Why every leader needs to be a coach - with Tom Preston and Luciana Nuñez of The Preston Associates

#209: Tom Preston and Luciana Nuñez are both highly experienced executive coaches and authors of the book Coaching Power.  They explain the different aspects of leadership, why leaders need to be coaches, and the results leaders see when they start coaching. 

What you’ll learn

• [03:52] The different aspects of leadership. 
• [07:23] The importance of having purpose within your work. 
• [08:13] What coaching really means. 
• [09:50] Common misconceptions leaders have about coaching. 
• [12:32] The collaborative aspect of coaching. 
• [14:21] The similarities of sports coaching and business coaching. 
• [21:00] Why coaching and leadership should be synonymous. 
• [22:40] The challenges of being a good coach. 
• [24:10] Why leaders should incorporate coaching into their leadership style. 
• [26:30] The results leaders see when they start coaching. 
• [30:36] How to introduce coaching into your leadership style. 
• [34:19] How to know which “gear” to choose in your interactions with colleagues. 
• [36:55] How to build confidence in your role. 
• [41:30] What you can do to incorporate coaching into the way you work. 

Resources mentioned in this episode
Please note that some of these are affiliate links and we may get a commission in the event that you make a purchase.  This helps us to cover our expenses and is at no additional cost to you.

• Coaching Power, Tom Preston and Luciana Nunez

For the show notes for this episode, including a full transcript and links to all the resources mentioned, visit:

https://changeworklife.com/why-every-leader-needs-to-be-a-coach/

Re-assessing your career?  Know you need a change but don't really know where to start?  Check out these two exercises to start the journey of working out what career is right for you!

Transcript

0:00

If you're a leader, and you're not coaching, then you're probably not getting the best out of your people. To find out why, what coaching really is, and how you can integrate it into your work, then this is the episode for you. I'm Jeremy Cline, and this is Change Work Life. Hello and welcome to Change Work Life, the podcast that's all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. I'm a career coach, and in each episode my guests and I bring you tips, strategies and stories to help you enjoy a more satisfying and fulfilling working life. Is the leader the person with all the answers? Do they set the direction and tell people what to do? Or does a good leader enable their team to find their own answers without necessarily directing them? To find out why and how leaders should act more like coaches, I'm delighted to be joined by Tom Preston and Luciana Nunez of the Preston Associates. As well as being highly experienced executive coaches, Tom and Luciana are also the authors of the book Coaching

Power: 1:16

Leading with Coaching to Create Individual team and Organisational Outperformance. Tom, Luciana, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having us, Jeremy. Indeed. Let's start with the book. Who specifically would you like to read it? We wrote it with the leaders that want to lead with a coaching style in mind. And I would love to hear Tom's perspective, but for me, at least in the few years that I've been doing coaching, a big part of the approach we take as coaches is that we open the black box, and we help the clients that we coach learn to then apply the same frameworks that we use with them to working with their teams. This created a very natural appetite. For years, we heard the leaders that we work with saying, 'We want to do more of that.' But the beauty of the book is that it allows us to reach the thousands of leaders that we don't get to work with, for geographical reasons, for any other reason. So, any leader that wants to lead with a coaching style is the person that we both had in mind when writing the book. Tom, what would you add? I think that's correct, but I think it goes even beyond those with direct leadership responsibility. I mean, today we're all leaders. Whatever our role in an organisation, right from the bottom to the top, we have an influence over others. Sometimes that's just in our own families even. So, the ability to be a better coach, whether that is part of a team, coaching your boss even, coaching the people below you, sideways to you, sometimes in team coaching we hear a lot of clients going, 'Ah, I can use that with my kids'. So, I really think that it's a very broad appeal base and a very broad group of people who can just benefit from generally knowing more about how to be a great coach. So, against that background, how is someone going to know that the book is for them? Or is it just if they are a living, breathing human being, then the book is for them? No, I think Luciana hit the nail on the head when she said it's really for leaders wanting to lead with more of a coaching style. My point is, it's just not exclusive to that. Okay, so what's the gap here? What are these people not doing that perhaps they should be? I think from my experience, what I observe with the leaders that I work with is that sometimes it's just inertia. The pressure that leaders are