Latest research indicates that organisations need to make a radical shift to succeed. This means roles and skills of managers and leaders need change to become coaches. In this content you will learn some of the basic principles of coaching, and some steps you can do right now to make the shift into an effective leader and coach.
I can remember when I got promoted to senior manager, one of the first tasks was to go and do the “dirty work” for the people above me. The story goes as follows; the senior management had a long term friction with two very difficult staff members. Now I know they are awkward and difficult, because I used to sit on their side of the fence when they used to speak negative of the management. Then sitting on the management side of the fence, I knew what they were thinking, so it wasn’t a very productive environment to be in.
So the latest fad comes in, which needs to be implemented across the school, the task delegated to me also a test if I could pull it off. The first people I go to were to two difficult member’s of staff, all the time thinking what’s the best strategy to deal with them. So I went with being myself. The first questions I asked them, were how are they feeling, what they are working on now, what were they thoughts on the new initiative, and given your skills what could you bring to this project to make it work. I can remember five minutes into the meeting they stopped me and said that “you have shown far more emotional intelligence that the whole leadership combined” . Which was flattering considering the were a lot older than I was.
Anyway later on in the day, meeting again with the leadership team, I relayed the conversation to hem, and instead of congratulation me, they began to attack me, and I can quite clearly remembering them saying that I had been taken for a fool by the two.
The result of new initiative spoke for themselves, there was engagement with it from the whole school which gave us more accurate and timely data.
What I want you to take from this is people have their own issue that they deal with on a daily basis, some convince themselves that’s the way the world is and that’s how it will remain, what they feel is real to them but its not actually the case they just believe it to be so, unless someone can you them a different perspective.
A strategy you could use is to help them and you is to genuinely ask:
- How they are feeling
- Why they are feeling that way
- Listen and acknowledge and repeat back to them in their words their feelings.
- Offer one thing they can do to take the next steps.
To illustrate my point about leaders and mangers not having the right skills and outsourcing , the movie up in the air comes to mind. (18+)
You can as always reach out me at : hello@safonlinecoach.com