Book Review – Coaching : The Secret Code to Uncommon Leadership

In my post about coaching, I mentioned how coaching has become an integral part of leadership.Around the same time, I was reading this wonderful book Coaching – The secret code to uncommon leadership by Ruchira Chaudhary. This is one of the best books I have read in the recent past. I would like to share my review as follows. 

The author starts with the definition of coaching as making others better in the same way as making myself better. This means coaching is a two-way process, that helps both the coach and the coachee. Author builds the premise for the book with the idea of a manager as a coach paradigm. Over the years, leadership coaching followed the model of having external coaches to facilitate leadership pipeline building. No doubt this external coach model worked well over the years, however it’s time to go beyond that model. The business case for coaching has only become stronger, where building the next level of people has become inevitable for organizational growth. Having a trusted and cohesive leadership team in multiple levels has a direct correlation with the top line and bottom line of the organization. In order to establish coaching as a business case, the author introduces various case studies from her broad consulting and coaching assignments, which were wonderful. 

Taking the manager as a coach idea, the author establishes why the majority of the top individual contributors don’t make great leaders. She draws examples from my favourite game of cricket by comparing Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly. While Sachin was a genius with the bat, his captaincy record is is not that great. He could not build a winning team under his captaincy, in fact, captaincy became a burden on him. One of the key challenges with top individual  performers is they can’t take failures. Also, they  focus a lot on self-improvement to be the best in the trade.  

On the other hand, taking people together and building a cohesive unit requires multidimensional skills. It starts with building a self awareness as a leader by coming to terms with strengths and weaknesses. Further, leaders ensure their weakness is substituted with other team member’s strengths, which is the foundation on which great teams are built. This often doesn’t happen with top performing individual contributors. It is better to leave these great individual contributors as subject-matter experts or vertical specialists and allow them to do what they are good at. For example, give enough space to Sachin Tendulkar to do what he does best – batting!

Sourav Ganguly had a natural ability to bring  people together and ignite them with a common vision. By spotting the potential in players, he went on to build a great team with champions like Virendra Sehwag, Harbhajan Singh, Yuvraj Singh, MS Dhoni and many more. So choosing the right person for taking up leadership role, plays a critical role before even getting into the coaching part. 

In further chapters,the  author deep dives into details of coaching. To start with, she introduces 4C coaching framework – Capability, Clarity, Confidence and Consciousness. Both the coach and coachee need to work on all these four dimensions. When it comes to executing it, the coaching style comes into picture. It can take a structured and formal style, where both coach and coachee meet and discuss based on a calendar. It can also be just-in-time or popcorn coaching style, where the coachee gets inputs on a specific situation. It can come in the form of hallway conversations, discussions on long flight travel etc. Irrespective of the style, the key element is for the coachee to think through. The coach will act as a facilitator by asking pointed questions and leave the action or execution aspect to the coachee.By taking the review, reflect,learn,continue – approach actions can be fine-tuned. Another important aspect for the coach is not to expect any immediate results, as the coachee need to go through a transformation process. It should allow the coachee  to develop a growth mindset to produce the required results. 

In order to roll out coaching at  organizational level, it requires scalable frameworks. Here the author introduces some pre-existing frameworks like GROW. In the recent past, organizations are  transitioning from traditional Performance Management System (PMS) to  deploying Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework. It has an important element called CFR (Conversations, Feedback, Rewards) which can play a very vital role in driving coaching across the organization. Further, talking about organizational scaling of coaching, author mentions how the ARC (Architecture, Routines, Culture) plays an integral part. It will be too long a blog post if I dive into further details of  this chapter, hence I leave it to you to go through and derive your learnings. 

In the concluding chapters, the author brings in cultural diversity aspects which needs to be kept in mind. For example, what works in a highly individualistic European cultural environment, countries like Germany, may not work in the Eastern countries like Japan, which is more consensus based. Such aspects need to be considered during coaching. The author talks about  tough love, which is about maintaining a fine balance between being tough and showing love towards the coachee.For example, letting a player sit out of the game and write down the strategies of the players on the field. This is in order to instil discipline in the player to maybe  be punctual or less clumsy. The other example you can easily relate is the Hamam ad, refer to the video below to get a view. 

Over the past year, building a strong leadership pipeline has remained as a key topic of discussion between my partners and me. While we are clear about our goals, I was thinking how we should roll it out. This book came at the right time and has given me practical insights into coaching. In summary, I would say this book is a must-read for anyone in leadership roles and looking forward to growing the team or organization. Going forward, I will be writing more posts on this very topic of coaching as we scale our organization to next level.

PS: Along the similar lines to  Coaching, the OKR is another topic of my interest, ever since I read the book Measure What Matters by John Doerr. One of my mentors Mr. Vaidyanathan has built a great SaaS based solution called OKR Stars for implementing them in organizations. We have been discussing this topic for long. Will share more insights about OKR in a series of articles. Stay tuned.