Imagine your eight-year-old child comes home from school on a regular basis with 10/10 for Math tests. Wouldn’t you be delighted? What if you found out that the Math teacher was giving your daughter the answers because it was easier for him and your daughter was a bit slow? How would you feel then? Probably furious that the teacher had stolen an important struggle and learning opportunity from your child, simply to make his life easier.
Can we be too helpful?
Yet we do this at work all the time. The thinking goes, ‘Surely, it’s bad management to let my team waste valuable time working through problems, risk making stupid mistakes, when I know what to do, and I can just tell them… right?!’
If this is you, then I’m guessing you are invited to more meetings, spend more time solving problems, more time advancing other people’s work, and more nights and evenings catching up on your own work. While it feels good to have the answers and save the day, it’s not a great business strategy.
There is another option
Instead of managing by telling or doing, you can achieve a lot more by driving a structured conversation that helps others think through their own problems and identify effective solutions for themselves, including solutions that you might not have considered. Over time, these short conversations improve a team’s competence and confidence to solve their own problems, freeing you up for more interesting work.
When staff are encouraged by their manager to think and solve their own problems, they feel more empowered, when they feel more empowered they want to take on more, and when they take on more and continue to grow, so does the business.
Now surely, that’s a good business strategy...
Learn how to drive coaching conversations at work that encourage better thinking, more confidence and more committed action from your team.
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