3 Myths That Will DESTROY Your Coaching Sessions as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

Are you falling for these common myths that could be undermining your coaching sessions?

Coaching is one of the most powerful tools in a leader’s toolkit, but many aspiring humanitarian and international development leaders are sabotaging their efforts without even realizing it. By debunking the myths around coaching, you can unlock new levels of performance, empowerment, and success within your team.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• Three common myths that could be preventing you from becoming the coach you aspire to be
• How understanding these myths will help you overcome them
• How using coaching the "right" way will help you create a higher performance team

Ready to step up your coaching game and lead your team to new heights? Press play now and start transforming the way you lead!

Want to know how to lead better? It starts by understanding your leadership style. To find out yours, take my free quiz “What Is Your Leadership Style” - you’ll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.  Just click on the link fill out your quiz and click submit.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

In this episode discover how to free yourself from three common coaching myths so that you can more effectively use coaching to build a high performance team.

Welcome to The Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader podcast, the podcast, helping humanitarian and development supervisors make a greater impact by taking control of your time, leading more inclusively and empowering your team all the while avoiding stress, burnout, and overwhelm. I'm your host, leadership coach and former aid worker, Torrey Peace.

Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hello, my aspiring modern humanitarian and development leader! I hope you're having a wonderful week. And once again, in this episode, you're going to discover: three common myths that make you horrible at coaching if you believe them, why overcoming these myths will help make you a better coach and how to use coaching to build a higher performance team.

So, first of all, why coaching? Well, coaching is just one way of leading and should be a tool that you have in your leadership toolkit. I actually believe that a coach approach way of leading is the way of the modern, humanitarian and development leader. Because through coaching we are not telling our team what to do, but we are helping them come up with their own way of doing things, their own solution.

This is a more inclusive way of leading, it encourages more diversity of thinking, it empowers those around us to take more responsibility and to do more, to step up and do exactly what we hope to see in the humanitarian and international development sectors, which is for those around us to gain more equality, more power so that we have voices at the lower levels, the community level, our partners, those in our organization. That everyone has a voice, and this is what a coach approach way of leading will help obtain. However, I see that there are three commonly believed myths about coaching, which I think are really important for you to understand why these are not true and how they might be making you a horrible coach, if you believe them. And by just understanding why these are not true will automatically allow you to see coaching in a different way, allow you to see how powerful it is. And also how you can use it to build a high performance team.

So the first myth is that if you are the coach that you need to know more than the person you are coaching. Or you need to have more experience than them in order to be able to coach them. I think this comes from two places.

One is I think that a lot of times people confuse coaching and mentoring. And actually they're quite different. Coaching is where we do not give advice. We do not share our experience. We ask questions and help the other person come up with their own way of thinking through something on what they want to do. Whereas in mentoring, you might use some coaching, but also the person who is being mentored by you is expecting that you share your experience or your lessons learned along the way so that they can be taught or learn how you did it, in the hopes that they can do something similar and maybe they won't do exactly like you did. But the idea is because you have more experience that's what makes you more valuable as a mentor. But as a coach, because we're not giving advice, because we're not sharing our experience. Because we're not teaching anyone what to do, we do not need to know more than the other person in order to be able to coach them.

I think the other place where this comes from this myth that a coach needs to know more than the person they're coaching is the idea behind like a sports coach. I think a lot of people get confused with sports coaching versus leadership coaching.

So when we are sports coaching you would need to know more than your team because that's the value you bring. For example, if you're coaching basketball or football, you can tell them how to dribble the ball better or how to hold the ball or how to kick the ball or whatever, because you have that experience.

You can tell the players where to go in the field and how to set themselves up. So you're instructing, you're managing, you're telling. Because that's the value that you bring. You're overseeing the team.

But when we are coaching as a leader, That is not our role. Our role is not to tell others our experience or to tell them why don't you try this or do that? It's to help them think through their own way. In coaching and leadership coaching, we believe that this person in front of us already knows enough to be able to solve their own problem.

Like human center design, for example. That idea comes from the community already knows what they need. They already have enough experience and learning and understanding to be able to solve their own problems. It's just they need to think through maybe how to do that and maybe how to access resources in order to be able to evolve the way they want to.

Now, of course, sometimes you want to use teaching or another leadership style. But I just think it's important to point out that in order for coaching to be most impactful we are not giving advice or thinking that we are more experienced or we know more than the other person, because that's not what coaching is.