under just makes them not stop to think. And the minute a leader stops to think about what is the right gear for me in this moment, more often than not, they realise that there's essentially, I call, three leadership gears. We can manage, we can lead, and we can coach. And there's a place for each one of them. Sometimes you have to roll up the sleeves and manage and get to the doing bit. Sometimes there is a role for leadership, to set the direction, to give the answers, to give guidance. But the higher a leader goes in their trajectory, the more space there is for coaching. So, the gap, to your question, I think, is the ability to stop and think what gear would serve me best here. Because the beauty of coaching as a gear is that, yes, you have to slow down and help the person in front of you that you're coaching or having a thinking partnership with. Stop and think, and your role is to ask the right questions and let them get to the answer. That feels a bit counterintuitive when you're under pressure to deliver fast, but if you take the time to slow it down and guide the conversations through a good line of questioning, guess what, that's the one time you need to do it, because the next time the person gets to do it for themselves. So, it's a little bit of that investment at the beginning that sometimes people are reluctant to realise that it's worth making, but it buys you so much time, and it improves the results so much better at the end of the day. So, when people learn that trick, they often say, 'It's the biggest shift I can make as a leader', and they stop seeing that gap. Tom, what can you add to that? I think there's a couple of additional aspects. One is the level of change that's occurring today and the speed of that change. But we don't have the answers to everything. So, the ability to use collective intelligence, which is a lot of what coaching is about, is the ability to creatively solution. So, I think that there's a huge piece there that, you know, it's kind of just part of the new dynamic of the speed of change in the world. And I think the other thing is the level of commitment to do something. If somebody tells me, 'You have to do this', I haven't chosen it. If I've chosen the route, the path, my contribution, I'm much more likely to deliver on it. So, I think that it is just a more effective way, a more agile way of engaging people in a definition of collective success, rather than just telling them what to do. We simply don't have the answers today. And if you look geopolitically around the world, you can see how few answers people actually have. That's interesting. And there's also that link between personal agency and satisfaction. And when that agency is taken away, that's when people start to question whether they're really enjoying their jobs, for example. It's a big part of what your listeners are motivated by. Right? I was very intrigued by the premise of your show and that Sunday blues, that sense of meaning and agency, we know that it's a big contributor to how people engage and what people want from work. So, we know that coaching is a great way to get that agency back in the picture. Yeah, and purpose. More and more people want to know that what they're doing is somehow helpful to the planet, to other people, to their organisation, to their customers, so that idea that they can create their value add, in line with their own values, is really important. If I went out onto the street and asked five different people what they understood by coaching, I suspect I would probably get five different answers. So, let's get a definition here. What's your one-sentence definition of coaching? And I'll give you each a go on this. So, Tom, would you like to go first? I think coaching, the type of coaching that Luciana and I do anyway, let's start there, is the ability to be a thinking partner in order to enhance business performance while developing better leaders to do it. And building up on that, I think that's the kind of coaching that we do, but in its simplest form, to me, the definition of coaching is the process that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And it's a collaborative process between two people in the case of one-on-one coaching, and it's a very creative process, because to what we said before, it allows you to get to the path and to the answers that give you that sense of ownership and agency, that then if you believe in what you just created with the support of that coach, you're going to go to the ends of the world to make it happen. So, it really helps you bring your vision forward with a level of autonomy and agency that is a game changer. So, before a leader comes to you, and before they've understood coaching as you understand it, what misconceptions do you see when it comes to leaders about what they think coaching is? Well, I can tell you how I think sometimes people misuse the word coaching, which is some version of role modelling or leading by example. Meaning a few of the leaders that I work with think that if they unpack what they do, and they give a tutorial to their team for this is what I did, this is how I did it, that is coaching, I don't necessarily see that as coaching. I think that's a very thoughtful way