Coaching other vs Doing my own work

There is a paradox in coaching: It may feel slow, yet its results are super-fast.

3 Things in this Newsletter:

(1) An ARGUMENT about whether to Coach or Do your own Work

(2) An INVITATION to sign up for the August IntelliCoach Event

(3) An INVITATION to Listen to the Latest Podcast Episode

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Hi,

This is part 3 of our ongoing newsletter series on frequent objections that hold us back from coaching more. This time, let's have a look at a very specific use case. This is a statement that I hear quite often from Leaders:

"When I spend time on coaching, it takes too much time away from my own work."

As a result, in this article, I compare the options 'Do my own work now' vs 'Coaching team members'.

And I want to start with a question to you: When in a typical day are you doing your best work? When are you sharpest?

Now imagine you have a 1-1 scheduled with one of your team members exactly during those best work hours. You both had a pre-discussion and it seems that there's no burning issue to discuss this time.

However, for ages, there has been this certain infrequent error that your team member keeps making, resulting in unnecessary rework on your part, repeated explanations and discussions. You feel like you are running in circles here. Yet, the issue never got urgent or important enough to actually make it into your 1-1s to be fully addressed.

Today would be the rare chance to address it in a sustainable way using a coaching approach.

BUT, there is also super important concrete work that you have to get done yourself for your own deliverables. Your own task list is long and screaming for your attention. You know exactly that you could achieve a lot in those 30 min, if you simply postponed or cancelled just this one 1-1 meeting.

Do you keep the 1-1 and coach or jump into your own deliverables?

A Dilemma

This small dilemma is a typical situation and scenario.

A) Get my own things done now: Am I going to double-down on a concrete problem from my own task list that I know I can make progress on within 30 min?

B) Coaching Now: Or am I going to bet on the uncertain outcome of a coaching conversation with a team member, where the positive impact might be illusive and some time in the future?

Let's look at it from both angles:

A) Get my own things done NOW:

You are the best person to judge, how urgent and important your own work is. However, when you say YES to your own work, you must make sure to compare the right things. When you say "30 minutes of time spent on my own work vs 30 min of uncertain talking", your decision is biased from the start.

But "30 minutes spent to get this one issue fixed vs 30 minutes spent to likely gaining 3-4h of time back over the next 2 months" is a much fairer way to look at it. The tricky thing about the value of coaching team members is that it results in their improved autonomy and competence. And the value of that materialises not during the moment of coaching, but later.

B) Coaching NOW:

When you decide to coach NOW, and not to tackle your own task list, you know that your reward is in the future. With a bit of patience invested (1) your team member gains autonomy and competence and delegation will become easier. (2) you spend less time on urgent problem-fixing, which always felt unavoidable, before you started coaching. (3) you get time back for the things that only you can do.

When we compare these two valid options, it is clear that we coach to give up some time now, to get more of it in the future, so we can exercise our own role more fully. It is a classical trade-off decision to make, which is so typical for a Leader's daily reality.

(And small side note: we are not even touching at all the benefits to the coachee/team member here and on the very fact that many people will say that coaching actually IS doing work.)

Summary

Any Leader who possesses professional coaching skills still has to make judgment calls every single day when it is most appropriate to use those skills. That is especially relevant in high-pressure, fast-paced environments.

In this article, we looked at a very typical question that any Leader will ask themselves at some point: Should I rather get my own work done now, or should I coach my team member on something?

I specifically do not address here the fact that for many Leaders the very act of coaching is a reward and makes it worth it. While that certainly strengthens the personal business case for it, it may not be enough for many. Coaching does have a very clear business case in 'time gained' alone, and this article discusses it.

Doing my work now: This means to spend time NOW to fix and solve an immediate issue on your task list that is urgent and critical.

Doing coaching now: This means to spend time NOW to build the future capacity of others to handle things they would normally escalate to you and therefore reduce your available time for 'doing my work now'.

In short: it is a trade-off between (1) using up my time vs (2) using my time to free up more time in the future. We can notice: Coaching is actually very similar to money investing: (1) spending now on stuff vs (2) spending now to invest and get more return in the future. We give something today (time) to get more of it in the future.

The conclusion? As in many areas of life, breakthroughs happen after a deliberate investment and after we put some work into an area. If you make no time to coach at all, you are not building capacity and your chances at winning time savings are much lower. Lastly, the quality of our decision-making in that moment matters: Don't just compare immediate short-term costs; compare against the likely future gains you would have received form coaching.

Happy Investing in Others!

p.s. I hope you enjoyed this content! As a newsletter subscriber, you get our articles weeks before we publish them publicly, likely on LinkedIn. Please use your power wisely:)

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Podcast episode 63 is out!

It's not difficult for any Leader to learn the very basics of coaching, i.e. to hold back your solutions and give the other person a chance to talk and develop something themselves.

Yet, when all we do is to ask: 'What would YOU do?' or 'What is your idea?', things will get bland and predictable very quickly. This is just the very basics of coaching and it often leads to the very dreaded 'I don't know' by the coachee.

In this episode I share what it means to take your coaching to an entirely different level.

Click HERE to listen and subscribe.

An Inspiring Quote

There is no glory in prevention.

(unknown)

Food for thought: How do you relate this quote to coaching?