Canadian HR Reporter

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014 CANADIAN HR REPORTER & STRATEGIC CAPABILITY NETWORK Want a great team? Become a great coach Coaching an essential habit for good managers, says expert BY LIZ BERNIER You could have the most talented team imaginable and it still might not be enough. To unlock a team's full potential, managers need to learn more than just management skills — they need to learn how to coach. Coaching is something we en- gage in in many diff erent roles — as a manager, teammate and in our personal lives — sometimes without even realizing it, said Mi- chael Bungay Stanier at a Strate- gic Capability Network event in Toronto. But many managers don't de- velop their coaching skills, instead falling into other management styles like "the director" — order- ing employees around and giving advice, but not stopping to engage them, hear their ideas and help them learn, said Bungay Stanier, a senior partner at Box of Crayons in Toronto. ere are three core principles to becoming a great coach, he said, and the fi rst is perhaps the most diffi cult to get your head around. "Be lazy — I want you to stop working so hard. As a manager and as a leader, you're overwork- ing and the price you pay for that is the price your team and your organization pays for that as well," he said. "Being lazy doesn't mean sitting back and not working — it simply means sitting back and lis- tening to your team members in- stead of constantly taking charge." e second principle is to focus on curiosity and ask questions. "Always be curious; stop giving so much advice," he said. e third and fi nal principle? Coach often. "It's actually a day-to-day in- tervention," he said, adding that true coaching is not limited to a preplanned, stilted, yearly perfor- mance appraisal. "You have to be able to coach in 10 minutes or less, otherwise it'll never work as a day-to-day inter- vention," he said. "Every interac- tion you have with people… can be a little more coach-like in its approach." ere are a lot of diff erent per- spectives, said Bungay Stanier, but really coaching is about insight — into yourself and the situation. "It drives positive behaviour change — in other words, you do something as a result of that in- sight," he said. "So, hopefully, it feeds into a positive cycle that creates new insights about yourself and about the situation. is is simple but diffi cult to drive this whole cycle — insight to action to impact." Another crucial thing to under- stand about coaching? "(It's) unlocking a person's po- tential to maximize their perfor- mance — helping them to learn instead of teaching them." e coaching habit Great managers and leaders make coaching a habit — an everyday activity that becomes ingrained. To do this, leaders must un- derstand how habits are formed, which is rooted in neuroscience, said Bungay Stanier. "Forty-five per cent of your waking behaviour is habitual — at least 45 per cent, according to a study from Duke University. e habitual behaviour, this is stuff you don't really think about — you just kind of do. It's unconscious, it's reactive, your conscious mind isn't engaged. For half your wak- ing life, someone else is in control of you. It's a bit unnerving when you think about it," he said. ere are a lot of myths and misconceptions out there about habits, but here's the reality, said Bungay Stanier. " e more you do something, the stronger it can get ingrained as a habit... A drop of water be- comes a trickle becomes a stream becomes a river becomes the Grand Canyon. We have grooves in our brains, like the Grand Can- yon, that are from doing the same things over and over again," he said. To build new habits, we have to fi gure out new ways of behaving, and then repeat that behaviour. "Everyone's heard the whole 'If you do it for 21 days, it becomes a new habit.' Lies. ere is some research that says… typically, it's closer to 66 days." Also, a habit is not just a behav- iour — a habit actually has three parts to it, he said. " e fi rst part is the trigger — it's the thing that sets you off . It's the context in which that old be- haviour gets activated. And if you don't know what the trigger is, you don't know what the context is, you have no hope of chang- ing your behaviour," said Bungay Stanier. " e other parts are this: ere's the trigger, there's the behaviour and there's the reward. And the reward is that thing that makes your brain go, 'We should do that again next time. at's worth it.'" e key insight to defi ning a new habit is making it very small and very achievable. "Defi ne it in a way that takes 60 seconds or less to complete… Otherwise, your brain, plus the momentum of the status quo, means that you will almost always come up with a way not to do it." Applications for managers So, how can managers realisti- cally apply the coaching habit to interactions with their teams? It's about shifting your habits from giving advice to asking more ques- tions, said Bungay Stanier. "You're trying to rise above your own self-determination and limit- ed willpower… to change the way you react to the situation," he said. " is is not to say 'Abandon ev- erything you ever learned about management and leadership, and don't give anybody advice ever again...' ere's no problem here with people not giving enough advice." For leadership to get results, you need to use the right leadership style for the situation. ere are about six styles, he said. "And great leaders know how to use the right leadership style at the right moment," said Bungay Stanier. "Coaching is one of those leadership styles that is the least utilized, even though it has the greatest drive towards employee engagement, and is second or third in terms of influence on bottom-line results." You also need to relearn rela- tionship dynamics around man- aging confl ict. "Chemically, when a dysfunc- tional relationship starts to play out, three diff erent roles start to play out: victim, persecutor and rescuer," he said. ere are diff erent versions or incarnations of all of these roles, and people see advantages to each. However, there are also costs and disadvantages to each role. To avoid falling into those roles, it's important to be aware and to know what triggers you, said Bun- gay Stanier. "You've got to know your triggers before you can change your behaviour. So if you want to change your behaviour out of the drama triangle, then knowing your trigger is really powerful… knowing what triggers you into the drama triangle means you can stay out of the drama triangle, so you can be the coach-like man- ager or leader you want to be." Toronto Maple Leafs new head coach Mike Babcock speaks during a media conference to announce his signing with the club on May 21. Many managers don't develop their coaching skills, says one expert. Credit: Dan Hamilton-USA TODAY Sports

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