world. In this podcast, we explore leadership not as a title, but as a set of behaviors that shape trust, credibility, and impact. In each episode, I'm joined by leaders, scholars, and practitioners who are rethinking leadership and shaping a better tomorrow today. Thank you for being part of this conversation. In this episode, I will be engaging in conversation with Mark Crowder, Delta's coach program liaison, and an experienced executive coach who's guided hundreds of leaders through transitions and growth. Our conversation will explore how coaching and feedback bring the six domains of leadership to life. Highlighting how clarity, context, and honest dialogue can help leaders expand perspective, embrace feedback as currency, and accelerate their development. Mark, it's a pleasure to have you here and to have the opportunity for us to chat.

SPEAKER_02 2:01

Thanks. I'm looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

What I want to do is try to delve into different aspects and implications of coaching, and in particular, coaching the six domains of leadership model. And I want to start us off with your experience. What do you see as different about using the six domains to coach leaders versus other approaches that you've that you've used in the past?

SPEAKER_02 2:31

Well, I guess, first of all, it's a model, and not all coaching is based on any particular model. Sometimes it's much more open-ended. So you have some built-in structure to go with the coaching, even if you don't have a particular endpoint or goal in mind. Um, you could you have some structure to build it around. Uh the other thing I would offer is other models that I'm familiar with, maybe not expert in particularly, uh, aren't exactly Goldilocks. I feel like there's some that are like too vague and kind of not very specific, and others that are so specific that you're really complicated. And I I won't name any brand X, but there are some that I feel like, you know, you would need a year with a client to explore the whole model and their assessment. And it's like not all clients want that or need that. So I feel like it's kind of in that just right sweet spot that it's uh it's easy to understand, but offers a lot of depth and complexity if you want to explore it.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

That's great. So it's it's not too narrow, it's not all-encompassing. Um, and in in fact, my guess is it can be used in conjunction with a lot of other things and to help clarify and focus them.

SPEAKER_02 3:43

I'm sure. In fact, one of the other assessments that I use quite a lot is the Clifton Strengths or Gallup Strengths Finder. And that's not particularly a leadership model, it's a performance model. But again, all leaders have to perform and they have roles. And so it really helps to be able to understand uh whether you're looking at this domain or that subdomain, what strengths does that client bring to that that they can leverage effectively? So it's not just what you need to do, it's how you need to do it. And all leaders are gonna be different in how they do similar things.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Yeah. And also it it can complement something like that because it's not just about strengths, it's also about weaknesses. Yes. And as a leader, you can't just say, well, that's one of my weaknesses, so we're gonna ignore that. Right. You've got to deal with it and figure out how you're gonna address those issues, even if it's not you who's the right one to address them.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

Aaron Powell Exactly, right. And there are a lot of different strategies for addressing weaknesses depending on the situation. So uh, yeah. And sometimes the Clifton Strengths is wrongly accused, I think, of ignoring weaknesses. As you know, uh, that's not it at all.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

Right. Yeah. So so building on what you were just talking about about different circumstances, um, you've coached individuals who are in a variety of circumstances, from CEOs to to all different levels in the organization and different kinds of organizational contexts. What do you see as the critical ways of adapting or focusing when you're dealing with a CEO versus a not-CEO, someone in a technical environment versus versus other kinds of environments or different cultural contexts?

SPEAKER_02 5:19

Well, first of all, the title doesn't matter as much to me if I'm coaching somebody. Um people think CEO, maybe they automatically assume Fortune 500 or something. I coached a CEO who was in charge of a small nonprofit and a small staff, but that was her title, CEO. Uh so you can't really go on the title. You really need to go into what their role is, what their challenges are in that role. Um, you know, you can look at maybe span of control, how many direct reports they have, you know, kind of things like that. But whether it's middle managers, emerging managers, CEOs, I tend to be very tactical focused, at least to start with. In other words, like, what can we help you do better in your role now? That eventually, of course, grows into other things because you're really looking at helping people grow and develop, not just perform better in what they're doing. But to start with, what are your challenges in that role and how do people see you?

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Are there different clusters that you would identify? Maybe not based on the title, but uh that there are different sort of buckets that these leaders would fall into where you might take a different approach.

