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As a Lean professional, manager or coaching Kata practitioner, have you ever experienced a situation where people cling to you and can’t do anything without your help? Have projects failed the minute you turned your head? Can your teams execute the action plan without your coaching?
It happened to me, and it’s not a validation of expertise or skill. I’ve learned my lesson!
Rather, making yourself indispensable is a symptom of weakness. For some people, this weakness can be a lack of confidence, a controlling tendency, an inability to delegate, or a failed teaching or coaching experience. It’s a weakness that quickly suffocates you.
Don’t worry, there are intentional practices to get us out of this situation and improve our coaching skills.
In this article:
Are we all coaches?
What happens with in-company coaching?
These days, it seems like everyone’s becoming a coach… Is it just a passing fad? Absolutely not! Rather, it’s a profound trend. Advances in neuroscience and education show that coaching in the workplace is excellent for transferring knowledge and developing skills.
While adopting an expert position and controlling knowledge can give us a certain status and flatter our ego, it also has several consequences:
- It slows down or even stops the deployment of Lean projects because it seems too complicated.
- It creates a Lean clan instead of a Lean culture.
- It also generates helplessness, because only the expert has the answers. It becomes impossible to move forward without this person.
On the other hand, adopting a coaching posture within the company and passing on your knowledge also has a number of advantages:
- This approach creates a Lean culture and develops each person’s ability to contribute to improvement efforts.
- It empowers people and enables them to work on projects aligned with their capabilities.
- It builds trust over time, as the scope of projects evolves.
And my favorite benefit, the one I experienced when I was in charge of a team of 30 employees: it reduces the workload and the mental load. People didn’t need my approval for every little detail, and they didn’t ask for my help all the time. They knew what to do and how to do it, and could solve problems on their own. What a relief! And the only person who had to change their way of doing things was me…
Coaching: a human investment
OK, I want to coach. Now, what else do I need to know?
To begin with, coaching is not a quick fix, but rather an investment in another person that pays off over time. It means training people and thinking long-term. These concepts are now fairly well known in the field of continuous improvement.
I love to follow the progress of the person I’m coaching by choosing autonomy as a goal. This means that at some point, I expect the coachee to succeed in doing things for themselves, and ideally to become a coach in their own right.
The reason is simple, if I’m the only coach, then I’m a bottleneck and will have to coach someone else at some point. By developing capable and confident people, we might find a few in the batch who have the potential to become coaches themselves. And with more coaches, the impact becomes exponential as people’s ability to develop increases.
Autonomy in the workplace is one of the keys to tackling the labor shortage. We can’t waste management resources by micromanaging, as we did when there were more motivated workers than positions to fill.
The surprising power of autonomy
There’s an ingrained belief that people are motivated by gains: the more goals you achieve, the more rewards (money, points, etc.) you get. This is only true for mechanical work and simple tasks. This type of reward system undermines motivation and commitment when people are performing complex or cognitive tasks. If you want people to think, you have to use a different type of motivation.
Here are those that work for complex or cognitive tasks:
- Goal: Contribute to something bigger, belong to a group, give meaning to the task.
- Mastery: Sense of skill improvement, pride in acquired know-how.
- Autonomy: Self-direction and discernment, freedom to make decisions.
In the In the 21st century, many mechanical tasks have been automated, and those that haven’t will soon be. Work is becoming increasingly intellectual, as even manual jobs now require at least some planning and problem-solving skills.
Teaching and measuring autonomy: child’s play
Imagine a child learning to walk.
In the beginning, the baby is carried everywhere; there is absolutely no autonomy. He doesn’t carry his own weight, he has no choice of where he goes, and he’s helpless unless someone is there to carry him. This is the stage we call “doing for them”. Competence is “non-existent”.
Then we hold the child as he tries to walk. We carry some of his weight, keeping his balance as he gets used to standing. With repetition, his muscles develop and he takes a few steps. He doesn’t choose where he goes much, but he tries to move around. This is the “teaching” stage. The child “learns” the skill.
Then the child can take a few hesitant steps on his own, and we hold his hand. We no longer carry his weight, but help him keep his balance. He decides where he goes, unless we hold him back so he doesn’t run away. We keep him safe. This is the stage when the child becomes “competent”. He has acquired the skill of walking and needs “supervision, support and protection” while he perfects his new ability. Supervision, support and protection are the job of a coach.
Progress
But you can’t always hold a child’s hand. He’ll walk on his own, explore the world, decide where he goes, carry his own weight and keep his own balance. This is the stage when he’s “confident” and you have to “let go”.
This metaphor is excellent, because it shows that we have to adapt our own reaction for a person to develop a skill, progress and then move on to the next level.
- Doing things for you => no skills or autonomy
- Teaching him => learning skills and little autonomy
- Coaching => skills acquisition and supervised autonomy
- Letting go => confidence in skills and full autonomy
However, suddenly changing the way we respond can create a lot of confusion and distress. That’s why I suggest telling the coachee that she has moved on to another stage of learning, and that we should therefore move on to another stage of support. This approach has the dual advantage of rewarding his success and reducing his distress by giving him clear advice.
