During my recent webinar, Becoming a 21st Century IT Leader, I made the case that IT is entering a new era and the skills you are going to need to compete and survive in this era are very different from those you might normally think about in terms of an IT organization.
One of these skills is going to be coaching.
As we move into an era of greater distribution of responsibilities and greater business impact, the days of command-and-control will fade away. This means that simply "ordering" people to act a certain way and having any hope of them actually doing it is pretty remote. Instead, you will need to develop your coaching skills if you want your team to perform. You will also need coaching skills to "coach" your customer on how to best leverage technology to create value.
But what does it mean to be a coach? I think that there are three primary principles that you must embrace to be an effective coach:
Principle #1: Bring Out the Best in Them
Principle #2: It's About the Team
Principle #3: They Get the Glory, You Get the Win
This is going to take a lot more space to dig into, but here's a brief look at what I think these three principles mean.
BRING OUT THE BEST IN THEM
If you have ever played a team sport, you had a coach. What was their focus? It was on you and the rest of your teammates, right? The coach's job is to see your hidden talents and unearth them. They seek to help you find the best within you and bring it out.
This is what you must do if you are going to be a great IT coach. Can you go into each situation focused on how you will help others improve and find unrealized talents? It can be tough in the harried corporate worlds most of us live in, but you will never succeed in moving forward if you don't shift your focus from one based on your success to one based on how you can help others succeed.
IT'S ABOUT THE TEAM
Hero worship is alive and well in IT organizations everywhere. I remember as a young kid trying to make a name for myself, I took great pride on being the last person to leave the office. Sometimes I would pull an all-nighter to get something done - and I made sure that everyone knew it. As a result, I got a lot of "addaboys" from the senior management team. All of which encourage me to do more of what I was doing.
The only problem was that I was all about me and not about the team.
By being the hero, I wasn't necessarily doing what was best for the organization. Wouldn't it have been better to engage my entire team and rally them around whatever problem was so pressing that I needed to work 40 hours straight to get it done? You see, I was much more focused on being the hero than I was focused on doing what was right for the customer.
As a coach, you need to resist the tempation for hero worship. You need to make sure that your entire team understands that you succeed or fail together. Period.
In terms of your coaching relationship with your customers, it is pretty much the same thing. You need to get on the same team with them. It must always be a situation in which you don't win if they don't. You must realize that you can never be a hero at your customer's expense. Get this right and you will have laid the foundation for a powerful force of change.
THEY GET THE GLORY, YOU GET THE WIN
There is an old axiom that to be a great leader, you must take all of the pain, but give away all of the glory. In simple terms, it means that when something goes wrong you must take accountability, but when it goes right you must give away the credit.
Frankly, I always thought that this seemed a bit unfair.
It always bugged me. I could do everything that I was supposed to, but one of my guys messed up and I had to take the lumps. As I've matured, however, I realized the power in this approach. Its power comes from the fact that your team is measured, recognized and rewarded at the "event" level. As the leader and coach, on the other hand, you are recognized, measured and rewarded over much longer periods of time. By providing your team the protection when something goes wrong, you free them to take risks and experiment. This leads to better outcomes over the long haul.
Likewise, when something goes well, they are deeply connected to it because they've invested their blood, sweat and tears into it. When the manager takes the credit, it takes all of that effort and turns it from a source of pride to a source of resentment. Even if it isn't fully deserved, giving your team the credit encourages them to stretch further and work harder.
The key fact to understand is that while your team's product is whatever project or activity they have been assigned, as a coach and leader, your product is them. So as you give them the glory and protect them when things fail, you will get the wins.
These are not common skills in IT organizations today - but they will be. The changes that are coming to our industry are demanding it.
Are you ready to be a coach? Which of these three principles will be toughest for you to embrace? What can you do to change that?