How to Use Coaching to Develop Excellence in Your Team
What if, as managers, we could help people grow not just in their roles, but as whole individuals?
Over the past few years I’ve become pretty excited about the practice of coaching. In my role as Engineering Manager I’ve always helped people on my team develop in their roles and advance in their careers. Yet the entrepreneur in me always found this a rather constrained exercise. How, as a manager, could I help people grow not just in their roles, but as whole individuals? What would it look like to truly help folks develop and unlock their full potential?
My introduction to coaching was through leadership development programs offered to leaders at Airbnb. Since then I’ve been gradually exploring these concepts more deeply. This way of working with people to foster their innate potential and develop excellence has been incredibly exciting to me. Along the journey, I’ve been very fortunate to get to learn from excellent learning and leadership development professionals who have enthusiastically shared their passion. Kate Saber, who generously spent many hours teaching me and a group of folks interested in the topic, in particular deserves much of the credit for my growth along this dimension to date.
I now coach startup founders as well as folks across the industry in varying roles from engineering and product leadership to finance. While really I’m just getting started on this path, practicing coaching has been some of the most rewarding work I’ve done recently, and I believe that these tools would be hugely beneficial to anyone who works in a people leadership capacity. To that end, I thought it might be helpful to share some thoughts on coaching from the perspective of a people manager.
Everybody’s talking about coaching. What is it, anyway?
Coaching is a practice of helping people grow themselves in the direction they want to, by developing new mindsets and changing behavior. In coaching we help people create clarity on their development goals and implement practices to achieve their goals. We can use introspection, challenge perspectives and offer different ways of looking at the world, and suggest practices to achieve behavior changes that help people overcome obstacles on their path. In contrast to consultancy and mentorship, coaching focuses less on providing answers and more on helping people create insights to help them come up with answers themselves. As a coach, you are not the expert and many times don’t have the answers. You simply shine a light or hold up a mirror to help coachees identify limiting beliefs, navigate new options, and develop clarity.
While athletes have coaches, and pretty much every top executive has a coach, more and more people seek coaching to help them in their careers or even personal lives. Society and work environments are becoming increasingly complex and we need new ways to navigate and make sense of it all. On a spectrum between consultancy on the one hand, and therapy on the other, coaching lies somewhere in the middle. In contrast to consulting, coaching goes beyond giving advice and looks at the full person to help them achieve change, though in contrast to therapy coaching is not concerned with diagnosing and addressing the underlying causes for behavior.
Deeper change
When talking about personal development, I refer to shifts in the way people show up or look at the world. Someone might have a surface layer goal of achieving a certain project milestone, or to get a promotion. These would not be examples of personal growth. An example of actual personal growth could be for someone to reframe how they think about setting personal boundaries and get more comfortable doing so. That way they can say no to less important work, focus more of their energy on high-leverage activities, and satisfy their personal needs outside of work. This will help them achieve the promotion but also develop a healthier and sustainable way of being. True personal growth means for someone to develop a new “way of being” which they can apply to going forward.
Underlying this approach is a core idea that our experience is shaped by the way we interpret situations, by narratives and mental models we have about ourselves and the world. Narratives are the stories we construct — based on our observations and a generous share of assumptions — about ourselves, others, and what’s happening around us. Our beliefs influence how we interpret events, which defines our experience, which in turn drives our actions. There is a feedback loop at work as our actions have an effect in the world, influencing others’ perceptions of us, which in turn affect our beliefs and system of interpretation.
Our interpretation has been shaped by behaviors that we have developed throughout the course of our lives. It is important to recognize that all these behaviors have served us in some way, hence we have fostered them. Therefore, there is no judgement in our assessment, and when we coach we don’t intend to “fix”, because no fixing is needed. Applying introspection to this is powerful though, because what has served us in the past may no longer serve us today or may not serve us in a particular context. By changing our narratives and the behaviors that are not serving us, we can change our experience.
As a coach, you can support people in crafting an alternative narrative that changes the way they interpret the world, which in turn can alter their experience. We can shine a light on the underlying beliefs and assumptions and provide alternative ways of looking at situations. Techniques that are helpful are asking insightful questions or using metaphors that resonate with the coachee. When someone adopts a new narrative it can lead them to different behaviors, which in turn feed back into their system of beliefs. Along with the new narrative we therefore also attempt to implement practices of new behavior.
