Inspiring Success at Your Practice: Part 1 - Leading With a Coaching Mindset

This three-part series explores different aspects of professional coaching, including how using coaching techniques can decrease your stress and help you find more opportunities for joy and abundance in your professional and personal lives. Part 1 discusses leading like a coach. Here, we share tools you can put into practice in your career.www.shutterstock.com. Leader, coach, career coach, practice management, practice management series.WHAT IS A CAREER COACH? Let’s first clarify what we mean when we say “coaching.” What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “coach?” Many people will think of a sports coach. Sports coaches work with athletes to analyze their performance, showcase opportunities for growth, and champion their athletes to be the best they can be at a specific sport. Career coaches share many similarities to sports coaches. A career coach can help you see possible blind spots in your own life and help you develop and accomplish your goals. Career coaches are there to hold a space for you to identify any blocks, limiting beliefs, interpretations, or assumptions you may be making about your life experiences that are limiting you from living the life you want—personally or professionally. Career coaching helps individuals consciously connect with their core thoughts and emotions.1 Moreover, we often hear the word “coach” used interchangeably with mentor, consultant, and friend. For the purpose of this series, we are going to define mentor as a role model, perhaps someone that has already walked a similar path that you wish to walk. A mentor may also share personal experiences and tell you what they did to be successful. Consultants typically have an agenda, with possible answers, that they bring to the client or business. These individuals serve a purpose and can have a huge impact on your life. We use them ourselves with great benefit! LEADING LIKE A COACH Many of us have been a leader at some point in our lives. With traditional leadership (or command-and-control leadership) it can look like, and often feel like, “this is the way we are going, and you will follow.”2 This type of leadership is needed at times. The limitation with traditional leadership is that it reinforces to your team the assumption that you, as the leader, have all the answers. It does not leave much room for the team member to triage and create a solution themselves. Leading like a coach can help encourage your team’s development by asking them questions instead of always giving a solution. It allows you to support problem solving instead of making judgments. This can encourage your team to see the world and the workplace with a different perspective. It can give team members the freedom to embrace a new way of thinking and allow them to act with motivation to achieve a specific result.3 However, this can be difficult, especially for health care professionals like audiologists, as we are accustomed to identifying and diagnosing audiologic problems and then immediately providing solutions to our patients.4 Unlike our job responsibility in health care, when you lead like a coach it is not always your role to diagnose and solve all the problems that come your way. Leading like a coach allows and encourages team members to pay attention to underlying drivers behind their own actions rather than just focusing on the end result. WHY LEAD LIKE A COACH? Leading like a coach can decrease stress and improve boundary setting.5 Think about that for a minute. Who doesn’t want to decrease stress in their lives? This can also result in a decrease in the heaviness you may feel, as well as burnout. It can create buy-in for your team, which improves team morale and culture.6 The beauty of this leadership approach is that it is sustainable; this is something you can start doing today and continue doing. TOOLS FOR SUCCESS Here are some strategies you can implement to start leading like a coach. We recommend using an agenda during scheduled team member interactions. This allows each party to know the structure of the conversation, ensure both parties are on the same page, and make sure a clear outcome is determined. We use an agenda that is loosely based on SMART goals7 Topic = “What would you like to talk about today, and what goal would you like to achieve by the end of our time today?” Objective = “How will you know we’ve been successful by the end of our time today?” Buy-In = “Why is achieving this [specific goal] important to you?” Team member leads = “What do you need to resolve in order to achieve this goal?” Some other things to consider: Make sure you are in the right headspace. If you’re in the middle of something, ask your team member if it is urgent or if you can circle back to it another time. This will allow you to be fully engaged in the conversation. Try to use as many empowering, open-ended questions as possible, and validate what they are saying often. (Want a list of empowering questions? Scan the QR code to get your free resource.) Do they have any solutions they can suggest? If they could fix this problem themselves, how would they do it? If they come up with an outcome that works for them, you and/or the team, great! Stay out of their lane. You aren’t there to judge what they are feeling or why. Mirror or paraphrase back to them what they said to make sure you are understanding what they are saying and how they are feeling. Remember, leaders don’t need to have all the answers! You can use these tools with situations around the office to improve office culture, as well as helping your team progress towards their personal goals. Leading like a coach does take practice. Having someone on your side that can hold you accountable and be a mirror for you is key to developing these skills. If you are you interested in practicing these skills, send us a message! Check back with The Hearing Journal next month for part 2 of this series, which will cover the seven levels of employee engagement. We will explore a new way of identifying employee engagement, along with practical ways to improve it.