Just this week I was speaking with a long term friend and senior leader, we were discussing my belief that the goal of coaching should ideally be a process of transformational change to be highly effective.
I have always had the view that it’s better to teach / coach someone how to fish rather than give them a fish every day. Giving a fish every day to someone leaves them completely relying on you showing up every day to feed them, no real learning is taking place.
This same dance takes place every day when a leader choses not to delegate because they haven’t got time to coach somehow how to do a certain task which may be a bit of a stretch for that individual. The challenge is that the leader is stifling that persons opportunity to grow and learn new things, they are also overloading themselves with tasks that should be delegated.
So here’s the dilemma, do you go for adaptive change or transformational change?
Let’s use the example my friend shared with me, someone in your team shouts at women in meetings, they don’t do it to their male colleagues and it’s obvious that it’s not a desirable behaviour.
Do you go for adaptive change which in essence means they get the feedback on their behaviour and are asked to change their behaviour, the change happens which is great until another undesirable behaviour bubbles up!
The point my friend was making, was that the poor behaviour has been corrected, even though the individual won’t have explored why they thought that the behaviour was acceptable in the first place and attempt to create a deeper level of awareness around why they have a need to shout at anyone and in particular single out women!? Getting to the root of issue allows for a deeper level of awareness and learning for the individual.
I find this to be an interesting challenge as a coach, it’s fair to say that not everyone wants to go deep within themselves to understand why they behave the way they do, in fact I’m sure that I’ve spooked some leaders away with this approach, it’s just too much for them to handle!
“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink!”
I must admit that I’ve always had this idealistic view that everyone has greatness inside themselves and that it’s our role as a coach to help them reconnect to that inner greatness that has always been there.
Transformational coaching is about exploring at a much deeper level and looking at the patterns of behaviour that we run, or patterns that run us and to find out the root cause of how that was created so that the change is more long term and the individual grows in the process.
This approach allows the individual to eventually coach themselves and then becomes less reliant on the coach to ask the questions and is able to self reflect on the finger print they are leaving.
It’s the quick wins verses long term gains argument, which is another post!