An example of this mechanism at work could be someone — let’s call them Carson — who has a narrative that their team really depends on them to keep things afloat; that they are responsible to step in whenever there is something about to slip through the cracks. Because of this, Carson always prioritizes other people’s asks and has gotten really good at getting things done quickly at the last minute. Others in the team look at Carson as the go-to person to save the day and as someone who loves to help out. Carson may find themselves overwhelmed and have all their time consumed by these asks, not able to focus on anything else. As a coach, we might relate Carson’s current narrative to one of a firefighter running after brush fires to prevent the forest from burning. An alternative narrative could be that of a forest manager using controlled burns to prevent larger wildfires. This framing may help Carson to start saying no to the urgent smaller things and protect their time, and realize they’d still be helping the team. As a suggestion for a practice, we may offer to set aside time for activities outside of work. Once Carson starts saying no and setting boundaries (action change), this changes the way the team looks at them as well, which will reduce the random asks that come their way and in turn reinforce the new narrative. When as a coach we later on help Carson assess the impact of this behavior change, it might help them see that the small things were truly just brush fires and others don’t see them as any less of a team player. This reflection is a helpful way to cement the new narrative.
Coaching as a people manager
It’s important to draw a distinction between management and coaching. As a coach we help people develop towards their personal growth goals. As a manager we can use coaching as part of our interaction with the people on our team, and help them grow in their careers. We are also responsible for managing and evaluating the work of our team members. This means we often have a stake in the outcome of the coaching conversation and a sense of judgement is involved, most clearly experienced from the perspective of our direct reports. This points to a possible tension between someone’s personal growth and achieving the best outcome for the team. To truly coach effectively, coachees have to trust we have their best interest at heart, which means we have to put our own needs aside. A risk is that otherwise we may not actually be helping people grow in the direction they want to, but in the direction we want them to. The key here is to be open and transparent about trade-offs.
In management, career development is sometimes seen as almost synonymous with role advancement. This assumes that the best growth path for people is to advance within their role, to “the next level”. When we make that assumption, we limit possibilities for people. Of course role progression is structured such that helping people develop as leaders and increasing their impact in the organization helps them advance in their role. These things often end up being in line with development goals people have. But personal development is just that; it’s personal. While someone’s most important goal might be to get a promotion, this isn’t nearly always the case. For example, an engineer might want to become a product manager, or even a professional musician, and likely little in the stated expectations for engineers helps them develop in those ways. I like to remind people I work with that company-stated role progressions are just constructs, and to what extent they want to align their growth path with those stated paths is up to them.
It can be helpful to clearly delineate when you are speaking to someone from the perspective as their manager or their coach. As a coach, I support folks in developing in the direction they want to, or even help them identify possible directions. As a manager, I am clear about my expectations of them in their role (or more advanced role), which they can take into consideration. In an extreme example where someone wants to become a professional athlete, it’s clear that efforts on that path do not ladder up to expectations I have for them on the team. If an engineer wants to develop to become a product manager, or a data scientist, it may be less obvious and creating that clarity is important. One common example is an individual contributor who wants to develop laterally into people management, yet may not realize the inherent trade-offs between that and advancement within their existing role. To best support people in their growth, it is important to surface these trade-offs so people can make the decisions that are best for them.
While it sometimes may seem like there is tension between supporting a team and helping someone grow in a different direction, I would argue that the hint of a zero-sum nature here is an illusion. An alternative view is that what’s best for the individual is also what’s best for the organization, and that it’s in our best interest to help people grow in the way they want to. If people are unhappy with the path they’re on, that will have long-term negative consequences for both the individual and the team, so helping folks find the path that’s right for them is always the best approach. It turns out this also builds trust and a strong supportive culture in your team.
So how can you practice coaching?
Identify the coaching opening
First, identify where coaching is appropriate. As a manager you always apply a combination of direction and coaching. You want to use coaching when targeting longer-term change, when someone is solving an ambiguous problem, or when you can help someone change a behavior. If there are more immediate needs, something that you need someone on your team to do, or behavior that you need to correct in real-time, coaching is likely not the right interaction model. You can always come back to coaching after the immediate need is addressed. If you have identified that someone could benefit from coaching on something, you want to make sure they’re willing to be coached on this topic. It may be helpful to ask the person explicitly.
Assess the current experience
When you put on your coaching hat, you want to embrace the mindset that you are not the expert and don’t have the answers. Rather than providing advice, you now shift towards becoming deeply curious about the person and their way of being. Shift to asking questions that illuminate how someone is experiencing a situation, and withhold all judgement within that. Realize that whatever experience they’re having is completely valid, and try to understand what their perspective and beliefs are that cause them to have this experience. As you do this, avoid questions that start with “why”. Some example questions that can be helpful in this context are:
- What is the story you tell yourself about this?
- What does it feel like when you experience this situation?
- Who else is involved in this, and what is their role?
- What assumptions do you have about the situation?
- What would Obama [or insert someone they look up to] do in this situation?
- What would they need to believe to have that experience?
