A CEO once told me: “You are too focused on the people, that won’t get us the results we need.”
Guilty as charged! I have ALWAYS been focused on the people and their growth – which is also what ultimately led me to becoming a coach. Helping people grow is all I do. Was it ever at the expense of results? Maybe short term, although I don’t really think so. Even if it was, I’d say: “fair trade.”
In his book “The Living Organization” (TLO), Norman Wolfe postulates a tension between two approaches to people in an organization:
Using people to create results
versus
Using results to grow people
Having recently gone through the TLO training, this simple reframe was one of the main epiphanies I experienced. Result as a tool, people growth as the goal? Sign me up!!!
Of course, the underlying truth is that people’s growth WILL deliver better results. Often outcomes beyond your own imagination. Sounds obvious, right?
Sadly, to many leaders this frame of logic is anything but. We see the ‘machine’ paradigm play in organizations over and over again. The concept is: you put in inputs, then there is a process, and then there will be a predictable output. Where’s the human in that context? Just a cog in the machine, with SOPs how to do their job?
Now, of course I am simplifying for effect here. No good leader will say they don’t want their people to grow. The question is, what are they doing to actively support and accelerate this growth? You don’t buy a plant, never water it, and then expect new leaves or buds to form without effort put in from your side.
In Metronomics, we have what is called the Coach Cascading System. The idea is as we work with the leadership of an organization, the leaders become coaches to their teams, and so on and so on. This is inherently consistent with the TLO concept of a leader as a “coachsultant.”
So, how do you use results to grow people? By keeping them in the ‘challenge’ zone, and engaging them – and their creativity – in the quest of achieving the desired results. Try: “This is what we’re aiming to achieve – how can you help?” And once there is a clear path to the stated goal, ask “what can we do to get even better results?”
Your job as a leader is to deliver results. How do you go about it, by utilizing or growing people? And how is that working for you now?
