Dr. Victor Aluise
Today’s business environment is ever changing and at times fraught with unprecedented challenges. Global pandemic, political discord, business and supply chain disruption, cyber threats – all require leaders to be nimble and proactive problem solvers. They must lead teams in data-driven solutioning and agile implementation by utilizing a continuous-improvement mindset. As leaders, they must remain proactive and grounded in the moment – acting on defense to minimize short-term losses. Talk about trying times.
To help organizations navigate, I’ve found that today’s leaders need to act as coaches rather than managers, as was framed in a recent Harvard Business Review article, The Leader as Coach. Coaching, at its core, is agile and supportive problem solving – helping individuals and teams identify goals, spot or clarify problems, uncover root causes, design solutions supported by data, communicate pathways forward, influence others, remove barriers, find accelerators, measure results, and so on.
This requires letting go of some conventional management notions that leadership is about having all the solutions and driving teams (often without their buy-in or awareness) toward a fixed goalpost. The days of leaders creating strategy and tactical plans for teams to deliver are gone. Or at least they should be. Rather, leaders need to foster a workforce culture based on co-creation and ownership, one of vision, strategy, tactics, and continuous-improvement efforts.
Rapidly changing workforce needs will compel many to learn new skills, often several times throughout their professional careers. This requires a new mindset and approach to learning – as well as a new adult learning experience that employs coaching. Fortunately, some education organizations are leading the charge to help students and employees navigate a rapidly changing workforce landscape. I am proud to work with one of these organizations, nonprofit Western Governors University (WGU), one of the largest fully online and fully accredited universities.
At WGU, students are assigned mentors who employ coaching techniques. Mentors work elbow-to-elbow with students from the beginning of their learning journey, coaching them to clarify their objectives, set their success markers, and most importantly, to develop an action plan for achieving their goals.
The student is in the driver’s seat; they own the vision and action plan as the mentor asks critical questions, supports them, and holds students accountable. Action planning offers the opportunity to focus on an objective and determine the proper steps that must be taken to achieve it. It’s meant to clearly define what a learner wants and how they plan to achieve it. Action plans are the backbone of coaching, and the proper development of a plan is essential to the success of the learning experience.
In leadership education programs at WGU, we aspire to develop coaching as managerial capacity within our learners. That is, we model coaching best practices and develop coaching capacity within learners. The mentor as coach helps the individual or team to:
- Create a vision and goal framework
- Set the quality bar of the work to be done
- Clarify roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities
- Create action plans for reaching the desired end state, noting key progress markers, measuring success against the plan
- Raise awareness, generate buy-in, motivate teams, and ensure resources are in place for the vision and tactics – all intended to mitigate confusion, anxiety, resistance, and frustrations that many may experience as they implement action plans
- Insist on high standards against a quality bar as the individual or teams execute against the plan
- Ask critical questions to regularly check in, inspect, and verify the work underway – all the while withholding judgment and staying focused on what’s best for learners
- Support and motivate as questions, challenges, and complexities arise
Key to the coaching process is holding oneself and others accountable to the action plan. Sure, plans change because of obstacles or accelerators along the way. So, mentors continuously engage in a diagnostic process – facilitating check-ins against objectives, actions, and limitations that are non-judgmental and foster ownership, accountability, self-agency, and innovation. Individuals and teams need a safe sounding board where they can share struggles with and get support from their leaders. The diagnostic process might go something like this:
| Critical Question | Objective |
| “What do you think the problem is?” | Help surface a problem, barrier, or struggle that may be happening in his/her professional world. |
| “How do you think that can be resolved?” | Help uncover blind spots and think through solutions. |
| “How will you handle this? | Dig into individual’s or team’s role in the solution. Prompt creation of an action or plan. |
| “What is your plan to handle this?” | Facilitate commitment to action or plan. |
| On a scale of 1-10, how confident are you that it will happen? | Reality-check the action or plan. |
| What can you do (what actions can you take) to make you more confident? | Reality-check the action or plan. |
| Come to me with solutions (don’t direct them) – Accountability – Best efforts (they use) |
The byproduct of coaching is growth – towards becoming a solutions-based leader who gets the job done. It fosters innovation and increases self-esteem for all involved in the process. It replaces conventional and often archaic styles of management with a malleable model that easily fits the needs of individuals and organizations at the same time because goals are shared and aligned. Coaching impacts the bottom line of a business. It is the surgical accuracy of coaching that turns a leader into a catalyst for change and progress.
