One of the primary roles of any leader is to make those on the team better.
In addition to other roles and responsibilities, good leaders coach others to success. They develop the skills and talents of those on the team by offering feedback, setting competitive goals, creating practice routines, pointing out corrections, asking powerful questions, designing experiences, exploring critical insights, and spending the time to answer questions.
As coaches, leaders serve as a learning resource to those they lead. They will do anything they can to help others reach their highest potential.
Everyone on the team needs the attention of the leader as coach. Unfortunately, there is only one team leader. They simply can’t give everyone the coaching they need and desire.
So how does a great team leader find the time or fill the void needed to make others better?
Leveraging the entire team and asking each member to play a coaching role is how the best leaders solve this dilemma. Study high-performing teams, and you will likely find that everyone on the team has a temporary coaching assignment with someone else on the team.
These are not permanent assignments. In fact, most last for only a handful of days or a couple of weeks. Once they complete an assignment with a colleague, they are handed another one by the team leader.
The coaching assignments vary from sharing knowledge and getting a colleague up to speed on an issue or process to improving a specific skill that so happens to be a strength of the temporary coach; from offering peer feedback about a recent performance to collaborating on an action plan for improvement to practicing a difficult skill together.
Not surprisingly, when colleagues coach each other, they are even more receptive to coaching from the team leader. They take feedback from the leader differently and ask more insightful questions. It seems becoming the teacher changes the way a student learns.
When members of a team are always engaged in coaching each other, they all learn valuable leadership skills, as well. Developing both the capacity and skill of coaching others stretches the leadership muscles of everyone on the team and has long-term benefits as people progress in their careers and become team leaders themselves.
Team leaders make the requests and design the assignments for this ongoing endeavor. Once the pressure is off of giving everyone the amount of time and coaching focus they desire, the team leader can now pick the right spots to have the greatest impact with their own coaching. As it turns out, great leaders will do anything to have team members succeed, including treating the entire team as a coaching resource.
The best leaders unlock the wisdom and skills of the collective team so they can unlock the potential of every team member. This unleashes the best of what coaching is all about.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
