Charisma or Caring
The ability to inspire others is a key leadership skill, and I am asked by many clients to coach them to be more inspiring. They think it is to do with being charismatic. I don't. I think inspiring leaders genuinely care about their people - they care enough to take the time to get to know and understand what each person is inspired by. If you want to be an inspiring leader, you need to care. It's just not negotiable. Different people are inspired by different things, and you can't take a one size fits all approach - and you definitely shouldn't assume that what inspires you will inspire them.

Empathy is Not Intuition
We often believe that empathy requires intuition - that you must put yourself in someone else's shoes in order to see things from their point of view. I think that requires you to be a mind reader. The easiest and most effective way to develop your ability to see things from another's viewpoint is to ASK them. If you want to know what matters to other people, just ask - and pay attention to the answers.

Authentic Conversations are Key
As you get to know the members of your team on an individual basis, you will have many conversations with them. It is in the context of these conversations that you will get to know what inspires each of them. Generally you will hear them talk about things that matter to them - personal or family goals that they often talk about. Do they talk about how important it is to them to send their children to good schools? Do they talk about the home they dream of building? Do they speak about a course of study that they are longing to follow? If they do talk about these things, listen and pay attention. Ask them questions to ascertain just how important they are and what else they are inspired by.

What about the Quiet People?
Some people are more inclined to keep these thoughts to themselves - for whatever reason. Perhaps they are just more private; perhaps they don't think anyone really cares; perhaps they just haven't allowed themselves to dream. Here is an opportunity to show an interest in them. Ask about what inspires them. Ask what they are trying to achieve in life. Ask who they admire and why - and see how that knowledge can be more inspiring. Perhaps by asking questions you help them to discover what inspires them - that's a real gift because now they can dream!

Everyone is Different
Sincere questions and non-judgement are important here. Everyone is different. You may be surprised what inspires others - especially if that doesn't inspire you! It is what it is for each different person - and differences are fine. What you want to know is what inspires them. It does not need to be what inspires you.

Stay Connected and Celebrate Success
This means you stay interested in their sources of inspiration. What progress are they making? What successes are they experiencing? And when they experience setbacks, help them to use these as learning opportunities so that they can keep moving forward. Most importantly, celebrate their successes and validate the progress that they make. This is far more valuable and inspiring than relying on your scintillating personality!

Contact me
If you are a leader/manager and this topic is something you would like to develop in yourself, email me at [email protected] and let's discuss your coaching programme.

If you are a manager committed to leading in a coaching way; a manager who has done some “Manager as Coach” training or who has read and experimented prolifically with coaching as a style; a manager who sincerely works at using a coaching approach to leading your teams; a manager who is human, has bad days, experiences stress and pressure, and who inevitably messes up despite your best intentions; this series of articles is for you. This is the fourth in a series of monthly articles, first published in SA Coaching News, in which I share tools, techniques and practices that you can use over time to create new default behaviours that will enable you to live into your intentions of being a coach and creating a coaching culture in your team. 

Taking a coaching approach to managing and developing your team is a journey. As with any journey, we need to figure out where we intend going and how we think we might get there. You will notice that I have used the language of “intentions” rather than the language of “goals”. The reason for this is that the beginning of the coaching journey is about exploring possibility and not about creating certainty. Furthermore, developmental activities such as succession planning and career planning are also about opening up possibilities – for the organisation and for the individual – rather than about creating certainty and single-minded commitments.

It may be useful to think about the beginning of the coaching journey as a series of conversations. The first will be a conversation intended to get to know and understand your team members’ values and motivators.  The second conversation will be around understanding their hopes and dreams for their best life. The third conversation aims at coming up with a development plan with each team member. Let’s look at each conversation individually.

Conversation 1: Values and Motivators

I begin all my professional coaching programmes with an intake interview that has clients telling me their life story. I begin the process by asking them to tell me about their life from the earliest time they can remember (usually around 4 or 5 years old). I am listening for the following kinds of information:

• Key events, achievements, disappointments and people from whom they have learned important lessons. I will often stop them to ask “what did you learn from that” or “what did you learn from her”? This may tell you something about their fears (things they have learned to avoid or mistrust) and hopes (things they have learned to move towards because they are rewarding);
• Key decisions they have taken and their reasons for taking these decisions. Here I may say “Please tell me more about that decision. What made you make that choice?” This will often reveal values – and you can note these quite tentatively as something you might check later.

It is important to remember that some team members may initially be uncomfortable with revealing too much. That’s ok. The purpose of these conversations is to build trust and this happens over time. There is no need to press a team member who wants to move away from talking about childhood events. Move onto topics that they are more comfortable with. Even these will tell you something important about people’s hopes, fears, values and motivations.

If it makes you more comfortable to have a set of questions than to have the conversation meander, you can create a short agenda for yourself. This is a good habit to have early in your coaching, because it calms your own anxiety about “doing it right” or remembering everything. If you do this, hold your agenda lightly and be prepared to take little detours.

You might end this first conversation with a summary along the lines of:

• This is what I’ve heard …;
• It seems to me that the following is important to you …;
• It sounds as if you enjoy … and dislike …;
• What resonates with you? Where am I off the mark?
• Is there anything else you’d like me to know?

Expressing appreciation for your team member’s willingness to share is a good way to end this conversation.

Conversation 2: Hopes and Dreams

The purpose of this second conversation is to get a sense of what they hope to experience at the peak of their career, and what living their best life might look like. This is a far more useful conversation than the usual “tell me about your 5 year plan”, which generally elicits the answers that they think you want to hear.

There is an important caveat here. As managers and leaders, we are working with people who are free agents. We do not own them and we should not expect that they want to be with us forever. They are whole people who are on their own journey, part of which they are sharing with us. We should expect that one day they will move on and make choices that advance their own hopes and dreams. We need to be ok with this. While they are journeying with us, we want to create an environment where they can learn, grow and make a valuable contribution.

Ask questions like:

• What do you hope the peak of your career will look like?
• Tell me about 3 to 5 dreams you have for your life.

It is also useful to see how these hopes and dreams align to your team members’ values. Imagine that one of their dreams is to retire early, yet a clear personal value is contribution. It would be interesting to find out what is behind the dream.

You will then want to discuss the critical skills that your team members need to develop in order to get closer to their dreams. What skills do multiple dreams have in common? Team members can go away and do this privately and bring it with them to the third conversation.

Conversation 3: The Development Plan
The purpose of this third discussion is to reach agreement on the following:

• What are the skills that the team member needs to develop in order to move closer to the realisation of one or more of their dreams?
• What work opportunities or projects would help them to develop these skills? How could this person’s role or responsibilities be adapted in order to support them in learning these new skills?
• How else could they learn these skills? A mentor? A course? Some reading? A personal project outside of work?
• How will you coach and support them in the acquisition of these new skills? How often? When?

Future articles will give you additional tools to use with your team members as you continue your coaching journey with them.