Find your way with experiments
So coaching. It’s a thing right? Like – “we need all of our leaders to be coaches”. Learn a good coaching model, practise that thing until it comes through silky smooth and nobody knows you’re doing it, now go and solve stuff.
Here’s a new discovery I had a few weeks back. I was running the final peer learning group of a leadership series with a cohort who were mostly early in career. We’d been together five months. We started with good, deep workshops and I patted myself on the back as they walked out of those, jazzed on a pretty well known coaching model. At that last learning group, I referred us back to the coaching model they had no doubt been using over the last five months. Tumbleweed moment. Eyes glancing sideways. And then one of the group asked if I meant the experiments they’d been running each month. Nope, I didn’t mean those. But there it was – my realisation that bulky models for anything leadership tend to get put into a storage unit in favour of short, sharp and practical.
So I’ve been changing it up. Instead of a coaching model drenching people with everything they need to be a coach, I’m helping them set up experiments that focus on a different element of coaching (or whatever they are wanting to develop) each time.
Try it yourself - if you want to get better at coaching, set yourself an experiment as a challenge this week. Whenever someone asks you to solve something for them, try these three questions:
What’s your thinking so far?
What do you want to do about the situation?
How do you want to do it?
No coaching model, no acronyms, just three easy (but actually a bit tricky) questions. Give it a crack and, at the end of the week, set aside half an hour to reflect on what difference your experiment has made, and whether this is something you now want to bring into your leadership practice. And if you want to let me know how it goes - do!
We experiment and copy and ultimately find our own way to put paint on the canvas.
-Kim Fancher Lordier
My Simplify Leadership series helps leaders who are early in their careers move from emergent to potent. If you’d like to talk about how I can help your leaders accelerate their development, get in touch.