As someone who has worked in the business coaching arena for the past 25 years and built two different coaching companies that collectively have worked with tens of thousands of business leaders across the United States, I want to share with you my four secrets to coaching key hires to greatness.
The best business leaders are always on the lookout to build a bench of future talent. Hiring shouldn’t just take place when a vacancy needs to be filled; instead, look at building your team as an ongoing process. Develop relationships with potential hires, nurture referrals, and work with future talent to build a team that will allow you to scale as needed.
The second responsibility of a good leader has to do with delegation and making sure that the right people are in the right roles. This will require you to balance out the egos of your stars in such a way that these players lift the team, as opposed to pulling the team down. A team with 11 quarterbacks isn’t going to make it very far.
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.
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.
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.