Mastering Leadership: The 3 Hats Approach | Burn the Box Series

Are you a people leader looking for ways to know when to direct, train, or coach your employees? I have some advice for you, everyone. It's Anthony Esso, and this is my burn the box drop for this week. What we're talking about is switching hats. How to know or teach your leaders, or if you're a leader, how do you know when to coach your employees, train your employees, or direct them? We all know leadership is an art and a science. But before we jump into the advice here, let's talk about. Why should we even consider thinking about coaching? Well, there's business impact. Always business impact. First of all, by just including coaching in your framework, you can increase productivity by 88%. Now, if you don't do any coaching, it only increases productivity by 22%. So just by adding coaching, you're almost three times your productivity increase. There's an ROI on this. This actually has shown that putting a coaching environment in your company will increase the return on investment by sevenfold, in some cases. 49. Employee engagement. Of course, if you're coaching your employees, they're more engaged, they're more productive. 81% of professionals say that organizations with a ro. Robust coaching culture tend to have superior leadership and then retention. We're always talking about how to retain our employees and our highest performers. This actually reduces by coaching, it reduces employee turnover. So how do we bring this all together? Well, of course, I am in a Star wars kind of framework these days with this new show, Ahsoka. And episode five was a culmination of what we all were looking for, this reconnection of Ahsoka to her master. I don't want to spoil it if you haven't seen it, but let's just say it's really a remarkable episode. But what I, of course, I'm geeking out on this from a Star wars from an HR perspective. It's the connection of that master to Padawan, this. This. This coach to Coachee, and seeing the evolution of these different things and the way the master is going across and looking at how to coach, how to direct, at. At moments within the episode, the. The. The coach is directing, in some cases, their coaching. So it really lends to perfect timing of what we're talking about today. And in fact, when we went internally at Suzy to, you know, reminisce about the most impactful leaders they've had, a couple of things came out well. One was effective mentorship, their ability. These leaders had an ability to teach and guide and transcend that task. Delegation. There was a meaningful connection. So not it wasn't always about business but it was a human connection for a lot of our leaders. Their leaders had strategic vision, the capability to link strategic efforts to day to day tasks and then personal growth, realizing the strengths and facilitating personal and professional growth within these team members. Number so what's the advice Anthony? You've gone through why it's important what folks at Suzy are thinking about? Well there are three hats and this is something we recently learned through our coaching and training provider and partner. Bravely so we had a session about coaching and the facilitator talked about wearing three different hats. A coaching hat, a trainer hat and a director hat. So the question and I'm going to talk about each, each hat and then how do we think about using each hat in different situations. So as a coach your role is to empower the team to find solutions and motiv motivate them by building self confidence. So coaching, it's not directing someone or giving them the answer but instead getting them to a place where they figure out a solution or the answer on their own. It is incredibly powerful way of thinking about providing mentoring or coaching to your to your team. The second is trainer. At certain points of your employees life cycle you're going to be responsible for training them to developing their skills. A lot of this you've seen in onboarding when they're relatively new to the organization. If they're more junior or inexperienced we're going to talk about some of the grids and how to identify which coaching methodology but it's also through that continuous learning. And the last hat that you're going to wear is director. There are going to be times where you're like here is the answer. This is what you need to do through direct instruction. You're going to set deadlines, I need you to do this thing by this date. And then monitoring there's a great quote Ronald Reagan trust but verify. So sending them off but doing check ins like how are things going? And monitoring their progress. So the three hats are coaching hat, trainer hat and director hat. And so now how do you apply? How do you know when to be a coach or to be a trainer or to be a director. And you could think about the situation or your employee in three different kind of buckets or four. Excuse me, low competence, high confidence, low competence, low confidence, high competence and low confidence and then high competence and high confidence. So let's just unpack each four of those. So low competence is someone that is new to the role or new to the company. They're not Familiar. They don't have the skill sets or the knowledge. But they are eager. They have high confidence in this world. You would direct and train those individuals. So you are looking at because of the low competence, you're looking to direct and train them. You're saying, I need this by this time. Because they don't have the skill sets. And it's all about the autonomy you give to them and their different levels of autonomy. Next level is you have someone that has low competence and low confidence. So this is someone that's struggling on your team. They should be doing better or performing better than they have and they know it. And so here is where you coach. What is happening? You're asking them questions, trying to build up. Why are they being challenged right now? Why is their performance challenges for them. But there's also an opportunity with these folks to train and direct. It's actually this area where it's low competence. Again, low performance and low confidence, where someone you know engagement or motivation. This is where you want to really figure out how do you coach, train and direct? It's one of the rare pieces in this framework where you're gonna use all three hats. Next is high competence. Someone performing really well, understands their role and the tasks that are needed and performs well on a regular basis. But they have low confidence. They feel like maybe they're not growing or they're not performing to the best of their capabilities. In this case, you're gonna wanna coach them. You don't wanna give them the answers. You don't wanna train them on something. Cause they have that high competence. You wanna coach them instead. What is holding you back? What are the elements you're gonna ask them? Their confidence because they're already having high performance or high competence. And then last is high competence, high confidence. This is your top performers. These are the folks that you're not regularly checking in with. You're delegating to these folks. You're saying here, I need you to do this thing or you own this piece of the business and let me know how to remove obstacles. In some cases, you can delegate and coach in this framework here. But you're going to be coaching and delegating these individuals because again, you're going to have a high level of autonomy for them. They have high competence and also, also high confidence. And so if you watch The Ahsoka episode 5 episode, you see that her master transitions really seamlessly. And again, you have to be an HR and a Star wars geek. And I say that with love to really look and see these things. But when Ahsoka is in low confidence he coaches her. When she lacks competence, he directs her. He's very directive. And then finally when it's all done and he feels like she has high competence and high confidence, he delegates and that is an important message. So if you leave with anything, three hats. The three hats are coach, train and direct and then the the the matrix is low competence, high confidence. There you're going to direct and train. Low competence and low confidence. You're going to coach, train or direct. It's one of the ones that has all three involved. High confidence and low confidence. You're going to coach. Why are you struggling? This is a person that should be performing at a high level and then you have your high performers, high competence, high confidence. You're going to delegate in and sometimes coach for those individuals. That's my latest spur in the box drop for thanks for listening.