What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There
Most leaders have gotten to where they are due to some combination of knowledge, skills, ability, hard work, courage, and will.
However, what got you to this moment in your career won’t get you to the next level you are seeking either for yourself as a leader or for the company or department you lead. You see, you and I, and every other person, regardless of our education and experience, have a limited amount of knowledge. In fact, we know there is more we don’t know than there is that we do know.
For example, I only know one language, English. However, there are roughly 6500 languages spoken in the world. American University, my alma mater, at present offers well over 100+ majors. I graduated with one major, a degree in Finance. As you can see, the list of what I don’t know is far longer than the list of what I do know.
When we graduate college, we have a commencement, which means a beginning or start, not of our careers, but of our education. Unfortunately for many of us, we don’t view it that way. Aside from learning our jobs, too many of us just don’t continue the learning process. In a previous blog, I spoke about reading being The Most Powerful Leadership Practice.
As I continue to learn about what voracious leaders value the most, it's not what they learn, although that’s important. It's about how what they read alters their thinking. It opens up their minds to new possibilities, different ways of seeing things that they had not seen before. What this tells us is that the sheer act of seeing the world differently opens up a whole new set of possibilities that didn’t exist for us before.
Yes, reading is one way of learning and opening us up to new possibilities. Another way is to have a coach. We fully accept and expect athletes and artists to have coaches. Can you imagine a cellist who doesn’t have a coach or teacher to help bring out the best in their ability? The best golfers and tennis players wouldn’t be caught dead without a coach. Why is that?
The reason is simple. The coach or teacher helps the performer see their work differently. Coaches have the gift of seeing things from a different vantage point, which in turn opens up the student to new possibilities. Coaches encourage their clients to leverage their strengths. They challenge them to see around corners that the performer may not see. Simply put, they alter their mindset, and in so doing, the performer’s range of possible actions expands.
I believe that if you are serious about taking your performance to the next level for both your team and yourself, having a coach is the single most important thing you can do. A coach isn't someone who has the answers. Rather, a great coach is someone who has great questions.
Coaches force us to think outside our typical thinking patterns. They challenge us to view our work and what we are up to from different angles. They challenge us to look in novel places to discover untapped possibilities. They have global mindsets and encourage us to look not from the street level view, but from the view of a helicopter hovering over a city, giving a bigger broader view of that which we are working on. Ultimately, coaches help us see things that we either haven’t seen before or have lost the ability to see.
When this happens, when we look at our work from the broader view, whole new worlds of possibility open up. New paths forward emerge and new actions are revealed to help us get to where we want to go. And as a result, we will be more likely to get to where we are going. In my experience, working with a coach will not only get you to where you want to go, but you will do so more quickly and with less effort.
I have multiple coaches that I rely on to push me in new directions. So if you don’t already have a coach, what are you waiting for?