Zandra was a senior leader, an expert in her field, and prided herself on being brilliant at what she did and setting herself and her team very high standards… She loved her job, and cared deeply about her team of 9 people…however…
Zandra* was near breaking point – overwhelmed, starting to drop the ball on several things, and clearly careering down the path to burnout.
During one of our first Executive Coaching sessions, she told me she was regularly working 14 – 16-hour days.
With tears in her eyes, she told me she ‘never seemed to be able to get anything done’ during working hours, and regularly worked late into the night.
She’d then collapse into bed, snatch a few hours’ sleep, then get up early to try to get more work done and catch up ‘before the day started properly’.
Zandra was a senior leader in a large bank, an expert in her field, and she prided herself on being brilliant at what she did. She loved her job, cared deeply about her team of 9 people, and set herself and her team very high standards that she strived hard to not only maintain but exceed.
Zandra had originally come to me to do our Time Management training program – she thought that was what she needed as she clearly couldn’t manage her workload and was feeling completely out of control.
Zandra also knew her team were also very unhappy. Over the past couple of months, Zandra could see her team were less engaged, less committed, and less productive.
One of her best performers had recently left (Stella*), telling Zandra before she departed she didn’t feel valued and wasn’t getting the development she wanted. Another person openly said they were looking for a new role – for ‘better career and professional development’, they brazenly told Zandra.
Our executive coaching conversation evolved as I asked questions and listened intently, delving deeper into what was happening for Zandra.
It soon became clear that Zandra’s challenge, like many other leaders in her position, was actually NOT a time management problem at all.
Her calendar, email and overall time management skills were actually pretty damned good, and there were only a few minor tweaks here and there that we identified she could benefit from.
As our coaching session unfolded, Zandra came to the realisation that her problem hadn’t suddenly materialised – it had steadily got worse since she took over the team and it had taken her until now to become fully aware of it.
Zandra told me when she took over the team 13 months ago she was working normal hours – genuinely 9am to 5:30pm (impressive in itself, I know!).
Like the proverbial frog being heated up in water metaphor**, Zandra hadn’t noticed the insidious creep. It had stealthily crept up on her, compounding day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month until she reached her current near-breaking point.
Over that time her working day had crept out: first 9am to 6pm…then 6:30pm…then 7pm…then 8:30am to 7pm and so on until she found herself in her current brain-scrambling routine:
Get up & work 6am – 8:15am, breakfast at her laptop; commute to work on office days (emails on the bus), then 9am to 7pm in the office, often no lunch, commute home (emails on the bus), and continue until 1 or 2am, working on her laptop while eating dinner, often eating takeaway or microwaved ready-made meals as she ploughed doggedly through her work.
WFH days were the same pattern without the bus ride! On WFH days she’d often never leave the house, trying to stay on top of her workload.
And yet, she still never seemed to catch up on things!
Zandra’s tears flowed as she explained how she felt – she felt she was in a never-ending stuck-on-the-hamster-wheel nightmare that she couldn’t wake up from.
And AI hadn’t made that any easier – just the opposite in fact! Zandra felt it had just added another ton of weight to her already overbearing workload, as it was yet another thing she had to get across.
We put that aside for now, and I asked her to roll back the clock and think back to when her working day initially started to extend.
“What’s your thinking around how that initial creep started?” I asked, trying to delve down to the real cause(s) of what was happening, underneath the symptoms.
I listened intently and asked more questions about what she revealed, giving Zandra time & space to think deeply.
She went to speak, then suddenly stopped and went silent. I could see Zandra was processing things and needed space, so I bit my tongue to make sure I shut up (see my article on the 9-second pause).
She looked directly at me, her eyes wide open in a moment of brilliant insight. “I know what’s happened”. She sighed, her body crumpling forward as she exhaled. “And I think I know why my team are so unhappy!”
“Go on”, I said. “Tell me, what’s your thinking?”
Zandra looked up at me with a dejected look on her face. “It probably started soon after I took over the team if I’m honest – but a particular turning point was probably when I recruited 2 new team members to my team a couple of months in.
Before I took those 2 people on board, my team and I worked pretty seamlessly together – they were very experienced, and we bounced off each other well, and were going great with the work.
However, I started to take on little things that I didn’t think were worth bothering the team with – as you know I’m a bit of a perfectionist and like things done right!
So I’d often just tidy up some of the wording in the policies and procedures they sent through as I thought that was faster than the to-ing and fro-ing between me and them, and it didn’t seem worth wasting time on it.
And I thought I was protecting them from the niff-naff stuff and taking the load off them a bit.
Now I can see that was the start of it!
But it really got to be a problem with the new people. Looking back, I expected them to be at the same standard as the others, and didn’t take the time to get them up to speed properly.
I was busy, I needed things done quickly and to a high standard and it didn’t seem worth wasting time on them as I thought they’d soon pick things up.
But what I ended up doing was just an extension of what I was starting to do with my experienced team…
Rather than taking time to coach the new people and help them to learn and to think for themselves, I started correcting and doing things myself – it seemed quicker and wasn’t really worth bothering them with what I thought were the trivial things…
Now I can see that was a massive mistake! And that’s why I’m here sobbing in this coaching session!
I just did things myself. I didn’t ask them or teach them to fix the mistakes themselves – so they never learned for themselves how to do it better next time.
I kept on correcting their mistakes myself and didn’t take time to show them where they were going wrong! And because I wasn’t taking time to develop them, they felt I wasn’t interested in them and that they weren’t learning anything new. So they never learned to do things differently.
