Recap: Developing and Coaching Your People

As a final recap of our session on coaching and developing talent, I just want to highlight some of the themes that we’ve talked about. Remember the course is focused on, and its foundation is, the Michigan Model of Leadership, which you see here. Whether or not you are trying to coach and develop talent to be more creative and innovative or more results-driven or more structure, process, and execution focused. Or whether or not you’re trying to coach and develop them to have improved teamwork skills and collaboration skills, all aspects of this model come into play. And it comes right back to driving results through coaching and developing talent. You can create a more innovative team.

You can create a more results driven team, a more process or execution focused team, or a more collaborative, team-oriented group of people through your coaching and developing of your talent as a leader or as a team member within that group. The ACS model that we talked about, Assessment, Challenge, and Support. First, remember you need to assess, what’s important for me to develop? It may be important that we want to develop a more innovative set of skills or a set of skills that will enable us to be more innovative. Or a set of skills or a mindset that will enable more results, or better results, or greater execution within certain boundaries.

Or again, the assessment may illuminate that you need to focus on teamwork and the social skills within the group. That assessment is critical as your starting point. Then you’ve got to figure out, how do I challenge and stretch the individuals, the team as a whole to address any weaknesses that have been identified, and/or to further develop and leverage those strengths that came out of that assessment process? Then as you’re challenging them and as you’re stretching them, you’ve gotta have that support mechanism in place. Both from a board of directors’ advisors, so who’s going to be there to provide the mentorship, the support, the stretch, the accountability?

But then also from a reflection point of view, to make sure that individuals and teams as they go through these experiences are reflecting on them in ways that will enable the learning and developement to occur. This ACS model, if you can remember the ACS, Assessment, Challenge, and Support, will have help you have a mental framework for guiding your strategies and your tactics for coaching and developing your talent and your teams. And that’s what brings me to this point. I’ve said it now several times. One of your most important roles, one of your most important responsibilities as a leader is to teach, to coach, and to develop your talent.

Your team, your organization is only going to be as good as the team and the individuals within it. And your role, your responsibility is to bring them along and help them grow and develop in ways that are going to enable your team and ultimately your organization to achieve its goals, its vision, its aspiration.

Remember, these insights can be used to develop yourself, not only your team members. A lot of the principles we’ve talked about in terms of assessment, challenge, support, the coaching process, the board of directors apply not only to how you coach and develop your team members, but also how you develop yourself. And what you surround yourself with, so that you can grow, develop, and achieve your own goals.

Finally, you have to take responsibility for your own development as well as the development of your team. This is our responsibility. The organization is not going to always do it for us. We have to be the ones that will take responsibility for our own development, and our team’s development. And I hope I’ve given you a set of tools, frameworks, strategies, and tactics that are research-based, that have evidence behind them. That if you implement them, you will be more successful and so will your team.