Coach Through Obstacles

One of the biggest challenges I see with leaders at every level of an organization, including the CEO, is that we do not know how to coach team members to overcome obstacles. And instead, what we'll end up doing is doing the work for them or solving the challenge for them. And in doing so, what that will do is that enables learned helplessness. And you can see it happen to entire teams when a leader does this.

And those become some of the most painful removals in organizations because that leader has inadvertently weaponized their entire team against the organization. And what I mean by that is if we believe our job as leaders is to take on the challenge, the team member themselves in their role, that's their challenge to solve. If we take that on for them rather than coaching them through that, that will create that cycle of learned helplessness. So there are some ways out of that.

And some of you may have heard me say this before, but one of the fastest ways out of that is the next time a team member comes to you with a challenge, you've got to ask, what do you recommend? And again, this isn't to be mean. This is to help team members really think through the challenge and be able to come up with a solution. Can they always come up with the right one?

No, but our A players can, and we want our other team members to be able to elevate to that standard as well, because what you get is a team that becomes more adept at handling bigger challenges. We also tend, and those scenarios tend to come part and parcel with one, we aren't coaching as regularly and as effectively as we should. You heard me talk about having a consistent weekly one-on-one with each of our team members. And if we don't do that, and we're not talking about the most critical things like time management, prioritization, what not to do this week, we're going to have a bigger instance of problems come to us as leaders that we end up trying to solve for team members.

And again, it creates this perpetual cycle where we are enabling learned helplessness. If you ever want to see something really interesting, go look up the Cartman-Drama Triangle. And the Drama Triangle talks about a persecutor, which could be a A manager, it could be a client, it talks about a victim. In this case, maybe it's a team member and it talks about a rescuer.

And a rescuer could be the leader of the manager of the group. And what happens is there's a drama triangle created because the persecutor goes to the rescuer, sorry, the persecutor goes with it takes a problem and the victim says, Hey, woe is me, I can't solve this. You've got to solve it for me. The rescuer then goes and solves the problem with the persecutor.

Instead of turning around, instead of being the rescuer as the leader, what we need to do is coach team members through those issues and challenges. One of the coolest things I was able to experience in my career is I had a coach who never would take my work away from me. She would always ask me questions to help me be able to work through the issue that I had. She would never take the problem away.

She would help me figure out ways to solve it if that was my problem to solve. Now, yes, there are lots of times when we have problems as leaders, we just have to solve and they are ours to solve. But the ones that our team members need to be effective at solving, she would never take those away from me. And in doing so, I and my other team members, we became excellent at our jobs.

So if you find yourself doing this as a leader, you've got to turn it around quickly. CEOs, anyone in the organization who leads in any way, shape or form, we have to learn how to do this or else again, that team becomes weaponized against the organization. Learned helplessness becomes a very, very difficult challenge to overcome. If you want to read more about this, go read Pat Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, where in particular, if you're on the leadership team or even the extended leadership team, you might call that middle management, you might be a supervisor.

If you're on the leadership team, you're on the leadership team first, not the head of marketing, you're not the head of sales, you're on the leadership team first. There's also another great book by Pat Lencioni called the Motive, where it talks about the difference between two CEOs and how effective they are really boils down to one coaches and one doesn't. The coaches is more effective. That applies to us as leaders as well.

So make sure we know that our role is to coach people through obstacles and all of us will be more effective.