The Courage To Lead — What It Takes To Use A Coaching Style

It takes courage to lead. We all know that. It’s even become a catchphrase. Here are five forms of courage – all with parallels in parenting — that are required for a coaching style of leadership.

TO DEVELOP a coaching style of leadership takes time. Time for yourself to develop the competence and time for people to get used to it. It also takes time to do the actual coaching stuff, like gaining understanding before asking questions. Then asking those questions. Then waiting for people to respond. Then giving feedback. It would be much easier, surely, to just fire off instructions.

Anyone who tries it quickly sees the upside. How it can get everybody working at a higher level. How that can set you free to focus on what’s important—to be the pilot who actually flies the plane. The nett effect is vastly improved team and organisational performance.

However, time is not the only barrier to developing a coaching style of leadership. It also requires courage, and courage in a number of ways—ways that, as the examples used will show, are not unlike the courage you need to be a parent.

Here are 5 particular forms of “courage to lead” that are required for a coaching style of leadership.

1 The courage to lead while “not knowing”

Firstly there is the courage to lead while not knowing, or appearing to not know. When somebody asks you a question, you’re always tempted by the need to show yourself. After all, the corporate environment is competitive. Showing and proving how much you know, being the smartest kid in the room, is a reflex action. And yet, when you apply the coaching style of leadership, you deliberately don’t do that. You choose to be the kind of leader who sits back and pretends to not know, who asks questions instead.

That way, people get to practice the skill of thinking for themselves. They’ll learn to answer their own questions. You’ll elevate their level of work. Think of when you teach a child to tie his or her shoelaces. You don’t jump in and try to prove every time that you know how to do it! You let them do it, however clumsily. That’s how you grow little people, and how you grow big people, too!

2 The courage to lead while being led by others’ solutions

Then it requires courage to lead while being willing to be led by other people’s solutions. When you ask people to come up with a solution, chances are it’ll be different from how you would do it. It requires courage to allow them to take that path. Especially if you can see they’ll probably bang their heads a little.

Many companies talk about innovation and yet their people are afraid to make mistakes because the consequences are so great. So you need to decide: are you going be about innovation or about conformity and always trying to get it right, trying to avoid mistakes, trying to protect reputation? Or are you going to allow yourself to be led by other people’s solutions? Are you going to trust your people to make good decisions and deal with whatever comes up? All of this requires courage.

An example from parenting

I remember when my son was a toddler. We often visited Swakopmund in Namibia and drove out into the sand dunes. We’d get out the car and he’d run in the direction of the ocean—he always seemed to know which direction it lay in, no matter how winding a route we’d taken, and even though there were no distinct landmarks, just mountains of sand! Instead of stopping him, I’d let him run. I’d go with him, just making sure he didn’t get lost, or run into the path of another vehicle. I’d think of it as making sure he didn’t go off the edge.

Isn’t that your role as a leader, to allow your people to make decisions and back themselves?

Later on, when he finished school, he wanted to express himself as a DJ, while I wanted him to study. I conceded—with conditions that he would still finish his associate’s degree by age twenty-one. He asked me whether I believed in him and I replied, “That’s your job, to believe in yourself. My job is to make sure you don’t go off the edge!” He became a DJ for a while and soon made the decision to study again.

Here’s my point: I had let him make decisions and trust himself early on. So now, as a young adult, he was doing just that, and I wasn’t afraid of him making a mistake—not because he wouldn’t make them, but because I knew he’d be able to see them, learn from them and course correct.

Your role as a parent and as a leader

Now, isn’t that your role as a parent and as a leader, to have the courage to lead while allowing your child and your people to make decisions and back themselves, and to explore their world and express themselves, while standing back and just making sure that nobody gets run over, or goes off the edge? If you agree, then letting them learn to do that is more important than trying to “get it right”.

Obviously, you’ll let them loose on non-critical issues at first, until you’re able to trust them with the more important stuff. And even then, there will be some projects you’ll want to keep your eye on regardless. However, that should be more like twenty percent rather than eighty percent.

3 The courage to become redundant

Developing a coaching style of leadership, in order to elevate the level of work, also requires the courage to lead while letting yourself become redundant. Every leader should ultimately aim to make him- or herself redundant within the relevant time cycle for that role. It might be a two-year, five-year or even a ten-year period. And hopefully you’ll do that by leaving a positive legacy that isn’t, Oh dear, what are we going to do now that he’s gone?

The Good To Great studies by Jim Collins point out that the leaders of those great organisations were generally anonymous in the public eye. In other words, when they moved on, the company didn’t falter because they hadn’t made it all about them. The companies weren’t over-reliant on a single person or a walking ego. Ironically, this is often the failing of a family business, that the founding father—or mother—doesn’t want to let go.

Preparing yourself for redundancy, while leaving a positive legacy, would mean that you share your decision-making processes, share your thinking, share your technical knowledge, in order that somebody can take over, or that your people can all do it for themselves. Naturally, your fear could be that there’s nowhere to go after this. Well, perhaps you need to trust that by producing good results through people, you will move on to greater leadership positions. If not within the business, then beyond it.  Perhaps you turn yourself into that author, speaker, consultant in a way that you’ve always dreamt of. In a way that you can give back, while being your own boss. To put it in the parenting context, it’s like becoming the wise elder of the family, or the tribe.

4 The courage to lead by not doing stuff

Then, of course, all of this requires the courage to lead by not doing stuff. Seriously. We pay lip service to work-life balance and having a more holistic approach to work. Working smarter, not harder. Yet, deep in our corporate cultures is this belief and feeling that we have to look busy in order to feel deserving. If you’re not busy, you worry that other people are looking at you. So you feel driven to look like you’ve got your sleeves rolled up and you’re getting stuck in. If you’re doing that as a leader, then you’re more likely to be solving problems— like the pilot serving drinks instead of flying the plane.

There are some leaders who have said that they spend up to two hours a day in reflection time, strategic thinking, and so on. For some people, that may feel like too much. However, there’s a good chance that you are not even on the page when it comes to that. So that’s an invitation to actually take some time and start getting used to the feeling of not being busy and not always doing, but sometimes taking that step back to reflect.

Perhaps you can start with a practice that is moderately scary for you, say twenty minutes, or half an hour. Then stretch that out to an hour, maybe even two—per week, if not per day. See what you can manage to fit into your schedule. Get used to the feeling of doing that. Then start to measure the benefits. After all, what’s the point of being a parent if you can’t send someone to the refrigerator to fetch you a cold drink?! Similarly, what’s the point of being a leader if you can’t take time out to think like one?

5 The courage to develop courage in your people

Finally, on the subject of feelings, when you’re doing all of the above, you’ll also need the courage to lead while developing courage in your people—in particular the courage to make their own decisions and execute on them. In many cultures, people don’t get that opportunity. Growing up, they get told what to do—at home, at school and in the workplace—and so, for many people, starting to be trusted in terms of their own decision-making is quite a revelation and it’s quite a scary, heady feeling. Most people need to develop the courage to do that and your job is to support them in getting there.

Being this kind of leader requires courage—and you instil courage in your people by demonstrating it.

So, as you can see, courage is a key feature of a coaching style of leadership. Being able to conduct yourself as a leader requires courage and you instil courage in your people by demonstrating it. So, the invitation to you is to take on courage as a key element of your own personal leadership brand.

The higher up you are in your organisation, the more you’re able to start to transform the organisation in these terms. However, if you still have uplines that you report to, perhaps by setting the example you can start to influence them to do the same as well. Or can suggest some coaching for them too!