COACHING YOUR TEAM TO BIG RESULTS BY GETTING COACHED YOURSELF

Most managers think the most important thing to learn from Steve Jobs is that to be the greatest leader in your field you must be the fastest, the smartest, or the first.

They fail to capture the truly valuable lesson from Jobs.

Image via Business Insider

What Managers Fail to Learn From Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was the most innovative human being in terms of getting technology in the hands of users on the planet. Many of today’s enigmatic bluechip leaders, like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, have taken direct inspiration from him in the way they develop tech and pipeline it to their consumers. While the man Steve Jobs may be forgotten, his influence and legacy have left an indelible mark on human history that will continue to stand out for centuries to come.

Would you consider Steve Jobs to have mastered tech by the mid/late 2000s? In 2009, who was more skilled, more experienced, and more revolutionary? Whose instincts were sharper, whose vision was clearer?

Steve Jobs was the master; there’s no debating it. Would it surprise you to learn that during this time of unprecedented achievement, Steve Jobs was being... coached? It’s shocking to many managers that a man with a vision and perspective so far beyond the present would need a coach to help him achieve greatness.

The fact that Steve Jobs, at the height of his influence, still needed a coach should teach you this one important principle.

You will never stop needing a coach as long as you want to achieve and remain at the height of your career, performance, and success.

Scott Baird, human performance scientist and executive coach at Griffin Hill, says this to clients who ask when they’ll “graduate” from his program; when they’ll move past all of their problems and no longer need a coach anymore:

You and your employees need coaching to stay relevant, let alone succeed. Here, you’ll discover how to coach your employees and how to give yourself access to coaching through self and executive coaching. You’ll learn the characteristics of good coaching, how to go through a coaching session with one of your employees or team members, and how to self-coach in a way that can help you become the very best version of yourself while learning from world-class masters. By the end, you will be able to take this system and apply it in your company to help your employees, your team members, and yourself realize your fullest potential over time through patterns of continuous improvement. This is what leaders like you are achieving for themselves and their teams by being coached and coaching their teams better.

Defining Coaching By Outcomes

To start, we need to define the kind of coaching Steve Jobs was receiving at the height of his career from legendary executive coach Bill Campbell. Let’s step back to view the field on which coaching sits. People who are focused on improvement frequently interact with experts in a variety of ways. Some of these interactions are more effective than others at helping individuals become the best version of themselves that they can be. Coaching interactions have a certain set of characteristics that set them apart from other, less impactful interactions.

Teaching

• Teaching interactions are a one-directional flow of information.
• Teachers engage with students in a lecture format, they stand in front of you and deliver information.
• This information is useful and important, but it is up to the student to contextualize what has been said to meet their needs and solve their problems.

Outcome: The student learns the information taught by the teacher but is left alone when applying it.

Mentoring

• Mentoring interactions involve exchanging information and a discussion of goals.
• The major difference between mentoring and teaching is that the mentor understands your goals and helps you apply the information you learn to grow, develop, and ultimately meet them.
• Mentors give specific guidance and share experiences relevant to your situation, not necessarily based solely on a curriculum.
• It’s generally up to the mentee to initiate and maintain interactions with their mentor. Outcome: The mentee gains direction and useful experience applied to them from their mentor, but takes on full responsibility for maintaining that direction while pursuing their goals.

Coaching

• Coaching is the highest form of expert interaction you can strive for
• Coaching interactions represent a committed relationship between the coach and the performer.
• They teach and mentor, but they also model performance to the person being coached and then tweak and adjust the performer’s duplication of that modeling in practice.
• Coaches give you a severe dose of reality about your decisions and their consequences in your life, which is not in the Mentor’s role.
• Coaches don’t let you coast in the direction your life is going without sharp clear feedback.
• Coaches show up when and where they are needed, not when it is convenient for you. Outcome: The performer gains not only information and direction, but also the training, support, and accountability to maintain that direction while pursuing their goals and even afterward when they move on to higher goals. The performer becomes the best performing version of themself, or in other words, they fulfill their goal potential.

A Coaching Model

You need a powerful model to begin coaching people effectively in your company. With these strategies, you can begin to use your systems, knowledge, and expertise to elevate the performance of your employees, team members, and direct reports.First and foremost, it’s important to define behaviors that are always present in good coaching. Without these behaviors, your coaching will have a negative effect. Your coaching won’t generate the kind of relationship you need to help employees achieve their goal potential. In fact, it will have the reverse effect, losing you the trust and commitment needed to make a lasting impact. With these behaviors, you unlock stronger relationships with those you lead and create the foundation for a system of continuous improvement.

Essential, Good Coaching Behaviors

While each coaching relationship is different and specific to the individuals that comprise it, successful coaching relationships share the characteristics above in common. Similarly, while the end goal of a coaching relationship is specific to the performer being coached, the following coaching model is successful across a wide variety of roles and focuses on replacing old systems with newer, more productive ones.