Coaching is believing that the other person knows enough to be able to do something themselves. Okay. So that's the first myth that the coach needs to know more than the coachee or have more experience. And if you overcome this myth by believing that actually my team already has in a lot of ways, the experience they need, your way of leading will automatically start to change and you will automatically start empowering them more. And start creating a higher performance team.

Okay, so that's myth number one. Myth number two: coaching takes a lot of time. Now coaching can take some time. Because we are asking questions. Sometimes the other person needs to think through how they might do something. We might be asking them all these different solutions that they hadn't thought of.

And so maybe they need time to reflect. And in that sense, yes. Coaching can take more time than just telling someone what to do. But in the long run, especially if we use coaching consistently, we can actually build our team's confidence and their belief in themselves enough where the coaching conversations become shorter and shorter and people start thinking for themselves more and more.

So to me, the difference is when we start using coaching as a leadership style, we're training our team to start to think for themselves. And so in the beginning, that might take more time because we're having to go through a conversation where they're thinking through what they might do. And maybe they're not used to doing that because maybe they're used to you telling them what to do.

And so, yes, it's going to take more time. But in the long run, it will take less time because they will be automatically coming to you with their own ideas because what you're doing is training them to think for themselves rather than you thinking for them. And the thing is we think that by telling them what to do, sometimes we're saving time.

And maybe in that moment, you think you are, but maybe you don't fully understand the problem. And maybe the solution you give does not work. And so the person comes back again. And then you have to go through it again and then they try again. And so . It can take just as much time to tell someone what to do if we don't fully understand the issue or the problem.

And of course they understand it better than we do because they are in it. And that's where coaching can be really, really. Helpful and valuable as well. So I think that actually in the long run, if you compare coaching versus, what I call directing or managing leadership style I think that they end up being about the same amount of time. Because of all the misunderstandings or miscommunications that come along with just telling people what to do. And because that takes a lot of your time.

If your team is not trained to think for themselves, it's going to take more of your time because they're going to be interrupting you asking what should we do?

So I just wanted you to think about a different way, because if you break this myth, this way of thinking it will allow you to start using coaching more, to build a more proactive, more independently thinking team which will start to save you time.

Okay. The third myth is in coaching you as the coach control or direct the conversation. A lot of times when I ask people, what does coaching mean?

They say that the coach guides the conversation and in a sense, yes, that's true because we do have a coaching conversation structure. So in that sense, the coach does the guide the conversation. But the way I like to think about and explain coaching is that actually the person who should be in the driver's seat of the conversation who should be driving it is the person being coached. And that is because the topic for coaching, the solutions and the action steps that will be taken afterwards, all come from the person you are coaching, not from the coach.

Remember when we are coaching someone we are not giving them advice. And if we are not giving them advice, that means we are not leading or directing the conversation. This is what I teach in my six week course "becoming the modern humanitarian and development leader" is how to ask questions that are more open. To the point where the person being coached has many different options in terms of choosing where the conversation goes. And it's their choice.

It's not our choice. And depending on how we ask our questions, we can be very limiting in the way that we direct conversations and take over the driver's seat. And as supervisors, I think we're used to being the ones driving. And that is where coaching can be challenging sometimes for leaders when they're starting to use it. That's why it helps to have feedback and support when you are starting to use this new way of leading.

So once again, In coaching you as the coach do not direct the conversation. It's the person being coached that chooses the topic. And what the solutions are, what the challenges might be, and also the actions at the end.

So if you overcome this myth, you will allow yourself to open up your coaching conversations so that the person you're coaching can be free to really solve their own problems and become a higher performer.

So once again, the three myths that I went through today are number one, the coach needs to know more than the coachee or have more experience. Number two, coaching takes a long time and number three, in coaching you as the coach need to get direct or guide the conversation.

If you are able to overcome these three myths, your coaching will automatically become much better and you will start to really, truly empower those around you to become high performers. All right. So until next time keep evolving. Bye for now.

Are you the type of leader that tells others what to do? Or do you let them figure it out for themselves? Understanding your leadership style is the first step to deciding what's working for you and what's not. To find out your leadership style, take my free quiz "what is your leadership style?" You'll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team, and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.

Just click on the link in the show notes, www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz fill out your quiz and click submit. So what are you waiting for? Go to www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz and discover your leadership style now. Your team will thank you for it!