to unpack your process and deconstruct it and help people see how you did it. But that doesn't necessarily help them find their own way of doing it, because the way you do it, the way Tom does something, might be very different from my way of doing it. So, that's one misconception of coaching, is that it's a role modelling type of lead by example behaviour of leaders. It's not common in the senior leaders that we work with, it's more at the mid-level of leaders perhaps, but I've seen that definition of coaching used quite a bit. But what have you seen, Tom? I think that coaching is changing very quickly. I think that one of the misconceptions about it is that it's this very soft approach to, and how do you feel when that happens? And when you're talking to leaders, they don't have a lot of patience for just that. So, they want it to be quite pragmatic, quite thoughtful, quite business-focused, when you're talking to the sort of people that we're talking to as coaches. I think it's at the beginning of starting to be an alternative to management consulting. Instead of hiring a management consultant, you might hire a coach these days, not because they will be a consultant, they will be a coach, but they will help you think through the problems and the challenges and the opportunities for businesses in a way that used to only be addressed by management consultants. So, I think that it's getting much more pragmatic, much more effective at helping business leaders find business solutions. It's really interesting that you both described almost like two ends of a scale. So, on one end, it's the coach as the, look at me, I'm the role model, do as I do and you'll succeed kind of thing. And then at the other end, oh, coaching is just this sort of airy fairy, how do you feel kind of thing. I mean, what's the point of that? What other misconceptions do you see come up in addition to those? I think one misconception is, it's not hard work. If I'm going to see my coach, it's kind of luxury time. And there's some truth in that, because not many people will focus only on listening to the person that they're with, on the subjects that they want to talk about, to help the solutions that can work for them. But the coachee has to do the work. Right? It's not the coach that does the work. So, people will sometimes come in and go, 'So, how are you going to help me?' I'm like, 'I'm not, if you're not going to help yourself.' I am the vehicle, as Luciana was saying earlier, I'm the vehicle that helps you get from where you are to where you want to be. But you are sitting in the vehicle. You are driving the vehicle. So, there's a lot of hard work behind it and a lot of commitment. And I think that leaders who approach it with a bit of a kind of like, 'Oh, I'll go if my diary allows', they're not going to get the benefit from coaching that they should get by taking it really seriously. Because it's a big investment by an organisation, and it says that an organisation believes that this person has more potential and more talent very often than they themselves think they have, and that an organisation is prepared to pay pretty significant sums of money to release that potential, if they take it seriously. When you mention coaching, some people automatically think into the realm of sports. So, I'd just be interested to know, on your perspective, is sports coaching and the sort of coaching that we're talking about here, the coaching that leaders do, are they really two very different things? Are they more closely aligned? Is there an intersection of the Venn diagram? Luciana, what are your thoughts on that? I think, to your point, there's Intersections, and I definitely see commonalities, but there's also quite distinct differences. The first thing I'll say is, if you look at elite athletes, nobody thinks of putting an elite athlete on the field, on the court, without coaching. Every elite athlete in the world has a team of coaches. The interesting thing is that sometimes corporations have the equivalent of elite athletes, which is their C-suite, their presidents, their VPs, and they don't always have a coach. So, for us, in the world that we operate in, having a coach is almost a sign of being a top athlete. So, the old definition of coaching as something remedial has definitely changed. So, I think coaching is embraced as a driver of performance. That is very similar to the world of sports. At the end of the day, how do I get more out of my potential, my capabilities, how I play the game? I do see that in very much the same way as sports coaching. The other thing that I think is very analogous is the ability of the coach to observe you at your best and sometimes at your worst. So, for example, sometimes part of our coaching process involves asking feedback on behalf of our clients. And believe me, the way we frame it, the people that work with our clients day-to-day do open up, and they do tell us what the client looks like on a good day and on a bad day. That's the same that a coach would do on the field. They will really dissect that play that you really excelled at, but when you didn't, and you were in your crappy day, they'll also have the courage and the ability to show you with constructive feedback