The Coaching Aspect of Leadership
There are a number of ways to help your people grow and develop, including giving them new challenges and opportunities, timely and constructive feedback, formal instruction, mentoring, and coaching them for success. Each of these has its own art, with the art of coaching being often misunderstood. Coaching is not about fixing others’ weaknesses, it is about inspiring them to achieve their full potential and giving them the tools with which to do so.
With this in mind, here are the top five secrets to great coaching as a leader:
1. It’s all in the positioning.
It’s important as a leader to remember the impact, and thus power, of the words you use. For example, “You need to fix xyz because it’s wrong/bad for all the following reasons” puts the focus and energy on the negative, is mentally and emotionally draining, and won’t be nearly as effective from a coaching perspective as, “Let’s have you try this because of all the reasons this is going to help you succeed and shine.”
As my brilliant business partner reminds me, “Where you focus, the energy will follow.” Put your focus on the behaviors you want to encourage, not the behaviors you want to discourage.
 2. Stories make you more relatable and trusted.
It’s human nature when being coached to be concerned that the coach is going to point out all the ways you’re doing something wrong. When coaches share stories about their own experiences of growth and learning, it creates a more positive environment and enables the team member to open up to the coach’s wisdom.
By knowing the coach has been at a similar place in their career and found ways to overcome challenges and create opportunities, a bond is more easily formed. When done with honesty, sincerity and even humor, you become more relatable and trusted as a coach.
3. Encouragement, when genuine, is motivational manna.
This may seem obvious, but it is often overlooked. The simple act of telling someone you believe in them, and in their potential, can change their whole perspective, including how they feel about their work. This is because when you tell someone they are valued and you see their greater potential, you tap into their higher level esteem and self-actualization needs in Maslow’s Hierarchy. This is truly a life force.
4. Goal setting is all about them and not about you.
If coaching is all about inspiring someone to achieve their full potential, then it’s important to understand how they view that potential, what they are personally aiming for, and what they are passionate about. It may not be the same as what you, as the leader and coach, want for them.
If there is a clear disconnect between what the team member wants and what you want as a leader, then that’s an issue that needs to be on the table. The most important thing is for each team member to be fully connected to themself, to their true passion and objectives, so they can honestly tell you where they want you to help take them and what they want you to help them achieve. If you help them connect to this deeper understanding, you will do a much better job of putting them in the right role in the organization and setting them up for success. Their success, of course, leads to your success.
5. Praise is the magic ingredient.
As with encouragement, praise empowers you to tap into the higher levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, fostering confidence and feelings of achievement and the respect of others. What sets praise apart is it’s recognition of all the work that has gone into getting the person to the point they are currently at. It’s about abundant acknowledgment of what they are doing well, and how this has come about through hard work, skill, and dedication.
Praise is a way of saying, “Thank you for all you have done,” which is truly a magical sentence to hear, particularly from those we hold in high esteem. It is an exceptionally strong and richly fertile foundation from which to grow the coach-coachee relationship!

Developing the Future's most needed talents

 

 

In our new world where we have emerged from labor to Analytics, the new demand in Leaders is Right Brained conceptual people who can discern situations and people, then execute results from a plan. Now we lose social skills to technology dependence so how do we find and develop best performers?

 

Personal Competence.

 

 The 25 emotional competencies

fall into five categories. The first three categories

contain personal competencies, which determine how

we manage ourselves:

• Self-Awareness: Knowing one’s internal states, preferences,

resources and intuitions. Self-awareness competencies

include emotional awareness, accurate selfassessment

and self-confidence.

• Self-Regulation: Managing one’s internal states,

impulses and resources. This category includes selfcontrol,

trustworthiness, conscientiousness, adaptability

and innovation.

• Motivation: Emotional tendencies that guide or

facilitate reaching goals. Motivation competencies

include achievement drive, commitment, initiative

and optimism.

Social Competence. The last two categories contain

social competencies, which determine how we handle

relationships:

• Empathy: Awareness of others’ feelings, needs and

concerns. Empathy competencies include understanding

others, developing others, a service orientation,

leveraging diversity and political awareness.

• Social skills: Adeptness at inducing desirable responses

in others. This category includes influence, communication,

conflict management, leadership, change

catalyst, building bonds, collaboration and cooperation,

and team capabilities.

Self-Awareness –– Competencies

Intuition and gut feeling bespeak the capacity to sense

messages from our internal store of emotional memory

— our own reservoir of wisdom and judgment. This

ability lies at the heart of self-awareness, and self-awareness

is the vital foundation skill for three emotional

competencies:

• Emotional awareness: The recognition of how our

emotions affect our performance and the ability to

use our values to guide decision-making.

