What’s Your Story?
Everyone has a story. A 300-year-old metaphor narrates a time when the architect Sir Christopher Wren saw three bricklayers at work doing the same job task and producing wildly different results. Curious, he asked what they were doing. The first bricklayer said, “I am earning money to feed my family.” The second hastily grumbled, “I’m laying bricks to meet your specifications.” With a sense of wonder, the third bricklayer said, “I am building a thriving culture.”
There is a story within every person, group, team and culture. Stories narrate identity, shape our places, bring us together and create shared meaning. We tell stories to persuade others, explain how things work, and justify decisions we make. The beliefs, attitudes and ways of working in the stories a leader tells can make or break the human experience at work — and the corporate bottomline.
It’s no secret. It is easy to get sucked into doing leadership, speed through meetings, check things off the list, and hastily text, like, friend, post, follow or hit reply all. Navigating the day-to-day, many leaders think that they inspire greatness to rise when in fact they tell people what to do. Their stories reward mediocrity, fuel disengagement, promote bias, ignite stress, halt learning, impede change, lower performance and put the brakes on potential in working life. Despite good intentions, even some of the most talented, educated, creative, technical, and ingeniously brilliant leaders can lack the attitude or skills to coach, inspire and lead.
Demotivating leaders — along with burnout and boredom — make a dream job feel like a dead end.
Leaders influence 70% of the variance in work engagement. When leaders tell stories that demotivate, people can feel a sense of dread of going to work. It’s no wonder only 15% of employees worldwide are engaged, and that the U.S. quit rate rate is 2.3% — the highest it has been since 2001.
In the U.S., one in two professionals have left a job because of a bad boss. Shockingly, just one in five people feel that they are managed in a way that inspires them to grow, 43% are bored and 67% experience job burnout. The spiral of demoralizing distress zaps social emotional energy and exacts a toll on collective body, mind, spirit — and the corporate bottomline.
Coaching Matters
Coaching is increasingly being used as an organizational pedagogical tool to accelerate leadership learning and development, career advancement and wellbeing. Scientific literature shows that willingness to engage in coaching can help people grow character strengths, increase change readiness, solutions focused thinking, self-efficacy, resilience, wellbeing, goal attainment and sustainable high performance (Grant, 2014). High performing leaders who use coaching to actively grow their strengths are 18X more likely to flourish in a changing world.
This is important because cultures that cultivate high-performance adaptive leadership are associated with a stronger bottomline. Multi-year research by Kotter and Heskett (1992) found that high-performance cultures reported revenue growth of 682% versus 166% for low-performance cultures, stock price increases of 901% versus 74% and net income increases of 756% versus 1%. Organizations with highly engaged employees report being 22% more profitable and 21% more productive than organizations with low engagement.
When leaders coach, greatness grows! Being an inspiring leader is a skill that you can learn and is a valuable personal and corporate asset. Leaders who value people as individuals and employees, and use a coaching leadership approach, play a vital role in helping others grow meaningful careers, personal goals, and excel with impact. When people feel valued, they are more likely to “live” the culture.
Ultimately, mindset and behavior change is the value that coaching delivers. In contemporary coaching nomenclature, a state of readiness and willingness to make positive change is called coachability. That being so, measuring the psychosocial and behavioral mechanisms of effective coaching begins with deciding if you are ready to make positive change.
I use coaching, science and technology to predict and grow leadership potential — with less stress, more worth, shared wisdom and love. Read my bio.
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