Moving From Command & Control to Coaching & Collaboration: How Leaders and Managers Can Become Better Coaches

The meaning of communication is what’s received, not what’s said.

The number-one leadership initiative in any organisation today is better coaching. Coaching empowers employees, empowerment drives engagement, and engagement drives performance. At its core, coaching is about transformation. Leading distributed teams requires transforming how we coach and changing our play calls and playbooks to get things done.

As part of an interview series with Medium's Authority Magazine, I was featured in an article titled “Moving From Command & Control to Coaching & Collaboration: How Leaders and Managers Can Become Better Coaches.”

Here it is:

Nicola Ellwood is a Master Executive Coach (MSc, FMAC), performance and leadership transformation specialist (IIHNLP, ANLP) with more than two decades of experience in supporting senior leaders and high performers internationally.

Thank you for joining us to explore a critical inflexion point in how we define leadership. Our readers would like to get to know you better. What was a defining moment that shaped who you are as a leader and coach?

On leaving University in 2000 and living in Cambridge, I had the startling realisation that my English degree would not give me a career path I actually wanted to follow. I listened to my heart and consequently turned down a much sought-after job as a reporter at the local newspaper, and found myself directionless.

I knew two things. I liked people; I wanted a job where I could work with people; I needed to earn money fast.

I heard from a friend that you could earn decent money selling double glazing. That was a quick fix, and I had nothing to lose. I immediately started at a local firm, and at 20, I was the person walking up people’s driveways, window in hand and a smile on my face. I really enjoyed getting to know people and exploring how my solution could help them improve their homes and lives. Within a couple of months, I was the highest-selling sales Rep in East Anglia.

The lightbulb defining moment came on one customer visit, when I measured up a large house in a particularly affluent part of Cambridge. I had spent the day there, ended up having dinner with the family and really enjoyed meeting them and getting to know their family context. The quote was big, and commissions were high; to get this sale over the line would mean a significant commission for me.

On receiving the price, the homeowner looked at me, smiled and said: “Alright then, let’s go for it”. To which I replied in disbelief; ”Really?” He responded with something I didn’t expect.

“Nicola, it’s a yes because of who you are. You have been a delight to talk to. You have been genuinely interested in my family, my wife, my children, even our dog. You really have been a joy to have here today.”

At the age of 20, I found this interesting: “But isn’t everyone like me — as in, interested in other people?”

To which he smirked and replied, “No, Nicola, not everyone is interested in other people in the way that you are”.

I’m forever grateful for him and his feedback. He helped me tune into the truth that my natural interest is in people, and that's unique to me.

After a couple of sales roles that followed in the year or two afterwards, I was headhunted by a global leadership and development consultancy, Dale Carnegie International, to facilitate their leadership development and competency programmes.

They headhunted me based on my natural communication style and people-centredness; at the time, I knew nothing about leadership. They trained me to be a facilitator, coach and developer. I have been a coach my whole career and am a coach through and through.

25 years later, with an MSc, a rather full toolkit and a successful international coaching business, the truth remains that I love using who I am and my innate (and highly trained) skills to help people be their best.

John C. Maxwell is credited with saying, “A leader is someone who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” How do you embody that quote as a leader?

A strong leader has confidence and congruence. Whether tenured or new in post, a leader can be present and tune into their own compelling vision and sense of purpose. They have a deep understanding of what truly matters, garnering strength from that as their ‘true north ’, which helps them know what to do.

‘Showing the way’ isn’t about rolling their sleeves up and diving into the weeds. It’s about working with their team to agree on outcomes and actions, then liberating and enabling them to help make it happen. Their teams collaboratively own the mission and are equally compelled to sing from the same hymn sheet. This is enabled by how the leader works with them.

Leaders stay balanced during uncertainty, making their teams feel safe, personally navigating everything as the version of themselves who is present and ‘holding steady’ in the tricky moments, the version of them who will achieve what everyone wants. Leaders build tribes, people united in a common goal, while creating a sense of community and togetherness to get there.

Leaders have class and grace. They work with themselves and others consistently at their best. They are the version of themselves they want to be and the leader others want to follow.

