Coach as Instrument: Expanding Your Support of the Leaders You Coach

Sometimes, when I’m working with a leader who is frustrated or disappointed or simply perplexed by the performance of their team, I feel like I want to be doing more than one-to-one coaching to help them. Certainly, some of that is reflective of the “wants orientation” of my WE-Q Profile. And some of that is reflective of the fact that our clients are only one part of the equation of their team’s performance. And as a coach who works with the WE-Q Profile, I know I can help the leader I coach unlock a new understanding of their team’s performance, how to improve it and how to relate to them to maintain it. That’s something I couldn’t do through coaching alone.

In situations like these, I’ll suggest to my client the possibility of using the WE-Q Profile with their team and I’ll share what the benefits could be. Benefits like:

• The leader being able to see how their own Profile can be triggered by the Profile of the team as a whole and that of individual members of their team, thereby contributing to the performance challenges of the team
• The leader finding a new perspective of the team member who they consider to be “the problem” (especially when “the problem” has an opposite Profile)
• The leader developing greater empathy for their team members and their experience
• The personal and professional development of each team member in way that can be life changing and employee retaining
• The leader, the team and each team member having a clear understanding of how their individual and collective WE-Q Profiles can get in the way of their potential performance
• The team having a new language to use to communicate with their teammates and to express themselves more relationally under stress.
• The team being able to develop pre-emptive strategies that prevent their patterns from impacting their performance.

To take this out of the conceptual and into the practical, I’ll share a bit about a coaching client I work with and how we came to use the WE-Q Profile throughout his entire small company (and how it’s continuing to be used with each new team member).

We’ll call my client Paul. Paul is the CEO of a small tech company.

I’d been coaching Paul for a couple of years. He’s an affable, positive, kind and mission-driven leader. He tends to retain team members for long periods of time and the team’s engagement scores are phenomenally high. All good, right?!

Well, during coaching sessions, Paul would often want to explore performance management and what kind of metrics he could put in place to indirectly manage the performance of his team. He found that often one member of his team would “cover” for another member of his team, making it difficult to reliably determine individual team member performance. (And this happened with more than a few team members). He talked about how he often had to drop out of the role of CEO and slide into Project Manager in order to rescue the projects of team members who weren’t performing and/or were stretched too thin. Finally, he talked about how the profit margins of his company were suffering because his team would acquiesce to their client’s changing desires and not identify them as changes in scope.

As a side note: In our work with the WE-Q Profile, we’ve learned that leaders tend to hire people with their same orientation. (And BTW, they tend to partner, marry and befriend people with their opposite orientation). For example, self-oriented leaders tended to hire self-oriented teammates. And other-oriented leaders tend to hire other-oriented teammates. (Not 100%, but well over a majority would be of the same orientation).  

Note: Self-oriented doesn’t mean self-ish. It means that under stress the focus will be more on their own thoughts, emotions and desires, usually trying to figure out how to “right” the situation.  And Other-oriented doesn’t mean altruistic. It means that under stress, the focus will be more on the thoughts, emotions and desires of the other person or people.

What’s your guess about the orientation of Paul and his team? Self oriented? Other oriented?  What are the clues?

If you guessed self-oriented, you’d be right. The nature of a classically self-oriented person (as revealed by the WE-Q Profile) is to want to be and stay in relationship with others, even at their own expense. The desire for an “indirect” means of managing performance through metrics, covering for a non-performing team member, spreading yourself too thin without not raising the red flag and submitting to the wishes of clients at the expense of the company are all indicators of self-orientation.

When we worked with Paul and his team using the WE-Q Profile, the team’s self-orientation and its impact on their culture, performance and profitability became clear. As a direct result of our work together, the company: 

• Changed the composite make up of teams within the company, partnering self-oriented people with the few other-oriented teammates.
• Created a comprehensive onboarding process for clients which included scenario planning for what they would do if things went off course or out of scope during an engagement.
• Developed a deep appreciation for the need for each team member to stand on their own for the strength of the company and the health of their collective mission.
• Developed a language around what healthy boundaries were and how to maintain them.

 The engagement was so successful, the company decided to have everyone who later joined the company take the WE-Profile and have the company’s WE-Q Profile updated from time to time as new team members joined and the composition of the company shifted.

It was a win for me too. I got to help my client in a way that I could not have helped him through coaching alone. And the income from the engagement with the team came to close to 6 months of coaching fees and took only about 6 weeks to perform. And my coaching with this client continues to be better and richer because of our shared knowledge and frame of reference.

Working with teams isn’t my favorite thing to do and God bless those of you who do it and love it. There are so many agendas and emotions and sidebars and politics. AND with the WE-Q Profile in my toolkit, I can confidently work with a team knowing they’ll get real value from the experience.

If you aren't yet a WE-Q Practitioner, you can become one and embark on an experiential journey starting in September with our WE-Q Practitioner Certification training. Deepen your understanding of various aspects including yourself, your clients, coaching techniques, and the WE-Q Profile itself, while gaining the expertise to facilitate transformative experiences in your clients.