The average NFL football team had a franchise worth more than $3 billion dollars in 2020. With so much riding on performance, it’s hardly surprising that each team employs an average of 15 coaches.
“The best coaches in football are constantly thinking about how to help their players get better. They focus on understanding the people on their teams, what motivates and drives them, and how best to coach them.”
–Damian Vaugh, former NFL Player, Cincinnati Bengals
This proven effectiveness of NFL coaching leads to a common question among business thought leaders. Why don’t more executives take a page out of the NFL playbook and adopt their own coaching-style leadership?
The Association for Talent Development (ATD) hypothesizes that there are four main reasons why organizational leaders don’t coach, including wanting to avoid confrontation, lack of experience in coaching, insecurity about possible insights, and lack of time.
And yet, says ATD, a coaching-style leader can encourage employees to “chase those big projects.”
Healthy Feedback
Why build a leadership team based upon a coaching-style leadership? For one, coaching opens up a two-way dialog that can lead to healthy, constructive feedback.
In business circles, a lot of attention is paid to the value of “constructive criticism” in guiding employees. At its core, however, constructive criticism is still criticism, which can be detrimental to performance and to motivation.
The alternative is providing healthy feedback.
For leaders confused between the difference between constructive criticism and feedback, Benedictine University has developed a useful infographic delineating the differences. One of the main differentiators between the two is that criticism says “you are the problem” while feedback says “we can make this better, together.”
Both methods allow for a course correction, especially when poor performance issues or decisions need to be addressed, or core values have been violated, but healthy feedback reduces the emphasis on “blame” or “fault,” especially when it is an employee’s first such experience.
Highlighting this team approach can open up your employees, especially your A Players, to be more innovative and to pursue problem-solving. Avoiding criticism can further help divest employees of the anxiety that they are considered “the problem” when ideas don’t pan out.
Creates a Learning Environment
Just as with an NFL team, a coaching-style leader encourages learning.
The past five years have been challenging for consumers. A global pandemic, a major international political conflict, growing fuel and interest rates, massive shifts in the business work environment, and major advances in technology, have all kept consumers on their toes. Not unexpectedly their buying habits have shifted tremendously during this period and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.
There is no one organization or one person who can stay on top of these shifts and fully predict what will be the next motivator to drive consumers. To keep up, your business will need to be nimble and need to experiment, to stay abreast of what customers want and how they want it delivered.
Adopting a coaching leadership style encourages employees to learn, which allows them to have the breathing room to explore shifts in the business environment.
Building a learning environment will further help define who your A PLayers are. Employees who are consistently tied to the status quo, or tied to the “we’ve always done it this way” sentiment may not be best suited to an organization focused on growth, and may not be an A Player for your team.
Feedback Schedule
One commonality among A Players is that they usually crave feedback. They want to excel at their job and they want the tools to be able to grow. By providing regular feedback, leaders encourage employees to pursue personal and professional growth, which can cycle back greater contributions to the business.
Generally, feedback has become synonymous with the annual performance review. This once-a-year meeting is often dreaded by employees and supervisors and has been proven to be time consuming and basically ineffective as supervisors often use the platform to rehash months-old grievances rather than providing a future-facing plan for success.
What’s more, employees crave more frequent and consistent feedback. A Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) survey found that 60% of employees want feedback on a daily or weekly basis. For employees under 32, that number jumps to 72%.
In a coaching-style organization, the review process is best scheduled on a more frequent timeline, generally quarterly. Here, the leadership, whether it is CEO to executive team or executive team to departmental leaders or manager to employees, has a regular and routine process in place to review high-level business and departmental metrics, goals and priorities.
A regular feedback schedule also provides an opportunity to review the business’ core values and how team members are aligning their behaviors and beliefs with those core values. If the team’s values includes a commitment to on-time performance, for example, the quarterly review would be the place to discuss an employee’s tendency to show up five minutes late to all meetings and activities.
Feedback in the Moment
While a scheduled quarterly review is important in reviewing and emphasizing larger corporate metrics, in-the-moment feedback is also essential.
As noted, employees are seeking regular and timely feedback. What’s more, leaders shouldn’t allow employees to keep doing something that isn’t essential to corporate success by delaying feedback.. Additionally delaying feedback waters down the feedback as the delay can cause employees to question the value of the feedback. “If this were critical, why didn’t someone say something earlier?
Again, feedback should not be confused with criticism and as such it also means acknowledging and celebrating wins. Celebrating accomplishments not only brings people together but it also encourages employees to chase the wins.
Coaching Goes Both Ways
Building a future-facing team means providing the team with the tools they need to face the future, including the freedom to coach their leaders.
In some annual performance review scenarios, employees are able to provide a review of their supervisor. In organizations where this process exists, a fear of retribution may cause employees to avoid this step or to not complete the review in a wholly honest way. Often a funnel is created that drives employee feedback to human resources rather than directly to the supervisor.
In an organization focused on coaching, the consistent and regular feedback schedule should provide employees with a comfort zone that allows them to discuss what they need to contribute, including a possible performance shift from their supervisor, allowing both employee and supervisor to grow from the experience.
If you’d like to learn more about developing a successful coaching leadership style, PFD Group would love to support you and your senior team. Please reach out to us to schedule a call.