It’s like we’ve seen in corporations, the big problem was command and control. Managers are telling them, Here’s what’s true, and here’s what you ought to do about it. Then the coaching movement comes in, and we incredibly overcorrect. Now the managers can’t tell people what they think anymore. They can only ask them what they think, and hopefully they’ll self-discover, and yada, yada, yada. This is the problem with what people do with something like the GROW coaching model. I’ve I’ve been in the aftermarket. My faculty and I’ve been in the aftermarket for people who’ve been through this, and they’re like, Oh, I could only ask questions anymore. No. It’s an adult-to-adult conversation where it’s a collaborative search for the truth, and you both have valuable input on it, but together you’re figuring out what’s true. And then once you do that, a lot of times, trying to figure out what to do about it, strangely, more than that, it’s the easy bit. The hard bit is for us having a common shared view of what the problem is, of what’s true. I think that’s a nice way to think about it. Align on what’s true first with other people, and then align on what to do about it.
And if your folks were to take away that one thing, agree in the problem, before talking about solutions, I have found that to be revolutionary, that small tweet.