And my team thought I didn’t trust them as I did things myself! No wonder they got annoyed at me when I started giving them a hard time saying they weren’t performing to the standard I wanted – I can see why now! No wonder they started disengaging and Stella left!”
Zandra had come to the burning realisation that, as the saying goes “I’m too busy chopping down trees to stop and sharpen my axe” (not the most environmentally friendly saying I agree, but I’ll use it because it illustrates the point well!).
In today’s ‘always on’ ‘always busy’ workplace mêlée [and at home!], I hear this sort of situation time and time again.
After Zandra’s intense insight, we talked through her options. The top one was how could she become more of a Coaching Leader.
How could Zandra efficiently and effectively coach and empower her team so she could engage and develop them to do more of the things she needed them to do?
How could she empower them to learn, ask, and support her – instead of doing it all herself?
After chatting for a while, we arrived at a discussion Coaching Leadership. I introduced her to our pioneering, super-practical T.O.A.D.™ Coaching Leadership Model and mentored and coached her to implement the Coaching Leadership style she was keen to put into daily action.
Zandra then courageously talked things through with her team, and opened up about what was happening for her.
Within 4 weeks, her working hours started to wind back. For the first time in the past 4 months, she got to bed before midnight! That was a real victory for her and she celebrated by buying herself the new pair of boots she’d been promising herself for a long time, but hadn’t even had the energy to go out shopping for. That really spurred her on!
Zandra started asking her team what they were thinking, what were their ideas, what was their thinking about how they could work together more effectively, and more Coaching Leadership behaviours.
As a result, Zandra started to notice her team were increasingly engaging with her – proactively asking how they could help and what they could do to support her, offering their suggestions and ideas.
Zandra took time to coach and mentor her team members on how to do the things she’d previously taken on herself. That made a huge difference and was another critical ‘axe-sharpening period’ she undertook.
After 2 months, people mentioned they felt ‘the old Zandra’ was back – the one who cared about them, developed them, supported them, had time for them…
The person who had been openly looking for a new role told Zandra they were going to stay and support her and the team, as they now saw the opportunities for development that they were previously missing.
All because Zandra had taken time to be a coaching leader with her team!
For those first few months, it was still hard work for Zandra, and with the good days she still had some very difficult days.
However, it was worth the effort, and the net result was what counted!
After 5 ½ months, Zandra’s working hours were back to a manageable level.
She still had breakfast at her laptop, but she got more sleep and woke up later, and didn’t need to work before breakfast.
She made time for lunch the vast majority of days. She still did emails on the bus as that worked well for her, but she very rarely had to work at home in the evenings.
Also, on WFH days the ‘office-days evening bus commute timeslot’ was spent going for a run instead of doing emails – another game changer for her health and mental well-being.
As a result of becoming a Coaching Leader, Zandra felt like she had her life back! She was a very different person to the one who started the coaching.
Coaching Leaders like Zandra understand they can’t do it all. They trust and empower people to think [for themselves].
Coaching Leaders facilitate solution-focused outcomes and behaviours, and build and utilise the Collective Intelligence of their teams…
…rather than having or giving all the answers themselves.
These are very different skill sets from a leader who is used to being the expert and telling people what to do.
In today’s disruptive, constantly changing AI era, leaders cannot possibly have all the answers and do it all themselves. And that’s only going to be more the case as time goes on.
Leading with a Coaching Leadership style, and applying our super-practical T.O.A.D.™ Coaching Leadership model builds a coaching leadership culture – and is the core foundation of true psychological safety.
Coaching Leadership is also practical Emotional Intelligence in action.
People take more ownership and think more for themselves. People feel more empowered, engaged and challenged to be their best.
More innovation happens. More critical thinking. And leaders can get on with leading and strategy rather than getting bogged down in the doing and the detail.
Productivity surges. One client told me implementing the T.O.A.D.™ Coaching Leadership model across the Asia Pacific Japan region (including Australia and NZ) boosted productivity by over 30%!
Our Leader as a Coach/ Coaching Culture Leadership program is based on my unique, super-practical T.O.A.D.™ Coaching Leadership Model.
“SO much easier and better to use than GROW” was the feedback from participants, including a highly qualified and experienced executive coach who was on a T.O.A.D.™ Coaching Leadership program I ran in December.
Accredited with the International Coach Federation for 8 CCUEs (Continuing Coach Education Units), the T.O.A.D.™ Coaching Model is a proven, easy to use, everyday Coaching Leadership tool that leaders (and anyone, for that matter!) can put into action.
We’ve proven it works for leaders at all levels: staff, new managers, middle managers to senior Executives and C-suite execs. And self-leadership, and managing up – yes, you can T.O.A.D.™ Coach your boss!
We have proven case-studies demonstrating T.O.A.D.™ Coaching Leadership improved productivity by over 30% and led an organisation to being Region of the Year for 2 consecutive years (after previously being the second worst out of 11 global regions)!
T.O.A.D.™ Coaching Leadership helps leaders develop a day-to-day Coaching Leadership style to get teams to take more responsibility and accountability for their work, boost engagement, productivity, critical thinking, collaboration and innovation.
T.O.A.D.™ Coaching Leadership ensures leaders live the everyday behaviours that underpin Coaching Leadership and Adaptive Leadership – and Emotional Intelligence.
If you or your team want to learn how to be a practical, real-world Coaching Leader, get in touch.
* Not her real name, name changed for confidentiality.
** The ‘slowly boiling a frog’ metaphor is just that – not actually true, apparently – I’ve not tried it myself of course, but I am reliably informed someone has tried it and that the frog will, in reality, jump out!
