Want teams to be self-managing? Be more coaching

Coaching as the oft-misunderstood antidote to people being helplessly dependent on you or others

Here is a common problem I hear people, especially leaders, describe when they are trying to develop self-managing teams:

“People are dependent on me [or others]. Instead of taking initiative, they’re always asking for solutions and answers. They aren’t really taking responsibility or ownership of anything. They are passive, waiting for someone else to take care of their complaints.”

The trap many leaders fall into in response to this is: trying to solve it. We get busy thinking “how can I get people to be more responsible? To take more ownership?” We design all sorts of structures and processes to address it. Or we make a speech about how it needs to change. In summary, it is us who become responsible. And here’s the fun thing about humans and dynamics: the more responsible we become, the less responsible others become. We are part of the system we don’t want!

There are different ways out of this dynamic and one of them I want to share is coaching.

Different definitions of coaching

When I mention the word coaching, very often what people think I mean is a profession. Someone who has learned lots of clever models that they will use on me, like a wizard with some spells. A lot of people I meet have had unsatisfactory experiences of being coached. “Someone asked me questions when what I wanted was answers.” “I felt like they were doing something to me and I didn’t like it.” (No shade to professional coaches, I’m one myself!)

But there is another way of defining coaching. One that is, in my opinion, more accessible and more powerful.

Here’s an alternative definition from my colleague Karin Tenelius in our book Moose Heads on the Table:

The purpose of coaching is to empower another person to achieve their desired aim. Coaching is a “way of being” which enables another person to choose to draw on their own potential.

With this definition, anyone can choose to be more coaching. All it takes is intention and practising three core abilities (more on that in a moment).

And if you want people around you to be less dependent on you, to be more self-sufficient, more creative, more responsible… then practising a more coaching way of being might be of interest to you.

Here are some tips for adopting a more coaching way of being.

1. Kick the ‘automatic advice’ habit

All of us have been conditioned to give advice way more quickly and more often than is actually useful. Most leaders have often also been promoted for this! So here’s a provocative statement:

If you are an automatic advice addict and a problem-solving robot, you are training people around you to be dependent and passive, and you are robbing them of their potential.

Once you realise that automatic advice is not always helpful, one practical thing you can do is ask people what they want when they come to you with problems, instead of assuming that advice is what they want.

For example:

Person A: “I want to talk to you about this problem I’m having with my project.”

Person B: “Sure. What are you looking for from me? Do you want me to share my advice, or do you want some coaching?”

Or, if coaching is not in your team/organisation’s vocabulary…

Person B: “Sure. What are you looking for from me? Do you want me to share my advice, or do you want me to listen to you, and maybe ask some questions that help you get clear and see if you can find a way forward?”

At this point, some people in my courses tell me that their colleagues will choose the advice option every time. This for me is an indicator that people haven’t experienced the alternative (or had a good experience of being coached) and so assume that advice is the only option that will give them results.

In this case, you could choose to try and ‘enrol’ people in the possibility in coaching which could sound something like this:

“OK, I can listen to you and if I have some advice, I could share that. But I also think it could be valuable for me to listen, and ask you some coaching questions, and see if that sheds some new light on your challenge. You might have a much better solution than me! Would you be up for trying that? And if it’s not helpful, we can always switch back to an advice conversation.”

2. Don’t coach people who don’t want coaching

I’ve found that one of the reasons people have frustrating experiences with coaches is that they’ve found themselves being coached when that isn’t what they want. As we’ve established in tip number one, it’s good to give people a choice.

But one thing I will say is that whether people want coaching or not, there are some key principles of having a more coaching ‘way of being’ that will support them, even in an advice conversation.

One of these principles is simply to stay curious a little longer. This comes from Michael Bungay Stanier, a best-selling author of down-to-earth coaching books.

A main reason why our automatic advice often isn’t helpful is because we assume the first challenge a person shares is the real challenge. So even if you are in an advice conversation, staying curious a little longer will support the person to get to the root of their problem and you to be more ‘chosen’ (versus reactive) in what you say next.

3. Practise three core abilities

There are three core abilities that make a good coach: listening, asking questions, and giving feedback.

Listening – in an advice conversation, we are mainly thinking. In a coaching conversation, the main activity is listening. But it’s a more intentional kind of listening than we usually do. We are listening more deeply, not just to what’s being said, but to what’s under the surface. What’s in the way. What’s needed. So it’s good to train this muscle. (One resource for practical techniques to try out that I quite like is Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator. He talks about mirroring, labelling and other listening techniques that you can practice.)

Asking questions – again, when we are in advice-mode, we ask thinking questions to help us gather facts and analyse the problem. In a coaching conversation, all we need to know is the person’s goal for the conversation, and then we ask questions from our listening. Questions that place the responsibility with the other person and move things forward. You could even call them ‘lazy questions’.

Questions like:

• What is the real challenge here?

• What would you need in order to do [their words]?

• What’s missing for you to take a first step?

Giving feedback – once I know the person’s goal or outcome, and I start listening to them and asking questions, I might hear something that’s in the way for them. For example, let’s say someone has the goal of finding a way to meet a tight project deadline. But as you listen to them, you can hear that their mindset is “it’s impossible.” So you could give them feedback on that:

“Can I share some feedback about something I see is in the way for you to achieve your goal? It sounds like you have a mindset that it’s 100% impossible and as long as you see it that way, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to find a way forward.”

