The contemporary business environment offers few places to hide. Even large corporations and government departments that once allowed mediocrity to coexist with performance are weeding out the unfit. So where are tomorrow’s top performers going to come from?
Management skills are largely acquired through experience, but whether an individual manager is learning what they need to know or applying that knowledge correctly is difficult to evaluate. Many potential top performers have lost their way and fallen victims to the stresses caused by uncertainty when, with appropriate guidance, they could have made become corporate leaders.
Coaching is not a cure-all for those without the ability to succeed. Applying coaching in an effort to correct substandard performers can be an outright waste of resources. It’s far more beneficial for an organization to use coaching as a tool to develop those who have already given indications of superior ability.
Look for Existing Abilities
Relate a business to a team of professional sportspeople and the reasoning becomes clear. Regardless of whether it’s baseball, football, ice hockey or any other sport where audiences pay to see the best, team selections begin with the identification of outstanding young athletes that will become better with experience and coaching.
Coaching average athletes in the hope they’ll become champions has the least chance of succeeding, and makes no sense if the opportunity to select and coach superior ones exists. Mixing marginal performers in with the elite players will only drag down the overall performance of the team.
Just like professional sporting teams businesses must compete and win or they’ll lose their customers. Investments of resources need to be carefully considered, and then made where they’re likely to return the greatest dividends. Coaching isn’t about fairness and equity; it’s about building a team of top performers.
It must be remembered that the top performers in any organization can inspire other members of the team to lift their games. Even if no coaching is applied to those other than the elite of the enterprise, the overall performance of the organization can be enhanced.
“Topgrading” — Building the A Team
In his book “Topgrading”, Bradford D. Smart outlines the possible outcomes when every position in an organization has been filled by a top performer. As the Topgrading.comwebsite puts it: “Topgrading is accomplished by hiring A players, developing people into A players, and redeploying underperformers into roles in which they can be more successful.”
Smart uses the example of the USA “Dream Teams” that dominated Olympic basketball competition in 1992 and 1996. “The Dream Team’s fundamental competitive advantage was clearly the talent. All other advantages flowed from this primary driver of performance.”
He then goes on to say that high performers, the A players, “contribute more, innovate more, work smarter, earn more trust, display more resourcefulness, take more initiative, develop better business strategies, articulate their vision more passionately, implement change more effectively, deliver higher quality work, demonstrate greater teamwork, and find ways to get the job done in less time with less cost.”
Coaching Builds Tomorrow’s Leaders
To a large degree the business stars of tomorrow will be produced by those who coach them on the way up. Coaching is about developing performance and that’s not a function of most HR departments; as a process it works best when sourced from outside an organization on a needs basis and is focused on specific long-term targets.
Coaching, even if applied to the “right” people in an organization, needs to have a long-term focus if it is to provide optimum benefits. There’s not much value in giving tomorrow’s leaders coaching that’s only going to enable them to deal with current issues; it still might be successful but it’s not making full use of the developmental power of the coaching process.
Begin by hiring good material — “the young A players” as Bradford Smart would put it. Then invest in coaching to build these young players into an A Team. Develop them into leadership roles and continue their coaching to help them stay at their peak. This is how championship teams are built and it’s where the next generation of top performers will come from.
Copyright 2005, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.