Oct 12, 2020 5:43:39 PM | 5 Min Read

Why We Need An Additional Approach For Business Coaching

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Bruce Dorey
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Why We Need An Additional Approach For Business Coaching

Originally posted on Forbes

When Captain “Sully” Sullenberger manually landed an Airbus A320 in the water in what became known as the “Miracle on the Hudson,” he called upon an extraordinary human capability. Many of us may be familiar with this capability, but we just don’t talk about it. Sullenberger used a special kind of knowledge available only to those who have achieved a level of mastery. During his nearly 20,000 hours in the pilot’s seat, he’d been sweeping up and retaining information all the time, both consciously and unconsciously. Incredibly, in that crisis, Sullenberger was able to cycle through multiple scenarios in a matter of seconds, and he got it right.

This type of deep knowledge is not new neuroscience; ancient Greeks referred to it as metis, and it was earned by master craftsmen and skilled sailors and written about in the Odyssey and the Iliad.

As a senior executive in a Fortune 100 company, an entrepreneur, a C-level consultant and a coach, I’ve seen this type of knowledge — this metis — with executives in many industries, and often it separates the greats from the merely good enough. I have not, however, seen a consistent method for developing metis in the executives of the next generation or the transfer of metis to them from senior management.

To anyone with experience, it’s self-evident that the only way to get metis is through deliberate practice and, ideally, learning from someone with mastery in the field. This is certainly not a new idea and is still employed in highly skilled professions like medicine and aviation. Professional musicians and athletes also rely on this craftsman-like approach, as they know that leadership is but one of many competencies required to be successful in their particular field. However, this way of working and coaching has become less common in large corporations.

Despite the growth of leadership-focused coaching, Gallup’s 2017 State of the American Workplace report found that U.S. employees don’t have much faith in their company’s leadership. According to Jim Clifton, chairman and CEO of Gallup, some of the figures in the report “indicate an American leadership philosophy that simply doesn’t work anymore. One also wonders if the country’s declining productivity numbers point to a need for major workplace disruption.”

Henry Mintzberg, a prominent management professor, addresses what I believe is the crux of the problem in his book Managing: “Leadership cannot simply delegate management … we should be seeing managers as leaders. … The more we obsess about leadership, the less of it we seem to get. … That is because leadership is earned, not anointed."

As the baby boomers retire, coaching and training the next generation becomes increasingly important. Developing an internal coaching competency moves coaching into a more intimate, internal practice. Working with managers and leaders who serve as coaches enables a closer coach-player relationship in which deep contextual learning and role modeling can occur. Metis includes the subtle and more nuanced aspects of performance and expertise and is only transferred and nurtured in this type of relationship. However, little has been written about this category of coaching, which I call "expert coaching."

It's for this reason that I began to study these issues and wrote a book on the subject. From my experience and research, it appears that training existing executives to become in-house expert coaches is not only possible, but it also will make key contributions to businesses.

When experienced executives coach and train the next generation, the organization and its employees secure important benefits:

• A competency will be built into the organization, and the existing institutional knowledge, heritage and values will be retained.

• Future leaders will benefit by having coaches as in-house role models. Research shows that effective coaching and training is done by role modeling.

The good news is that there are plenty of highly experienced business professionals interested in coaching who will make great expert coaches.

 
 

Topics: Aspiring Coach

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