The Power of Relationships
John Macek is Publisher of Bosshandbooks (). His career in management includes 17 years as a CEO. He provides a monthly newsletter to his own SHRM chapter and shares it with LASHRM to share as well.
Early in my career, I held clinical faculty appointments with two universities. My job was to teach graduate students how to do psychotherapy.
There were no text books. The process revolved around learning from experience, assigning cases and processing them with the intern. That gave me a quick grasp of the intern’s strengths and weakness, and we went on from there. I am sure that many managers feel the same open-endedness when trying to exercise their responsibility for coaching those who report them. Perhaps I can reduce some of this discomfort by sharing my experience with Sharon, the best intern with whom I ever worked. Read more
Sharon arrived with prior experience as a psychiatric aide in a treatment program, so she had a well-defined agenda. I have never since worked with anyone with such an insatiable appetite for learning. The more I taught her, the more she wanted to learn. At times I questioned whether I was somehow driving her too hard, but she always came back with her list of questions expecting answers.
Sharon taught me a good deal about dynamics of coaching highly talented and motivated personnel. The most valuable lesson came from a gift she brought me when the internship ended. Both she and her husband were students living on a tight budget. Her gift came in a dime-store metal frame with hand-cut matting. The true treasure came from a quote she wished to share with me. It reads:
A friend is someone who leaves you with all your freedom intact,
but by what he thinks of you, obliges you to be your very best.
(Author unknown)
Given that our relationship was totally learning centered, I was surprised that she had come to regard me as a friend. I knew I taught her more than any other intern, and was pleased for that opportunity. After taking a few steps back, I came to appreciate what had happened. First, Sharon had come with a clear learning agenda. Second, when I accepted her agenda and responded accordingly, I was affirming her abilities and helping her meet her highest expectations.
This very same process takes place when managers coach subordinates. Expressing confidence in another person’s abilities affirms their abilities and promotes self-confidence.
Today we face a serious skills deficit. We cannot rely on the educational system to leap frog students into plug-and-play mode. For one, many teachers have not had hands-on experience. Second, the textbooks they use are outdated by the time they come to print. The only alternative for employers is to make life-long development part of every employee’s job description. That’s the only way to establish and maintain a pipeline of skills necessary to meet future challenges.
Good coaches exhibit the following characteristics:
Respect – They identify and affirm individuals with potential.
Confidence – They express a “you can do it” confidence to the people they coach.
Service – They see coaching as a personal responsibility they have toward every subordinate.
Trust –They give their reports opportunity to take risks and make mistakes. Persuading a report to take risks requires earning their trust.
Life Long Learning -- They emphasize with their subordinates that the greatest mistake is not the mistake itself, but failure to learn from it.
I spent virtually every day of my management career examining my actions, what worked and what did not, and what constituted the ideal manager. The effort culminated in a statement you can download free from my website.
This is how it reads:
You know you have fully arrived as a manager when:
1. You have surrounded yourself with a trustworthy team of lieutenants who you can fully trust.
2. You can fully deputize these lieutenants to act in your absence.
3. You can be gone for extended periods and receive only occasional phone calls from a team member who wishes to alert you or “check signals.”
4. Upon returning to work, instead of hearing questions, you hear reports: “This is what came up. This is how I figured you would want me to handle it.”
5. Upon receiving the report, you can comfortably and honestly respond “Good job. Thanks.”