Will I Lose My Team's Respect by Not Having the Answers?

What is a common fear of leaders in humanitarian and international development when it comes to coaching their teams?

The fear of losing respect.

Losing respect because their team sees them as needing to have all the answers.

So if they start asking their teams what they think, then the team will question their authority.

I understand the reasoning behind this concern, especially in certain cultures where leadership is more directive.

But how true is it?

And is it really true we need to provide our teams with answers all the time?

In this episode I share how this way of thinking can limit your growth as a leader - and how to use a more balanced approach which will motivate your team and take pressure off of yourself to need to know it all.

Previous Epsiodes Mentioned:

How a Coach Approach Increased the Impact of Her Work - with Inonge Wina-Chinyama

Three Main Leadership Styles: Advantage of Each and When to Use Them

 

NEW!!!  Episodes are now accompsnied by full transcript!!

Please find full transcript below, or you can visit the link here and push the "play" to see the corresponding text highlighted!!

Episode 284: Will I Lose My Team's Respect by Not Having the Answers?

TRANSCRIPT

 Hello, my aid worker friend. I hope you're having a wonderful week. And today I might sound a little bit different because I'm coming to you from a place where, well, let's just say I forgot my microphone, but hopefully the audio quality isn't too bad. I'm trying some new technology out. And what's exciting about that is one of the things I'm offering now are full transcripts of all the podcast episodes going forward.

We're at around episode 280 now, which is just mind blowing to me. I can't believe that I've recorded 280 podcast episodes. So, I can't promise you I'm going to go back and do all the transcripts for all of them yet. Maybe at some point, technology will be such where it'll be much easier. But right now, I will be doing transcripts of all the episodes going forward and you can find those on the website. And also if you click on the link on whatever podcast app you use should be available as well.

So something I want to talk about today, because it keeps on coming up in my coaching course where I teach coach approach leadership style to humanitarian and development workers. And The thing that comes up is the concern once people start to understand how to use a coach approach way of leading, where we are basically asking our teams, what would you do rather than telling them the answers, one of the concerns that comes up is, what if I lose my team's respect for not having the answers? And so I wanted to explore that question today because it's, first of all, it's a way of thinking, it's not a fact, but a perspective, and I want to explore how it can result in different abilities to lead effectively and how it can really impact your way of leading and your way of seeing your team as well.

So first of all, I can totally understand where this is coming from. I mean, the idea that your value as a leader is your experience. A lot of us have this idea that as we, progress in our career, the value that we add comes from all the things that we know. Also in some cultures, the leader is seen as the one needing to have the answers or tell others what to do.

And so for that reason, as well as some personality types of people that we work with who just prefer being told what to do . All of these things add up to this particular perspective, but I do think it's worth looking at this perspective and how it impacts us as leaders.

So let's start by looking at the question: what do we mean when we say "the answers". So when we say that we think that our teams will not respect us for not having the answers, what do we mean when we say the answers? So the way my students or others with this belief use this is as a catch all for many things.

So the answers could be decisions that a leader has to make. Maybe the way that you do something like to tell others what to do or how to do something solutions to problems that come from the leader and also approval for doing things that comes from the leader. So this is the way I think it's kind of like that, that when we say, or when my students say the answers, a lot of times they're thinking this as a very broad definition, which sounds great, except for that this is what I call in coaching. all or nothing thinking. You could call it a thought error or a way of thinking, which really limits us when it comes to our growth opportunities is when we have this all or nothing thinking.

So all or nothing thinking is where we look at an idea as being all one way or all another way. That there's no middle ground. So it's a common way of thinking because it's our brain's shortcut to simplifying potentially complex issues. So our brain loves to solve problems and our brain also likes to simplify things or look for patterns in things. And so this leads us to make assumptions that things are all one way or all another way.

And a lot of times, we don't question that. And that's why coaching can be so valuable for you and your team, because we question this kind of assumption of all or nothing thinking. So let me explain how it applies here. For example, when we think we as leaders must have the answers or our team doesn't respect us, then that means that there's no middle ground, that we are not open to the idea that possibly sometimes, we're not going to have all the answers or that our team would have better answers than us.

