#5 π Coaching
This week: βοΈ The False Dilemma, π Leadership Plans & Β± adding vs. subtracting.
When I posted #0 Blindspotting earlier this year, I spoke about my journey to understanding my development in terms of conquering blindspots; however, I skipped over perhaps my original blindspot: not knowing the power of surrounding myself with people who can help me see my blindspots. I fell into the common trap that professionals fall into when they are ambitious and see early success - the False Dilemma.
The False Dilemma is when you have to choose between two options that clearly each have negative consequences:
Do I say nothing and let this initiative be doomed to fail, or do I say what everyone is thinking and be "that person"?
Do I admit I was wrong when I don't believe it, or do I stand by my convictions?
Do I run the meeting and spend the whole time speaking, or do I let the team run it and risk nothing being ready?
For me, that False Dilemma was "Do I double down on my strengths, or improve my weaknesses?" Like in any False Dilemma, it doesn't matter which one you chose, because both options are wrong. We're mostly trading off soft skills (weaknesses) in pursuit of mastery of hard skills (strengths), which closes the door to real leadership for 99% of us. Increasing the impact of your hard skills will require soft skills. What stops us from developing our strengths is very often our weaknesses: I would be a better writer if people weren't scared of how I will react to feedback. I would know more about demand generation if I was a better listener and supporting the growth of my demand generation colleagues (who in turn could share their obstacles and insights).
This is a narrow approach to self-improvement. As children, what helps us grow is to add new skills or get better at our existing skills. As adults, growing is about subtracting what's holding us back - we are all already excellent at something, but we have developed blindspots like barnacles on a boat, and we can't get rid of them unless we take the boat out of the water and examine it.
Blindspots aren't our weaknesses - they are just impediments to our success. For example, I'm a weak astrophysicist, but it's not impacting my ability to grow. The binary notion of strengths & weaknesses assumes that the best way to increase our ability to succeed is to either get better at what we are good at or improve what we are bad at, leaving out all of the areas where we are decently good at but require excellence in the moment in order to truly succeed.
Most people facing this false dilemma choose to double down on their strengths. Leaders who double down typically hire teams to complement their skills (i.e: make up for their shortcomings); however, what kind of people are you really hiring if you can't coach them?
Up-and-comers who will learn from your experience.
Other False Dilemma choosers who have doubled down on their strengths: good luck communicating with them when you get to the Storm part of team development.
Well-rounded professionals who are going to measure their ability to grow in the role based on your ability to help them grow, which will be limited.
Doubling down on my strengths, my early hires can be split into two categories:
Team members who I considered stronger in their job than I: I was unable to help them improve because I saw only their strengths as areas to work on and could not help them with any other aspect of their development.
Team members who I considered "weaker" in their job than I : I could only show them how I became better - micro-management at worse, coaching by experience at best - which had varied results depending on whether my experience was applicable to their challenge.
For each, my blindspot on coaching made me a lesser coach to them.
What I needed to see is that it isn't about strengths and weaknesses, itβs about identifying Strengths & Improvement Opportunities. Improvement Opportunities aren't necessarily areas we are weak in, but rather they are areas where improvement would have the biggest impact on our output today.
For most team members, improvement opportunities are areas that are impeding them from achieving their mission at work in the short or long term.
System: The Leadership Plan
Everyone on your team deserves the opportunity to work on their blindspots, to get out of their own way, and to understand what they aren't seeing. What's more, in order for you to lead your team forward, you need to address both the obstacles the team is facing today as well as those the team will face tomorrow. I balance this out in teams by focusing on Performance through OKRs (which I'll speak about in the future) and Transformation through Leadership Plans. Don't mind the name, this process applies to individual contributors even if they don't plan to lead teams - it is about being a leader in our own mission, an active contributor.
