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Coaching Begins at the Top
The
contemporary business environment offers few places to hide. Even
large corporations and government departments that once allowed
mediocrity to coexist with performance are weeding out the unfit. So
where are tomorrow’s top performers going to come from?
Management skills are largely acquired through experience, but whether
an individual manager is learning what they need to know or applying
that knowledge correctly is difficult to evaluate. Many potential top
performers have lost their way and fallen victims to the stresses caused
by uncertainty when, with appropriate guidance, they could have made
become corporate leaders.
Coaching is not a cure-all for
those without the ability to succeed. Applying coaching in an effort to
correct substandard performers can be an outright waste of resources.
It’s far more beneficial for an organization to use coaching as a tool
to develop those who have already given indications of superior ability.
Look for Existing Abilities
Relate a business to a team of professional sportspeople and the
reasoning becomes clear. Regardless of whether it’s baseball, football,
ice hockey or any other sport where audiences pay to see the best, team
selections begin with the identification of outstanding young athletes
that will become better with experience and coaching.
Coaching average athletes in the hope they’ll become champions has the
least chance of succeeding, and makes no sense if the opportunity to
select and coach superior ones exists.
Mixing marginal performers in
with the elite players will only drag down the overall performance of
the team.
Just like professional sporting teams businesses must compete and win or
they’ll lose their customers. Investments of resources need to be
carefully considered, and then made where they’re likely to return the
greatest dividends. Coaching isn’t about fairness and equity; it’s about
building a team of top performers.
It must be remembered that the top performers in any organization can
inspire other members of the team to lift their games. Even if no
coaching is applied to those other than the elite of the enterprise, the
overall performance of the organization can be enhanced.
‘Topgrading’ – Building the A Team
In his book ‘Topgrading’, Bradford D. Smart outlines the possible
outcomes when every position in an organization has been filled by a top
performer. As the
Topgrading.com website puts it:
“Topgrading is accomplished by hiring A players, developing people into
A players, and redeploying underperformers into roles in which they can
be more successful.”
Smart uses the example of the USA ‘Dream Teams’ that dominated Olympic
basketball competition in 1992 and 1996. “The Dream Team’s fundamental
competitive advantage was clearly the talent. All other advantages
flowed from this primary driver of performance.”
He then goes on to say that high performers, the A players, “…contribute
more, innovate more, work smarter, earn more trust, display more
resourcefulness, take more initiative, develop better business
strategies, articulate their vision more passionately, implement change
more effectively, deliver higher quality work, demonstrate greater
teamwork, and find ways to get the job done in less time with less
cost.”
Coaching Builds Tomorrow’s Leaders
To a large degree the business stars of tomorrow will be produced by
those who coach them on the way up. Coaching is about developing
performance and that’s not a function of most HR departments; as a
process it works best when sourced from outside an organization on a
needs basis and is focused on specific long-term targets.
Coaching, even if applied to the ‘right’ people in an organization,
needs to have a long-term focus if it is to provide optimum benefits.
There’s not much value in giving tomorrow’s leaders coaching that’s only
going to enable them to deal with current issues; it still might be
successful but it’s not making full use of the developmental power of
the coaching process.
Begin by hiring good material – ‘the young A players’ as Bradford Smart
would put it. Then invest in coaching to build these young players into
an A Team. Develop them into leadership roles and continue their
coaching to help them stay at their peak. This is how championship teams
are built and it’s where the next generation of top performers will come
from.
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