Hey Coach!

If you love your business, you have probably read more than one book and a whole host of articles on management approaches.

Books like “Who Moved My Cheese,” “The One Minute Manager,” Jack Welch’s “From the Gut,” and “Managing the GE Way,” “Good to Great” and a whole host of contributions from Donald Trump highlight the difficulties of effectively managing a new workforce in a changing marketplace, trying to change an existing staff’s collective approach in the face of new demands, and, of course, crushing the competition. The recent softness in the U.S. economy is sure to breed a whole new flock of them.

There are probably as many management approaches as there are managers. There are certainly as many books on management as there are wealthy business personalities with enough time on their hands to write them and enough ego to think that we might want to read them.

Having thought about this subject off and on for the past decade and a half or so, I am forced to conclude that the approach that appeals most to me is a combination of leader and coach.

To succeed you need to be a leader, but not in the sense of a military-style drill sergeant, barking orders. I once had a boss like that, and it was all I could do to prevent myself from clouting him with one of the baking pans we made and I had to stack (10 high, 20 wide, zigzag pattern).

A good leader listens to staff–nobody knows everything–but then makes a clear decision about which direction to go and lets them get on with it. An effective leader communicates what is required and shows total commitment to the goal, leading by example. Few things demotivate people more than being saddled with a heavy load while “the boss” takes off early for a long weekend.

The coaching approach has been much maligned as too soft, as coddling the underachiever, as a namby-pamby approach that leaves managers spending too much time worrying about the feelings of the team and not enough time focusing on results.

People who think that don’t know any of the coaches I knew. I think it is a safe bet that many Jobber News readers have at least a passing association with hockey, even if just during their youth. Every hockey coach I ever had was known best by the fury of his temper when we lost, and his command of the four-letter lexicon when we were dogging it in practice.

These men kicked our collective butts and did it for our own good. To a man they never took a piece out of us for mistakes, but get lazy and that was a different tale.

They were knowledgeable about the game, they gave us good advice, they positioned us where our talents were best suited, and they made us work. They made us work hard. They were also very effective.

They pushed us to use our skills to their fullest and they were generous with praise when we got results.

It is a coach’s job to ensure that the contribution of each person is appreciated by each other person. I am not so naive as to believe that everyone in business is highly competitive or easily motivated. This is a fact of life, but it is also true that star players need the grinders to make the team a success. The grinder who shows up every day contributes more than the “star” who only gives his all when it suits him.

It is also true that business isn’t sport–the challenges of business go well beyond the 60-minute mark–but that doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons to be learned.

When everyone contributes, everyone wins.