Capabilities trump expertise: I'm not the expert, I'm the coach. I'm not the expert, I'm the supervisor. I'm not the expert, I'm the manager. By Simon Dennis
In a business where you get new people joining an organization, very early on they are expecting to be told what to do, expecting to be given their next task, or expecting to be given their next strategy – they are expecting the answers.
People who are leading the business are expected to have all the answers. I believe and admire true leadership that demonstrates that huge vulnerability – in terms of being able to say, "I don't have the answers."
For example, I was talking to one of our technical guys and shared with him that, "This is what the customer is asking for." He responded with, "I can't do that." So I asked (with a non-coaching ‘hat’), "If you're saying that that's not something we can deliver, what can we deliver? That's what we will go back to the customer with." He was quite surprised. He genuinely felt that it was my job to set a strategy, to determine the answer and tell him what he should be and shouldn't be doing. Instead, I was saying. "No, you're the expert."
It's back to that parallel in coaching which reaffirms, "I'm not the expert. I'm the coach." Or alternatively,
"I'm not the expert. I'm the supervisor. I'm not the expert. I'm the leader.
I’m not the expert. I just happen to be the manager of the team, but I'm no better or worse than anybody else in the team. I just happen to have additional responsibilities."
Even in Supervision…
I remember my first supervision group. I remember feeling under intense pressure to, in some sense, perform but in the real sense, to provide to contribute and to deliver content. I remember taking this back to our group external supervision and exploring this concept. Does the energy always have to come from, in that case, the coach supervisor, or in other cases, the energy from the leadership? It's not what we were expecting. Maybe, what we need to be thinking of is encouraging the people that are players in the game to be contributing at all levels all the time.
That's the way that we play the supervision now. We are clear to the coaches in our supervision group that we don't have all the answers. We have a different set of training. We have a different set of skills that we're using in supervision. Ultimately, our job is to contribute to the process and to hold the environment and the process in which supervision can take place. Actually, the contribution from the coaches are all equally valid in the supervision discussion. That was quite a lesson for me. It was quite interesting reading back through my notes and reflecting, "Actually, we need to keep that thought in our minds."
Just like true leadership is enabling. It enables people to flourish and to grow.
True coaching does the same. It enables people to develop and reach their potentials.
Similarly, true supervision allows coaches to do the same. It enables them to support themselves to develop and grow alongside their clients.
It's quite a sobering thought because a lot of leaders, a lot of senior people get bogged down with, "How am I going to solve this challenge? How am I going to set the next three-year strategy?" When actually, they should be saying, "Who do I need to involve in this conversation? Which of my team are going to contribute?" It needs to be much more collaborative. That was a real awakening for me.
Knowing your capabilities
For some people, this can be quite a hard lesson because if you've been expecting to be directed and being channeled in certain directions, to be suddenly given that freedom can be quite daunting. For example, a colleague recently left after returning from a secondment to a different job landscape. He was told on his return, "We haven't lined up a specific role for you. We feel that you would benefit from being able to explore the opportunities that exist in the organization."
It felt quite alien to him. He thought, "I took on this role that was clearly advertised and made myself available. Did the job. I'm now back." He expected to be able to see the next steps in his career and the next steps in his role as this had been the norm, to some extent, all planned out. However, the company was basically now saying, "We're not going to dictate this. Find out what you want to do. Go and explore." Now, all of a sudden, it's a case of, "We've actually taken away all the signposts. You've got a whole myriad of opportunities. Where do you want to go next?"
The real challenge for this colleague, and many others in similar situations, is knowing how to talk about your capabilities and really truly understanding them rather than disassociating them from your experience and your skills.
Afterall, skills can be learned. You can go on training courses to pick up skills.
Experience is clearly something that happens with time.
However, capabilities are those things that you're inherently good at and capable of doing; they tend to not change once you're mature – although they inevitably improve.
A good tip. When we talk to people about their capabilities, it’s important to remove the job titles and get to the core by asking them questions like "As an accountant what are your core capabilities?” This is because job titles tend to reflect a mixture of your capability, your skills, and your experience, and we want them to comfortably share their capabilities and show how they can adapt them into different roles and situations.
Imagine if someone had said to me 20 years ago that I would be doing the role I'm doing now, the role I'm doing now didn't even feature in my vocabulary because I didn't know roles like these existed – at the time they probably didn’t. Whereas, if someone said, "What makes you capable of doing what you do?" There's a certain core capability that I bring to the role. Then on top of that, there's a layer of experience I've had both internally and externally that makes me useful and good at what I do. In the future, on your next step on the journey you might just rely on your pure capability with your experience as a bonus for the organization.
There's a whole channel of thought around how you enable and empower individuals to make those decisions, whether they’re decisions around corporate strategy or their own personal strategy? How do you enable that to happen in such a way that you don't have anarchy? You could end up with everyone going, "Well, if that's the way it's going to be, I'll go off and create my own job." That works for some – but generally not in corporate environments. You don't create your own job, it's understanding what roles exist that you might be good at and capable of doing, that perhaps you've never thought of – now that’s pretty hard!
Opportunities for capability building
When we started coaching many years ago, a lot of the coachees we saw were looking to make changes in their career, partly because their roles were being made redundant, or projects were coming to an end, or there was a lack of opportunities for promotion, and so there was a forced change. Occasionally, it was just, "I'm not comfortable where I am." In coaching, I tended to approach these situations from the context of,
What is it that you enjoy doing?
What is it you're good at doing?
What makes you good at doing that?
Because honestly, that's the hard bit. When you’re asked “Why are you good at that?" often the answer is, "I just genuinely don't know." That’s where having these coaching conversations can expose the raw capability to a point whereby they can say, "Actually, this is something I'm genuinely capable of doing." It naturally then feels more comfortable to talk about and share with others. We see that in a lot of roles, for e.g. entrepreneurs and corporate leaders who go from company to company to develop and improve their capabilities in that space and building their experience in the different areas.
There were also examples of coachees choosing to leave the organization after having coaching. That wasn't seen as a good thing because people were saying, "Hang on a minute. Isn't the idea of coaching to improve our talent pool and grow the business?" In actual fact though, if someone is in a role that they can do and there's no performance issue, they might be perfectly good at the role, they might be perfectly accomplished and achieving in the role, but if it's not truly what they want to be doing and doesn't align with their genuine core capability, then I think an organization is better off letting them explore that alignment elsewhere provided there's no appropriate role in the organization.
People join organizations and become, in some sense, conditioned by the organization, and it's very easy of them to lose sight of what are they generally capable of. Because of the way organizations work, quite often you have to find a role, then through organizational change, your role turns into something else, which turns into something else. In my experience, there're very few opportunities to step back and say, "Where am I going in all of this? What is my purpose? Where can I exploit my capability? Actually, that might not be in this organization." Perhaps this is something that needs to be more proactively engaged in, like a habit, by both employees and organizations both during the good and bad times. Let me leave you with some questions to help you get started,
Are you clear on your own core capabilities?
How do you know and who might help you find out?
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