SPEAKER_02 6:25

I would say you can bucket people, first of all, into how long have they been in the role? How much leadership or management experience do they have? Just because they're in a what sounds like a senior role doesn't mean they're particularly well prepared for that role. You know, so you have people who are struggling because they're new in the role, and then you just kind of have to take that into account and what their background is and what their experience is. And um, on the other hand, you have people, I've coached people who had been in the role so long they felt they were getting stale. And uh, you know, it wasn't that they weren't. And they were in some cases, yes, that's right. So sometimes people are they'll get in a rut, even at a high level or very senior management level.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

And the rut may be less of a problem for those they're leading than for themselves, because it's it's gotta be something you want to be doing.

SPEAKER_02 7:15

Yes, yeah. Um, and often as a coach, you may be the only person they can talk to that they can say, I'm kind of in a rut and I can't tell anybody about it because they think I'm doing great.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Right. And it it can be even more of a rut the better they're doing. Yes, yeah. Because no one's asking them to change anything.

SPEAKER_02 7:34

In fact, they may be asked to stay exactly as they are because nobody wants to rock the boat or you know, try to find a replacement for somebody who's doing really well.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Yeah. And they're not growing anymore. Right. And so how as a coach do you get them focused on growth if they're not thinking that way, or help them begin to move down the path of growth if they've now come and said, I'm in a rut, I want to grow. Okay, coach, what do I do?

SPEAKER_02 8:01

That one's a little easier than the first one because they've acknowledged that. And you can help them start to build a picture of what's the uh maybe a gap analysis, if you want to use that term. You know, what is it you really want and what is it you really have? What's the gap between the two? How could we close that gap, maybe in the role you're in or a different role or whatever it might be? And what would you need to do differently or better, more, in order to be ready for that and succeed in whatever that new thing is? So you can help them kind of plot a a path. Um, if they're not really in that state of having an awareness of a need to grow, that's a that's a tougher challenge. And again, sometimes you just have to start small with let's do some immediate problem solving. And eventually you might get to, maybe not eventually, maybe right away, you might get to a problem that in order for them to really address it well, they need to grow. There's a skill or a talent or an approach or something that they need that they either don't have or haven't been exercising. So you try to bring out the need to grow in a sense of to be able to achieve what they want to achieve. And not a kind of a uh way of thinking about like, well, I need to grow, but I don't know how.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Right. Right. And and it may be that that the area of growth is is more focused on an acknowledgement of a weakness or something I want to give up rather than something I want to do more of. Sometimes acknowledging that and then saying, okay, how can we help you get there where this is a piece that you've been holding on to too tightly or doing because you felt no one else would do it. But what you really need to do is to move to the next phase of how do you find it so someone else can do it.

SPEAKER_02 9:48

Yeah. I found that's especially true with people who have come up through a particular technical or functional specialty and they were really good at that, and that's how they got promoted or given some new role, and they don't know how not to do that. And they think that's, well, their identity in a way. When you start to get to like, who are you if you don't do the thing that you were always great at. Right. And so yeah, it can be very hard to let go.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

And how can you be the authority if you're not authoritative when you're in the room? Whereas what you want to do is build the capability of the group to be authoritative about something.

SPEAKER_02 10:22

Yes, yes. I had a colleague who was actually going through a leadership development program with me who had a challenge. And we had a professional coach. This is before I was actually a coach, and we had a coach, but we were a cohort. And uh his approach to success in the past had always been a bit of a kind of a white knight on a steed. Yeah. You know, the team could get screwed up, but I'm always there to bail him out. And uh he had to come to realize if he was going to be the leader they needed, that he had to act like, okay, if I couldn't go in and fix that myself, how would I lead differently? How would I manage differently? And he'd never really thought about that way. He was like, well, I know they need to get the job done, but if they don't, I got this.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

Right. Yeah. And it, you know, I've always tried, for example, when people would come to me with a question is to ask first, what do you think? Because a lot of times they already have the answer. Yes. They actually don't need the answer from you. But they may need you to say, that's a good answer, go with it. But but the ideal is that they know when to come to you and when they don't need to. But you need a certain amount of confidence to be able to do that. It's confidence in yourself, but also confidence in them and the system.

SPEAKER_02 11:36

Exactly. Exactly. Um, knowing what to delegate, how to delegate, that is probably among the top five challenges that all managers and leaders have. Um I was watching something, um, I guess it was probably on LinkedIn, um, with Daniel Pink, and he was talking about uh he's always got these short blips of, you know, three great ideas, right? And one of them talked about micromanaging. And uh he said, you know, peep people are already believe you're a micromanager whether you think you are or not, right? Because it's always in the eye of the beholder. It's never in the eye of the manager who thinks they have a good reason for doing whatever is viewed as micromanagement.