how you need to shift that. So, that ability to be the mirror on a good day and on a bad day, I think, is analogous from a business coach to a sports coach. But then, I also think that there's distinct differences. At the end of the day, yes, we work with elite athletes, the C-suites of the world, but we also have to build in them a certain sense of, even if they are the star quarterback of the company, they also have to learn how to play in a team, similar to the sports, but they also have to learn to get their ego out of the way. So, there are things that you then start to go much more into the human component of the person in front of you, in ways that perhaps I don't think in sports are that relevant, because a big part of how you show up as a leader has a lot to do with your history, with how your beliefs set you up for success or not. So, then we go into a much deeper personal side of things, that it's, by the way, not for the sake of digging and, like Tom said before, how do you feel, but really understand how does that get in the way of you leading at your best, of you performing at your best. So, there are moments in a process of coaching where I think the business side of coaching starts to be very different than the sports side of coaching. Tom, what would you add? Two things. In sports coaching, anybody who skis or plays tennis or anything like that knows the power and the importance of visualisation. But how many business leaders do you meet that say, 'Oh, I visualised my day today, or I visualised how to land my budget, or I visualised how to get discretionary effort out of my people, so that they knew that they were making a big difference to our consumers'? Right? So, I think that we need to get businesspeople to understand better how they can use visualisation as an extremely powerful tool to reset your mind as to what you're chasing after. So, that's one thing. And I think the second thing that is more in line with sports coaching is controlling that voice in your head. An athlete, they don't set out to lose. A lot of businesspeople are afraid or are alone or don't have the solutions that they need to drive their success or what their shareholders expect or what their board expects, or even their own boss expects. So, how do we reframe that voice in our head to allow us to win? Because the difference between, say, a gold medallist doing 100 metres and a silver medallist, it might only be 0.1 of a second. So, it's not a physical difference, it's a mental difference. So, I really think that there's a lot that coaching in the business environment can help people to apply, but in a very different way, in business. I agree. And I would add to that briefly for your listeners, Jeremy, there's a video now doing the rounds in social media that speaks to that point that Tom made by Roger Federer in a commencement speech, where he actually said, 'In my career, I won,' I don't know, it was like 80% of the finals. But then he started to zoom into how many points did he actually win. And it was only 54% of the points. So, it was his ability to recover after a point, both the winning and the losing points, by saying that was just a point. So, you have to reset your mindset every single point so that the next point is a fresh point, is a new point. And coaching is all about checking your mindset and shifting your mindset fully under your control. So, realising that, at the end of the day, it's just a point, and being able to move on, not only as a sportsman but as a leader, is a big part of how coaching helps you shape, literally how you show up second after second. Sticking briefly with the sporting analogy, I've occasionally heard in the context of leadership the question, do you want to be the coach, or do you want to be the captain? So, you know, the coach of the football team or the captain of the football team. Is that a helpful metaphor? Tom, you're shaking your head. No, because you are de facto both, right? If you're going to be an effective leader, you have to be able to paint a picture. Churchill talked about the sunlit uplands, right? You have to be able to do that. You have to be able to get people to play well together. And you have to be their thinking partner and the lubricant that allows them to solution. So, it's not one or the other by any means. And I think that the other thing that is really clear, when you look at sports versus other, the type of coaching that we do, sports people almost always know what they want, right? They want the gold medal, for example. We as human beings are not always so clear about what we want. And we talk in the book about this thinking structure that we use called trilogy questions. And the first question of the trilogy is, what do I, or we, want? So, a coach's job is to help somebody also clearly identify what they want. Because once we can do that, we've got a snowball's chance in hell of getting it. But if we don't know what we want, we're almost guaranteed not to get it. I agree. And I think part of the challenge of being a good coach in this day and age is that, in addition to what Tom just described, helping your client clarify what they want, the reality of the how for them is that today, sometimes it is about the 