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Leaders of todays workplace recognize coaching as a core leadership skill. More and more companies are expecting managers to actively develop their employees and support their growth through regular development conversations. For leaders who embrace this responsibility, coaching can be incredibly rewarding. But its not always clear how to do it well. Most managers feel comfortable helping employees build technical skills or prepare them for their next role. But when it comes to coaching social and emotional skills, leadership qualities, or behavioral changes, many leaders get stuck. Because the path to success is less clear-cut, more complex, and requires sustained effort over time. How to coach for behavioral change As companies increasingly expect managers to step up as coaches, were seeing more and more resources that help leaders build their coaching skills. Doing that requires leaders to learn how to build trust, ask open-ended questions, actively listen, and provide constructive feedback. Frameworks like the GROW model provide a structured approach to coaching conversations. But when it comes to coaching employees on behavioral changes and social-emotional skills, many managers hit a wall. Traditional coaching methods dont always work. Thats where an evidence-based frameworkoriginally used by executive coachescan help. The Development Pipeline The Development Pipeline, created by David Peterson and Mary Dee Hicks, breaks down the often complex process of personal growth into five essential conditions for lasting development. Its a game-changer for managers because it helps them diagnose and address where employees might be stuck in their development process. This method relies on five key elements to facilitate behavioral development: Insight, Motivation, Capability, Practice, and Accountability. Think of them as interconnected pipelineseach one needs to stay open and balanced for growth to happen. If one element is blocked, progress can stall. As a manager, keeping these five conditions in mind will help you guide your direct reports through meaningful conversations. Heres how you can help facilitate the presence of these conditions in your regular coaching chats as part of your one-on-ones 1. Insight: Do they understand what to develop and why it matters? Development starts with awareness. Employees must recognize the gap between their current behaviors and desired outcomes. Sabina, a Customer Success Director, wanted to help one of her team members exude more confidence in high-stakes meetings. In their one-on-one, Sabina highlighted specific moments where this happened and discussed the impact. This helped her direct report see why building confidence was crucialnot just for herself, but not to undermine her credibility and influence. They made it a specific development goal. 2. Motivation: Are they motivated and committed to making a change? Even with insight, change wont happen without motivation. Employees need to see personal value in their development goals. One way to gauge motivation is to ask, On a scale from 1 to 10, how motivated do you feel to work on this?. Pay attention to verbal and nonverbal responses to gain a greater understanding of how motivated your employee feels to put in the time and effort it takes to change. The key is ensuring the goal aligns with what matters most to them. That means their values, career aspirations, and measurement of success in their role. 3. Capability: Do they know how to improve? Employees need clear, practical ways to develop a skill or shift a behavior. Without knowing how to improve, insight and motivation alone wont lead to progress. Naomi, a Product VP, needed to coach an employee on receiving feedback without shutting down. The employee wanted to handle feedback more gracefully but didnt know where to start. Together, they broke down the goal into small actionable steps: proactively asking for feedback, deeply breathing while listening, taking notes, visualizing feedback landing in front of her, and looking at it more neutrally from a distance. Doing this allowed the employee to move from awareness to action. 4. Practice: Are they actively experimenting and refining? New behaviors require practice and repetition. Employees need opportunities to test, tweak, and refine their skills in real situations. Michael, an Engineering VP, wanted to support his direct report in being more positive and encouraging in team discussions. So they worked on being more positive in meetings. First, he focused on recognizing team contributions. Later, he practiced framing ideas more constructivelyacknowledging a colleagues perspective before sharing his own. Over time, this intentional practice made positivity more of a habit. 5. Accountability: Are they following through? Progress stalls without follow-ups. You need to conduct regular check-ins to keep the momentum going. Simple questions like How is it going with [goal]? Whats getting easier? Whats still challenging? What do you want to focus on next? help reinforce commitment. The importance of keeping development on track At any given time, your employee may be stuck in different parts of their development. As their manager, your job is to identify the bottleneck and provide specific support. Are they lacking insight? Do they need a clearer action plan? Do they require more practice opportunities? By focusing your coaching conversations on the specific condition that needs reinforcement, you can help them sustain progress. You dont need to know this ahead of your conversation, but you can explore this together by asking open-ended questions and fully listening to what emerges. Remember, meaningful development doesnt happen overnight. It requires your support along the way. Regular, short coaching conversationsrooted in curiosity and attentive presencecan make a significant impact over time.