SPEAKER_03 12:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Uh and to be able to let go of that and say, no, you don't have to have all the answers within limits, right? Uh you have to be able to give people some latitude. By the way, how did you get there? Somebody had to give you some latitude, or you never would have got where you are.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

Well, and also to recognize sometimes to get to the other end, you have to micromanage because you don't know the answers until you've tried it. But if you've had experience, you shouldn't have to micromanage because you already know that. But I'm thinking of a good friend of mine became the dean of his his business school, and he said the first year was torture because he had to do everything, because he didn't know what he could not have to do. Yes. He felt like everything do it all first. The second year became mostly giving stuff away because it didn't require him. It's just he didn't know enough to know that the first year. Yeah. Yeah. And then by the third year, it was it was fine. He didn't have to get get involved in the details. And but people don't always have the wisdom he had to know that first year the goal was not to do it, it was to learn what you don't need to do.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:26

What you need others to do, even if you can do it.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

Even if you can, that's right. And and also to learn what everybody else can do so that you don't have maybe you don't have to wait a year to start that.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

And if you can do it, you should be faster on that learning curve than if you can't. Because if you can't, you first have to learn to do it and then help others do it. Yes. Unless it's outside your technical expertise, and then you just have to value that others are going to be smarter and more knowledgeable and experienced than you are about those things.

SPEAKER_02 13:53

Yes, yes. My personal experience is actually kind of a mirror image of that because my first job out of college, I was a Navy officer. And uh military officers are expected to be leaders without knowing what the people they're leading are doing. Right. They have technical specialties, whether it's in aviation or electronic, whatever it might be, and you're never going to learn all the stuff that they know, but still you have to lead them and manage them. So I was lucky in that sense, and very different from many of the people that we coach who get promoted because they are good at a particular technical or functional specialty, and that's who they're supervising.

SPEAKER_01 14:27

Yeah, that is that is an important distinction. And how do you think we could help organizations cultivate that approach to leadership development and the leadership pipeline as opposed to the current one? But even if even if you're promoting people up through the technical ranks and then to the leadership role, they're now leading stuff that they didn't. It's hard when you're leading the group that and you were always the expert in the group, that's harder to give up in a sense.

SPEAKER_02 14:59

Right.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

But now you get promoted to the next level where all these other people know things you don't know. But organizations typically aren't orienting their leadership development and coaching toward the model you were describing from the Navy. Right. How would you advise them to get there?

SPEAKER_02 15:18

I would advise them to train their leaders and managers on asking the kinds of questions of their people that reveal what it is they their people think they do best, what do they struggle with? And there's this 20th century mechanistic model of organizations that is so outdated, but it's still in operation, right? The organization as machine. Yeah. And if I have a person in that slot and I know what that slot is, that's all they have to do, and and we're gonna be fine. If that was ever a good model, it's certainly not now, right? Uh, but to be able to ask people what they struggle with, what they succeed in, what would they like to do more of, what would they like to do less of, and then be able to help them find the right role is telling them it's okay to say you want to do this more or that more or this less because we're gonna find the right role. And if somebody else needs to do that, we'll figure out how to do it. But if you never ask the question, you never find out.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

And it might be that the implication of it is not to move them to a different role, but to change the role definitions. Yes. Because it might be that the role definition was an appropriate one for historically when it was a machine operating and now it's more organic. Yes. And, you know, it gets back, you know, this is an issue that we often come up with and is especially critical in coaching as well, is that questions are often more important than answers.

SPEAKER_02 16:45

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

Asking the right question is, and when you're coaching, you're not telling people what to do. You're asking them the questions that lead them to discover what what they should do. Exactly. And leadership isn't like that.

SPEAKER_02 17:00

Yeah, that's a key distinction between coaching and other forms of training, mentoring, counseling, whatever it might be. Um, in fact, I was a really exposed to coaching because I got into it through a leadership development program for managers. So I didn't think out I was going to be a coach, which I am now. It's how I define myself. I went into it because uh I was exposed to coaching for managers, a little module in a leadership development program I was in. And I think it appealed to me right away because I felt like I'd always been doing things like that without knowing that it was a discipline, that it's a thing. And oh, by the way, not everybody does that. Right. Right. Um, so uh that was that was kind of for me the idea that uh you can be a better leader and a manager if you are prepared in some way to coach yourself, coach yourself and coach the people that work for you and with you. Um, again, it's I say it's not a job, it's a skill set. You can use that skill set in a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Which, by the way, is is very much analogous to our approach to leadership. Yes. That that coaching is not just what one person does to another, it's what people do to each other. And so because you're coaching me doesn't mean I shouldn't also be coaching you. Yes. Because if we're both doing that, it it creates this positive cycle, which is just like leadership in our approach to leadership.

