How can you deliver top-flight results through your direct reports—and accelerate your career growth?
Try coaching. Coaching is not restricted to outside professional coaches. As a corporate manager, consider adopting elements of coaching as a key strategy to develop the strengths and capabilities of your direct reports.
If you enjoy learning from books,
like I do, let me recommend an excellent one I recently read: Coaching for Performance by Sir John Whitmore. It’s like a textbook on how
professional coaches and corporate managers can increase the performance level
of their coachees and direct reports, respectively, through coaching.
Here are my top three take-aways
from Whitmore’s book, complemented by my own experience as an executive coach:
Ask questions, listen attentively, and keep asking questions to raise your direct reports’ awareness and responsibility. Help them arrive at a conclusion versus prescribing a course of action for them. Aim to grow the relationship toward interdependence between the two of you. They need you to help them grow and achieve their performance goals. You need them to deliver the results that your boss will hold you accountable for.
View coaching as helping your direct reports develop and practice their Emotional Intelligence (EQ). Whitmore describes EQ as “…interpersonal intelligence or, even more simply, as personal and social skills.” It can be explained through a four-part model:
Self-awareness: Understanding why we do what we do
Social awareness: Identifying people’s strengths, interferences, and motivations
Self-management: Being authentic, flexible, and positive
Relationship management: Trusting, partnering, supporting, and challenging others so your direct reports are equipped to contribute toward a high-performing organization.
Follow the GROW model in each coaching interaction. Although I was already using a somewhat similar model in my coaching sessions, I liked the structure and simplicity of Whitmore’s model, which is applicable to both external and corporate-manager coaching situations. It builds on asking questions, as indicated in point #1 above:
Goal: What does the coachee want to accomplish?
Reality: Where is the coachee now? What’s their current situation?
Options: What could the coachee do? What are the alternative courses of action?
Will: What will the coachee commit to do, how truly committed are they, and by when?
I hope you see yourself as a
manager who can deliver much better results through your direct reports by coaching
them, rather than by the “command and control” style practiced by too many
leaders. This, in turn, should carry an additional benefit for you: Accelerate
your career growth.
Contact me if
you wish to adopt a coaching style to develop the strengths and capabilities of
your direct reports.
Does your company or professional practice deliver consistent and predictable experiences? If unsure or wish to learn more about it, please read this article from Shep Hyken.
Excellent reminder to take care of yourself every morning before you start your professional activities. My favorite tip is #1: Get 7+ hours of sleep. I know that if I come out short with my sleep the night before, I won’t be at my best during the day. Care to share your favorite tip?
In the previous video, we covered how you, as a corporate manager, can choose to accelerate your career growth by learning how to deliver results through your peers.
If coaching and developing the strengths of your Direct Reports is one of your priorities for 2020, please watch this video:
In the previous two articles, we covered how you, as a corporate manager, can choose to accelerate your career growth by learning how to deliver results through others.
An important choice to make is to let go of the mindset of an individual contributor, where you had to rely mostly on yourself to deliver your goals. Instead, seek to achieve results through others. Adopt a mindset of service, where you always focus on “What’s in it for them”, them being the people within your organization with whom you interact the most: Your direct reports, your peers from other departments and your boss.
Please watch this video for Tip #3: Find creative ways to determine “what’s in it for your peers.”
Being a manager in a corporation is not easy. You likely face a litany of challenges and are expected to rise to the occasion with little help. You are expected to deliver your performance objectives with limited resources, work with colleagues you may not necessarily trust, or deal with lackluster direct reports. Do any of these problems sound familiar?
If challenges like these are not addressed promptly, you could miss your performance objectives and hurt your advancement opportunities. So, you have two choices: Do more of what you have been doing or elevate your game as a manager by learning how to deliver results through others.
In this and future articles, I will share tips to help you become a better corporate manager. I will build on the lessons learned during my 25 years as a manager for three large corporations (P&G, IBM, and Microsoft), as well as my seven years as an executive coach for over 200 professionals. If you missed the first article in this series, please click here.
Tip #2: Enlist your boss to help you deliver your performance objectives.
As a corporate employee, I quickly realized how important it was for my manager and the senior executives to see me as somebody who was adding value to the business and giving my best at work.
In one case, I had a review scheduled with an executive a few levels above mine, from whom I required approval to expand an important project I was working on.
My manager at that time helped me develop my presentation. He insisted on the importance of eliciting a “wow” from the big boss, meaning that at some point during the presentation, he should be pleasantly surprised to find that the work we were doing exceeded his expectations. He said this would reassure him that we were on the right path and that approval for the expansion would be granted. It worked. The presentation went well, there were (literally) a couple of “wows,” and I received approval for my expansion.
In another situation, I had a different manager give me excellent advice about how to develop a good relationship with his boss. He recommended that I remember to “feed the lion,” meaning that it’s important to provide frequent updates to our managers on the work we were doing. They want to be reassured that we are generating the kind of plans and results they expect from us.
I encourage you to consider using these lessons as well. Generating wows and feeding the lion will help you capture upper management’s support, get your proposals accepted, achieve your objectives, and generate good personal branding, all of which will be work in your favor when advancement opportunities arise.
Contact me if you need help developing the skills and capabilities to significantly increase your business results through your boss and, as a result, accelerate your career growth.
Percy M. Cannon
Helps you make the rest of your life…the best of your life
Being a manager in a corporation is not easy. You likely face a litany of challenges and are expected to rise to the occasion with little help. You are expected to deliver your performance objectives with limited resources, work with colleagues you may not necessarily trust, or deal with lackluster direct reports. Do any of these problems sound familiar?
If challenges like these are not addressed promptly, you could miss your performance objectives and hurt your advancement opportunities. So, you have two choices: Do more of what you have been doing or elevate your game as a manager by learning how to deliver results through others.
In this and future articles, I will share tips to help you become a better corporate manager. I will build on the lessons learned during my 25 years as a manager for three large corporations (P&G, IBM, and Microsoft), as well as my seven years as an executive coach for over 200 professionals.
Tip #1: Become a coach to your direct reports.Think about the best manager you’ve had in your life. What made them such a good manager? In my case, early in my corporate career I had a manager who regularly called me to his office to brainstorm potential solutions to business challenges. One of these challenges was to address the low brand awareness of a recently launched product. We held several
brainstorming sessions, covering such topics as defining the problem, reviewing the data available, searching for best practices, developing potential solutions, finding alternative ways to enlist other internal areas for feedback and support, developing a plan, seeking approval and funding, and executing the plan.
Throughout the entire process, my manager coached me, mostly one-on-one. At the end, he empowered me to lead the execution of the plan: making our product the exclusive sponsor of a game show in a highly rated TV time slot. This and other actions resulted in significant improvements in brand awareness, sales, and market share.
My manager not only coached me on how to analyze and address business challenges, but he also taught me how to coach direct reports. I paid it forward when I became a corporate manager myself and aimed to follow his coaching best practices with my new direct reports.
Contact me if you need help developing the skills and capabilities to become a better coach, significantly increase your business results through your direct reports (and peers and even your boss) and, as a result, accelerate your career growth.
Your punctuality (or lack of it) sends a message to the person(s) you are about to meet. This article by Shep Hyken should provide you with additional motivation to always be on time.
