Coaching Styles and Effectiveness

Coaching and Leadership Are Never Neutral

Often we present information and strategies as if we are all in a vacuum and that there is no existing mindset, and all are starting at the same level of experience.

While it is important to address the real issue and the underlying beliefs that may be preventing the organisation and the coachee from developing a more constructive culture, or becoming more effective, we also need to apply the same processes and constructs to our own approach to coaching and leadership.

Personal Leadership Style as Culture

We all have our own styles, a personal culture, if you like, which, like organisational culture, can be enabling or counterproductive.

The Passive Coach

If you are essentially a passive coach (and individual), what worries you is getting people offside and dealing with them potentially not liking you.

As a result, you:

• Avoid conflict or challenging others’ views

• Avoid making decisions in case you get it ‘wrong’

• Avoid getting into the real issue in case it raises issues you cannot cope with

You will dance around the issue with an overly consensus-type approach that frustrates everybody, including yourself.

You genuinely worry about giving honest and direct feedback in case people are upset by it and feel that it may impact their ‘liking you’.

If you do raise an issue and are challenged, you will quickly begin backpedalling and give up your own opinion to keep people onside.

Given it is almost impossible to deal with issues directly, you are perceived as a vacillating, non-committal leader who is hard to pin down on any issue, with opinions designed to please everyone.

You are highly avoidant and sidestep issues with:

• “Let’s form a sub-committee”

• “Let’s get more data before we commit”

You are the poster person for the old expression:
“He’d give up the farm to please others.”

Frequently, you apologise for vague reasons, are reluctant to ask people not to talk over you, and are equally reluctant to verbalise an opinion without having a back-out strategy ready.

The cost of this inability to deal with behaviours or practices directly is that you have unwittingly allowed potentially unsafe practices to continue, or behaviours at odds with agreed parameters to persist,  because you have worried more about what people think of you than about doing the right thing.

The Aggressive Coach

The above describes a strongly passive coach.

If that sounds vaguely familiar from personal experience, you will appreciate that it will be borderline impossible to address the beliefs underpinning behaviour.

For the aggressive coach, the main concern is yourself, and much of the world seems to revolve around you.

No matter where the conversation starts, you have a gift for bringing it back to yourself.

You worry about not knowing everything, so you have an, usually uninformed, opinion on everything.

Because you are task-focused, you become unsettled when emotions surface.

You must be in control, and you feel the need to dominate the coaching conversation.

Control, Dominance and Leadership Impact

This strong need for control leads to disparaging remarks about self-management or engagement.

You present a command-and-control approach in meetings and rationalise that one day you will use a consensus approach, but now is not the time, nor is any time in the next two years.

You have the capacity to turn everything into a contest because of the drive to be seen as a ‘winner’.

For example, if a coachee expresses pride in an accomplishment, you inject one of your own (and better) feats into the conversation.

You are comfortable being critical of others, but you take feedback on your own leadership effectiveness personally, seeing it as disloyalty.

At times you are abrupt, frustrated that people are not like you, and simply want things your way and under control.

This is why you make disparaging remarks about engagement and empowerment, because to you, that is a recipe for the lunatics to run the asylum.

The Cost of Aggressive Leadership

This style may be effective in times of crisis; however, the vast majority of days are crisis-free.

The cost of this approach includes:

• Stifled accountability

• Reduced innovation

• Limited participation

Team members become conditioned to wait for you to provide the answers.

It Starts With You

By raising the challenges of these styles, the point becomes clear.

Unless you can get to the heart of your own core beliefs, the need to be liked, or the need to dominate and control, how can you effectively and consistently help others make the leap?

It starts with you.
And it starts with me.