This belief that we as leaders have to tell our teams what to do and have the answers therefore creates only one way of thinking that which is authoritarian or directive. And even in cultures or with personalities on your team who are used to a directive way of being treated, or directive leadership styles or, prefer to be told what to do, it's not so clear that, that, you know, you as a leader need to always tell them what to do. There are situations where it works and it's good to tell them what to do. And it's situations where it does not work. So, what happens when we don't make this all or nothing thinking? In this case that would mean that we allow for the possibility that sometimes we need to provide answers for our teams and sometimes, we do not. That there's a middle way where we can have both.

And sometimes you won't know the answer and you'll have to ask your team because they are closer to the problem. I'll give you an example. So one person who I really enjoyed working with and she also took my coaching course is named Inonge. I will put a link because I actually interviewed her in a former podcast episode because I was so impressed with her use of the coach approach.

And, so Inonge, she was working in Zambia. And she is actually a technical advisor at the time. And Inonge was concerned that she needed to have all the answers that, she, as an advisor, that was her role. She wasn't only just a leader in the sense that she had a team, but her value, at least for her, she perceived it as giving advice. And so how would she be able to use a different way of leading where maybe she wasn't giving advice all the time? Maybe she was asking others what they think? So she tried out coaching and what she found because she found this middle way, a middle way of leading, not all one or all the other, she found that that balance really not only helped her team. to think through their own way of doing something with the knowledge that they have from the community level, which she did not always understand, but she blended that with her advice, her technical support. And between her technical support and the team's perspective and ideas, they came up with a much stronger way to broaden their impact at the community level.

So this is what I mean that her role being to give advice, and that if she wasn't giving advice, she would not be respected by her team. But what she found was when she started blending the advice with a coach approach way of leading,

she found that people were actually coming to her and asking to be coached to help them to solve their own problems. So sometimes I think we also make assumptions about the way our team's going to react to something without having any solid evidence that that is true. Once again, this is the brain trying to protect you from stepping out of your comfort zone and from disrupting the norm.

So, I have another example. This is from a wonderful leader named Yoko who has a team in Timor Leste and she was concerned that not giving her team the answers was going to lose her the respect of her team because she had some strong personalities on her team.

But what she found was as she used coaching, mixed with some directive styles of leading that it was actually more effective in generating ideas from her team and coming up with a more inclusive and diverse way of leading. So think about it for yourself. How do you feel when your supervisor asks you for your opinion or how you would do something?

Do you lose respect for them or do you feel proud and motivated that they even care to ask you or that they really value what you think? One of the basic human needs is the need for autonomy, meaning the need to be able to make decisions and take responsibility for the things in our immediate environment and life.

That has been a universal human need proven by much research, including by Daniel Pink. And this need also goes hand in hand with the need for the leader to not always have the answers because our team needs that autonomy in order to be motivated, in order to grow, in order to gain confidence.

So we as leaders provide value by having answers, but we also provide value by asking for them, there is no one way. This opens up our way of leading when we don't think it's, all one way or all another way and makes us more flexible and adaptable as leaders that we can lead sometimes. with our directive hat, and sometimes with our coaching hat

And if you're asking right now, well, what do you mean by hats? Well, I'll also put a link below to another episode I did on wearing different hats, because as a leader, the more ways you have and more tools in your tool belt in terms of ways of leading, the more effective you will be.

So, I challenge you this week to have a balance to notice when you need to tell your team what to do in order to best serve them. And when you need to ask them for their way of doing something. My experience, from both myself, but also working with hundreds of leaders is that we tend to do more telling than asking partly because of the false belief of needing to know all the answers, or we're going to lose their respect. Play around with this idea and see how it goes.

And if you want to learn more about how to use a coach approach, the coach approach leadership style doors are open now until April 5th. You can go to the website, aidforaidworkers. com and click on coach approach course for more information. All right. Until next week, keep broadening your impact.

Bye for now!