When I ask CEOs one year or so into their role what, if anything, they would have prioritised more when they were starting out, focusing even more from the outset on the composition and potential of their team stands out as the most important common answer. Yet when I perform in-depth assessments of senior leaders, people development is consistently the weaker dimension among their key people skills. If this is not a question of priority then what is going on?
For some there is a question of moving from a more passive, “my door is always open” approach, to a more active commitment to helping their people shape their careers. This is understandably difficult in the busyness of stretch commitments. Most leaders share that whenever they meet with their reports one-on-one there seems to be a torrent of practical updates and questions that need covering. Before they both know it, the hour is gone, with no real opportunity given for them to step back and take stock of where the individual concerned is in terms of their career journey. In such contexts, some mutual commitment is often needed to kick-start a more planful approach to the deeper questions of career advancement, with islands of time provided for discussions that are free from day-to-day concerns. Yet still there is in my experience a deeper source of much of the development gap. Many senior leaders continue to rely mainly on what I would call mentoring to develop their reports, rather than refocusing their efforts more on coaching. Let me share a bit more of what I mean with this distinction.
Mentoring here I take to mean the practice of apprenticeship, sitting alongside a less experienced colleague and sharing your thoughts on a problem that they are facing or where they have been having difficulties. It is a foundational part of effective development work and is invaluable in many instances. Sharing a perspective on how to tackle a real issue that needs solving as soon as possible combines practical utility and a much higher likelihood that the individual receiving the advice will absorb it and integrate it for next time. However, it is best in my experience for developing effective managers rather than leaders. That is to say, it builds the technical competence to fulfil the current role, but is not necessarily best designed to increase an individual’s capacity to lead others and build their potential for even larger roles.
Coaching by the line manager, on the other hand, has far more potential to build leaders. Coaching encourages a senior leader to translate their experience not into soundbites of wisdom and expertise, but rather into really good open questions. Those questions are valuable nuggets in themselves. Much more universal than specific situational advice, questions may be squirreled away for reuse by their recipient in other future contexts. But more powerful still, they provide an opportunity for a discussion of the “why?” of a challenge, as well as the “what?” and the “how?” So often in development the real heart of the issue is to be found in the root cause rather than the surface symptoms. Such root causes can be technical issues, questions of knowledge and skill that can be surfaced in a mentoring conversation. However, in more senior leaders the true origins of development issues are much more often to be found in questions of identity, of motivation and of underlying emotional drivers and triggers, many of which may be not immediately obvious to the individual or their line manager.
The dialogues that result from open coaching questions can be much better at getting to these deeper root cause issues than a more well-defined best practice conversation. However, by the same token such interactions tend to range widely. The line manager needs to be prepared to go wherever their team member’s questions take them. To provide truly excellent answers, they may need to make themselves quite vulnerable and share difficult moments, hard truths or failures on their part. They may need to be prepared to be asked questions for which they don’t have an obvious instinctive response or clear answer. Over time it has been my experience that the more a leader is focused on building their self-awareness, and on remaining humble despite all the pressures of their role, the better they are at developing leaders, not just brilliant managers. I think it is because these qualities allow them to open themselves more readily to this sort of vulnerable and deeply authentic conversation with their reports. And while the content of those conversations is likely to be highly individual to the line manager in question, the raw power of such interactions that allow you to connect to the essence of a leader is something they can feel and will never forget.