It’s good if I can state the feedback, free from advice, and see if it resonates. And if it does, I can coach them in how to shift that mindset by again listening and asking coaching questions.

So the key word in tip number three is ‘practise’. Find ways to practise your listening skills – get feedback from people on when they feel heard and when they don’t. Find ways to practise coaching questions – learn a vocabulary of coaching questions and then try them out. Notice when you ask coaching questions, and notice when you slip into asking thinking questions. And finally, practise giving feedback. Feedback could be the topic for a whole other blog, but for our purposes here: practise giving feedback when you see something is in the way for something someone wants, and ask for feedback on your feedback. What was helpful and what was not?

4. Cultivate a coaching mindset

Our way of being is shaped not just by what we do (like the three abilities above), but also by how we see ourselves, others, and the world. In other words, our mindsets.

The kinds of mindsets that drive our automatic advice addict persona can be things like:

• I need to give advice to be helpful

• If I don’t offer solutions, we will fail

• Struggling people need to be taken care of

• Things will go faster if I just give my advice

To be clear, this doesn’t make us bad people. These are tapes that have been playing in our heads for years, maybe even decades, and have served us well in some respects. But they are unproductive if what we want is to be more coaching.

It can be helpful, then, to ask yourself: what is driving my automatic advice addict? What do I tell myself when I justify doing that?

Once we are more self-aware of what drives us, and also what triggers that mindset, we can create something more in service of how we do want to be.

One aspect of a coaching mindset that my colleagues and I at Tuff have come up with is: to relate to people’s potential.

To say more about what that means, let me describe the opposite. If I’m someone who doesn’t relate to others’ potential, I might believe that people are fragile and need to be taken care of, and therefore I see my job as making their life comfortable and easy. Or I might see someone helpless and believe that they will not find a solution unless I give them one. Or I might not trust that others can make good decisions, or be impatient because they are going too slowly and might never get there.

So to relate to potential means to have a mindset and a way of being that others have capacity and potential, whether or not it is visible right now. I might not see it, and maybe they don’t even see it in themselves. But it is there nonetheless. That’s why research shows us time and time again that we draw on more of ourselves when someone relates to us as capable, when they trust us more than we expect.

A good way to practise relating to potential is when you have someone who appears really stuck and answers your question with “I don’t know”, try being still, listening to them, perhaps even reflecting back: “wow, seems like you’re really stuck” followed by an empathetic silence, and watch what happens. You’d be amazed at how often people, in that space that isn’t filled with advice, start to tap into their resourcefulness. Suddenly you might hear: “Yeah… but I guess maybe what I need to do is…” – and they start to do the work!

Some caveats

• I want to be clear that being more coaching doesn’t mean I can never give advice. It simply means that I am more conscious when choosing to give advice, or considering if a coaching conversation could be more beneficial. There are times when advice is entirely appropriate (for example, when someone is really new and still learning the ropes.)

• Being more coaching doesn’t mean abdicating or abandoning people. Quite the opposite. Another part of the coaching mindset is to ‘be for’ people, to be caring. That means I listen with curiosity and compassion, without becoming parental.

• Part of the way out of the dynamic of people depending on me is being more coaching. In other words, to stop feeding that dependency with automatic advice. But I can also use coaching as a way of understanding what’s driving that person’s dependency. What would they need in order to feel more secure? What are we missing for people to be more self-sufficient? The answers could be a whole myriad of things, such as: how I’m being; that person’s individual needs; a lack of information or resources; or structures or processes that we are missing.

In summary…

If you want people to be less dependent on you and more self-sufficient; if you want people to develop and thrive; if you want to unleash the potential of your teams; if you want more time for yourself (!), consider being more coaching.

And remember these four tips:

1. Kick the ‘automatic advice’ habit – ask people if they want advice, and become more conscious about when you give it and when it might be better to do something else

2. Don’t coach people who don’t want coaching – give people a choice, and even if it’s not a coaching conversation, stay curious a little longer

3. Practise three core abilities – train your muscles in listening, asking coaching questions, and giving feedback about what’s in the way

4. Cultivate a coaching mindset – notice which mindsets drives your advice habit, and try instead to relate to people’s potential, and create new mindsets that help you be the person you want to be

“There is a quiet political message… that coaching is available to all of us and is not a profession, but a way of being with each other.”
– Peter Block

Something that might interest you…

If you’re interesting in training your coaching abilities and how to support self-managing teams to thrive in general, I’m launching a course together with my colleagues at Tuff and Corporate Rebels called ‘Self-Management Bootcamp’.

It’s a programme designed specifically for people working with self-managing teams who are interested in the inner shift – the mindset, ways of being, and skills needed for new ways of working to actually work

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Recommended reading:

• My book, ‘Moose Heads on the Table: Stories About Self-Managing Companies from Sweden’, if you want to learn more about a coaching mindset and how to support teams to be more self-managing

• The book ‘The Advice Trap’ by Michael Bungay Stanier, who has some provocative insights about the limits of advice and how to tame your advice monster! You can also listen to my conversation with Michael on my podcast, Leadermorphosis, about being more coaching.

• The book ‘Confronting Our Freedom: Leading a Culture of Chosen Accountability and Belonging’ by Peter Block and Peter Kostenbaum, which has some powerful soundbites about leadership and why we are so often scared of freedom (ours and others’)