How do you define the differences between a leader as a manager and a leader as a coach?

The worlds of the leader as a manager and the leader as a coach are very different. Their focus, beliefs, need for control and energy are placed very differently.

The leader as a coach has their eyes on the horizon. They’re clear on the overarching direction and the strategic changes needed to get to where they want to be. This vision compels and motivates them personally. The leader as a coach will share that prolifically and emphatically with those they lead. They compellingly share the why and the how; the rest is up to those they lead.

Because of how the leader shows up in that conversation, their people resonate and engage. The leader as a coach invites their people to find their own sense of vision to motivate and align them in the same direction as their own. They help them explore what that direction means for them.

From here, it’s often straightforward: energies are present, strategies self-generate, and ideas are intrinsically created by the team. The leader, as a coach, then liberates, champions and challenges them to achieve it and reach towards their best.

The benefit is twofold.

The team become committed and motivated towards their own goals. And the leader as a coach is liberated, reducing pressure and freeing up time. To quote one of my coaching gurus, Julie Starr: “As a coaching leader increases people’s independence, they directly reduce the dependency on themselves.”

For the leader as a manager, it can be different. The focus is more directive. The direction of travel remains compelling and meaningful to the leader, and they will share this prolifically, but the ‘how’ is also often predefined and managed by them too.

Outcomes, deliverables and strategies are shared and agreed with the team, and they then acknowledge and establish their ownership of them. The leader as a manager then holds them to account, ensuring the outcomes are delivered on time.

To determine which style suits a leader, they must ask themselves: Where do I want motivation and ownership to sit? If they want these things to sit with their people, they must find a way to unlock them from within. Coaching does this. The leader, as a coach, uses their communication skills to unlock what people want from within. All the leader needs to do is check that everything aligns and that people are hitting benchmarks (which, if coached, their people have probably set for themselves anyway).

We started our conversation by noting that improved coaching is the number one leadership initiative in any organisation today. What are some essential skills and competencies that leaders must have now to be better coaches?

Coaching leaders have two core skills sets:

1. They are skilful with others.

2. They are skilful with themselves.

   
   

To be skilful with others, coaching leaders must have heightened communication skills, which are often underpinned by their awareness of the true meaning of the word ‘communication’: The meaning of communication is what’s received, not what’s said. When coaches begin their development journey, this truth changes everything.

A coach’s role is to stand by their person, understand their direction of travel and why it matters, and help them identify strategies to get there. The key is demonstrating that they’re with that person on their journey. They must use non-directive, person-centred language. Being non-directive means being able to ask the right question that invites the person to tune in, have vision and think in generative, liberating ways; the coach then plays it all back to the person so they can check that what they’re saying aligns with and stays true to what they think. Being non-directive enables ownership, accountable empowerment and a sense of control.

To be non-directive requires self-awareness, self-management and showing up in a conversation as skilful, linguistically ‘clean’ and balanced. These leaders are conscious of their unconscious. Coaching leaders don’t direct their person’s thoughts with their language when in coach mode. They create space for the person’s thoughts (and therefore motivations) to come alive.

We’re all familiar with the adage, “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” How are you inspiring — rather than mandating — leaders to invest in upskilling and reskilling?

A manager who’s taught to lead in the style of a coach first is lucky. Because coaching is unnatural. Humans naturally have opinions, thoughts and beliefs. The skill of coaching is about being aware of them and learning how to silence them (or at least quieten them) in service of the person they’re talking to. If they learned these ways early on in their managerial or leadership training, they have fewer negative habits or patterns to overcome.

So how do we inspire leaders and managers to shift from a directive to non-directive approach?

It’s not a quick fix, but we start by asking: Do you like being told what to do? The answer is usually ‘no’, followed by a pause as they realise their people probably don’t like it either.

We then ask them to imagine a world where opinions are sought, and teams are invited to bring their thoughts, opinions, and all of themselves to the task at hand. How would their people react if they were asked, ‘What do you want? What could you achieve? How do you want to achieve it?” The lightbulbs flash, energy comes and momentum sparks.

