January 2021 - Nick Robinson

8 ways to deal with managers who aren’t top performers

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The Olympic motto is “Citius – Altius – Fortius”, better-known as ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’. But what about the opposite – what about those of us who might be Slower, Lower or Weaker in our potential?

How organisations regard the people in their teams and leadership positions who would never make it to the management Olympics says a lot. I believe it actually speaks volumes about the attitudes of those who shape an organisation’s culture. In particular, how they regard others (and perhaps therefore how they also regard themselves) along two key dimensions:

Whether the fact that not everyone will make it to the management Olympics is a Risk or an Opportunity; and

Whether people’s innate capacities are either Fixed or Flexible.

I’m not entirely convinced that it’s best to think of there being a right or a wrong way to regard this issue, more that senior leaders and organisations should be aware of the choices they’re making and do so consciously and strategically.

Which is your organisation’s typical response when managers might not be candidates for the Olympics?

Please leave a comment below if they’re still open at the time of reading, or tweet me @nickrobcoach

To make progress, great coaching runs on two intersecting tracks: Understanding – expanding what’s possible; and Doing – creating practical results

First, there’s a Doing track.

The Doing track is important because great coaching has to be a practical, tangible thing – to result in something useful that you can see or touch or hear. It’s not possible for clients to arrive at that destination without actually Doing something.

Second, there’s an Understanding track.

The Understanding track is important because great coaching should take people beyond what’s currently possible. And that requires new ways of looking at ourselves, more understanding about how best to relate to the world around us, and a deeper sense of what’s possible for us, both as individuals and in concert with others.

Clients often have an expectation that the coaching work will only focus on one or other track – sometimes they’re unaware that there even is a second track.

They might be struggling to get something done or to make a significant change, without realising that the reason they’re struggling is that they first need some new or deeper understanding. At other times, they can be flailing around, looking for the magic bullet to make things easier, when they simply might not have tried enough different ways, or even have tried hard enough.

The trouble is, of course, that it’s not easy to tell if something we’re attempting is difficult because (a) we lack some crucial insight; or (b) we should just be trying more things, or just trying harder. This is where our tracks need to intersect and why the coaching space, somewhere to reflect on those points, is such a powerful one.

So, intersecting tracks:

Track 1: discover some new Understanding because that then makes possible a different type of Doing; and/or
Track 2: try more or different ways of Doing, because the results from that doing will lead to new Understanding.

Once you become conscious of the intersecting tracks and the need to be both Doing and Understanding in a way that’s pretty close to simultaneous, all kinds of fantastic breakthroughs start to appear.