Coachability & Organ transplant
Why leaders will fail without it!
I don't think I was coachable for most of my career. I wonder what new paths could have opened out for me if I had worked on becoming coachable. Transplanting organs is now an established science & it works. Transplanting attitudes & perspectives needs a similar approach & cannot be done casually.
Coachability is the ability to listen to others, reflect on the feedback & be able to choose the right action from the inputs you receive. But while many successful leaders have this desire, only a few can take action on it. Being coachable is about allowing the feedback that you get to enter your daily operational checklists. Unless you can practically take action on the feedback that you receive, it will remain theory. For most people, this is something they would like to do but don't have time for! Or they don’t make the time!
What can make you coachable is your commitment to this desired change. Commitment expresses itself in different ways; for some, it may be fierceness & for others, it may just be a true purpose. The key is how much of these changes to your style you can bring into your daily life. Unless these changes are part of your routine, a new leadership style does not take shape. The challenge that leaders face at this stage is the massive issue of the learning doing gap. We all know what we should change; it’s just that we don’t get down to doing it & making these changes.
One of the biggest challenges leaders have is that they believe the coaching work is about "just attending the sessions with the coach". They think that they have solved the problem by hiring a coach. The real hard work is actually in between the coaching sessions. That is when you, as a leader, are “in the akhara.” When you are in the wrestling arena, all your planning & thinking meets reality. That is when you show your mettle. Much research on the “learning/doing” gap indicates that many people don’t apply what they learn. We have all experienced this in our lives. Life intrudes to stop us from using this learning. We get too busy to apply the principles that we have learned. The knowing-doing gap is the lack of connection between knowledge and action.
We also have to overcome the enormous barrier evolution has put before us. Evolution has taught us to do things in a certain way & any change to that is challenging. If we have always yelled at someone to get work done, it will not be easy to change that, whatever theory about emotional intelligence you may have learned. Just being aware of something is just never enough. Evolution has designed our brains to run on the “easier path.” Using the Prefrontal cortex, which is the centre of our executive functioning(reflection, intuition, empathy, etc.), is highly energy-consuming & the brain would instead use the lower energy-demanding subcortical areas. So our brains are designed to run on the lower fuel-consuming tasks & the behavior that we see gets built with this insight. That’s why we choose the “easier path,” & no training program or book, or video can change the leadership behavior game for us. We have had many training sessions where a bulb went off & we had an aha moment & yet we didn’t change our behavior. If we want to assemble new micro behaviors in our repository, we must practice them daily. The only way to build a new leadership capacity is to try out the new behavior & practice daily. Creating a new capability is the work we need to do outside our coaching sessions. And to do this, we need to be ready to take risks and be a little more vulnerable. Try some behaviors that don’t seem to be about you when you first do them. So a leader’s coachability is a lot about her readiness to use the Coaching to build her framework to select what to change & then have the willingness to make those changes in her life.
And finally, the leader needs to be ready to allow for some vulnerability as she moves up the conscious competence ladder. Noel Burch developed the Conscious Competence Ladder in the 1970s. The model highlights two factors that affect our thinking as we learn a new skill: consciousness (awareness) and skill level (competence). According to the model, we move through the following levels as we build competence in a new skill: first, we don’t even know that we are unskilled, so that stage is being Unconsciously unskilled. From there, we become aware & that is called Consciously unskilled. This is a major transition; being aware that we have specific behaviors in our leadership style that may limit us can be a game-changer. From there, you move on to what is being consciously skilled & finally, unconsciously skilled.
So coachability exists on a continuum & we may find ourselves mostly coachable & sometimes not. It is important to think of coachability as something you can prepare for & invest in before you hire a coach.
The fact is that there are better solutions than Coaching for many leaders. There are many ways to learn to become more impactful & the burning embers of “bad experience” are probably the best teachers.
I WAS MAINLY UN-COACHABLE when I think of my 30-year corporate & entrepreneurial journey. I was headstrong, sure of what I knew & much else besides. And then, of course, life happened & leaving large companies & becoming an entrepreneur humbled me. But I remained un coachable still for many years. For me, the early years of being an entrepreneur were more about hustling & moving fast. I could not appreciate at that stage the deeper nuances of risk & return that I had entered into as an entrepreneur. At this stage, I can spot a transition in my leadership style, where challenging experiences began to help me “self-coach” myself.
Like many leaders, I learned at the crucible of “bad experience.” A bad client, a difficult & complex problem, a terrible boss & a senior person hire gone wrong were often among the varied experiences that taught me.