SPEAKER_02 18:23

Yes, and it's so much more effective for learning. And in this generation, in this century, again, the static machine model, the steady state model doesn't work.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

Everybody has to be continually learning. That's scary. But that's not talked about a lot in terms of leadership.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

A key aspect of leadership is being a learner. The thing I thought of when when when you first said that was uh you'll remember this. Some of our audience may not, is um in in the old Dobie Gillis show, Maynard G Krebs, whenever someone would use the word work, he would go, work. And and so I I have this, I had this image all of a sudden of any time someone would talk about learning with leadership, they'd go, learn. Learn. You know, I I'm not curious. I have the answer. I'm not learning, I'm telling. I'm here because I don't need to learn anymore. Exactly. Yeah. Whereas it's the absolute opposite of that, that you should have enough confidence to be open to not only being wrong to just being surprised. I hope so. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:28

Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, that's a great thing to model for other people. When you're willing to admit what you don't know and you are curious, and there's no stigma attached to it, then everybody around you says, Oh, I guess that's okay. I could do that too.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

And if there is a stigma attached to it, either change the environment you're in or find another environment. Oh, definitely. My advice to people. Because otherwise you get in that rut. And you're digging that rut deeper and deeper and deeper because you're not open to new. And probably you are surrounded by lessons you could learn. You're just not open and paying attention to. Inevitably. Yeah. Um, that also what you mentioned raises for me that we live in a very complex world and an increasingly complex world. How would you tap the n the understanding of that complexity and link it to how the six domains can help in in coaching leaders to cope with the complexity of the world that we're that we're in?

SPEAKER_02 20:36

Well, of course, the assessment will tell the leader that you're coaching what people think of their ability to create uh clarity out of complexity. And I would start with is there any disconnect between what the leader thinks they're able to do and what the people who are looking to them for leadership are seeing? Um and often it's a matter of what you're seeing and what you're perceiving, as far as you know, you think you understand complexity because at your level you've got it covered, but what you don't understand is what's missing from their picture uh that you could help fill in. And by the way, what's missing from your picture that they could help fill in, you know, from the shop floor to the foreman to the manager and so forth. Um, if you're if you're not seeing the complexity, even if you're not dealing with it directly because you're that's not your job, right? But to be able to appreciate it and convey to other people that you appreciate it and you're there to help them sort it out is the first step, acknowledging that that's part of your job.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

And and and also to extend that one more step, your job is not to solve the complexity, but to help others recognize and address the complexity. Exactly. Um so you can't do it. You can do both, but it's not you can't just do the one. But but for example, if you've come up the technical ranks, what you see your job as is being the Master problem solver, as opposed to helping develop, implement, and then support problem solution processes.

SPEAKER_02 22:08

Right, the systems and so forth.

SPEAKER_01 22:09

Yeah. Yeah. Part of that's the management part of the job. But the leadership part of the job is helping those around you understand all of that well enough for them to solve their problems and to recognize when you need educating. Because we've just encountered some complexities. The boss doesn't get that because they weren't there when we saw that. We need to feed that up so that they're more sophisticated now. Yeah. Doesn't mean we're asking them to do our job for us, but we're now leading up and helping them understand.

SPEAKER_02 22:45

And the leader is part of the team. And that's going to be uh in flux depending on exactly who is on the team and what background they bring. But yes, I think part of the leadership bit, as you alluded to, is helping them understand that's what you expect. And and that that's part of their job with your help, with your support.

SPEAKER_01 23:03

So so part of this, as you said, is um providing clarity or enhancing clarity. Is there any time clarity might be a problem and you want to decrease clarity?

SPEAKER_02 23:18

I think if there is, it's a time when people mistakenly believe that they understand the situation and it's more complex than that. So having false clarity, I think, would be a problem. Oversimplifying. Um, when in fact you need to leave the door open to there's still stuff we don't know. Maybe we're not ready to make the decision yet. And sometimes making a decision too soon is worse than making it too late.