Let’s get more specific. How do you coach someone to do their best work? How can leaders coach for peak performance in our current context? What are your “Top 5 Ways That Leaders and Managers Can Be Effective Coaches?”

1. Ignore your own mental dialogue.

You are hardwired to have one. Our Homo sapiens brain (that we still have) kept us safe by giving us thoughts, opinions and values (e.g. it’s safe to leave the cave in the day but not at night). Our minds create the same thoughts and opinions today, but when coaching people, it’s about being aware that our people don’t want them. We can trust our people to come up with a solution that can work. It might be different to ours, but hey, what if it’s better.

2. Know that change may be necessary

Humans are creatures of habit (again, those habits keep us safe), and we are programmed to work from the reference point of ‘same’. Doing something different takes effort. But if someone wants a different future than what they have now, change may be needed.

3. Use the power of ‘now’

Team members often come to you with problems focused on what they don’t want. They can imagine the negative outcome, and they get caught in an emotional state where it’s impossible to make good decisions. Asking them what they want instead of the problem, and what they need to do now to enable that thing they want, is one of the most powerful coaching questions a coaching leader can ask.

4. Encourage imagination

If leaders want to build motivation for change and encourage people to jump into a future that isn’t here yet, they need to empower them to visualise what that future looks like. Ask them — What do they see? What do they hear? What do they feel? What is exciting about it? And what might they have to do to get there?

5. Focus on their ‘how’, not ‘what’

How do they do their best? Their best is the version of themselves that achieves what they want. Invite them to think about who they are at their best. How do they think? How do they behave? What resources do they draw on to enable them to achieve their very best? Our job as coaching leaders is to tune our people into who they are and how they do themselves as their best.

We’re leading and coaching in increasingly diverse organisations. And one aspect of workforce diversity on the rise is generational diversity. What advice would you offer on how to effectively coach a multi-generational workforce? And how do you activate the collective potential of a multi-generational workforce?

It’s long been known that ‘deference is dead’ (Engage for Success). Today, in organisations, respect isn’t automatically given by employees, particularly the Gen Zs coming into the workforce; it’s earned, and today’s employees want or expect respect. They want their leaders and managers to stand by their side, helping them be their best by recognising what they uniquely bring to the workplace.

The more tenured employees (Generation X and even older millennials) have a part to play in creating a coaching culture. Typically, with more culturally deferential or hierarchical approaches, they may be more used to directive leadership styles, but if they are equipped to mentor with a coaching approach, they will not only be able to bring all their unique skills and capabilities to the workplace but also get the very best out of those younger generations around them.

Whatever their generation, the best leaders I know stand by their people, see each person uniquely and identify how to get the very best out of them.

You’re referring to emotional intelligence, in a sense. What are two steps every leader can take to demonstrate a higher level of emotional intelligence?

Do the work. If you’re not working with your unconscious, you’re not doing the work. If you don’t know yourself deeply, how can you possibly know how you show up in your world and the shadows you cast? The highest-performing leaders know themselves very well, their best and the bits they need to work with.

Know yourself, then grow yourself. Just knowing yourself isn’t enough. Are you the kind of leader that people like and want to follow? How do you know? Who are you at your very best, and how do you do that version of you? My clients know who they are at their best and have strong strategies to navigate their emotions while staying emotionally regulated. They know what they need to do with themselves to show up as the version of themselves they want to be and the version who will take others on the journey.

An exec leader I was coaching recently said to me, “If I can’t work with myself, how on earth can I expect others to work with me?” I was inspired by this lightbulb moment and know it to be true.

I keep inspiring quotes on my desk. What’s your favorite “Life Lesson Quote,” and why does it mean so much to you?

“Five f*ckin minutes", John Overdurf. This quote comes from my study with John last year. The simple phrase invites us to think about how we want to feel. Current neuroscience tells us that our ‘wiring’ updates every night based on the experiences we have with our sensations and emotions that day. So, change in our mindset and how we feel can happen fast.

So, I ask you? How do you want to feel leading at your best? How does that version of you feel? l Tune into this sensation every day for at least five minutes…because we all have access to “five f*ckin minutes”, right?

If one-to-one executive coaching sounds like something you and your team would benefit from, then please get in touch.