• Accurate self-assessment: A candid sense of our

personal strengths and limits, a clear vision of

where we need to improve and the ability to learn

from experience.

• Self-confidence: The courage that comes from certainty

about our capabilities, values and goals.

When the mind is calm, working memory functions at

its best. But when there is an emergency, the brain shifts

into a self-protective mode, stealing resources from

working memory and shunting them to other brain sites

in order to keep the senses hyperalert — a mental stance

tailored to survival.

During the emergency, the brain falls back on simple,

highly familiar routines and responses and puts aside

complex thought, creative insight and long-term planning.

The focus is the urgent present — or the crisis of

the day.

While the circuitry for emergencies evolved millions

of years ago, we experience its operation today in the

form of troubling emotions: worries, surges of anxiety,

panic, frustration and irritation, anger, rage.

 

Disciplined control of Mind/ Attitude

The notion of emotional self-control does not mean

denying or repressing true feelings. “Bad” moods, for

instance, have their uses; anger, sadness and fear can

become sources of creativity, energy and connectedness.

Anger can be an intense source of motivation, particularly

when it stems from the urge to right an injustice or

inequity. Shared sadness can knit people together. And

the urgency born of anxiety — if not overwhelming —

can prod the creative spirit.

Emotional self-control is not the same as overcontrol,

the stifling of all feeling and spontaneity. In fact, there is

a physical and mental cost to such overcontrol. People

who stifle their feelings, especially strong negative ones,

raise their heart rate, a sign of increased tension. When

such emotional suppression is chronic, it can impair

thinking, hamper intellectual performance and interfere

with smooth social interactions.

By contrast, emotional competence implies we have a

choice as to how we express our feelings. Such emotional

finesse becomes particularly important in a global economy,

since the ground rules for emotional expression vary

greatly from culture to culture.

 

Self-Regulation –– Competencies

Self-regulation — managing impulse as well as distressing

feelings — depends on the working of the emotional

centers in tandem with the brain’s executive centers

in the prefrontal areas. These two primal skills —

handling impulse and dealing with upsets — are at the

core of five emotional competencies:

• Self-control: Managing disruptive emotions and

impulses effectively.

• Trustworthiness: Displaying honesty and integrity.

• Conscientiousness: Dependability and responsibility

in fulfilling obligations.

• Adaptability: Flexibility in handling change

and challenges.

• Innovation: Being open to novel ideas, approaches

and new information. _

 

Motivation –– Competencies

Three motivational competencies typify outstanding

performers:

• Achievement drive: Striving to improve or meet a

standard of excellence.

• Commitment: Embracing the organization’s or

group’s vision and goals.

• Initiative and optimism: Twin competencies that

mobilize people to seize opportunities and allow

them to take setbacks and obstacles in stride.

 

Social Skills –– Competencies

Social skills, in the essential sense of handling another

person’s emotions artfully, underlie several competencies.

These include:

• Influence: Wielding effective tactics of persuasion.

• Communication: Sending clear and convincing

messages.

• Conflict management: Negotiating and resolving

disagreements.

• Leadership: Inspiring and guiding.

• Change catalyst: Initiating, promoting or managing

change.

 

Social Skills –– Competencies

Social skills, in the essential sense of handling another

person’s emotions artfully, underlie several competencies.

These include:

• Influence: Wielding effective tactics of persuasion.

• Communication: Sending clear and convincing

messages.

• Conflict management: Negotiating and resolving

disagreements.

• Leadership: Inspiring and guiding.

• Change catalyst: Initiating, promoting or managing

change.

_

 Best team Dynamics are multiplicative, with the best talents of one person catalyzing

the best of another and another to produce

results far beyond what any one person might have

done. The explanation of this aspect of team performance

lies in the members’ relationships — in the chemistry

between members.

A study of 60 work teams in a large American financial

services company found that many elements mattered

to some extent for the teams’ effectiveness. But

the single dimension that mattered most was the human

element — how members interacted with each other

and those the team connected with.

 

Social Coordination –– Competencies

Several competencies of star performers are rooted in

the basic human talents for social coordination:

• Building bonds: Nurturing instrumental relationships.

• Collaboration and cooperation: Working with others

toward shared goals.

• Team capabilities: Creating synergy in working

toward group goals.

_

New Learning

Cultivating emotional competence requires an understanding

of the fundamentals of behavior change. The

failure to take this into account wastes an immense

investment in development and training each year.

