Originally published in Forbes
By Randy Illig
Coaching has been a hot topic for years now, and I too have espoused the importance of leaders being coaches. After beating this drum for years, it dawned on me that we were all wrong.
Recently, a multinational company brought me in after they’d tried—and failed—to follow the conventional advice of making their leaders coaches. These executives were smart people: they’d read all the books and kept up with the latest methodologies and, still, they couldn’t turn their sales leaders into effective coaches of their 10,000-person sales organization.
I listened intently as they described their struggle and then said, “No offense, but you’ve got it all wrong.”
I wrote two words on the board: coach and coaching. “There’s a big difference between these two words. You want coaches,” I told them, “but I propose you actually need coaching.”
Replace the noun with the verb. Instead of dumping this crushing responsibility onto a handful of overworked sales leaders, focus on building a culture of coaching that permeates the entire sales organization.
The Worst Advice You Can Give a Sales Leader
Telling a leader to become the team coach makes them feel like “If it is to be, it’s up to me.” Everything rests on their shoulders. It creates an environment of dependency. If their team needs coaching, they have to get in line. And what if the sales leader isn’t the best coach?
They can’t be good at everything. What if there’s some circumstance they aren’t experts in? In the leaders-as-coaches model, you get what you get. It’s also incredibly taxing to the leader because they can’t keep up.
So why have we given this advice for a decade or more? Perhaps it starts with our early experiences with coaching, as kids on sports teams. With a dozen 5-year-olds on a T-ball field, the coach must be directive, instructive and specific. That model doesn’t change until advanced athletics, which few of us ever experience, so we end up thinking: “Coaches know everything, and they tell everybody what to do.”
But that’s not actually what a leader should do, of course. The advice we should be giving is that the role of the leader is to create a coaching culture within their team. If you have 10 people on your team, you have 10 coaches. Think of the power of that: the synergy, learning opportunities and opportunities for others to contribute. It’s exponentially bigger than a single-coach model.
Perhaps you’re thinking, “Not everyone on my team is a top performer. I don’t want them coaching anyone!” Or “Hey, I’m the leader—that’s my job. I’m in control here.” But almost anyone can peer-coach using this simple GROW framework:
- Goal for this coaching interaction: I’m calling you today because I want to get some guidance on how to navigate the decision process with this particular client.
- Reality: So here’s what’s going on. I’ve talked with her four times, and we’ve got this competitor.
- Options: Here are the options I’ve come up with. What would you add?
- Way forward: Now how do I execute?
I’ve watched people coach effectively who don’t know anything about the situation—or even sales in general. Even without an experienced sales team, there’s value in a salesperson rehearsing their call plans, presentations or phone calls out loud.
Keep It Quick
Another big mistake: thinking of coaching as long and laborious. We have to set up a meeting, send a meeting request, prepare talking points. But a coaching culture takes place in a Google hangout or on a five-minute phone call: I’ve got a call coming up with this particular client, so let me run my call plan by you. Or I’m struggling with the relationship with this particular person at this particular company. For whatever reason, we have some bad chemistry. Can we come up with some ideas together? It doesn’t take a lot of time, but it has an enormous payback.
Having a culture of coaching is not something we have to schedule; it’s just the way we behave. It’s how we work.
Set Expectations With Your Team
Culture is the collective behavior of a group of people. So that group of people needs to know what’s expected from them: This is the new standard for our team. Whenever you have an important meeting with a client, take a few minutes and get some coaching from a team member…and give it in return.
Then take 20 minutes once a month to share the learnings as a group. Discuss what you’ve learned from giving and receiving coaching, and that team will get better and better and better. In fact, if there were one mechanism to improve sales capability, I would say it’s this process.
With a culture of coaching, the leader no longer thinks, “There’s not possibly enough hours in the day to coach everyone that needs coaching.” The leader’s role is to simply reframe what coaching is, let people know how to do it, and help the team grow by harvesting learnings every month.
Randy Illig is global leader of FranklinCovey’s Sales Performance Practice.