More extensive sets of questions are plentiful online, such as here. Much has also been written on the GROW model, which can be used to structure these conversations, so I won’t go into more detail on that here.
Identify the current narrative
When you feel like you have an understanding of what someone’s internal narrative might be, you may test this with them to see if it resonates. You don’t want to assume you have it figured out. Again, withhold judgement and instead remain deeply curious. Just articulating the current narrative you observe can be a very powerful experience for a coachee, and you may find they latch onto that and readily start to see different ways of looking at the situation.
Explore alternative narratives
Once you feel you have developed a decent understanding of the current narrative, you could try exploring alternative narratives. You might offer metaphors that paint a different picture of the same situation that can help someone see alternative ways of being. Again, you want to try these on and make sure they resonate. When someone adopts a new narrative, it can cause them to see things in a new light and approach things differently, which would ultimately cause them to have a different experience in the same situation.
Example 1
Imagine someone on your team, Morgan, who has great intuition but is hesitant about speaking up in meetings. As a result, they have limited influence in decision-making. As you discuss the situation with Morgan, they might share that they feel nervous about speaking up and think other people are more knowledgeable and their contribution will not be seen as valuable.
What is driving this experience? What is the story they tell themselves about this? As you dive into this, you might discover Morgan’s internal narrative is that they should only contribute really good ideas, which they are never sure of. Perhaps they grew up in an environment where they were ridiculed if they made a mistake. It would make sense that this caused them to be careful.
How would they ideally like to feel and act in this situation? Morgan might highlight wanting to feel more confident and that they hope to contribute thoughts more freely and feel good about speaking up in meetings.
What would someone need to believe to have that experience? Morgan might say someone would need to believe they will be appreciated and rewarded for contributing their thoughts, and that their reputation would improve. Once you get to this stage Morgan will likely see that both these things are in fact quite plausible, and that the assumptions they made and the behavior this results in aren’t serving them in the current context.
What could be an alternative narrative here? A different way of looking at this situation could be that an idea doesn’t belong to any person and a team works together to constantly evolve ideas, and that all new thoughts and perspectives are additive because they help polish the collective ideas. Another thing to highlight could be that while they may be concerned about how others perceive them, everybody else is too preoccupied with worrying about how they are themselves perceived as well, and so there is really nothing to be concerned about.
Example 2
Consider Jordan who leads a team and feels nervous about execution on the projects on their team. They may even be losing sleep worrying about whether the team will deliver on its goals. As you enter a coaching conversation, you might learn that Jordan feels powerless and is nervous about not being in control of the details.
What is driving this experience? You may find that Jordan has always been very independent and their success is a result of them being able to get things done themselves quickly. An assumption Jordan might be making is that when they don’t control the project things could easily go wrong. There might even be a deeper assumption that others aren’t as able or empowered to make the right decisions. The story Jordan tells themself might resemble that of steering a ship through a storm and needing to run a tight ship because the crew is not yet trained to know what to do.
How would they ideally like to feel and act in this situation? At first Jordan might say they want to feel more in control, less worried, calmer.
What would they need to believe to have that experience? Jordan might realize they need to believe that others will make the right decisions, and that everything will be fine. Or maybe they realize outcomes are very unpredictable and the impact of each decision is small, or that course correcting later is easy. You might also dig a bit into what makes Jordan believe that they have as much control in the first place.
What could be an alternative narrative here? A different narrative you might suggest is that in reality Jordan has limited control over the outcome and that others closer to the action are best positioned to make the right decisions. A metaphor I might suggest is of a jockey on a horse running down the mountain at a high pace. If the jockey gets nervous and pulls the reins to gain control, the horse’s head will go up and it won’t be able to see where it’s going, causing the horse to panic and the situation to become even less controlled. If instead the jockey trusts the horse, they will eventually get down the mountain just fine.
To conclude,
Coaching is a powerful way to help people develop excellence in our increasingly complex environment. By working to understand someone’s beliefs and way of looking at the world, and helping them discover new ways of being you can help someone grow as a leader, beyond just overcoming the challenge they’re dealing with right now.
In a coaching relationship, you withhold judgement and become curious about how the coachee is experiencing their situation, to help you identify their interpretation of the world. Once you have a sense of their internal narrative, you can offer alternative narratives as a way of holding up a mirror or shining a light on what limiting beliefs might be at play.
As a people manager, coaching is one of the tools you can use when working with people on your team. It is critical to have built trust to be able to do this well. Since as their manager you’re responsible for evaluating their work, someone on your team could easily feel judged, which will get in the way of effective coaching. There is also a possible tension between your own objectives and those of your team member. To overcome those obstacles, folks need to believe you truly have their best interest at heart.
Many thanks to Kate Saber, Jen Dolson, and Luca Beltrami for reviewing drafts of this post.
