Welcome to Hacking Your Leadership. I'm Chris and I'm Lorenzo. And Lorenzo on
this episode, I want to talk about coaching. I cannot wait to talk
about coaching. We've talked about coaching before, and I think I'm seeing a
lot more emphasis on coaching as it relates to the importance of figuring out whether
a person is going to succeed or fail as a leader. And what I
mean by that is that we've been talking about coaching for a long time,
and we've had full episodes on just how to be a better coach to people.
I'm seeing a lot of organizations start to understand the importance of that,
like they've they've used the word for a long time, but it's like a
catch all term that means a lot of different things to a lot of different
people, and a lot of organizations are moving into this kind of mindset where
they think, Okay, we need to have a formalized process around a term
whether or not a person is good at coaching, whether they are a coach,
and and that will help us determine whether or they will be a successful
leader when it comes to you know, hiring and promotion decisions and so I
think it's a it's an interesting kind of development that I part of me is
thinking, great, this is amazing. I love that companies are doing this.
The other part of me is saying, well, duh, like,
why where were you five years ago? Right? Yeah, No, I
was gonna say it's it's it's not a new concept. And coaches have been
around for a very long time in business, outside of business and sports and
things like that. And so I think that what I've experienced as somebody who's
you know, had leaders and mentors and things like that, is that,
you know, some of the best leaders I've ever had have been phenomenal coaches.
They they've really, you know, done a great job at inspiring,
motivating, creating vision, you know, having expectations, accountability, you know,
personal and team accountability. Like there's so many layers to being a great
coach, and so much of it is in the leadership space as well.
And so you know, to see that now this is something that's being called
out, something that you have to be a good coach. I think on
paper that makes a lot of sense. I think in reality, to understand
what a good coach is, you have to have someone who can assess a
coach, right, and so like that, now we start to peel this
thing back to say, like, you can't just say someone's a good coach,
because you know you've been told or maybe you've seen the greatest coaches have
the greatest outcomes. And when I say outcomes, I don't just meet from
a business standpoint. I see it from a leadership legacy standpoint. Show me
a great coach, and I should easily be able to connect the dots on
the leaders that have worked for them, and then have them have themselves become
successful leaders and have been able to then also create better leaders. Like that,
to me is the ultimate kind of thread to pull when it comes to
leadership coaching for me, right, and to pull words directly from your mouth
that you've said many times before. You can talk about something in terms of
being able to measure it or figure out how good somebody is at it,
you have to define it first. You have to define what coaching or anything
is. Otherwise you could be talking a different language than someone else and neither
of you could be wrong. Right. It's just a matter of it's making
sure that when you're having these conversations that everybody's on the same page for what
this means. And so what this brings me to is an article that I
saw on the Forbes Leadership Network around It's an article written by their Coaches Council,
and these are people who are nationally recognized coaches, like actual formal coaches,
and they've built businesses around being coaching, being coaches, coaching other people
and turning leaders into coaches themselves. And they have this list of things that
they would this is advice that they would give their younger selves. So this
is these are things that coaches know to their core to be true, and
they may not have known those things to be true when they started out,
and they wish they had. And a lot of these things are really good
in terms of if you are trying to become a better coach, these these
are absolutely things that you need to think about getting better at because this will
make or break you as a coach as and then therefore as a leader as
well. There's a lot of them on here, There's almost twenty of them,
and so we're going to go over them on a few different episodes.
I don't even know how long this is going to take to go through them,
but there's some of these, you know, require maybe a minute or
two of talking, but some of them require a lot of in depth kind
of analysis, and I want to make sure we have time to do that
because they're all really important pieces of information or pieces of advice that if you
are trying to be a better leader, this is where you'd want to start.
You want to start with becoming a better coach, because there are people
who are good at coaching who aren't necessarily great leaders, but there are aren't
any great leaders who don't know how to coach like it is is absolutely part
of that thread of being an effective leader, and if you aren't good at
coaching, you definitely will not be an effective leader, and your leadership crew
will probably be stagnated or cut short. Of the many that are on here,
the very first, one, really important place to start out is it
talks about listening being a superpower. And I've had I've heard this term before.
Listening is a superpower. The difference between a person who is listening to
me in order to just make sure they're being respectful while they wait for their
place to speak is very different from a person who I can tell is listening
because they're actually trying to learn something, and they haven't even they don't even
know what they're going to say yet because they haven't developed it in their mind,
because they're just listening right now, and what they want to say isn't
isn't already a baked pie, which it can't be because what I'm I'm saying
to them should impact what they have to say next, and if it doesn't,
then that means they weren't even listening to me to begin with. They
were just waiting to kind of, you know, coach me up or or
give me, you know, whatever they wanted to say. Yeah, it's
such a great point, you know. It's I was talking to somebody about
this the other week and it was kind of like are you listening but are
or are you hearing? Or are you hearing? But are you listening?