'and'. You have to be the coach and the captain. So, next level coaching is all about also helping clients deal with these paradoxes and this tension of, for me, as a leader, I have to hold the paradox, I have to be able to be the captain and the coach. I have to deliver top line and bottom line. I have to be able to give straight feedback and encourage people. So, your ability as a leader to hold that tension and hold the paradox and realise that performance is in the space where you're holding that tension and being able to deliver on both is key. And not any coach can do that eye to eye with leaders that are living the paradoxes in especially the world today as they are. We talked earlier about the inertia that leaders face as a result of the pressure that they're under to deliver results. And so, perhaps that doesn't allow them to create the headspace within which they could start to incorporate coaching within their leadership. So, what are they missing here? Fundamentally, why should leaders coach? What results can they expect to see if they incorporate coaching into their leadership style? Tom, let's start with you. I mean, so many things that we've touched on already. The first is the commitment to do it. Right? If I choose to do it, I'm much more likely to actually do it and deliver. I'm much more likely to believe the how. I'm much more likely to embrace the what, once it's been brought out of me as to what I want to do and contribute. So, I think that you just get better performance when you engage people in that way. You get better creativity, you get people behaving better. You also get better self-awareness, right? If you understand that your experience of being bullied at school might make you into a bully in the workplace, in extremis, the fact that you've got an awareness of that lowers the risk that you behave in a bad way, right? You have more choice about who you are. You're not stuck in your default operating system. You can choose your operating system, you can choose how you show up. And at the end of the day, if you are physically and mentally well, success is a choice. If you can develop the right mindset, if you can have somebody that you trust help you figure out your route to your freedom. So, there are so many advantages of doing it. I think the issue, Jeremy, is that leaders are all, all of us, are time poor. So, you need to stop and think. You need time to think in order to create time to lead and time to coach. But that investment pays off inordinately, because it saves you so much time later down the road. Luciana, can you give an example, obviously within the bounds of confidentiality, where you've seen a leader who perhaps wasn't really coaching, but then following work with you started to incorporate that into their leadership style and the results that they saw? I'll give you a very easy one, because it was so easy for her, it was almost such an eye-opening experience. I was coaching a CFO that was being groomed to become the CEO. So, for her, being able to get more performance out of her teams was key. And we talked about how was she doing that, and she was a very senior leader, she was probably at the game for 25 years. It clearly wasn't her first role. She was at the top of her game already. So, we started to dissect how was she having empowerment conversations, where she could really align with her teams in terms of what does the definition of success look like, what are the behaviours that I need from you, what do you need from me, interdependency, we have a framework that we use to create empowerment conversations that really move the needle. But for her, the game changer was at the very end of that framework, in the moment where you do what we call passing on the psychological baton of the empowerment. And it's a very simple question, which is, instead of you as the leader, because you want to control the time, you want to control the narrative, you want to control the outcome, her temptation was that she was doing the recap. So, this is what we agreed on. This is what you will do. By January 3rd, you will send me the report. She was taking ownership of that final recap because it gave her a sense of control. And when she realised that she was actually disempowering the person by having the last word, that person didn't leave that meeting with psychological ownership of that task. So, that's the moment where we do what we call pass on the baton of psychological ownership to the person. And the simplest thing to do it is by just resisting the temptation to recap and asking the person, 'So, what have we agreed on?' And let the person play it back. Because then you know, yes, they got it. Yes, they know exactly what they need to do. They've unpacked for me how they're going to do it. And they, in that moment, feel truly responsible for the delivery of that. And they feel agency, and they feel power, and they feel ownership, and they feel control. I coached her, we landed on that point. She went about her life. The next coaching session, the next month, she said, 'That was the biggest game changer of my entire career. Everything has shifted for me since I hold back from the recap. I build five minutes in every one-on-one that I have for them