One important time to apply these coaching behaviors is in the regular Priority Alignment sessions (1-on-1) with each of your team members.

One Potential Coaching Model

Teach

• Give you information, ideas, and concepts (like a teacher).
• Beyond just sharing, those ideas and concepts become a discussion (like a mentor).
• Make the information engaging, application-based learning

Model

• Model behaviors in a way that takes application-based learning to a literal level.
• Apply what you learn to your performers and have them take notes on what you do.
• Consider role-playing, walking through real-life scenarios, and other forms of rich learning.

Let the Performer Perform

• The performer prepares by choosing the play/approach and rehearsing as needed.
• The performer steps into the arena and attempts to duplicate what you’ve modeled
• As they are trying to duplicate your modeling, tweak, adjust, reguide, connect, refine, and help your performer to adjust in ways that get them closer to perfect.

Give Them Feedback

• Celebrate successes and correct mistakes
• Maintain the 3:1 ratio of positive to negative feedback
• Give the performer the severe dose of reality discussed earlier if they need it.

Reteach, Remodel, Etc

• Start teaching again with the next incremental progress step in mind.
• The cycle repeats in perpetuity.
• It is only over large amounts of time that lasting change is made and new systems are cemented in.

Self Coaching

In self-coaching, you fill the role of coach and performer yourself, an immensely difficult task if you don’t have the system, tools, and technology to guide you through the coaching process. With the correct system in place, self-coaching is a completely viable pathway to continuous improvement and achieving your goal potential. A self-coaching system needs to contain the following pieces to function as a holistic, effective coaching model

Source of New Information

This could be a book you read from an expert in your field or an idea you got from a colleague, family member, or friend, or an impression that came to you out of a situation at work. At some point, new information needs to enter the system for you to be able to make a calculated adjustment to your systems and behaviors.

Self-Evaluation Framework

Evaluate your current systems and behaviors based on the new information and record that evaluation in a self-evaluation/goal-setting framework. How are you currently applying the new concept you’ve learned? How are you not applying that concept? What can you do based on the new information you’ve received to improve your performance?

Process That Crafts the Clarity

When we say “craft the clarity,” we mean having a process in place that can take data, and can create well-considered, conceived, and constructed plans. A process that “crafts the clarity” generates new perspectives through data-driven decision making rather than utilizing the knowledge and experience of a coach.

Goal-Setting System

Set specific, attainable goals that are relevant to what you want to achieve, that are measurable and time-sensitive, and then evaluate them on four time horizons: daily, weekly, quarterly, yearly. Consider setting a larger goal (an end goal) and then a network of smaller goals that will get you there (means goals).

Griffin Hill Is Your Executive Coach

We’ve told you what coaching is, how it works, and we’ve even given you the strategies we use that will make it work in your company. At this point, you’re asking why we’re giving all of this valuable information away.

You’re probably thinking right now, Wow those are some good ideas, I should try them out with... and then inserting employees you know you can help, or ways to apply these coaching strategies in your company to solve problems and start excelling.

But soon you’ll hit your lunch break, and you’ll get a fast-food burrito down the street while you watch some cat videos on your phone, or a sports recap, or while you text your spouse. And then you’ll get back to work and there will be stuff for you to do, and you’ll get busy, and you’ll forget that you ever read this report with these good ideas. And you’ll move on with all the same problems and no more solutions than when you started.

The unfortunate truth is that this report will not have a lasting impact on many of you because many of you don’t even have the fundamental systems in place to apply it or a coach to help you set it as a goal and achieve it.

Our entire operation is geared toward helping you set the right goals, solve your problems, and transform every aspect of your business for the better.

We do this by establishing and maintaining a relationship that involves people, information, and tools that help you apply the fundamental principles of coaching that lead to continuous improvement in your company

Griffin Hill Generates Continuous Improvement

Coaching

We give you a coach who works with your company to develop a strategic plan, guide you through difficult situations, and develop in you the capacity to face new challenges and grow.

Information

Griffin Hill Learning gives you the information you need to excel in sales, marketing, customer care, and leadership through Griffin Hill Learning, our online, self-paced training platform. New information is the starting point for every coaching relationship. Griffin Hill Learning has proven strategies and tactics that will make data-driven changes to your systems that generate continuous improvement.

Accountability

The Priority Alignment Tool is a coaching tool that allows you to evaluate performance and coach direct reports in a role-focused framework. Team members and employees participate with you in a system that reinforces the coach/performer relationship through status updates on progress check-ins.

Technology

The High Performance Journal makes self-coaching intuitive by guiding your writing and reflection through a sequence of goal-setting entries, allowing you to start making data-based decisions off of the high-value information you learn. Start your journey to high performance with coaching from Griffin Hill and set yourself up to completely realize your full goal potential, becoming the best possible version of yourself.