SPEAKER_06 23:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:45

Uh so understanding that that uh what we think is clarity, we might need to do a little more digging. We might need to to make sure we haven't missed something that's really important. Um and it's it's it's a sense you have. You know, it's a sense you have. You don't know what you're missing, but you feel like you're missing something.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

Well, and in a VUCA world, it's inevitable you're missing something important. Yeah. Right. And because even if it was solved yesterday, well, we now got today. A different environment. And there's and there's new stuff, which gets back to the learning. If you have a learning, uh do you know the exploration exploitation distinction?

SPEAKER_02 24:21

Uh I've heard of it. March. I've heard of it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

So the idea there is my phone.

SPEAKER_02 24:32

I thought I turned it in.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

We may want to put it on silence.

SPEAKER_02 25:27

Yeah, I think you were saying even if we solved the problem yesterday, it's again today is different.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Today's a different problem. Yeah. Oh, so yeah, so where you want me to pick up where I think I was? Because you can then just cut off at one of the sentences if need be and then patch it in. Um is oh, it was the exploration-exploitation issue. Right. So, so, you know, it the Jim March approach to exploration and exploitation is that for organizations, but it also applies to individuals, we need to have a dualistic approach where, on one hand, we're open to and engaged in exploring new things constantly. That's that learning orientation we were talking about. But by the same token, it's really critical we exploit what we already know. And so if you're only oriented toward exploration, you never actually settle anything. So the clarity is that the only clarity is in a learning process, but never in anything that was learned. And you don't put any anchors in the ground, which is why you need both processes. And some organizations and individuals are brilliant at exploitation, but they're not very exploratory. And some, it's the other way around. What you can have one be the main focus, but you need a balance between the two. And in coaching people, one of the questions is how do you get people to realize where they are on that scale and where are the demands of their circumstances, where should they be?

SPEAKER_02 27:07

Where they need to be, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:08

And going back to your point, and I want to sort of switch gears and emphasize feedback, is if people are getting good feedback about their own leadership strengths and weaknesses, are they open to receiving that? Are they open and how can a coach help them explore what the meaning is and what opportunities that may be arise uh raising? And at the same time, how can you help them look at the feedback and realize maybe they have strengths they didn't realize and they're not fully exploiting? Can you comment a little bit about how you approach the feedback process, especially if it's something someone may be a little uncomfortable hearing? And then I'll want to have us come back about what you do to get them to hear it and implement it and begin to act on it going forward.

SPEAKER_02 28:05

So, yeah, that's a complicated, that's a whole different uh podcast, probably. But for our purposes, with with respect to coaching, yes. Um you you can get a sense pretty early talking with people about how receptive they're likely to be to feedback, well, positive, negative, anything, whatever it might be, right? Or or how certain they are of themselves. Uh again, it's that learning continuum. Are they really curious or not? Uh and you can get a sense of that. And inevitably, whether it's through the six domains uh survey or through any other feedback process, if they're even interested in getting it, they're probably gonna at least be willing to listen to it, even if they don't accept it. Uh I think a bigger problem is when people get feedback they didn't ask for and maybe they don't want, but they are confronted with it in some way and maybe triggered by it. Uh, and so again, when you're coaching, I think you can talk to people about when they've gotten feedback that's very useful, uh, when they've gotten feedback that hasn't been useful, um, what sort of feedback would they like more of? What would they maybe like less of? Like, no, I've heard that. I don't need that, I got that one. Um, and so just the general structure around the conversation is what kind of feedback, how often and from whom, would be most valuable for you. And again, as you said, as a coach, I'm not gonna tell them that. They're gonna tell me. And by asking them that way, I can at least elicit something that indicates what they'd be most open to.

SPEAKER_01 29:41

What's the hardest part of that part of the coaching process?

SPEAKER_02 29:45

Uh I guess just gauging that receptivity. You know, you can't introduce it too early if that's not what they're receptive to. And once you've got some sense of the receptivity, then you can talk about how valuable it can be. And again, often in coaching, we don't spend a lot of time dwelling on the past, but it's often useful for people to recount when something was working well for them. And how could you replicate that? Now you're in a new role. You you maybe you have no immediate peers and you're at the top of that pyramid. So you don't have the same situation you did before when maybe you could reach out to a peer um and and get some feedback. So, how can you get that same value? That's really the important thing. When is the feedback valuable? How can you get that value in the situation you're in now, which is might be different from what the situation you were in?

SPEAKER_01 30:38

So, are are there some concrete things that you could um uh provide some illustrations of or concepts in advising coaches about how to overcome some of those humps? So, if someone's resistant, how do you get them to be a little more open? Or if they're too open and they're not providing their own, you know, it's like they're this wiggly thing and you want them to have a little better backbone. Uh how do you help, how do you help a coach know what to do with with those kinds of circumstances?

