Don’t Solve Problems. Develop Problem Solvers

Premise

The real job of a leader is not decision-making. It is decision capability-building and this can be done by creating better leaders from those that they lead.

Bad leaders manage how work is being done, good leaders manage whether the work is being done and great leaders create capacity so that the work gets done.

This is possible only when we are able to find ways to train them, to coach them and to get them ready for their journey as a leader.

This requires us to give them additional responsibilities and create opportunities to lead as part of the day-to-day work. We can prepare them for these additional responsibilities via coaching conversations which we can have by creating coachable moments.

Before we even get to coaching conversations and talk about creating coachable moments, lets first understand what is a coaching conversation.

Three Types of Conversations

Any conversation that a leader has with their teams can be classified as one of the three kinds of conversations. Each of these three kinds of conversations are required tools for leaders – they fall on a spectrum and needs to be used in the appropriate situations.

Remember – Most leaders don’t over-direct or under-coach. They misdiagnose the moment.

Directive Conversation

This is when a leader says, do this or dont do that. This type of conversation or direction, is an important tool

• When you are dealing with someone who is very new and has not yet developed the skills required to do the job by themselves or
• When you are trying to deal with a crisis and need urgent responses or
• When you have a high stakes situation that needs a carefully calibrated response from you as a leader.

Mentoring Conversation

This is when a leader says, when I faced a similar situation, here is what I did and this is why I did it. This type of conversation is an important tool

• When you are dealing with someone who has enough experience and the ability to figure out the right approach when directed towards the right way forward. You don’t have to spell it out.

Coaching Conversation

This is when a leader uses questions to enable the colleague to arrive at the best way forward themselves. This type of conversation is the right way forward

• When you are dealing with someone who hasn’t yet developed the expertise required to arrive at the best way forward but has the potential to do so, when guided well
• When you want to teach them the ability to think through something
• When you want to help them develop experitise, instinct and become a leader worth following.

There are many frameworks that are available for how to conduct a coaching conversations. All of them require a few fundamental things in order to be effective:

• There is trust between the two people involved in the coaching conversation
• You as a leader are open and empathetic towards the person being coached
• The person who is being coached is open and wants to be coached
• The coaching conversation is beneficial for everyone involved, including the team overall.

The only way that coaching as a leader is different from all the above coaching models is that in this case, we are moving the person we coach towards an outcome (sometimes the outcome we already know and at other time allow the outcome emerge – however with the attributes we already know and want), which in traditional coaching models, is a no go.

Leadership coaching is not about helping your team in the process of self-discovery. It is about aligning deep, independent thinking with organisational reality.

The real job of a leader is not decision-making. It is building the capacity and capability for good decision making.

When not to coach

Before we even get started on how to identify how to coach someone as part of the regular work day, it is important to know when is it a good idea not to coach.

Here are some very specific situations where coaching is probably a bad idea:

High stake situations:

While there might be some times with some people, it might be a good idea, but for most of us and in most cases, high stake situations are not a good idea to use as coaching moments.

We can create a coaching moment and coach people after the high stake situation is dealt with.

This doesnt mean we don’t invite opinions from those we want to coach, it just means that we dont abdicate the responsibility of making the crucial decision and the accountability of the results from that decision to someone else.

Attempting to coach during high-stakes moments doesn’t build leaders. It builds anxiety and confusion.

Situations that require urgent responses:

Just like high stake situations, there come times when speed matters a lot more than anything else. In such situations, as leaders, we make the decision and act with speed and once the urgency has passed, we work with the team member to find a coachable moment with them about the urgent situation and how it was responded to.

Remember that coaching can be a tax on speed.

When Emotions are running high:

No coaching is possible when emotions are running high – either you are feeling it or the person you want to coach is feeling it. It also doesn’t matter if the emotion is a positive one (happiness or joy or similar) or a negative one (anger or frustration or sadness or similar).

When we are feeling emotionally aroused, our ability to understand or teach is limited. So, we need to first find a way to bring our emotions back to normal and then look for a coachable moment.

Coachable Moments

Now, that we have looked at some moments that are not suited for a coaching conversation, let’s find out how we can identify and spot coachable moments and have a coaching conversation and while at it, let’s also learn how we can get better as a coach.

Remember, coachable moments are when you help improve the thinking and decision making capability of your team.

So, we need to take them seriously and with utmost respect.

Any interaction with the people we lead can be converted into a coaching conversation, apart from the above listed situations. Even in these cases, we can always go come back to these situations and explore how they were handled and in that find a way to have a coaching conversations.

Here are some non-exhaustive ideas from a practitioner’s point-of-view, on how can we as leaders show up as a coach and help our teams get better and help them develop themselves as a Leader Worth Following.

How we Show Up

As in parenting, the people we lead learn about what is acceptable and what is not, by observing us and how we behave. So, it is super important to show up and behave the way we want our teams to behave. There can’t be two sets of rules within the same team.

