How was your last performance review or status meeting with your team? How is operation Command + Control going? How is your scoreboard looking? How are you doing with answering a million unasked or misunderstood questions from your team?
Rhetorically, how is management or leadership post-covid/ in 2021 going for you?
Once upon a time, career growth was a function of technical expertise, emotional intelligence, and having the right conversations. The general idea of management was to develop and direct teams to understand the growth continuum of the business and replicate its long-served success story.
Today, we are breaking all the rules.
Management and People Development is evolving into a model like 21st-century parenting – guidelines instead of rules, support instead of instructions, freedom to express instead of failure to communicate, joint evaluation instead of one-way feedback, co-planning instead of setting KPIs, and so on. In other words, what used to be termed “Manager” might as well be called “Coach”.
Have you ever wondered why sports is such a thriving industry, one that is referred to, learned from, and admired by a larger percentage of the world? It is because anyone good enough for the sports stage is only there because they have a powerful coach. The role of the sports coach is to guide athletes to achieve their full potential by wearing many hats, including – instructor, assessor, mentor, facilitator, chauffeur, adviser, motivator, counsellor, organiser, and cheerleader. It is a lot of responsibility, and they are all coined under one word – Coach.
This role shift from manager to coach in business has been dramatic but long overdue. Organisations are transforming themselves for the digital age; leaders have identified a need to cultivate new skills, and companies are investing in the new era of management. Coaching has now become integral to the learning culture, and if you want to optimise talent, you need to grab your whistle and hop on the “coaching coach” now.
What does it entail? It is not top-level management type coaching; it is growing the line manager as a coach and real-time talent developer. Coaching is no longer just a benevolent form of knowledge sharing with a subordinate. It is helping to inspire them to fuel goals that may have earlier seemed far-fetched. According to Sir John Whitmore, skilled coaching involves “unlocking people’s potential to maximise their performance.”
In most organisations, there is a huge gap between goals and execution. Placing a primary focus on developing managers to become exceptional coaches normalises coaching and helps talent surpass their expectations. Right after this, these coaches must understand how to create a standardised, fluid system of coaching, and this is where we come in – we can help you bridge that gap between goals and execution.
We have created a ‘High-Performance Coaching’ course to help tackle your deepest, darkest performance fears; and hit your highest goals simultaneously. A pcl. survey of over 1,000 managers in the last year ranked coaching as their least-favourite, least-practised management style, saying they simply did not have time and there was no definite structure to try it out. They blamed it on the turmoil of work and stress and reckoned that while it was necessary, it just was not possible. However, this so-called tedious task was re-ranked the most learned principle at all the classes attended by these same managers.
Their lack of enthusiasm turned to zeal and a willingness to grasp coaching as a behavioural shift in managerial behaviour. They also realised that the behaviours of their employees were more tied to their behaviour as managers – now called coaches – than they expected. The good news is that with the right support, almost anybody can become an exceptional coach. The impact of this knowledge is why we wound up here – helping businesses work with their managers to unravel the tough questions, evolve, and embrace their role as coaches to drive exponential growth and flawless results.
For further information on the pcl. learning services for High-Performance Coaching, please reach out to the Training team at Training@phillipsconsulting.net
Written by:
Feranmi Owolabi-Okojie
Learning Innovation Lead, Training