SPEAKER_02 31:15

Uh if I can put in a plug for a book I love, uh-huh. Thanks for the feedback. And uh, if they're not familiar with it as coaches, I encourage them to get familiar with it because it's it's so fundamental to understanding it's a book that was written ostensibly for people receiving feedback. When the person giving you the feedback isn't particularly skilled in giving it, how can you still make good sense of it? And you can't learn that without also not learning how to give feedback better, right? But one of the key concepts in there uh that most people get wrong if they don't think about it, I'm sure I did at one time, is the idea that there's appreciative feedback, coaching feedback, and evaluative feedback. And the biggest mistake most managers make giving feedback is mixing them up.

unknown 31:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:00

And most of it's lost if you mix them up. I won't detail any more of the book, but I I want coaches to understand when you talk about feedback, what kind of feedback are your clients getting? What kind of feedback do they need? Maybe they're not getting much appreciative feedback. Maybe they're not getting maybe it's all evaluative.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

I think it might be worth taking a second to at least define the three categories.

SPEAKER_02 32:21

Sure. So appreciative, as the name implies, is when somebody's done something well, you want them to know that you appreciate it and keep doing that. And we can all learn from that. So it's the great positive stuff we all want to hear. And unfortunately, managers aren't really good, aren't really good at delivering it. Even though they ought to be happy to be able to tell people what they're glad about, they forget that's their job. The coaching feedback is what maybe we used to call um constructive criticism or, you know, uh opportunities for improvement. Right. So it's helping people figure out what do you need to do better to be more successful in your role? And how can we help set you up to do that? Or how can we support you to do that? And then the evaluative feedback is the one most people think of when they think of their NDV or assessment or their annual report or whatever it might be. And there's a place for that. Unfortunately, if that's all the feedback you get, you you're not really going to do very well. But that's the evaluative is different from either coaching or appreciative because it's typically based on some standard evaluated against um your job description. What are all the functions? Evaluated against what other people at your level and job are likely to be doing. So it's against perhaps your peers, and maybe evaluated against what did we ask you to do? And how did well did you perform against that, which are not the same thing. There's obviously some overlap there. And um many uh, you know, whether it's quarterly or annual, people get the evaluative feedback. This is how well you did, this is how well you're doing, but they never get much of the other.

SPEAKER_01 33:54

Well, and evaluative feedback can be positive as well as you're right.

SPEAKER_02 33:58

If you're doing well against that standard, you need to know that.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

Yeah. But it it's also it's it's an interesting distinction from appreciative in that I could give you feedback that you're top of the class, but it doesn't come across to you that I care about that at all or that I value you particularly. I'm just objectively saying, here's here's where you are. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 34:20

And yeah, just saying you're doing great doesn't help you understand what you're doing that's great. That's people miss that. Good job. Really?

SPEAKER_01 34:28

What is what do you what am I hearing? Now, inappreciative, could there be the negative as well? Is that, you know, you're really great at this, but we both know this is really an area of we don't, you know, I'm not dismissing you or or not appreciating you, but my appreciation is based on knowing your weaknesses as well as your strengths.

SPEAKER_02 34:48

It's a it's a really fine line to walk that because the research shows that when you couple the and here's what else you need to do, the appreciative parts gets lost.

SPEAKER_01 34:57

No, but I wasn't using appreciative in in the in the in the sense of it just is positive appreciation. It's appreciative as I actually appreciate who you are. Yes, not I know you're uh it's a bundle of pluses and minuses. And the way I put it in terms of relating it to the six domains, um the the way I I put it in terms of relational leadership is that it's one thing to say I understand you and respect you, but if I only understand your positives and none of your negatives, the respect doesn't mean much. Yes. Because the respect is not of you, it's of a partial image of you.

SPEAKER_02 35:39

Good point. I hadn't thought of it that way. But you're you're right. Being seen as a whole person is so important.

SPEAKER_01 35:43

And being appreciative of I know everything about you, you know, it's and you know that I that I think you're wonderful, even though I know your your weaknesses. And in fact, that may be part of the charm. Yes, but that's right.