to play back what we've agreed upon. And it has completely shifted the sense of ownership, the sense of empowerment from my team.' So, it's powerful, but it's also sometimes in the small details. So, as a coach, you have to hold the space for the client to take the time to unpack all of these habits that they have, that they don't think twice about. But you've got to have that confidence in you to, even with a very senior person, help them see what they have forgotten to see because they are in such a hurry that they are in their default gear. Love that. And Tom, that ties in very nicely with what you were saying earlier about ownership and taking ownership and responsibility for the actions. Yeah. And also, what Luciana was saying there is understanding the person. The person that she was just describing felt this need to control. Right? And so, what she was doing was trying to give herself control, instead of actually enabling somebody else to take control of what they were responsible for. Which is exactly what you want as a leader, to encourage people to do. Right? So, for the leader who's listening to this, and they've started to recognise that they haven't really been coaching, they've been role modelling, they've been directing, they've been managing, they haven't really been coaching, aside from the obvious suggestion that they immediately go out and buy your book, where do they start? Where do they start to try and introduce this more coaching aspect into the way they work? Tom, would you like to start with this one? Well, I think what you've just said is a good place to start, but I suppose I'm not allowed a commercial break, so I won't say that. But look, I think you have to understand how to coach. You have to understand the basic premises of the listening, the questioning, the curiosity, the fact that there isn't only one way to do anything. I always give an example for leaders. So, just imagine that you're part of a team, and you're going to have a team dinner. And the idea of the team dinner is that it's going to happen at a place in Paris called Le Bistrot at eight o'clock on Friday night. Right? What do you do with that? You go, okay, well, look, in order for you to get to the bistro by eight o'clock on Friday night, you need to take the four o'clock Eurostar, because if you take the five o'clock, and it's late, you're going to miss. So, take full control, right? If you can just say, all right, it's eight o'clock, it's called Le Bistrot, it's in Paris, it's Friday night, get there how you want. If you'd like help, ask me. So, start there. Right? That's the first thing. And if they ask for help, then you will help them. You just show them the end state, and then help people get there. Yeah, I agree. And what I would add to that is something that I experience a lot with my clients, which is helping them remember they have gears. We forget. Disclaimer made, I learned to drive in Argentina where you shift gears. So, for me, that physicality of gear shifting is very real. In a world with automatic cars, we forget the gears so easily. So, as coaches, the first thing to get people back into the zone of coaching is remember that you have gears and that you can be in high speed gear, but you can also slow down, you can go in uphill gear because it's going to give you more traction and more power and more efficiency. So, that's such an easy a-ha moment for clients to remember they have gears, remember they have choices for how they show up. They have the gear of, yeah, sometimes if you have someone that is junior under a lot of time pressure, you have to go into directing mode. That's okay. There's a time for everything. But there are very often times where you have to remember to go into that coaching gear first, and then you go into the how. So, that's a big part of what are the small shifts to your point, pun intended, that a client can make is remember the gears and choose how you want to show up and go into coaching gear and relevant. I'm glad you said that, because one of the questions I had is how you choose which gear to go into. Now, in some cases, it might be obvious, but in other cases, maybe you have an option of directing, or you have an option of coaching, and maybe it's not entirely clear to you which one to go for. So, yeah, how do you choose your gear? It's very situationally dependent, I think. The clients that we work with, as senior people, are very good at reading the situation in front of them. What they are not as good is at slowing down to think about what does this situation require of me. So, I think if you look at very basic frameworks like the will and skill matrix, is the person that I have in front of me experienced enough? Do they have the high skill that I need them to have, to know how to navigate the situation? Do they have the will? Are they motivated, are they driven? If they are high skill, high will, great, I can coach them. If they are low skill and high will, maybe I need to slow them down. They are very eager to run, but they don't know where to start. So, I need to go into a little bit more of a directive space to help guide the direction, so that instead of running like a very eager chicken without a head, they're going to slow