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E-Commerce
People are often under the false impression that making their language complex or using jargon enhances their credibility. That might be true in certain circumstances. If youre an academic talking to other academics or a software engineer talking to other software engineers, using jargon makes sense. However, if youre talking to people outside of your field of expertise, it can alienate them. And when you alienate someone, it can cause them to switch off. It also reduces the likelihood that they take away anything useful or do what youd like them to do. Thats probably the last thing you want to happen when communicating with someone. So if youre prone to using jargon, you might want to consider taking the time to figure out how to communicate in simpler language. Why people use complex language Many people often use complex language because theyre insecure. When a person ties a big part of their identity to academic prowess, but they dont feel particularly successful, they can use complexity to serve as a security blanket that hides them. Its a way of making people perceive them as clever, or even obfuscate the truth. After all, its a lot harder to question or challenge something that your conversation partner doesnt understand. Secondly, many gifted executives simply lack social awareness. Unfortunately, many leaders dont give emotional intelligence the same weight they assign to developing technical expertise when climbing the corporate ladder. Quite simply, that means that theres a disconnect between what you find meaningful and important as the communicator, and what your audience finds meaningful. And when you choose to ignore the audiences perspective in your communication, issues arise. If you want the audience to listen to what you have to say, you need to consider how your audience would prefer to consume the information. Once you have that information, you can present the information in a way that will engage them and make them more likely to listen to you. The best communicators communicate simply Ive heard the argument before that history, physics, software engineering, and so on, are too complex to explain in a nontechnical way. I disagree. It is always possible distill complex subject matter down to simple language for a nontechnical audience. My argument is to look at Professor Brian Cox, who is a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester. Few subjects are as complex as astrophysics. Yet Professor Cox explained it so well and so simply that he filled auditoriums on a Friday night with people wanting to learn about physics. If he can do it, anyone can do it. It simply comes down to whether youre prepared to put in the effort to learn the art of simple communication. The acid test for simple communication I often use this question with my clients: Would a 10-year-old child understand what you just said? If the answer to that question is no, then, I encourage my clients to go back to basics. In the same way that childrens stories often contain an underlying message, you can use analogies and stories to engage your audience, evoke emotion, and simplify complex topics. Understanding what matters to your audience If youre trying to convince people to take a specific course of action, it will benefit you to walk people through it in a clear, step-by-step way. To do that well, you need to get into the mind of the audience and use the language that they use, not the language that you are comfortable with. Whether you are talking to the board or trying to convince a customer to buyyou need to understand the factors that will convince them. Make sure to find out whats important to them and structure your communication around those key things. Being a successful executive shouldnt be about being the smartest-sounding person in a room. Rather, its about being able to persuade and influence others to buy in and work towards your vision. No amount of jargon is going to do that, but distilling complex concepts down in a way that your employees understand can go a long way.
