By Jim Clemmer
If you buy a little goldfish and keep it in a small bowl it will remain no bigger than a few inches long. Move that same fish to a large aquarium and it will double or triple in size. Put the goldfish in a large pond and it can grow up to a foot long! The biggest factor that determines the size of the fish is the size of its environment. And so it is with people.
Many managers see people as they are and treat them according to what they see. A less effective manager would take a small goldfish and keep it in the little bowl because it would be inefficient and wasteful to put it in a larger environment.
Outstanding coaches, however, see people as they could be and work to grow that potential. Our research shows that extraordinary coaches share these attributes:
- Caring deeply about the coachee’s progress
- Believing people can grow, change, and improve
- Focusing on the future
- Showing interest beyond immediate job performance
- Allowing solutions to come from the coachee
- Having more frequent, shorter conversations
- Supporting and encouraging
How many of these attributes describe your coaching or the coaches in your organization?
Click here Keys to Extraordinary Coaching for a two minute video clip of me presenting and explaining these points.
Have you ever experienced a leader who’s very strong at coaching and mentoring but doesn’t get results? People feel great working with him or her, but the job doesn’t get done. What’s the likelihood this leader would be rated in the top ten percent of leaders?
How about a leader who is very good at getting results — he or she really delivers — but not much of a coach? How likely is he or she to be rated in the top 10 percent of leaders?
Research based on over 250,000 360 assessments of roughly 25,000 leaders shows that either of the above combinations produces leaders in the 90th percentile less than 10% of the time. How often do you think a leader who is strong at both energizing people to achieve results and coaching and mentoring others is rated in the top 10% of leaders? Hint; it’s much higher than most people realize.
Click on The Impact of Coaching Effectiveness for a three minute video clip where I present the research behind this powerful combination and how dramatically these two competencies turbo-boost a leader to the very top. You can then see the dramatic impact of coaching skills on turnover, engagement, discretionary effort, and leader satisfaction.
No other leadership behavior is more correlated with increasing employee engagement than a leader’s coaching effectiveness. Outstanding coaching skills rocket leaders to top-tier effectiveness.
Many crazy-busy, frenetic managers believe it’s a trade-off: “Either I deliver results (often by micromanaging and pushing hard) or I coach and develop people. Which do you want me to do?”
Highly effective leaders get results through people. They understand that peak performance comes from empowering, energizing, focusing, and developing people to their highest potential to own and deliver outstanding outcomes.
Reprinted with the permission of Jim Clemmer. For over three decades Jim Clemmer’s keynote presentations, workshops, and management team retreats, and seven best-selling books translated into many languages, articles, blog, and newsletters have helped hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. The CLEMMER Group is Zenger Folkman’s Canadian Strategic Partner, an award-winning firm best known for its unique evidence-driven, strengths-based system for developing extraordinary leaders and demonstrating the performance impact they have on organizations. http://www.clemmergroup.com