down and think about what is my direction, what is my purpose, what do I want, how do I get there. So, sometimes there you're going to go into a different kind of coaching that is already starting to gear the person, still through the lens of coaching by asking questions, but you guide their direction a little bit more. So, I think it's about, again, remembering what you have in front of you. What does the situation require? And then decide. And experienced leaders that take that minute to decide will know what gear to go into very, very naturally, I think. Or even who take the five seconds to remember the choices. To go with the gear analogy, it's not just that we've got forward and reverse, right? We've got 20 different gears as leaders we can choose from. First of all, we have to be aware of what those gears can look like and what they can achieve, before we decide which one to use. But the more practised you get at it, the faster you can choose the appropriate response to the situation in front of you, as Luciana was saying, right? It's just practise and constantly being aware of what's in my armoury, if you like, what can I choose from, rather than in that moment of stress where it's like forward or backwards, just taking that moment to go, and it literally can be just five seconds. It's enough. Once you're practised. It comes back to this time poor idea. And even in that moment where the leader, I suppose, feels like they have this responsibility to know the answer, and so by pausing, they're somehow, I don't know, betraying that responsibility by not instantly knowing what they should be saying. Yeah, but you know, Jeremy, it's like that thing, and I think we've all been in this meeting, you know the meeting where somebody comes in, I don't know, might be a management consultant or somebody who's famous for something, and they start talking, and you don't have a clue what they're talking about. You do not understand a single thing. And you're sitting there going, 'It must be me that's stupid.' But somebody else in the room puts up their hand and goes, 'I don't understand. I really don't get it.' And the whole room goes, 'Nor do I.' You know, it's so liberating. And a lot of what we help people with is the confidence to go, 'I don't understand, or I don't know.' And that's completely okay, because that is completely authentic. Right? And once you have that level of authenticity, you start to build the level of trust needed, as in a leader to help people collectively find solutions. That's our job. That's what we get paid for. Right? That's it. To find solutions. But it sits in that confidence, that ability to go, 'I don't know, or I don't understand.' And a lot of that confidence isn't innate. You need to build that. For many people, it's a new muscle. And a coach can help build that. Yes. And building on what Tom is saying, just to give you a very concrete client example of that, you can build that confidence at the individual level, and you can build the trust and the confidence at the team level. For example, a team I'm coaching, already, by the way, super high-performing team, one of those teams that you're like, 'How can I really add value as a coach to this team? They're already flying.' Their leader is a very fast thinker and fast decider and very confident in his decisions. So, he's going to come into a team meeting and say, 'This is what I've decided.' And his team trusts his judgement big time. But often, they really wanted to know, how did you get to that decision? How did you get to that conclusion? So, in a team meeting, in a team coaching session, what we did is give them permission to use in team meetings a moment to slow down, and the phrase that they all started to use, and when I see them, I want to hug them and kiss them for how well they use it, but the phrase is, namelessly, they're person X, 'Can you please unpack your thinking? Can you help me understand how you got to that decision?' And then the leader knows. Yes, of course, I went too fast, I went too quick, I need to unpack my thinking. Because if my team can follow my logic, then they can either challenge my logic, so it was permission to challenge my logic as needed, but also if they agree, they start to build that shorthand with the leader's judgement and criteria and thinking process that makes them more agile, faster, better. So, even giving them that shorthand, can you unpack your thinking for me, raised the level of trust and alignment in ways that are just amazing to see, and it's so simple. I love what you've just said, Luciana, because on top of everything else, I think people who are lacking in confidence are very aware that they're lacking in confidence. But if you are overconfident, you don't have an awareness that you are overconfident. And in a way, that makes you even more dangerous, right? So, building that awareness of what's appropriate, and in some circumstances we can be overly confident, and in different circumstances, the same person can be under confident. Right? So, it's that sea of emotion that we all live in, and understanding it better, getting better awareness of it. For the person who is listening to this on their morning commute into the office, aside from ordering