And we were having this conversation around this, and it's such a critical critical
point here. It's like understanding And I when I think of listening, there's
like the element of like listening to somebody in a conversation. But I also
believe that, like when I say the term listening as talking about definition,
I'm also like listening, Like I see that as observing as well, like
listening to what your business is telling you, listening to what your customers might
be telling you, listening to what your people are telling you through their behavior.
So not the actual like literal term of like not just listening to what
they're saying and taking that in and then and then understanding how you want to
respond, but like, are you away of things that are going on?
Are you are you listening and watching for the nuance and conversations? Are you
seeing things when leaders may feel uncomfortable in a conversation or maybe second guessing themselves.
You know, they they they want to say something to you, but
the words aren't actually coming out, but you can sense that type of thing.
So like, for me, listening is actually even bigger than just like
the actual active of hearing what somebody is saying to you, taking it all
in and then being able to respond you know, accordingly. But I absolutely
believe it's a major component when it comes to actually becoming a better coach,
because I'm not just listening to the words that are coming out of your mouth.
I'm also asking questions to listen to how you got there, and how
you explain it, and how you prioritize the explanation. I'm taking all of
that in because that, for me is helpful and understanding how I can best
support you as a leader in coach, in tweaking the things or adjusting the
things. You know, Like I was, I'll share another example of real
life example and actually I'm going to write about this on the newsletter about the
term accountability and the term responsibility. And I was talking to a leader and
they were talking about accountability and people are like, hey, I know as
a leader, like accountability is really important to you, and you know it's
about like, it's about accountability. And I pause them, I said,
I here's what I'm gonna ask you to do. I'm asking you to change
that terminology and I want you to use responsibility instead, because what I'm hearing
you say is that you are a responsible person and you want your people to
be responsible. So like you want to be responsible for what you're responsible for,
you want them to be responsible for what they're responsible for. You want
to be responsible together for the customers, the clients that you serve. Accountability
is the outcome of people choosing not to be responsible. So I was like,
when you hear the word accountability, when people say that to you as
a leader, say, oh, I know that you're really big on accountability,
so actually no, no, I'm big on responsibility, my responsibility,
your responsibility. Right, Accountability is just that's what happens if, in fact,
one of us chooses not to be responsible for what we're responsible for.
So you know, I I share that examples like again, I'm listening,
I'm hearing, and then I'm helping to shape maybe what that dialogu would look
like in the future. Right, Yeah, here's my for those of you
playing hacking readership bingo. Still, here's my my parenting reference. Yes,
par reference, Yes I had. I had a conversation with one of my
kids about a group project that they were working on for school where another person
in the group just didn't do anything and and consequently the project was not turned
in on time and uh and and my daughter got a bad grade on on
the project even though she did the part that she was supposed to do.
And we had a conversation about how something could be not your fault but still
your responsibility, meaning if if you are taking ownership for the grade that you
want, you can say, oh, I'm washing my hands of this.
I did my part. If I get a bad grade, it's on them.
It's like, well, no, if you get a bad grade,
even if you're doing your part, it might be caused by them, but
it doesn't mean it's on them. Your bad grade is still on you.
So something could be not your fault but still your responsibility. And to me,
I look at the exact same way when it comes to accountability and responsibility,
so that you know, if a leader, if an element is not
an actual part of a leader's job description to do, but the outcome of
that thing not getting done could absolutely impact things that are on a leader to
get done. Now that becomes part of the leader's job like they own it
by proxy basically, you know, or at least they have to consider the
fact that if they decide to wash their hands of it and not own it
because it's not their responsibility, that's fine, But they don't get to wash
their hands of what the collateral damage or the ripple effect is of that thing
not getting done just because it wasn't their fault that it didn't get done.
This is the exact same thing. It's it's this, it's this reading between
the lines. So if you're if you are listening to your employees and not
just what they're saying, but what they aren't saying their body language and reading
between the lines. These are the types of questions you'll end up asking yourself
as far as you know, how how did they get here? Like are
they are? They coming to you as the leader and they're looking for validation
because they're talking about something that is they're having a problem with. Do you
have the ability in the moment to be able to think about the things that
they're saying and realize why they got to the place that they got to Because
in a lot of time, a lot of cases, employees who are having
these conversations with you, they are the you know, they're the cause of
their own wounds, right, That's something that they did cause them to now
be in this place where they feel like they have a problem they have to
solve. But as a leader, you don't just get to say, well,
you made your bed, now you're gonna lie in it. You know,
you have to address it in a way that doesn't disengage them or make
them not want to talk to you as a leader, but while also not
just simply validating the things that they're saying. In a way that allows them
to keep on the path that they're on and just trying to make them feel
better like they were listening to Because if you're listening, as it is defined
here and they call it a superpower, it's what are you doing with that
listening? It's what tools do you have that you can unlock based on how
you are processing the things that person is saying? And then how can you
steer that person in a path that helps them get better and helps them become
a better employee, a better person, a better leader without them leaving the
conversation feeling like you schooled them, Like it's almost like they have to get
there on their own and the conversation can help them get there. And then
you've done your job as a coach and as a leader to help them get
where they need to go without necessarily being the one that owns the conversation yourself.