This is the process I use for my team:
π Identify their strengths & weaknesses - we come up with a clear list of 3-4 strengths and 3-4 Improvement Opportunities. There are three ways I've approached identifying my strengths & weaknesses in the past:
Self-identify: if they feel they can be honest with themselves, this can be a great exercise. Sometimes, I've been right on the nose. Sometimes, I've convinced myself that my weaknesses were the ones that I was most excited about improving vs. the ones that most needed to be improved.
Use a coach, mentor, advisor, or leader: regardless of the formality of the relationship, having an outside person work with them on this can be a great perspective. They may hear things they're not ready to hear, but if it comes from someone they respect, they might resist the knee-jerk reactions that we develop to protect ourselves from getting hurt. This may be you, if your relationship with your team member is solid; however, it may be better coming from someone outside of your team, as long as they understand the context in which the team member needs to define areas of improvement.
Identify them through 360 feedback: ask 8-12 stakeholders to weigh in on various aspects of a team member's behavior. I recommend doing this for everyone in the team individually & collectively so they can hear from external stakeholders how the team is perceived as well as how individual team members are perceived. You can frame the ideation around areas of focus such as βhow does the team need to change collectively and how can you contribute to that change in order to address Xβs feedback?β
With their strengths, you want them to write out practices that will help them more effectively leverage their strengths. Sometimes, the key to improving weaknesses is using a strength in a new way - you can't pull a nail out by hammering it, but if you turn the hammer out you can use the claw of the hammer to pull it out, Other times, the key to improve your weaknesses is putting your strength away for the time being - if you try to solve every problem with a hammer, you'll never learn how to use a drill because they both require your hand, eye & focus.
You'll come back to these strengths at the same frequency as areas of improvement, but you'll build a much more thorough and detailed approach plan for those improvement areas.
For each improvement area, have the team members write out the following:
Description / Example of Current Behavior: write out what they look like today with an example in the past few months of the behavior in context.
Start / Stop / Continue: just as I share below, a set of behaviors that they will start doing, stop doing and continue doing. "Start" acknowledges what we can add, "Stop" acknowledges what we can subtract, and "Continue" acknowledges that we're already well on our way to doing this well.
Next Steps & Experiments: have the team member come up with experiments or actions they can take in order to create the desired behavior.
Support Structures: you & your team member commit to how you keep yourself accountable on this. For example, sending your coach a reminder every Sunday about the three things you're going to focus on this week. It's not homework or tasks because it doesn't "actually matter," it's about creating a network for supporting your change.
Desired Future: how will it look in the future when they have achieved the desired behavior.
Cost of not achieving: explain why this is important for the team member and for the company.
Typically, I come back to these bi-weekly in my 1:1s with team members (the other week, I focus on short-term performance via OKRs) to keep these top-of-mind and make sure they are seen as being as important as short-term performance.
π Reboot
Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up
Jerry Colonna's journey is quite a doozy - after a quick rise in the finance world and launching Flatiron with Fred Wilson (aka AVC), Jerry switched gears completely and became a CEO professional coach. His book Reboot is full of vulnerability, casually switching between talking about his painful childhood and talking about struggling with financial success.
I didn't read Reboot to learn more about getting Coached, I read Reboot to learn how to be a great Coach. As with many things, the key to better serving other people is understanding ourselves, and Reboot is a great book for leaders looking to look inward in order to better serve outwardly.
π¦Start / Stop / Continue
π’ Start understanding the career ambitions of your peers and direct reports
π΄ Stop assuming that the team's ambition is the same as yours.
π‘ Continue framing today's challenges in the context of tomorrow's ambitions
π’ Start framing development in terms of what the company needs from them, as "areas of focus."
π΄ Stop using terms like "weaknesses" and "strengths" to describe yourself and others.
π‘ Continue sharing your own experience as opportunities for their own reflection.
π’ Start giving feedback based on what you're seeing in your team's behavior.
π΄ Stop assuming that a job well done creates satisfaction.
π‘ Continue meeting weekly for 1:1s with each direct report.