If you are not participating; you are not on the team. Anonymous
Those who lead by Influencing help their team reach a much broader audience. People with strength in this domain are always selling the team’s ideas inside and outside the organization. When you need someone to take charge, speak up, and make sure your group is heard, look to someone with the strength to influence.
Those who lead through Relationship Building are the essential glue that holds a team together. Without these strengths on a team, in many cases, the group is simply a composite of individuals. In contrast, leaders with exceptional Relationship Building strength have the unique ability to create groups and organizations that are much greater than the sum of their parts.
Leaders with great Strategic Thinking strengths are the ones who keep us all focused on what could be. They are constantly absorbing and analyzing information and helping the team make better decisions. People with strength in this domain continually stretch our thinking for the future.
Gallup found that it serves a team well to have a representation of strengths in each of these four domains. Instead of one dominant leader who tries to do everything or individuals who have all similar strengths, contributions from all four domains lead to a strong and cohesive team. This does not mean that each person on a team must have strengths exclusively in a single category, in most cases, each team member will possess some strengths in multiple domains.
How does this relate to the corporate coach?
You may ask, what does this have to do with coaching—whether it be in a sports analogy or a corporate business coach setting? One of the most common patterns in leadership or corporate coaching is an overbalance toward being forceful and away from being enabling. I call this the “muscle cramp” approach. There are variations to this theme. Some individuals are aggressive to the point of being abrasive and abusive. Others take so much responsibility that they crowd out their own staff. Still, others are so focused on having their own unit, an extension of themselves, perform exceptionally well that they do not cooperate with peers and even have contentious relationships with them. Although, often less observed, the converse pattern also occurs with regularity—an over-reliance on enabling behaviors and an under-reliance on forceful ones. Some managers are such good listeners, facilitators, and consensus builders, that their people do not know what they stand for. Other managers are so respectful of other people and so afraid of imposing their ideas on them that they fail to assert themselves. Others have such great faith in people and their potential to develop; this faith could result in a painfully slow ability to take action with performance problems.
Corporate Coaches should have a very clear picture of how they can be the most influential leaders in their current environment. This enables them to most effectively support their clients and corporate managers. Trust, compassion, stability, hope are among the clear strengths that coaches should have.
The Corporate Coach may have more to gain by guiding his client and organization into developing gifts and leveraging their natural strengths and skills than by trying to repair the weaknesses all of the time. If one can apply a systematic way to discover and build on the strengths, good payoffs can result.
Summary
The corporate coach is called upon to be versatile which is defined similarly in terms of the leadership qualities and skills of a versatile leader who has to continually adjust his or her behaviors, skillfully applying the right approach, to the right degree, for the circumstances at hand. Some profess this to be “situational” of “situational leadership” as termed by K. H Blanchard and D.E. Johnson…authors of “Management of Organizational Behavior.” These are the coaches that can pivot readily from forcing a tough issue to fostering harmony, from holding a blue-sky session to digging into an immediate problem. In that way, the virtues of the Corporate Coach or the Situational Leader are maximized and its potential liabilities avoided. It may be advantageous to be exceptionally direct or tough, for example, in a turnaround or crisis, but the same approach may be counterproductive in the early stages of working through finding strategic alliance or alignment with the Coach’s client. Unfortunately, versatility is in short supply in the business environment, but seems to be at its best with well-trained coaches.
The corporate coach needs to watch out for clients who start getting “muscle cramps”. To borrow a sports analogy, on the field of play, a muscle cramp can be a warning to get rest or medical attention— unattended, the cramp can put you out of the game. The coach must pay attention to their clients’ muscle cramps—signs that are not progressing with the corporate team as they once were. Ignoring a client’s muscle cramp can put you and the client out of business. At the same time, if a player’s natural strength is to be the best third baseman ever, why would it make sense for an individual to labor to develop his skills as a right fielder? Position your client to know and recognize their primary strengths—and construct a plan to build on them. Knowing and recognizing strengths also offers a better understanding of how to deal with the weaknesses—and helps build confidence. Lumping clients into one big heap of humanity dulls sensitivity. Do not let your team members or clients take the easy way out.
Coaches who help their clients build up their strengths can reach their highest potential. This positive approach does not pretend to ignore or deny the problems of traditional approach rather it enables the coach to tap into strengths they may or may not be aware of and so contribute more to their organizations. The challenge will be to tap into unrecognized and unexplored areas of potential. In the end, enabling a strength-based orientation helps to progress past the “good enough” bar. Once you help your clients discover who they are at the top of their game, you as a coach can encourage them to use their strengths to better shape the positions they choose to play—both now and in the next phase to come.
References
Research on derailment has shown that the strengths that propel managers up the corporate ladder can become liabilities. See W.M. McCall and M. M. Lombardo Off the Track: Why and How Successful Executives Get Derailed (Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership, 1983) and M.M. Lombardo and C. McCauley, The Dynamics of Management Derailment (Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership
K. H Blanchard and D.E. Johnson…authors of Management of Organizational Behavior, 8th edition (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; Prentice Hall, 2000)
Laura Morgan Roberts, Gretchen Spreitzer, Jane Dutton, Robert Quinn, Emily Heaphy, and Brianna Barker. Harvard Business Review, How to Play to Your Strengths. January, 2005
James B. Miller, author of The Corporate Coach: How to build a team of Loyal Customers and Happy Employees.
Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams and Why People Follow.
MIT Sloan Management Review, Summer 2003. Developing Versatile Leadership.