Adaptation
The interesting thing about walking is that even when you’re confident in your ability and a seasoned walker, you find yourself holding someone’s hand many times in your life. When we’re going through a rough patch during an excursion, after an injury, when we need comfort or simply to communicate, we stand by them. We also reach out when we’re wearing too-high heels on a fancy night out, or to do a spectacular pirouette while dancing. It’s nice to be able to hold someone’s hand whenever you’re fighting a battle or rising to a challenge. That’s why letting go is not surrender. You can stay close to the person if you need to, or you can do a bit of lightning coaching to help someone you’ve already coached.
Moving from competence to confidence
Encouragement and celebration are great coaching levers for developing and reinforcing skills. All three motivational elements can be used to provide positive reinforcement while coaching a person to acquire a new skill.
Step 1: Mastery
Highlighting mastery of a skill is done by making progress clear and obvious to the coachee, as they may not yet know how to assess their own progress.
There are certain points that we need to identify in our observations in order to highlight them for the coachee: a job well done, progress made in a skill or the unlocking of a new skill. Above all, we don’t want to miss an opportunity to highlight progress to the coachee, as their perception of progress is their source of motivation and commitment. When people make progress without realizing it, they can’t develop confidence. This situation creates people who need external validation for everything they do.
Another common reaction to a perception of stagnation is helplessness. When people don’t see any results, they stop trying. It’s essential to highlight an achievement before setting the next goal, as this allows the brain to register this progress.
Step 2: The goal
In order to set a goal and the skills to be developed as part of a task, we need to give meaning to the work.
- We can learn more about the coachee’s values, so that we can link his or her skills to something close to his or her heart.
- A sense of belonging can be fostered through shared experiences.
- We can reframe our intentions from a transactional point of view to a more meaningful one.
Setting a goal is really one of the easiest motivational levers to use, because people already know what’s important to them. All you have to do is ask them how the skill they’re learning contributes to their goal. If they don’t know, we simply have to help them see the bigger picture.
Continuous improvement is all about making the world a better place – that’s a good start, isn’t it? Next, we need to determine why someone chose this particular context, industry or project out of the millions of other options.
Stage 3: Autonomy
Developing autonomy is done by gently pushing the coachee to do things for themselves. Here’s how to do it:
- The first step is to show her the options and let her choose.
- You can then ask him to identify his choices and make up his mind.
- We can discuss her abilities and see how comfortable she feels, then ask her to step out of her comfort zone a little more to see if she succeeds while ensuring a framework where it’s safe for her to fail.
A coach’s confidence in a coachee’s ability can work wonders in motivating him or her to become self-sufficient.
Remember that you can’t hold a person’s hand forever! If you do, it will be detrimental to his or her development, even if you like to help.
Learning to let go?
Imagine a parent taking a few steps away from their child and encouraging them to walk towards them. This is a way of testing whether the child can walk a few steps alone, and of setting a small target for the next victory. After congratulating the child, the parent can step back a little at a time to continue reinforcing the child’s skills.
This is what is sometimes forgotten in coaching: set small goals, test the target skill while encouraging the coachee, acknowledge success and move on to a more challenging goal. Saying “You’re getting good, I’ll let you try it on your own this time” or “Good job, we’ll make it a bit harder next time” is both a challenge and a reward.
Don’t forget: mastery (becoming aware of progress) and autonomy (doing things yourself) are two solid sources of motivation. And by increasing the difficulty and the objective, you gradually build confidence.
To know when to let go, I test two skills in the people I coach:
- I stop offering them help and wait for them to recognize their need and ask me for a hand.
- I stop praising them directly and instead ask them questions to see if they can self-assess their work.
Conclusion on coaching
In conclusion, by slightly modifying the way we lead, teach and coach, we help people to become totally autonomous, to delegate with confidence to competent and confident people, and to multiply our impact tenfold.
Letting go, accepting that you’re not indispensable or that you don’t have all the answers, is sometimes difficult. But this change of mentality and behavior is very gratifying. Seeing the people you’ve coached become coaches in their turn fills your heart with pride.
Above all, don’t be sad. Even confident, competent people will still need a helping hand from time to time. They won’t disappear forever… The relationship of trust you build by coaching someone while respecting their autonomy is a strong bond.
To become a better coach, here are the two options we offer:
By Julie Savage-Fournier
Industrial engineer
Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt
Adapted from an article originally published in The Lean Mag.
Bonus questions
In-company coaching encourages autonomy by encouraging employees to make decisions for themselves. This is done by first guiding them to identify their options and choose their actions, and by creating an environment where mistakes are accepted as an integral part of learning.
The role of a coach is to recognize the progress made by the employee, help him set meaningful goals and encourage him to exceed his knowledge threshold by offering support and constructive feedback. The coach also helps the employee to link what he or she has learned to his or her own personal values, in order to boost motivation.
Coaching helps progress by setting small, successive objectives, testing skills in real-life situations, and providing immediate feedback. This structured support enables employees to gradually build confidence in themselves and their abilities. In the coaching kata, the explicit role is to make the employee competent in the practice of the improvement kata.
Gradually releasing control is important to enable employees to develop their own mastery of skills. This strengthens their autonomy and confidence, encouraging them to act independently and assess themselves.