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E-Commerce
On Main Street in the village of Freeville, New York, on a 2.8-acre lot where a dilapidated single-family house once stood, there are now a dozen tiny storybook-like cottages surrounded by the property’s pine trees. The development, completed last year, is helping bring new life to the village. Its one example of whats possible when towns dont have overly restrictive zoning. Its charming. The design encourages neighbors to know one other. And it offers housing for far more people on the same amount of land. The project is the third tiny house village in the region from a local developer, Bruno Schickel. His career started as a typical general contractorhe built and renovated single-family homes. But in the late 1990s, while reading a childrens book to his daughters, he was inspired by an illustration of a Gothic cottage in Maine. I said, You know, I gotta design something that looks like this, he says. And so thats what I set out to do. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Boiceville Cottages (@boiceville_)/a> 140 fairy-tale cottages on 40 acres Schickel owned a large property in a rural area nearby that had been part of a farm. One winter 29 years ago, when regular work slowed down, he asked his crew to build three rental cottages on the site, each with the same gingerbread design as the house in the childrens book. People loved them, so he built another three the next winter. The cottages range in size from 540 square feet to 1,100 square feet, but even the smallest units have a second-story loft for a bedroom and feel relatively spacious. There are now 140 of the homes, called Boiceville Cottages, on the 40-acre site. “The more I built, the better people liked them,” he says. “It was an interesting dynamic, because originally people were drawn to the fairy-tale cottage. And then people started being drawn to the community that was created.” [Photo: Bruno Schickel/courtesy Boiceville Cottages] A sense of community When I visited on a recent spring day, a group of neighbors was sitting at a picnic table next to the community’s meeting house while children played on a playground. While I was talking to a retired woman, teenagers playing basketball called out a greeting to her. Everyone seemed to know one another. “I lived in a suburb of Chicago for 45 years,” one resident, Christine Uliassi, told me. “My husband and I raised our kids there. But I know my neighbors here much better than I knew my neighbors there.” The cottages in the development are clustered in groups of three, each carefully angled so that when someone looks out their own window, there’s still a sense of privacy. But they’re so close together that people continually run into each other. At the meeting house, neighbors pick up their mail, use the on-site gym, and gather for book clubs and other events. The road between the cottages winds around curves, so people drive slowly, and it feels safe to walk. Despite the rural location, there’s also a bus stop at the property, so it’s technically possible to live there without a car. The development doesn’t have the density of a large apartment complex. But the specific layoutand the bucolic country setting, which draws people outsidemakes it more likely that neighbors become close. [Photo: Bruno Schickel/courtesy Boiceville Cottages] ‘Zoning chokes off innovation’ In many places, it would be impossible to build. “The one reason why I ended up building there was because there was no zoning in Caroline [the rural town where the site is located],” says Schickel. “I am a guy who thinks zoning, by design, just chokes off innovation, creativity. It creates uniformity. If you go to existing cities or towns or villages around the country and you say, ‘Oh, look at this, this is great,’ I can almost guarantee you their zoning would not allow that to be built today.” It also wouldn’t be possible in Caroline now. Last year, after a bitter fight, the town passed a zoning law that required large lots for any new home. Longtime rural residents opposed the law; wealthier transplants to the area tended to support it. “People said, ‘We love Boiceville. We want to make sure Boiceville can be built.’ But the fact is that they don’t,” Schickel says. “The result will be that they’ve preserved it for large suburban housing.” In Freeville, a zoning ordinance existed, but was flexible enough that it allowed for the conversion of the single-family lot. Neighbors were happy to see the former rundown house replaced, Schickel says, even if they were initially taken aback to learn that they’d suddenly be living next to 12 tiny houses. (The Freeville houses, in a departure from the original gingerbread design, are inspired by old railway stations and Freeville’s rail history.) In a third location nearby, where Schickel built 60 tiny cottages on a hillside overlooking a lake, the community passed a zoning law after the project happened. “There’s a complete discrimination against rentals,” he says. “And there’s a discrimination against small [houses].” [Photo: Bruno Schickel/courtesy Boiceville Cottages] Tiny house villages can help struggling communitiesand the housing crisis In the rural areas where Schickel built, the neighborhoods can help struggling economies. Caroline would have lost population without Boiceville Cottages; a popular local store, Brookton’s Market, probably couldn’t survive without it. And the approach can add more housing as rents continue to rise. (To be fair, the cuteness of the cottages means that Schickel can charge a premium for rent, but as in any housing market, adding supply helps moderate prices.) It’s a model tha Schickel says others want to replicate in other parts of the country. He continually fields calls from potential developers and city officials. “I just heard from a senior planner on Long Island,” he says. “He called me up and said, How can we do something like that down here?’ I said, ‘I can tell you right now, your biggest problem is zoning.
Category:
E-Commerce
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