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Posted by on Oct 30, 2012 in Engagement, Inspirational, Leadership, Special Series, Winning Through Engagement | 5 comments

Five Reasons to Be Coached by Your Employees

Engagement is as much about employees as it is about managers. Employee engagement can be made easier when the manager humbles himself to be coached by his employees. It shows trust for starters. Engagement doesn’t have to be a fancy initiative. It starts in the trenches. One of our new friends author Jake Breeden shows us one way.

You’ve probably worked on how to get better at coaching your employees. But have you worked on getting better at being coached by your employees? Good students lean forward in class, ask questions when they’re confused and look to make connections between the new things they’ve just learned and the old ideas they’ve already had in their heads. Are you a good student of the people who work for you?

Learning from your employees is one of the most powerful and least utilized tools in the leadership tool box. And I’m not talking about listening to your people when they try to make a point. I mean something more serious and more purposeful. Identify something that one of your employees does well and make it a point to learn from her. Make it her goal to get you to learn from her, and hold her accountable for delivering on that goal.

Do you have someone on your team who is world-class at interfacing with the IT team to get thoughtful, prompt responses? Then tell her she needs to coach you on how to do a better job of that. Later, she can help teach the rest of the team. But first, I recommend one-on-one coaching in which your employee coaches you on something specific that you want to learn from her.

There are (at least) five good reasons to learn from your employees in a purposeful way:

Reciprocity

Show yourself learning, and you’ll instill a learning culture. The more you make yourself ready to grow, the more you role model a growth mindset for others. The person who coaches you will naturally be more willing to learn – not just from you, but from others.

Authentic Leadership

Display the confidence to make yourself vulnerable enough to learn from your team, and you’ll reveal yourself to be a humble, human, authentic leader.

Drive Engagement

It’s a challenge to teach the boss. But if it’s a fun, different, stretching challenge it can drive additional engagement at work. And it’s a great way to breathe new life into something that someone has been doing for years.

Increase Employee Self-Awareness

Your high performing employee might not know exactly why she’s so good at the thing you want to learn from her. Ask her to coach you, and now she must reflect on what exactly she does. It’s great development for her to convert her tacit knowledge into explicit lessons that can be more easily conveyed to others.

Learn Something!

Don’t forget the most obvious benefit – you’ll learn something new and improve your own skillset. This only works if it’s genuine. You must pick an area where you honestly respect a team member’s capabilities and you genuinely want to improve your own skills. Think of every person who works for you as a teacher. What do you want to learn from each of them? Everyone on your team can coach you to be better at something. Build your learning plan, and leverage the potential coaches all around you.

Connect with Jake

Jake Breeden is the author of Tipping Sacred Cows: Kick the Bad Work Habits that Masquerade as Virtues (Jossey-Bass, March 12, 2013). For the past ten years he’s taught leaders in 27 countries as part of Duke Corporate Education’s top-ranked faculty. Visit Jake at his website breedenideas.com. You can also follow him on Twitter here.

 

Photo courtesy of  Sharad Haksar

Jake Breeden (1 Posts)


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  • http://www.adigaskell.org/blog Adi Gaskell

    Being receptive to learning is always a good quality. It’s perfectly natural for managers to have different skills than the people they lead. For instance it’s quite probable that gen Y can teach managers much about social technologies and how they can be applied within an organisation.

    Coaching and mentoring are fundamental parts of good leadership, but it shouldn’t ever be a one way street.

  • http://www.iridiumconsulting.co.uk Colin Graves

    The best leaders control their ego and to be coached by their employees requires a leader to not let their ego get in the way of learning and engaging.

  • http://www.bensimonton.com Ben Simonton

    Being coached by employees as a way to foster engagement? Sadly, there will be many employees who don’t know enough to be able to coach anyone. So where does this strategy leave them? Out in the cold?

    But the concept is a good one. I used command and control for years but was never able to significantly improve the performance of my middle and lower level performers. The I switched to listening to my employees and responding to their concerns as best I could. The more I did it, the better they performed eventually performing at least twice as good as I had thought humanly possible. I no longer ran around finding problems and giving orders. I ran around trying to find out from my people what they needed to do a better job and then giving it to them if it made sense.

    They taught me leadership by teaching me what it was they were following. They taught me higher standards by their desire to do better each day. They taught me how best to support them with training, tools, parts, material, information, direction, discipline, planning and the like because they were customers of what I was responsible for providing to them and would ask for better if they thought it should be. They taught me why they were conformers and how to help them to stop being conformers and become highly motivated, self-directed, autonomous, self-starters who needed almost no direction thus making my job very easy and their production about four times better than I had thought humanly possible.

    So I became able to achieve the 500% performance gain Stephen Covey said was possible. Managerial heaven on earth. To find out more about how I did it – go to8
    http://bensimonton.com

  • http://www.cerebyte.com/ William Seidman

    While I certainly support the idea that managers should learn from their people, I think this post provides only a series of ineffective tactics. Managers are typically expected to have two roles — expert in an area and coach to develop their people. In the expert mode, they tell people what to do. In the coach mode, they are supposed to listen and support their people. This post is really about a form of the coach mode.

    In over 15 years creating and implementing leadership development programs I have found that the telling mode overwhelms the listening mode so frequently and consistently, that a cultural norm gets firmly established that asking employees for education isn’t trusted by the employees. The manager may be asking, but the employee knows that the manager will soon be telling again and that saying too much could get them into trouble.

    Instead, if the manager really wants to learn from employees, she needs to establish an environment around two factors — compelling purpose and path to mastery — and get out of the way! Step 1: Build a collective purpose about achieving a greater social good. If everyone in a work group is completely aligned on the purpose, it is easy to share information about the optimum ways to achieve it. Step 2: Build a clear, collective path to mastery of the function in which each person has and follows a clear and specific plan for becoming great at their job. When everyone is aligned on purpose and is great at their job, there is no need for the manager to do special things to learn from employees because it is going to happen naturally. A culture of openness is much better than a few listening tactics.

  • Jake Breeden

    Adi and Colin: Thanks for the support!

    Ben: Thanks for sharing your change in approach to leadership. I applaud it. And regarding your question — what if your employees don’t know enough to coach you on anything? — I doubt that’s the case. If they are brand new to the role, their skills may be indirectly related to the job. But they wouldn’t have gotten the job unless they had some transferable skills. If you have people working for you who truly don’t know how to do anything, you should address your staffing practice before focusing on coaching.

    William: We agree that a culture of openness is critical. My goal was to translate that big abstract concept into one simple thing any leader can start doing right away. Learning from your people is a great way to start building the open culture that you and I both agree is so important.