The best leaders really know their people and understand their career aspirations. They are passionate about helping them achieve their goals and have the skills required to help them realise their ambitions.
Making progress towards a personally meaningful goal is one the major drivers of personal wellbeing and an almost infinite source of energy and motivation. If someone has a sense their daily work is fulfilling and leading to purposeful career they will both perform at the top of their game and thrive as a person. If you lead people this can be both profoundly helpful but also deeply challenging if you don't know how to harness these inbuilt drives.
Making sure you know how to be a great career coach will have a major impact on your ability to deliver on two of your responsibilities as a leader: grow your people and deliver performance. I also believe being a leader means you care deeply for your people and I can't think of a deeper form of care than helping them know who they are, where they want to get to and helping them get there.
Being good at this requires a solid coaching mindset and skillset, knowing how to apply that to career conversations and the drive to do it whenever you can.
How does a leader act as coach?
Coaching requires a specific mindset and skillset and is a wonderful and powerful way of leading your people.
The basics of taking on a coaching mindset means you:
Believe people are complete, resourceful and capable of tackling their challenges and opportunities
See your role as facilitating a process of raising awareness, increasing responsibility, fostering action and accountability
Hold your team member in unconditional positive regard to build trust
Adopt a mindset of curiosity and non-judgementalism
Believe you really don’t know the right answer, but your team member does
The core essentials of the matching skillset are the ability to:
Create a safe spaces where fear of saying the "wrong thing" is minimal
Ask deep questions that evoke powerful responses - think insightful, not informational
Listen deeply: what is being said, not said, body language, pauses, breath, energy
Use a simple model like GROW to ensure you have a good process to fall back on
There can be a sense of letting go and liberation for a leader when they act as coach. This can be scary but also deeply energising and fulfilling. Find ways of routinely practicing both the coaching mindset and skillset will add an invaluable tool to your leadership practice, not just for career discussions.
How to apply coaching skills to career conversations
Career conversations can be tense, loaded with power dynamics and a feeling that an expression of disloyalty in aspirations will be met with a sense of rejection and a lack of support.
Come back to why this conversation matters: progress on your career is fulfilling and motivating for people and your role as a leader aligns perfectly to doing this well. So park short term concerns, do your best to take power out of the discussion and put your people's best interests at heart.
Some tips to using the coaching mindset and skillset powerfully in career discussions:
Adopt a long term mindset and manage fears of losing your people - you can only win in the long run if your people go on to achieve their greatness whether it's with you or somewhere else
Signal this conversation is different and give permission for an open discussion of long term aims, goals not perfectly aligned to the current role or company
Remain conscious of the power dynamics in the conversation and reinforce you desire to know what really makes your team member tick and how you can help them do more of that
Powerful questions for these conversations will depend on where each person is with their career thinking:
For people who are stuck or not sure what to do, looking for motivations and strengths will help: "what do you enjoy most currently?", "who is a role model for you and why?", "if money wasn't an issue, what would you do for work?"
If someone is clear where they want to get to, focus on action oriented questions: "what have you tried so far?", "who can you connect with to make that happen?", "what can I do to support"
Finally, you are still a leader and probably line manager so feel free to step out of coach mode and signal you are going to offer an idea or some information. You may also want to give lots of permission for your people to explore your organisation and others by networking and taking on side-projects - this may break any implicit feeling that looking across a broad horizon is an act of disloyalty.
What should I do now?
Just start. It's that simple. If you aren't already having deep, curious conversations with your people about their careers, begin now. Don't wait until you are seeing signs of disengagement or a lack of motivation before you weave these dialogues in to your everyday leadership practice.
If you sense there is something that's holding you back, reflect briefly on what that might be and then make a plan to address it. Your mindset and skillset can both be practiced and learned and this is often best done in real life; find a safe person to start with or engage in some deliberate practice with a peer to build your confidence.
I believe having the courage to have a running career coaching dialogue from day-one with your people will pay off enormously in their performance. Every winning team needs to change and renew itself. Being a great career coach is cornerstone of supporting this cycle of attracting, retaining and growing your people before they leave to take on their next challenge.
Pinnacle Coaching and Development is a specialist career, leadership and personal development business. Contact me to find out more.
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