Making Others Successful: SUCCESS THROUGH COACHING
If you have ever played on a team, whether academic, athletic, or a hobby, you’ve experienced coaching. This individual who serves as “Coach” invests knowledge, understanding, know-how, personal experience, and study into making others more capable and successful in that specific field. Professionally, these individuals go by different names: supervisor, manager, director, trainer. But they all involve elements of coaching. Coaches prepare the team to successfully think through potential challenges, using the resources at hand to find solutions, and lead them into fruitful production and achieving goals.
So, how do we more effectively coach our teams? First, just what is a “coach”? We can start with this basic description:
“A servant-leader who is passionately and sacrificially focused on making his or her team and the individual team members successful.”
Coaching is more than educating. Certainly, coaches must teach team members, but what they do is more profound. Educators pour in the knowledge; coaches call out the courage that puts the knowledge to work. Education focuses on information; coaching focuses on transformation. Education can change a mind; good coaching can change a life.
Think back to someone who helped you to become more successful, whether personally, professionally, or other. How did this person coach you? Did he or she model strategic preparation, a focused mindset, how to effectively interact, problem-solving, recovery from disappointment, and goal setting? Who has helped you prepare for the unknown future?
Not only do effective coaches prepare team members in the aforementioned ways but also invest in a person’s soul. Coaches value you as a person, challenge you, find a weakness and call you up to a position of strength, and are a bedrock of support on your journey. He or she refocuses you when you fail and affirms you in your victories. Coaches are guideposts in life that reorient the path forward.
On the other side of the table, we have the ineffective coach: not inspiring, overly demanding, uncaring, unresponsive, providing little to no helpful feedback, belittling, and even cruel. The sad result here is a discouraged team member with distrust of leadership.
I’d like to introduce you to an interesting acronym for COACH as a reminder of five behaviors of those who are effective in this role:
Conduct one-on-one meetings regularly.
Offer feedback and assistance.
Avoid overlooking the “middle stars.”
Create an environment where EVERYONE can be a coach.
Help others succeed.
(From 144 Ways to Walk the Talk, by Eric Harvey & Alexander Lucia)
Re-read the “A – Avoid” phrase again. Consider for a moment who the people are with whom we typically devote much of our time coaching. It is usually the high achieving stars and poor performing stars. Most people on a team, however, are the “middle stars.” To be effective coaches for all, we should strive to spend time with these “middle stars” who need development to become greater. With time and investment, they could very well be your next superstar. Inattention, on the other hand, could permit them to slip further into poor performance.
One final element of effective coaching is understanding your team members’ strongest motivations. People find satisfaction through various experiences that a servant leader can purposefully infuse in the workplace and in their relationships to inspire them to achieve more than what they thought possible. Here are some motivators:
1. To serve the Lord Jesus Christ: Motivation based on the quiet internal desire to glorify God by serving others is much more likely to yield professional joy and fulfillment.
2. Trust: Knowing someone believes in you is a powerful motivator. Like the father who hands the keys of his new car to a 16-year-old son, so a leader communicates trust in his or her team members.
3. Personal contribution: People desire to be a part of something they consider worthwhile. If their work is not intrinsically satisfying or if the outcome does not contribute constructively to society, they won’t be motivated in the highest and deepest sense (Covey, 297).
4. Respect: Team members like to know that their leader respects such things as their unique contribution to the team, their demanding workload, and the pace at which they work most effectively. Respect is expressed by the amount of freedom and flexibility given to do the work.
5. Degree of overlap between the individual’s goals and the team’s goals: The more common ground there is, the higher the motivation.
6. Personal growth: If team members feel that their ministry is allowing them to become better people, they will sustain an alert and cutting‑edge attitude.
7. Excellence: People want to excel and showcase their strengths.
8. Receiving feedback: People want to hear what the leader thought about their completed project and proposed suggestions. “Feedback is the breakfast of champions” (Blanchard and Johnson, 67).
What elements of coaching can you add to your toolbelt of servant leadership?