Every leader is a believer and a connector too. We remind ourselves and our clients of facts like these, each and every day. We believe in reminders and we believe in a “thousand little nuances” and then a thousand more.
Great leaders are also great coaches. They know and understand that they are in the business of building humans in addition to anything else their business may produce. Here’s a nuance to building humans.
Try practicing this, slowly.
Pick one of your top performers. Study her. Become a student of her performance. Study world class performers in her discipline. Understand the skills that are required to achieving world class performance in her realm. If her discipline is engineering, study the best engineers you work with, study the best engineers in history, study the most innovative ones, the most precise ones, study the different disciplines inside the discipline, study the best schools, and then study some more.
Great coaches are master students first. They study their team as a whole and their team members as individuals. Become as knowledgeable as you can about each of your team members.
Know them.
AND, slowly and consistently build them into the best version of them, period. Be patient and persistent. Do whatever is necessary to get them into deep practice. Be rocket fuel for them. Pour yourself into them.
AND, recognize their effort not their result. Praise them for their hard work, not simply for winning. Do NOT remind them of how good they already are. Do remind them of how hard they are working and that you notice, care, and believe in them.
High performers are built by master coaches that understand the way a skill is built. Slowly, precisely, and with a thousand little nuances, a thousand tiny improvements, a thousand baby steps, a thousand failures, a thousand false starts, a thousand loses, and then suddenly a BURST. Master coaches take the long view.
Do you see why we see so few in the world of work?
Tell me more…
BUILT TO LEAD 