The glorified coach
I once heard Robert Spano say that a conductor is just a glorified chamber music coach.
What does a coach do? Whether it's a chamber music coach, sports team coach, a personal coach, or a career coach, a coach empowers people to become the best version of themselves. They do so in two ways: 1) help individuals and groups discover the real problems that need to be solved and 2) guide them to finding solutions for the problems.
One of the things that they don't do is to provide answers all the time.
In his book The Coaching Habit, Michael Bungay Stanier advocates for leaders to behave more like coaches. He says, "Tell less and ask more. Your advice is not as good as you think it is."
Stanier talks about three advice-giving monsters to beware of: our urges to tell it, to save it, and to control it.
Why do we like to give advice? Well, we think it's our job as a leader to give advice, and there are clear short-term wins involved. Giving advice also makes us feel good about ourselves. When we "tell it", we feel like we're contributing and providing value. When we "save it", we feel like we're protecting our people. When we "control it", we minimize chaos by being in control over the situation.
A long-term side effect we don't often consider when giving advice is the disempowerment of the people in process. For example, when we're trying to "save it", we automatically create victims when we call ourselves the rescuer. We don't ever invite people to collaborate in problem-solving with us when we only give advice.
More generally, we prevent ourselves from fully understanding what are the right problems that need to be solved and what do the people actually need from us.
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How do we accomplish this by thinking like a coach?
Stanier suggests that we ask 7 questions to probe, discover, and empower with our coaching hats on. I'll start with two from that list:
1) What's the real challenge here?
We think that we know the problem, but sometimes we actually don't. When something goes wrong in a rehearsal, we as leaders come up with a viable story about why things went wrong. We make assumptions. Based on those assumptions, we craft solutions and we go in and implement. This all happens in a split second, and we're really good at it. We may think it's a technical problem with an individual. We may think it's an ensemble problem between two sections. Whatever our diagnosis is, we don't tend to involve the musicians in asking what they perceive as the real challenge from their perspective. Maybe there is a problem that we don't know about and are completely overlooking. Maybe their chair is lopsided so their back is hurting.
Asking the people for their diagnosis may shed light into the real problems, and we can be more effective in solving them as leaders.
2) How can I help you? What do you want from me? What does support look like?
We often think of interacting with musicians with the mindset of "here's what you can do for me or for our final artistic product."
Yet, when we put our coaching hats on, we are there to help them to be the best version of themselves, to do their best work. It would behoove us if we never ask what we can do to help them achieve that goal.
Different people need support in different ways. Some people need more eye contact and attention, while it may freak other people out. And we should know that as leaders.
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Perhaps it is not wise to take time in rehearsal to ask these questions of every member of the ensemble, but we can sprinkle them into our everyday interactions with musicians on and off the podium. We can start seeing people as individuals with individual challenges and diverse ways they require our help to tackle those challenges.
All of this is not to say that giving answers is wrong. Stanier adds that, "One of your roles as a manager and a leader is to have answers. We're just trying to slow down the rush to this role as your default behavior."
I would start with asking before we tell, and see what happens.
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