Coaching Leader: Helping Your Team Redefine What They’re Capable Of

We all want our leaders, teams and organisations to realise their full potential. But potential is unknowable. And that has significant bearing on HOW we help people achieve it.

Potential isn’t a set quantity we possess and eventually fulfil. It’s a continually expanding frontier, expanded by our pursuit of it as we acquire not only new knowledge, skills and experience, but confidence and self-belief.

So, if potential can only be understood backwards, if we can only discover what is (was) possible by becoming capable of it, our supporting role is not to “unlock” potential, but to help people repeatedly test, extend and redefine what they believe themselves capable of.

(And establish both the commercial and cultural conditions to make that exploration safe and acceptable.)

Institutionally, we routinely fail at this in any number of ways.

We tend to equate current performance with future potential which creates serious limitations at both individual and enterprise levels.

We tend to label a select few as “high potentials,” fixing them in a category (and ousting others) in a way that is antithetical to treating everyone’s potential as capable of continued expansion.

And we tend to prescribe development against predetermined competencies and career paths without leaving sufficient room for capabilities and outcomes we couldn’t have predicted in advance.

We talk about creating the conditions in which people can continually explore what’s possible, stretching beyond their current capability to lean into their learning edge. But that will only get us so far.

We must fundamentally recalibrate how we understand potential, and equip leaders and managers with the coaching mindset and skills to help people navigate that continually moving frontier: stretching out of their (current) comfort zone and into their zone of potential, whilst maintaining the confidence, self-awareness and adaptability to keep discovering what else they’re capable of.

This is a fundamental tenet of my approach, bringing performance coaching philosophy, principles and practices to organisational learning. Because a coaching style of leadership is uniquely suited to the pursuit of unknowable potential. It:

• works beneath the surface
• addresses internal resistance
• resists giving advice and instruction
• pays more attention to the person than the task

Most importantly, a coaching style of leadership helps people develop the metaskills to navigate their own learning edge: self-awareness, responsibility, resilience and personal ownership.

If these are leadership qualities you can envisage profoundly improving your organisation’s approach to performance and potential, you can explore how I help managers develop a brain-based coaching mindset and skillset here:

If you can see these leadership qualities strengthening how your organisation develops performance and potential, you can find out more about my Brain-based Coaching Manager programme.

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