Today, millions upon millions of dollars are being wasted

on training programs that have no lasting impact —

or little effect at all — on building emotional competence.

It amounts to a billion-dollar mistake.

When heads of development at Fortune 500 companies

were asked what makes it difficult for them to

evaluate their own training programs, the most common

complaint was the lack of standards and yardsticks

available for training in the so-called soft skills like

emotional competencies.

To help change this, the Consortium for Research on

Emotional Intelligence in Organizations was founded

a coalition of researchers

and practitioners from business schools, the federal government,

consulting firms and corporations. The consortium

has searched the scientific findings on behavior

change and studied exemplary training programs, to create

basic guidelines for the best practices in teaching

competencies based on emotional intelligence.

 

Here are some of the resulting guidelines:

• Assess the job. Training should focus on the

competencies needed most for excellence in a given

job or role.

• Assess the individual. The individual’s profile of

strengths and limitations should be assessed to

identify what needs improving.

• Deliver assessments with care. Feedback on

a person’s strengths and weaknesses carries an

emotional charge.

• Gauge readiness. People are at differing levels

of readiness.

• Motivate. People learn to the degree they are

motivated and making the competence a personal

goal for change.

• Make change self-directed. When people

direct their learning program, tailoring it to their

needs, circumstances and motivation, learning is

more effective.

• Focus on clear, manageable goals. People need

clarity on what the competence is and the steps

needed to improve it.

• Prevent relapse. Habits change slowly, and relapses

and slips need not signal defeat.

• Give performance feedback. Ongoing feedback

encourages and helps direct change.

• Encourage practice. Lasting change requires sustained

practice both on and off the job.

• Arrange support. Like-minded people who are

also trying to make similar changes can offer crucial

ongoing support.

• Provide models. High-status, highly effective

people who embody the competence can be models

who inspire change.

• Encourage. Change will be greater if the

organization’s environment supports the change,

values the competence and offers a safe atmosphere

for experimentation.

• Reinforce change. People need recognition — to

feel their change efforts matter.

• Evaluate. Establish ways to evaluate the development

effort to see if it has lasting effects. _

 

Best Practices

Though almost every development program for emotional

intelligence includes at least a few of these “best

practices,” optimal impact comes from their added

potency when used in combination.

These guidelines offer a state-of-the-art blueprint for

teaching — and learning — emotional intelligence.

• Assess the job. One basic question needs to be

asked and answered before any training is undertaken:

What does it take to do this job superbly?

• Assess the individual. In general, the ideal evaluation

relies not on any one source but on multiple

perspectives.

• Deliver assessments with care. If there ever was

a task that called for emotional intelligence, giving

people the results of 360-degree evaluations is it;

empathy, sensitivity and delicacy are essential.

• Gauge readiness. If people are not ready to take

action, forcing them will lead to disaster: the sham of

going through the motions only to satisfy others,

resentment rather than enthusiasm, quitting.

• Motivate. The more motivated people are to learn,

the greater the effectiveness of the training for them.

• Make change self-directed. We change most

effectively when we have a plan for learning that fits

our lives, interests, resources and goals.

• Focus on clear, manageable goals. Breaking

goals into smaller steps offers easier challenges —

and successes.

• Prevent relapse. People need to be warned at the

outset of training that they are likely to experience

bad days when they revert to their old habits. Show

them how to learn valuable lessons from those slips.

• Give performance feedback. Knowing how we

are doing keeps us on track. Feedback means that

someone notices whether — or how well — the

new competence is being used and lets us know.

• Encourage practice. People learn a new skill more

effectively if they have repeated chances to practice

it over an extended period of time than if they have

the same amount of practice lumped into a single,

intensive session.

• Arrange support. Mentoring can serve as a coaching

forum for boosting emotional competence.

• Provide models. We learn by watching others; if

others can demonstrate a competence, they create a

living classroom for us.

• Encourage and reinforce. A fledgling competence

needs to be expressed during the actual situation

at work in order to take hold.

• Evaluate. Establish sound outcome measures, especially

for the competencies that were targeted in

training, and include job performance measures. _

 

The Emotionally Intelligent

Organization

An emotionally intelligent organization needs to come

to terms with any disparities between the values it proclaims

and those it lives. Clarity about an organization’s

values, spirit and mission leads to a decisive self-confidence

in corporate decision-making.

An organizational mission statement serves an emotional

function: articulating the shared sense of goodness

that allows us to feel what we do together is worthwhile.

Working for a company that measures its success

in the most meaningful ways — not just the bottom line

— is itself a morale and energy raiser.