How could a coaching mindset help your team grow towards digital maturity?
As a digital maturity expert, I get to be a coach, a mentor and a consultant at different times (and sometimes all at once!) Here’s what that looks like:
As a coach, I support my clients by giving them a framework to find their own solutions. I might say “What would you like to get out of this process? What would ‘good’ look like for you?”
As a consultant, I am asked to deliver solutions and plans. I might say, “When it comes to this issue, these are my recommendations …”
As a mentor, I share my personal experience with people to help them make informed choices. I might say, “When I was in a similar situation to you, I did this.”
Each of these approaches has a role to play in building up organisations’ digital maturity, at the right time. In this article, I want to explore the power of coaching mindset and approach.
A coaching mindset can empower your team to:
try new ideas,
learn from failure.
mature in their role by developing their soft and influencing skills
Here are eight practical things you can do to bring more of a coaching mindset into your team.
1. Treat your team as adults
A manager is not a parent. As a manager, it can be tempting to try to protect your team from stress. In digital, it’s particularly easy to do, because we often get mountains of requests for support from other teams.
Protecting your staff from an onslaught of tasks can build loyalty amongst your team members, but it doesn’t teach them to deal with issues themselves. Pay attention to the way you talk to your team. Do you say “I’ll speak to them, so you don’t have to deal with this”? Sometimes this is appropriate. But most of the time, we should coach team members to deal with the situation themselves. Remember that your team members are adults and equals.
2. Set team ground rules
Your team needs to create its own ways of working and being with each other. A bit of conflict within a team is not a bad thing, but sweeping issues under the carpet is.
A team needs to share a purpose (What are we here to do?), stakeholder expectations ( What are our stakeholders expecting of us?) and team culture (How are we working as a team?)
Once you as a team establish what values and aspirations your share, you can develop ground rules that work for everyone. They will also build your team culture. Ground rules are best when they describe a desired state or situation. So as well as saying “I don’t want x to happen”, encourage the team to define what they would like to see happen.
Then discuss with your team how they will keep each other accountable.
3. Failure is OK
In the digital world, data is our most valuable asset. It can give us an objective view of how well a project, team or organisation is performing. This means we can learn from what we tried, change or improve the next iteration or stop doing it all together.
Data helps us learn and make decisions, instead of defaulting to “who shouts the loudest wins” or letting the highest paid individual in the room decide.
Sometimes data from tests and pilots tells us that something we’ve put our heart and soul into is not working. Many of us think “failure is bad” and feel guilty because we got it wrong. Moving towards learning from feedback is much more productive. A coaching mindset helps you and your team learn from failure. Rather than trying to shield your team from risk and making mistakes, you can all agree the boundaries for taking risk.
4. Keep an open mind
Testing, learning and adapting from your mistakes isn’t easy. It requires patience. It can be particularly frustrating when you think you know what the solution is.
Sometimes the solution is no brainer because it follows a well-established best practice route. But when you are trying to do something new, testing your assumptions really can help deliver good quality lessons.
To absorb the lessons that our mistakes offer us, we need to keep an open mind. That means being willing to accept that something we personally don’t like is still worth doing.
Obviously, testing needs to be done within the parameters of your organisation’s brand, tone and values. But don’t let that be used as a reason to dismiss some home truths results are telling you.
5. Hand over power
Traditional leadership can be quite autocratic. Leaders used to sit at the top of a hierarchy, issuing instructions down the chain of command. They usually took credit for their team’s successes, as well as responsibility for their team’s failures.
This style of leadership is out of step with increasingly flexible, autonomous teams and “fail fast” philosophers. Leaders need to be comfortable giving up some power to enable their team to flourish. A coaching mindset can help us do this.
In coaching, there is no power imbalance between the coach and coachee. They are equals. In the team manager position hierarchy creates a specific power dynamic between managers and their teams. But that doesn’t mean that as a team leader you can’t still work with a coaching mindset.
Leaders who embrace a coaching mindset know that they can’t control everything. Your team’s mistakes could reflect badly on you, so you need to decide how much power you are happy to give up.
Instead of acting like a parent, telling your child how to behave and what to say, support your them to find their own solutions. Then you all own whatever happens next, depending on where you all are in the hierarchy.
This could mean that as a team leader you get criticised because of something your team member has done. Like an embarrassed parent whose child is throwing a tantrum in the street, you may wish that the ground instantly swallows you up. Instead, you can own this mistake and use it as a learning opportunity for the team and that team member. It would feel easier to try and fix the problem and never talk about it again. But how else will you and your team members learn from this?
Another way you could deal with this situation is by allowing other team managers to deal with your staff directly, rather than going through you. That has other benefits too, like helping to empower your team members by coaching them to manage and develop stakeholder relationships.
6. Make more time for the team
A typical team only gets together once or twice a year to think about how it’s working and set its strategic direction. It’s common to have a one-to-one with your direct reports, perhaps once a week or once a fortnight. Does this give you enough space for team development?
As a leader with a coaching mindset, you should create enough time and space for your team to think about their own development, embrace and reflect on past work, and come up with their own solutions to problems. This is an important element of team life which impacts on the quality of their work. For example, on a scrum project, a sprint retro happens at the end of each 2 to 4 week sprint. Its main objective is to improve how people and processes work (as opposed to improving the product itself). In the sprint retro, the team chooses actions by answering these questions: What worked well? What didn’t work? And what do we need to change? Why not use this model of team work - 90 minutes every month is not hard to put aside and the contribution to the life of the team will be invaluable.
7. Ask open questions
“Have you considered telling your manager about this problem?”
“Would you agree that this is an oversight issue?”
“Have you asked the trustees to weigh in?”
These may sound like questions, but they’re suggestions dressed up as questions. They direct the thinking of the person you are speaking to, rather than helping them think for themselves.
Open questions, by contrast, open up space for people to think. Open questions hold no judgement, no hidden solution and are best at guiding someone’s thinking. They show genuine curiosity about the other person’s view and ideas.
Instead of asking “Have you thought about flagging this to person X”, a coaching-inspired leader might ask “Is there someone who can help you? In this situation, what are your options? How can you strengthen yourself so you can deal with this problem?”
Use cues to encourage people to expand on their answers. Don’t underestimate the power of a simple statement like, “Go on” or “what else?” While short and simple, “Why?” is a loaded question because some people may hear it as “Why did you do that? That makes no sense)”. Instead, you could say something like: “Tell me more about that decision” or “What are the reasons you decided that?”
8. Practice deep listening
It’s normal for everyday conversations to bounce from person to person like ping pong, with each person focusing on the surface of what others are saying in order to make a point of their own.
But in situations when we are having challenging conversations we need to practice deep listening. This is when we hear the words, as well as the meaning behind people’s words.
If someone feels under pressure to agree with you, they may say something like “I’ll think about it” or “I might do that” in a meeting. If we’re not paying close attention, we can think we’ve convinced them. But deep listening encourages us to attend not only to the words but the mood, energy and body language surrounding them. If someone says “I might do that” they are not committing to do it.
With a coaching mindset, we can gently encourage them to expand. We might say something like: “I’ve heard you say ‘I might’. What would make it ‘I will’?” It is also essential to hear from the person say in their own words what the agreement is. And then listen carefully to check if what they’re saying is what you think you’ve agreed. .
Need some help bringing a coaching mindset into your team work? Let me know. As a certified and passionate team coach, I can help.
