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Coaching Corner
Learn to trust the team – as well as the process
As a leader, you face complex and intricate challenges every day. At times it can be hard to pinpoint or even articulate these challenges. But until you can fully address and resolve them, they have the potential to stall your professional and personal growth, your career, and your team’s success. This is where professional coaching comes in.
Ian is in line for the top job, but his management style is fueling burnout. Graham Clark explains why a future CEO must learn to lead people, not just results.
Rapid read:
- The human imperative within leadership is as important as purpose and results.
- Dialogue unlocks motivation and creates space to relinquish excessive control.
- Empowering others through trust, deference to expertise, and the delegation of responsibility represents true leadership.
The skills of a systems thinker
Ian is the Chief Financial Officer at a major hospital in the US. It’s a role that plays well to his native abilities as a systems thinker – the capacity to break down complexity, discern and align the diverse, moving parts that influence outcomes, and pinpoint the root causes of the challenges that he and his team face.
He is adept at making connections and driving solutions fast. He is also mobilized by tightly held values and a strong sense of purpose.
He wants to do the right thing by the people and communities his organization serves, and so he holds himself and his direct reports to exceptionally high standards.
Over the past year, his performance, energy, dedication, and gift for forensic analysis have caught the board’s attention, and he has been earmarked for the role of CEO when the current chief executive leaves.
However, several members of Ian’s team have complained about his management style. Some feel he micromanages, overseeing their work, issuing directives, and requiring continuous updates and justification to the extent that people are experiencing anxiety and burnout.
Others report being sidelined altogether. Ian doesn’t seem to trust them or their abilities, excluding them from major decisions and projects.
At the same time, a core group within his team works closely with him. The net effect is divisive: an in-group that is taking on disproportionate responsibility for the function, and a fringe group whose members are over-supervised or marginalized. The dynamic is fueling fear and exhaustion.
The current CEO is worried. She can see Ian’s potential, and there is tremendous confidence in his ability to lead the business forward when she steps down.
At the same time, she is concerned about his ability to delegate and the criteria he uses to evaluate people’s capacities.
While his hard skills make him an obvious contender for the CEO role, there is a real danger that he may burn through a new team, making his appointment risky.
Determined to resolve this issue before the transition begins, she suggests he works with an executive coach. Ian agrees.
Questions to ask yourself
- How can I be more curious about the underlying motivations, needs, and concerns of the people in my team?
- Are there areas in which my own purpose, drive, and determination might be holding back my team rather than inspiring them?
- What would a “high-support, high-challenge” leadership approach be that I could take for each of my direct reports? How would I need to tailor it to be genuinely motivating for each team member? Is there additional information I need to fine-tune my approach?
The coaching journey
First, the coach asks Ian to map out the results and outcomes he expects for each team member. The exercise provides two useful insights: first, the way Ian views each person’s competencies and areas for improvement; and second, the leadership mechanisms he deploys to help them achieve their goals.
The coach asks Ian to use a whiteboard to sketch out the desired results and the approaches he has used to date. Standing back from the board, Ian is challenged to think more deeply about the differences between team members.
His coach invites him to reflect on whether they all share the same level of anxiety and how individuals respond to his leadership and authority.
Ian is pushed to think about and articulate the frustrations that he feels at times with each team member – and how that frustration might manifest in his leadership practice.
Ian begins to appreciate that his team is not a separate entity producing work in response to his directives, but a complex human system that responds to diverse cues and behaviors: stretching someone who feels confident yields one response; pushing someone else who is anxious generates something quite different.
This allows Ian to reflect on how his role – his personal behaviors and his capacity to balance challenge with support – directly shapes the team’s performance.
His coach’s evidence-based feedback augments these insights. A systems thinker, Ian is able to join the dots and understand that, by pushing too hard, he inadvertently creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, setting up for failure those people whose abilities he doubts without providing the support they need to succeed.
The coach suggests that Ian tries scenario planning for different team members in different situations. Together they role-play new approaches and language to use with individuals, before Ian agrees to trial these techniques in the workplace.
This is a breakthrough moment. Instead of focusing one-on-one time on concrete tasks and outcomes, he experiments more with dialogue.
He asks open questions, invites opinions, and creates space for all his reports to contribute ideas. The effect is clear.
The entire team is moving from a “prove and protect” dynamic to a “play and explore” mode, surfacing capabilities and creative talent among members Ian had effectively written off, releasing trapped energy and generating unexpected outcomes.
The impact
Ian has recognized the human imperative within leadership – an imperative that is as important as purpose and results. Creating space for dialogue – particularly with individuals who are different from him – has unlocked motivation and created space for him to step back, relinquish excessive control, and delegate more effectively.
His team, his peers, and his organization have seen the shift in his leadership. As he transitions to CEO with the full support of the board, he is better equipped to empower others through trust, deference to expertise, and the delegation of responsibility that his organization needs to thrive.
In the Coaching Corner series, we share real-world cases that come from our work with leaders. Read other examples to discover the specific challenges that face each of the leaders we have coached – and the insights that have helped them navigate their multifaceted challenges to find their own solutions. How might these insights and questions apply to you?
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