The days of highly compartmentalized jobs are over. Companies-leaner than ever and facing tough competition from every part of the world-know they have to optimize the performance from every employee. They can no longer afford to expect a small percentage of “high potential” employees to carry the burden of exceeding market expectations. It simply won’t work.
So companies are calling on their managers to coax greatness from every employee. They need managers to coach.
To many managers, this task is daunting.
The good news is, any manager can learn to coach effectively. But first, they may need to stop being so smart.
That’s right.
As managers, you constantly rely on your experience and knowledge. As a coach, your experience and knowledge can get in the way.
Coaching is all about helping someone become an independent problem solver. It’s about helping someone find solutions that were once not apparent-perhaps even to the manager/coach.
The big secret in coaching is: you don’t have to be brilliant to evoke brilliance. In fact, when coaching, our need to feel smart and/or helpful often gets in the way.
Smart executives pay good money for coaches who have never even worked in the executive’s industry, let alone held the same position. Why? They have discovered that the less the coach knows, the more curious he or she is. And curiosity, not knowledge, is a main ingredient in evoking brilliance.
But many of us have misplaced our curiosity. Watch a child for two minutes and you will see undeniably that we were born with profound curiosity. But between the meetings and demands of our day, we speed ourselves up and squeeze out any time for curiosity. We assume we have the answers. We assume others will benefit most if we share our ideas and help them solve the problem fast, so we can get on to the next crisis.
Have you ever had a partner at home who wanted to talk with you about a problem, but then got annoyed when you wanted to solve it? Curiosity and listening are so rare, we are willing to pay for it.
So if you want to grow your people, your business, your results, your reputation, stop being so darn smart and helpful. Instead, try listening with curiosity.
And if you find that you can’t do that so well, fake it. Yes, fake it. Simply ask good open-ended questions that make you seem curious. Over time, you will begin to see that people seek you out because they experience with you, a space where they feel heard; where new thinking happens and new solutions unfold.
And then one day you will find that you are no longer faking it. And that will be brilliant.
Conversations for Brilliance