SPEAKER_02 35:57

But and it's okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:58

It's okay to be that so it's really appreciating the person is a different kind of, it's more of an emotional function compared with the evaluation, which could be positive or negative. And then the to me, the coaching is, and now we're gonna engage in something about so what do we do with all of that? Yeah. You know, you know I love you, you know I see your weaknesses. Okay, so what are we gonna do? Um, and that's the bundle for a leader. Yes. Because there are different functions, all of which are relevant. By the way, on the evaluation, people always think about the end-of-year evaluation.

SPEAKER_02 36:38

It's a it's a meme almost. It's a it's a it's a cliche.

SPEAKER_01 36:41

And one of the things I say is to me, if there's anything new in the end of the year evaluation, you haven't been doing your job all year. Yes.

unknown 36:49

Right.

SPEAKER_01 36:49

That it should be stuff that came up and was talked about all year long.

SPEAKER_06 36:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:53

And the end-of-the-valuation, if you're in a big corporation, for example, it should just be okay, let's figure out how formally we write down what we've been talking about.

unknown 37:02

Right.

SPEAKER_02 37:02

There are systems that require that you do that for various reasons, because that's not where people get the useful information.

SPEAKER_01 37:08

If there are any aha's there, that's a problem. Yes, absolutely. So, in terms of feedback, how I want to get back to some of the behavioral operations of how do you get someone to be more open to feedback? And in some cases, it may even be they're uncomfortable with positive feedback. Oh, yes. But but you know, in most cases, it's they're uncomfortable with negative feedback. How do you get them to let their guard down a little bit and be more open to that?

SPEAKER_02 37:40

Well, there's a simple exercise that has a number of forms. Um, start, stop, continue. And it's a way to ask people, peers, director boards, whoever, bosses, um, what one thing do you think I should stop or do less of? What one thing you think I should start doing or do more of? And what's one thing you want to make sure I continue doing that you value? And because it's the kind of triad there, it's balanced. You're not asking what am I great at, or just, you know, what do I need to improve on. And you're not asking traits. And again, to get back to the model, you know, there are leadership models that are very trait-based. Right. This is behavior-based. Yeah. And you're asking a question about what you could actually do differently. What behavior would you like to see changed? And that doesn't attack people's traits or their identity as much as just how am I showing up and what am I doing? So it lowers the kind of trigger threshold because whatever they come back with, first of all, you don't have to do it. You could you're still in charge of whether you take that advice or not. Um, and so you can own it. And you can own uh, I appreciate hearing that, and I've got to think about whether and how I would do that or however you do it. So, so introducing a exercise like that that gives them both the balanced approach and the behavior-based um, as opposed to just how am I doing?

SPEAKER_01 39:03

Okay, so um now let's turn to the six domains model because we're starting to run out of time. Um what do you see as most frequently or most importantly, the elements that you emphasize or elements where you think people get the most benefit through the coaching experience?

SPEAKER_02 39:26

In general, um, and I would say of the six domains, contextual is probably one of the richest. And as you know, uh the surveys are such that if if an area is typically scored lower than the others in ratings, that's the one. Because for many managers, again, depending on how you were trained or brought up, maybe you didn't understand that was part of your job. Again, because of this organization as a machine, in the 20th century, maybe you didn't need as much context. Um and I I want to just stretch the time a little bit because I have this anecdote. I was reading not long ago, you know, we're in the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, and I was reading um about Baron von Steuben. And uh he came over from Prussia to help instill some discipline in the American Army, and he confided in his diary in Europe, when I told tell a soldier what to do, he does it. In America, I'm obliged to explain to him why he should do it, and only then does he obey. 250 years ago, Sim. That's great. And yet today, there are still managers that think I could just tell them what to do and they'll do it. It wasn't true then and it's not true now. But nobody ever told them, no, that's your job. Your job is to help them understand how their work fits with the work of other people on the team, how the work of the team fits with the whole organization. Yeah. If you don't, you're just missing opportunities.

SPEAKER_01 40:50

And by the way, if they just do it without asking why, they're not doing their job about leading toward you because they need that information to know whether maybe you're telling them to do something really stupid. And they can save you from yourself in a sense and save the organization.

SPEAKER_02 41:08

Say, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_01 41:09

Or say it makes sense over there, but here's how we're different. You may not have realized that because you came up through the ranks over there.