So I think the first signs of whether you are coachable or not is to see whether you are open to new learning & do you recognize that you don’t know what you don’t know. When the first known Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus, was asked what was the most challenging thing in the world, he answered, “To Know Thyself.” That observation, made more than 600 BC, is as accurate today as many years ago. To know oneself, one needs an intense curiosity about one’s blind spots & a belief that diving deeper into this is not a theoretical exercise but instead will help oneself become a more effective leader. At this stage, the key attribute that will help you become more coachable is the accountability you bring to your personal growth. Are you aware of those moments where your coachability drops? For the longest time, I used words that motivated me, war-like words signifying aggression. I would not hesitate to use phrases like ‘smash through the opposition,’ ‘killing it,’ and “get it done at any cost.” And I realized I was very uncoachable when using this vocabulary. It has been a long journey to temper this & see the impact it can have on the people with me. I can imagine many of my former teammates cringing while reading this.
Anyone who is coachable has long-term goals, period. Without that, there is nothing to coach. Being able to think about who they want to be in the long term & be accountable for making those changes because these changes inspire you is an essential pre-requisite of a coachable individual.
Coaching can be compared very differently to what happens in an organ transplant. Over the last five decades, surgeons have figured out how to transplant many vital organs in the human body. Let’s say you want to bring in a new kidney into a patient; the doctors will try to reduce the immunity system of the whole body so that they can bring in the new organ. They allow the new kidney to take over the job that it has, and then they will let the immunity system back up. This process has matured a lot when we are talking about the body. Science has already discovered what we must do to accept the new organs successfully. The most critical piece is to match the organs effectively. The better matched the donor and recipient are, the more the chances of a successful transplant. Both the donor and recipient are tested for compatible blood groups. The patient can rapidly reject the transplant if the blood groups do not match. It is critical at this stage to manage this risk. To reduce the risk of transplant for the patients, they are treated with immunosuppressive drugs.
Think now about how we begin to accept new leadership behaviors. When it comes to us as leaders taking & trying to incorporate recent feedback, it’s hard. You are trying to transplant a unique perspective into an individual-a lot of old, well-fortified barriers exist to stop this transplant from being successful. So the first step is to identify the correct behaviors that have a chance of growing within you & not being rejected. This is your “perspective transplant.” And most critically, at this stage, you have to reduce your immunity to new ideas & make a focused attempt to be reflective. We need to build the muscle of reflection to reject new behaviors for all the wrong reasons. And then, adopting new behaviors needs practice. You can start by practicing the new behavior you want to adopt in low-stress situations? And anything new will have high failure rates. Are you willing to live with that & grow through it? And set up your system for reflection on your progress and adjust your approach as needed.
Adopting any new skill requires practice. Neuroplasticity is widely recognized as the brain’s capacity to create new neural pathways necessary to function more effectively. Only practice will create new neural pathways. Even Sachin Tendulkar had to practice by creating a rough patch outside the off stump to prepare for Shane Warne’s tour of India. Sports people recognize this very well. For a leader to improve his leadership capacity, he will need a lot of commitment & focus. You will need to think of your development through ongoing short cycles of action and reflection. No one says they will improve at a sport or musical instrument simply because they attend a workshop. Like Sachin Tendulkar, focused practice is needed to perform at a high level.
So it is a non-trivial problem when someone steps out to change some part of her leadership style. What can help to make you coachable is whether you have the dogged persistence to make it happen. And how much are you ready to engage & prepare to make your “perspective transplant” successful?
So for Coaching to succeed, it needs two people to clap. The coachee must want to do the work. The coach must do something other than the growing for you. A coach can be your partner, who can help you fine-tune your goals & work with you to help with the leadership behavior transplant in various ways.
Should I think of my leadership capacity as my laptop or hardware, or should I see it as my software? Both can have capacity increases, but my software can be added infinitely. Can I expand my leadership capacity over time? When I think back to the various transitions I have made, I am sure I have added to my capacity. But I could add to my capacity only when I was ready, not before!
So here is a list of questions I would like to leave you with which may help you evaluate your coachability & the appropriateness of Coaching as a solution for you:
What attributes, qualities & leadership behavior make you coachable? Reflect on them & try and articulate them to yourself.
Have you reflected on issues that you faced & made real changes to your leadership style? Make a list of the top 3 changes that you have made.
When are you far more open as a person & so likely to be more coachable?
What kind of person creates the conditions that make you more coachable & describe those conditions.
When aren’t you coachable?
What kind of people trigger you? Who are these people whose feedback you are reluctant to accept?
How are you when you are not being coachable? What are the behaviors, actions, and words you use?
It is critical for leaders today to adapt to a far more complex world out there. As the business environment continues to become more complex & nuanced, some leaders will find that Coaching is the right solution for them to engage with the future.