Michael Bungay Stanier - The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

Harlan Howard said every great country song has three chords and the truth.

This book gives you seven questions and the tools to make them an everyday way to work less hard and have more impact.

T he leadership press has endless articles about it. Assorted gurus suggest that coaching is an essential leadership behaviour. The number of executive coaches seems to be multiplying according to Moores Law. Even Dilbert mocks coachingand theres no surer sign of mainstream success than that.

Daniel Goleman, the psychologist and journalist who popularized the concept of emotional intelligence, put a stake in the ground more than fifteen years ago in his Harvard Business Review article Leadership That Gets Results. He suggested that there are six essential leadership styles. Coaching was one of them and it was shown to have a markedly positive impact on performance, climate (culture) and the bottom line. At the same time, it was the least-used leadership style. Why? Goleman wrote, Many leaders told us they dont have the time in this high-pressure economy for the slow and tedious work of teaching people and helping them grow.

And remember, this was in the halcyon days of 2000, when email was still a blessing, not a curse, globalization was just warming up, and we hadnt yet sold our souls to our smartphones. My experience these days, working with busy managers around the world, tells me that things have, if anything, got worse rather than better. Were all stretched more thinly than ever. And while coaching is now a more commonly used term, the actual practice of coaching still doesnt seem to be occurring that often. And when it does, it doesnt seem to work.

The odds are youve already come across coaching in some form. Research in 2006 from leadership development firm BlessingWhite suggested that 73 percent of managers had some form of coaching training. So far so good. However, it seems it wasnt very good coaching training. Only 23 percent of people being coachedyes, fewer than one in fourthought that the coaching had a significant impact on their performance or job satisfaction. Ten percent even suggested that the coaching they were getting was having a negative effect. (Can you imagine what it would be like going into those meetings? I look forward to being more confused and less motivated after my coaching session with you.)

So, in summary: Youre probably not getting very effective coaching; and youre probably not delivering very effective coaching.

My guess is that there are at least three reasons why your first go at developing a coaching habit didnt stick. The first reason is that the coaching training you got was probably overly theoretical, too complicated, a little boring and divorced from the reality of your busy work life. One of those training sessions, perhaps, where you caught up on your email backlog.

Even if the training was engagingheres reason number twoyou likely didnt spend much time figuring out how to translate the new insights into action so youd do things differently. When you got back to the office, the status quo flexed its impressive muscles, got you in a headlock and soon had you doing things exactly the way youd done them before.

The third reason is that the seemingly simple behaviour change of giving a little less advice and asking a few more questions is surprisingly difficult. Youve spent years delivering advice and getting promoted and praised for it. Youre seen to be adding value and youve the added bonus of staying in control of the situation. On the other hand, when youre asking questions, you might feel less certain about whether youre being useful, the conversation can feel slower and you might feel like youve somewhat lost control of the conversation (and indeed you have. Thats called empowering). Put like that, it doesnt sound like that good an offer.

At my company, Box of Crayons, weve trained more than ten thousand busy managers like you in practical coaching skills. Over the years, weve come to hold these truths to be self-evident:

• Coaching is simple. In fact, this books Seven Essential Questions give you most of what you need.
• You can coach someone in ten minutes or less. And in todays busy world, you have to be able to coach in ten minutes or less.
• Coaching should be a daily, informal act, not an occasional, formal Its Coaching Time! event.
• You can build a coaching habit, but only if you understand and use the proven mechanics of building and embedding new habits.

But why bother to change things up? Why would you want to build a coaching habit?

The essence of coaching lies in helping others and unlocking their potential. But Im sure youre already committed to being helpful,
and that hasnt led to your coaching more often.

So lets look at why coaching others helps you. It lets you work less hard and have more impact. When you build a coaching habit, you can more easily break out of three vicious circles that plague our workplaces: creating overdependence, getting overwhelmed and becoming disconnected.

You may find that youve become part of an overdependent team. Theres a double whammy here. First, youve trained your people to become excessively reliant on you, a situation that turns out to be disempowering for them and frustrating for you. And then as an unwelcome bonus, because youve been so successful in creating this dependency that you now have too much work to do, you may also have become a bottleneck in the system. Everyone loses momentum and motivation. The more you help your people, the more they seem to need your help. The more they need your help, the more time you spend helping them.

Building a coaching habit will help your team be more self-sufficient by increasing their autonomy and sense of mastery and by reducing your need to jump in, take over and become the bottleneck.

You may also be overwhelmed by the quantity of work you have. It doesnt matter if youve mastered all the productivity hacks in the world; the faster you dig, the faster the world keeps flooding in. As youre pulled in different directions by proliferating priorities, distracted by the relentless ping of email and hustling from meeting to meeting, you lose focus. The more you lose focus, the more overwhelmed you feel. The more overwhelmed you feel, the more you lose focus.

Building a coaching habit will help you regain focus so you and your team can do the work that has real impact and so you can direct your time, energy and resources to solving the challenges that make a difference.

Finally, you may be disconnected from the work that matters. My previous book Do More Great Work had as its foundation the principle that its not enough just to get things done. You have to help people do more of the work that has impact and meaning. The more we do work that has no real purpose, the less engaged and motivated we are. The less engaged we are, the less likely we are to find and create Great Work.

Building a coaching habit will help you and your team reconnect to the work that not only has impact but has meaning as well. Coaching can fuel the courage to step out beyond the comfortable and familiar, can help people learn from their experiences and can literally and metaphorically increase and help fulfil a persons potential.