SPEAKER_06 41:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:18

And that's an appropriate solution. In our case, it's going to wreck our client relations. Yes. Um highly risky. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Are you ready to take that risk, boss? Right. And so I have a responsibility to educate you just as you have a responsibility to educate me. Right. And and, you know, and the other thing is the research does show that contextual leadership, not just in our model, but in general, um, the higher you rank, the less you explain. Yes. And it becomes a part of everyday business. Our data supports that notion. And but there are a whole host of reasons for that. One is I don't have to explain, I'm the boss. Yes. Just do it. That's the say the Prussian approach. The other is I've risen to the top because of my expertise. And it's unimaginable to me that you don't know what I know. So I don't have to explain it because you know, but maybe you don't. Or maybe I learned it from another division over there, and nobody in our division knows that.

SPEAKER_05 42:27

Right.

SPEAKER_01 42:28

And I need to help them understand it. And then the last one is if I explain it, you could end up correcting me. And so I could be giving up power. And or I could be explaining it to you. And before you always had to come to me, and now you don't have to come to me anymore because you now understand. And I feel my power is diminished rather than my leverage is extended.

SPEAKER_02 42:51

Well, that's why the supportive domain sits on top of that. Exactly. Because when people have the context, they don't need to wait for instructions. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 42:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:00

They know when they should act and when they shouldn't.

SPEAKER_02 43:02

Yeah. In the military, they call that commander's intent.

SPEAKER_01 43:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 43:04

Right? Right. Um, but that's a complicated thing.

SPEAKER_01 43:08

It is. But we need to diffuse it, and coaching is one of the ways of diffusing it. Okay, let's end with a success story. Oh, okay. So if you can think of a really um salient, uh repeatable uh kind of example of how how the six domains can be leveraged for a real impactful coaching success.

SPEAKER_03 43:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:37

Um let me think. I guess one success comes to mind. This wasn't specifically with the six domains, but it as you said, the concepts are there anyway, right? Um I had a client, his name was Chris, and uh he was a very successful project manager and team leader. And uh he had great relationships with the clients. This is this is a company that provided consulting. And technical services. And the clients were happy. The people that worked for him were happy. His boss was happy because he was keeping the clients happy, but he wasn't happy. We talked about a rut. Yes. And Chris was the kind of guy that needed a new challenge often. And he'd been doing this job two or three years, and he'd gotten in that situation where he wanted to do something else, but they couldn't find anybody to replace him. And so our coaching really went into what his options might be and how he could talk with his boss about getting a different role or changing the role. And after several sessions, it was clear that was not going to happen. So we had to shift the conversation to okay, think about how you could really use all of your talents in a very different way. Just write me the description of the job that if you could create that job for yourself, you would do it. And he spent some time on it and went away with something that I think was very valuable. It didn't make an immediate shift, but I do this with a number of clients, which is almost just as much career coaching as leadership, which is if you have a mental and verbal picture of what the future could look like, when an opportunity comes up, you're more likely to recognize it. And he was able to first marginally make some changes, again, handing off some things that he was doing to his team so that he was more replaceable. And then working with his boss to expand his role a little bit. But at some point, again, with that boss and that role, it wasn't going to happen. And he eventually moved on and essentially created a role for himself that he had written, uh, first in the company that he was in, and then later left to actually fully realize it's like I looked him up on LinkedIn the other day, and and he basically has the title that he had described 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 45:45

That's great. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I I often say to students that if they're nervous about um sort of empowering and developing subordinates, especially if those subordinates are future stars and they get a little threatened and nervous by that, I say it's much more common that you don't get the promotion you should have gotten because you don't have a successor lined up. Yes. Then that successor is going to push you aside. Absolutely. And and it's like their eyes widen and they go, I never thought about it that way, but I've I can think in my past where that where that happened.

SPEAKER_02 46:24

Right. Part of your job is to train your replacement, whatever that might be. And um you ask people, do you really want to be in the same job five years from now? No, no, of course not. Well, what are you gonna do if they don't act that way? They don't act that way. They act like it's steady state. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:40

Thank you for being here. You're welcome. I've really enjoyed our conversation. So have I. Um, and uh let's hope that we've shared some lessons for those who want to coach in a more effective way going forward. Great. Thanks, Mark. You're welcome. Thank you for joining us for the Six Domains of Leadership podcast. If this episode sparked new thinking about your leadership, we invite you to take the next step. Explore our six domains of leadership workshops, certification programs, executive coaching, and 360 leadership assessments at Deltaleadership.com. And if you found value in today's conversation, share it. Because leadership grows when it's shared. To learn more about our global concierge leadership programs, visit our website, connect with us on LinkedIn, and follow us on Facebook. Delta Leadership is where leaders from around the world come together to create meaningful, lasting change. And remember, better leaders create better organizations, better organizations build better communities, and better communities shape better societies.