your book, what's one thing they can try today if you were to encapsulate it in one sentence, what's one thing they can try today to start to incorporate coaching into the way they work? Luciana, why don't you go first? Listen more. As a good coach, one of the superpowers is active listening. And I know that as humans, we often don't listen enough. The easiest thing, the lowest effort thing that you can do, seemingly lowest effort, we know it's not that easy, is listen more. Hold back from having the answers. Hold back from giving directions. Stay in a place of listening first and listening more. Tom? I would say, yes, listen more. But if I was on my way, on my commute, I would ask myself a fundamental question. What do I want today to be like? So, I would visualise my day. But when I say visualise it, I mean visualise it, feel it, embody it. Because what do I want can include so many different factors. What do I want people's experience of me to be today? What do I want them to understand? What do I need to understand? What do I want them to know about me today? What do I want to share with them? What do I want to learn about them? There are so many ways of picking out how your day can be great. It's going back to the sports analogy, it's that idea that every day is a ski slope. Anybody that skis knows that you get to the top of the slope, and you stop. And you look down the slope, and you think about how you're going to ski that slope before you set off. Think of your day, your workday, as that. Think of the different meetings you've got. Think about how you want those meetings to go. And it will enable you to be the best you, because you will have visualised it. Absolutely love it. Tom, Luciana, if people want to get hold of you, get the book, where would you like them to go? Easy-peasy, Amazon US, look up Coaching Power, Amazon UK, Europe, Google or put on the search bar Coaching Power. You'll find the website that allows you to ship it to your house. We've put a lot of effort and thought into writing it, so we can't wait to hear what you think. So, feel free to reach out to us through LinkedIn and continue the conversation. But in the meantime, go get the book and channel that inner coach that we know you have in you. Because you'll see it's not only a more powerful way to lead, but it's a much more fun way to lead to. I will put links in the show notes. Tom, Luciana, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having us, Jeremy. Okay, hope you enjoyed that interview with Tom Preston and Luciana Nunez of the Preston Associates. If you weren't convinced before about the benefits of coaching, then I really hope that you are now, because there really are just so many benefits. One that I particularly liked is this idea of collective intelligence. The leader doesn't have to have all the answers. They can't have all the answers, it's just not humanly possible. But chances are that they, collectively with the people around them, can come up with the answers. And it's by adopting a coaching mentality that the collective group reaches those answers. Coaching isn't about telling people what to do. It's not a leader saying to the people they lead, 'Look at me, look at the way I do things. That's the way you should do them.' A good leader recognises that other people will have their own answers, and they will come to their own conclusions in their own way. So, whilst coaching is an absolutely fantastic tool for growing other people, it's an amazing way to grow as a leader as well, as a person. I doubt there's a single coaching conversation that I've had where I've been the coach, where I haven't myself grown in some way as a person. And the beauty is that this is something that anybody can do. You don't have to be hierarchically a line manager or a leader. In any discussion with any colleague about how a job of work gets done, you can use coaching elements in that conversation. So, give it a go. Rather than bundling in with what you think the answer is, try asking a question instead. See what comes out. I think everyone will be surprised at the results. You'll find the show notes for this episode at changeworklife.com/209, that's changeworklife.com/209, where there's the transcript, summary of everything we talked about, and links to resources mentioned, including Tom and Luciana's book. And if you've enjoyed this episode, one thing I'd absolutely love you to do is leave a review. I know that I'm competing for ears, and I'm competing for attention, and one of the ways you can help me to get that attention is by telling people what's good about this podcast. What do you learn from it? Why do you listen? If you can spend a minute leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you use, I will be extremely grateful. You do that, and on my side of the bargain, well, I will continue to put out episodes. There'll be another one in two weeks' time. So, if you haven't subscribed to the show, make sure you do it. If you're on Apple podcasts, there's a plus symbol or whatever there is, a follow, a bell icon, whatever it is, make sure you're subscribed so that you get an episode in your feed as soon as it's released. And I can't wait to see you in two weeks' time. Cheers. Bye.