This team leader has been singled out for a move to a more strategic leadership role, but he gets sucked into solving his team’s problems. Would coaching on delegation skills be appropriate?
The problem
A coach describes an assignment to his supervisor:
“Tim was offered coaching by his boss, after discussion with HR. Tim, who is 45 years old, is valued by the organisation, and the HR manager explained at the outset that they want to support his move towards a more strategic leadership role. He is widely viewed as a good team leader, who coaches and motivates his staff well. I’ve seen him four times and we are getting on really well. He always arrives punctually and is prepared with issues he wants to explore, usually to do with managing the high workload of his team. I think he is overprotective of his team and we have talked about his need to delegate more. He is trying to do that, but does let himself get drawn into solving their problems. He is ambitious for promotion and sees himself as a potential MD. His career history shows a good breadth of roles and, although he was made redundant a few years back following a merger, he has moved on in his current company and gained a reputation as a problem-solver. In our sessions we talk a lot about the aspects of his role that he can delegate, so that he can release time to be more strategic. Does that seem like the right focus?”
The solution
Patti stevens, Accredited supervisor, The Coaching Supervision Consultancy
This coach’s focus so far on aspects of delegation fits very well with the main agenda item that Tim frequently puts forward at his coaching sessions, which is managing the high workload of his team. Improving Tim’s delegation skills would release time for him to concentrate on strategic matters. It would also support the HR department’s objective for Tim’s coaching in helping to move him towards a strategic leadership role. It appears that the coach has established a good relationship with Tim, so now would be a good time for the coach to start to help Tim to explore the wider range of his skills.
Future coaching sessions could focus on enhancing Tim’s preferred repertoire of skills and developing those that need attention. A useful way of doing this would be for Tim to complete the Personal Ecology Profile (PEP) to ascertain his learning style. As Tim has a reputation for and a leaning towards a problem-solving style of working, it is probable that his PEP learning style would be “exploratory”. Along with problem-solving, he enjoys divergent ideas and exploring where these may lead. This would be a suitable point of entry for the coach to start exploring innovative possibilities in relation to more strategic issues. It would also be a good idea for the coach to complete the profile, so he can identify his own unique coaching signature and the coaching style/s he is using in session with Tim. Matching coaching style to the different issues that arise, together with an efficient use of coaching time, would ensure quality control for all parties.
Ros Draper, Organisational consultant and coach supervisor
I would invite Tim’s coach to reflect on the challenges that working with Tim offers him. What would the coach do differently if he felt able to take a more strategic approach to coaching Tim? And what skills does the coach usually draw on to help clients to move beyond a potential “either/or” position of having to choose whether to be a problem-solver or adopt a more strategic role, to a more empowering “both” position. I would ask the coach to explore the relationship between the challenges Tim presents and the coach’s own professional development and ask questions like:
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- Does Tim’s situation echo a situation he has faced?
- How have his beliefs about the relationship between problem solving and strategic behaviour in business been influenced?
- Are there any ideas in point two that might be of use to Tim?
- If Tim has difficulty reallocating his resources and letting his team members develop by taking on more challenges, what possible explanations are there for this?
- If Tim were to develop more of the skills necessary for a strategic leadership role, what would he stand to gain or lose in his present role and relationships at work and what would he be doing differently?
- Could he identify Tim’s anxieties about achieving his goal of becoming MD and how would he go about surfacing these issues in his next coaching session with Tim?
One of the things that I believe enables professional coaches to move on with clients is the opportunity to hear themselves thinking out loud in supervision. This allows them to explore ways in which they can bring their intuition and observations to bear on the more explicit aspects of their contracts with clients.