In the 1999 film The Matrix, the red pill represents truth, the blue pill illusion. Coaches should take the red pill and accept life is messy, says Dr Paul Ballman
What is your coaching philosophy? I’d be amazed if there’s any reader of this publication who has never been asked that question. Whether as part of coaching accreditation, to get on a list of coaching suppliers for a big organisation, or just in passing by colleagues, it’s a question to which we’re all expected to have a well-rehearsed answer.
While there may well be as many answers as there are coaches, I tend to find that somewhere within each of them there’s a reference to at least one of four core philosophies:
- I believe people should play to their strengths I help them figure out where they are better than others, then become truly exceptional at these things.
- I believe that people should eliminate weaknesses I help them find out where they are not as good as others’ leaders and then work with them until they are.
- I believe that people should reframe their weaknesses If you are bad at something, with the best will in the world, you will never be a star at it, so I will help you to find a way of making it an asset. If the world gives you lemons, make lemonade.
- I believe that people should be wary of overplaying their strengths All strengths can become a weakness. I help people to learn to manage the volume control of their strengths so they do not overdo it.
Now, there are a great many solid arguments for each of these approaches. Some people are adamant that only one of them is best. Others see that they can fit together in two pairs. Philosophies one and three can sit quite nicely together, since if you pursue them you end up with more ‘spiky’ characters, whereas Philosophies two and four combine to help build leaders who are more ‘rounded’.
It seems hard to believe that leaders should be spiky and rounded at the same time, so coaches might plump for one or the other of those two pairs. If they work for a consultancy that supports a tool based on just one philosophy, then to them, perhaps, only one will be true. So who is right?
Stay adaptive
Whether it’s your beliefs about the nature of strengths, authentic leadership, CEO capabilities or organisational design, countless leadership gurus try to proffer the answer and tell you ‘What Works’.
But the reality that I reveal in my book is that simple answers to that question never seem to stand up. The more complex reality is that apparently contradictory belief systems can sometimes both be true – and sometimes both be wrong.
So, which philosophy do I believe in? All of them and none of them. Rather than dogged pursuit of one panacea, we must be as adaptive as the leaders we coach. At times, we must embrace a strengths-based philosophy, but we also need to know when to abandon it and get into people’s weaknesses.
Isn’t that contradictory and illogical? Maybe, but taking the red pill means acknowledging that the simple stories we tell ourselves and others are often illusions.
The truth is much more messy.
- Dr Paul Ballman is former CEO of YSC, an adviser and coach to CEOs and future leaders, and the author of Red Pill: The Truth About Leadership (January 2016)