If you observe carefully, if there is someone who has been a part of your team for any decent duration of time, they will start copying your mannerisms (the way you address people, the way you start your meetings, the way you respond to situations) sub-consciously. This is the power of social norms and the power of the leadership position.

So, before we can do anything else, we need to ensure that we show up and behave the way a leader worth following is expected to behave and we would have done half of our jobs.

Team Meetings

Team meetings are a great tool to coach people. One of the ways we can use the power of these team meetings is by inviting someone on our team to lead all team meetings for a month (if we meet weekly) or for a quarter (if we meet monthly).

They are responsible for setting the agenda, inviting the speakers, preparing the slides, running the meeting, taking notes and following up on action items that were agreed upon. And since this responsibility will remain with them for a specific amount of time, they know that they can plan their work around this.

When you offer this responsibility (yes, offer – they can always refuse to take this up and that can lead to a completely different conversation), you also offer them your full support.

They should be able to come to you with questions, ideas, suggestions, challenges and you work them through together. The way you do that is through coaching them through the process (we will come to what I mean by coaching in a bit) instead of directing them to the best way forward (you can do this as well, when the person is very junior and needs it).

This creates an opportunity for every member on your team to showcase their ability to lead a team meeting, a small but an important skill, if they want to become a leader worth following. And in the act of leading the team meeting, they are also learning other soft skills (Influencing, negotiation, etc).

Problem Solving

Every time you are faced with a problem that you need to solve, it is a great opportunity to create coachable moments and to create a coaching conversation (unless it falls in the urgent or critical category, in which case you do the same thing, but a bit later in the future).

When you come up against a problem (or someone on your team comes up with a problem) that needs solving, you invite the most relevant person, who has the experience or the aspiration to grow to a level that requires them to know how to solve such problems, and have a conversation with them.

You ask them the following question – If you were to solve this problem, how would you go about solving it? And ask them to think out aloud if they have some experience with similar problems.

If not, ask them to come back to you with proposals of how they will solve this, along with their thinking behind their proposals (Yes, in the plural). They are free to ask you questions or reach out to anyone relevant (depending on the sensitivity of the problem).

This framing about coming up with multiple solutions is also in a way coaching – this teaches them that for any problem, there are always multiple solutions. The framing about open to reach out to anyone for help is also another coachable moment – teaching them early that it is ok to ask for help.

Once, they come back with their proposals, ask them to share their thinking about how they would solve the problem. You can then either agree with their approach (if it is correct) or guide them toward other ways to solve the problem that are available. The key here is for them to arrive at the optimal solution by themselves, maybe with your support, but they need to feel that they came up with the solution. Then implement the solution, giving them due credit publicly.

Repeat this process with different colleagues for different sets of problems based on their current situation, ability and future aspirations. It is crucial that we don’t always go to the same person, which is easy to do for us.

This builds up their ability to solve problems, helps them develop instinct and build confidence in their ability.

If you are coming to this conversation after dealing with an urgent or critical situation, we do the exact same process but in addition, do it in reverse order as well (starting from the solution we used to address and going back to why this was chosen over the other potential solutions).

This helps them understand the concept of tradeoffs and how to find balance when picking between two competing sets of values.

When they come to you for advice or approval

When someone on your team comes to you for some advice (lets acknowledge that if this is happening, you are already doing some good work – Congratulations), it is a great opportunity for a coaching conversation. Again, the idea here is to help them (through asking a series of questions, sometime guided questions), come up with a resolution to the questions that they came to you for advice.

When they come to you for approval, could also potentially be a good coaching opportunity, if they haven’t fully made the case based on which you can provide your approval.

In this case, you use the coaching conversation to guide them such that they recognise what’s missing by themselves and are able to get the same to you.

This also teaches them about how you think about something before you approve it. They can use similar process when they become leaders themselves and until then, make it easier for you to approve their requests, as it has everything you need from them.

Performance Appraisals

The same process holds good while you are providing them feedback on their performance (weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual).

By letting them understand and come to a shared view of how you think about performance and the reasoning behind your feedback, you are creating a trusting relationship and training them to be on their way to becoming a Leader Worth Following.

This also has the benefit of the team being extremely clear on what is expected out of them and how they measure upto those standards. It makes the leaders job easier when it comes to the next round of appraisals and the time in-between.

In conclusion

A leader’s real output is not producing results. It is to produce people who can produce results without them. The time we spend on coaching is an investment in the future.

In order to make this a reality, we can treat every interaction that we have with our team members as a coachable moment that can lead to a coaching conversation.

The better we get at this, the more effective the team gets and the less busier we get so that we can spend more time on dealing with the critical and urgent situations as and when they arrive.

As a leader, it is our responsibility to develop our teams such that they bloom into leaders worth following are are able to realise their full potential.

The feedback I usually get from leaders is that they are far too busy to find time and energy to invest into coaching. My response to that is that the very reason they are so busy is because they didnt take the time to coach their teams to make the decisions that they are being forced to make.

The question is not whether you have time to coach. The question is whether you want to keep solving the same problems forever.

PS: You can watch me talk about it here.