Note: If you ever have a star who is destroying the culture of your team, you can’t afford to pay their salary. They have to go. Preserving your company culture is more important than the personal production of one key team member.
Your third responsibility as a team leader has to do with coaching with purpose. When it comes to coaching a team member, you generally coach for development or you coach for growth.
Depending on the conversation, there will be times when you work with a certain team member and you’re coaching them just for results. You’re focused on specific outcomes and help guide them to reach a certain goal. Focusing on development takes more time, but you are helping that team member grow their future capacity to be able to produce higher quality work without your assistance.
4. Coach With an Uncompromising Core
When it comes to guiding your team to greatness, it is important to have an uncompromising core and stand for something. Flexibility and creativity are wonderful and important, but the best coaches all have an unchanging core–an approach or vision about how the game should be played–and they hold firm to that vision.
For Steve Jobs, it was design. He wanted to build extraordinary products that were both beautiful and functional.
In our coaching business, our uncompromising core is to “eat our own cooking.” If we are going to be the best business coaching program in the world, we need to leverage our own methodology and structure to be a product of our own product. We don’t tell our clients to do anything that we don’t already do ourselves.