You're doing a lot more listening than you are talking. Absolutely, and
with that it brings us to this episodes one minute hack. But first a
few words from our sponsors. All right, for this episode is one minute
Heck, here's we want you to do. Get very good at the phrase.
So what I'm hearing you say is and what I mean by that is,
when you're talking to one of your employees, be listening to the point
of being able to repeat to them exactly what they said back to them.
This is so important to do because it will do one of two things.
First, it will absolutely validate them. It'll make sure that they understand that
you were listening to every single thing that they said. Sometimes people can have
a tendency to say something that they didn't actually mean, and hearing it get
said back to them in exactly the way they said it might make them think,
you know what, Yes, that is what I said. That's not
exactly what I meant, So let me go back over it with you again.
And this brings us back to something we talked about the beginning of the
episode, which is the importance of defining something before you can have a conversation
about it. If you're listening to an employee with the mindset of you want
to help them, you want to be able to coach them, you want
to be able to help them get better or solve their problem, whatever that
is, you two have to be on the same page for what that problem
is. And defining whose responsibility is who's accountable for it, and how you
can help the employee through that process. The agreeing on what the employee said
in terms of how they phrased the problem to you is a must before you
can go down that path. So being able to repeat back to them exactly
what they said in a way that is validating is the most important thing you
can do when it comes to using listening as an actual superpower. Yeah,
it's a great one minute hack, And again, I think it's such an
important part of it. You know, there's so many things we can talk
about when it comes to active listening and active questioning and how do you make
sure that you're you know, you're actually hearing what your people have to say
and in those types of terms like what I what I heard you say is
you know, these things matter a lot when it comes to being able to
do being able to not only build great culture with the team, but but
build great relationships with your people, you know. And I've definitely had those
moments where it's gone both ways. I say, so what I heard you
say was this, and they said like yeah, absolutely, I'll say okay,
great, Like if that's the case, Like let's have this conversation here.
Let's make sure we're good here. And I've definitely had the opportunity where
people have said like, no, no, no, that's not that's not
what I it's not what I said. I said, No, that's what
you said. They're like, well, that's not what I meant. Okay,
that's not what you meant. That's fine, Yes, that's not what
you meant. Then that helped me better understand what you meant, because I
want to make sure that that what we talk about, what I share,
what perspective, whatever it is that you're asking for me to take a look
at in our conversation here, that I understand what you mean so I can
best help us to move forward in whatever direction we're going. And I think
those things are really really important. And to be a great coach again means
you really have to be attuned to what people are saying, what people are
doing, how they're getting there, and how you are taking in that information
to then be able to coach them in a way that is it impactful and
positive and it helps to to get them what they need to be more successful
in their role, right, all right, And I think this is a
really important thing when you're doing this with people too, is that it can't
ever come off as if you are patronizing them or that you are trying to
school them. If you're truly looking at listening as a superpower to help you
solve a problem for that for that employee, or to help them solve their
own problems. If that's your goal, then the the the win is to
make sure the relationship continues in a positive way, because it's likely the problem
that that person is presenting to you isn't going to be solved in a moment.
It's going to take follow up, but it's going to take the continuation
of the relationship in a positive way. And so if you if they say
something to you and they phrase a problem a certain way and you respond back
with so what I'm hearing you say is that you, you know, don't
don't relate to people well and cause problems with people. Like if you're doing
this in a way that says you're trying to shine a spotlight on their own
shortcomings, you've already gone about it the wrong way. I'm not saying that
person doesn't have shortcomings. Again, they could be the complete cause of the
problem of the situation. That they're in and they could be their own worst
enemy when it comes to this stuff. It's not your place to force fully
rip their head out of the sand, force them to look in the mirror
at themselves and have this, you know, come to Jesus moments, right.
They have to get there on their own, and they will only do
that through you if they feel like they can trust you to help them work
through some things, as opposed to, you know, just jumping in and
thinking you have the answer to solve their problem right away. Absolutely, and
with that it brings us to the end of this episode. This is hacking
leadership. I'm Lorenzo and I'm Chris, and we'll talk to you all next time.