CBL Book Talks| Is the Best Performer a Great Coach? | ft. Ruchira & Dr. Meadows | Part 4

So Rashira, if you're trusting your people as you're grooming them, what if they screw up?

I mean, screwing up is okay. I mean, what you need to tell them is you can screw up to this extent and no more, right? You have a job to do. You have to find the balance between letting them slack off Cutting some slack without letting them slack off, right? Like, and what about failure?

Is failure okay? Do you want to let your people fail?

You have to let them fail if you want them to succeed, but you need to say that explicitly.

And fail early and fail often to succeed sooner.

Absolutely. But that needs to be clearly articulated. And often what we think is micromanagement is just a lack of trust. You haven't articulated that it's okay to fail, that you have my back and that I'm going to support you. And when you don't de-risk risk-taking, people are afraid to take decisions, they're afraid to do more than they're capable of. And then you believe that you have a set of employees that need constant hand-holding. So we need to change that dynamic. Let them fail. Let them fail fast. Let them learn from an iteration of success and failure. But you can't keep failing all the time.

So if I'm your coachee and I come to you and say, oh God, I failed. You're not just going to say to me, okay, forget about it. Move on.

It's okay. No, no, no.

You're going to say, hey, what are we going to learn from this? Ah, see, I'd like to ask, go ahead.

I just say that failure is important, mistakes are important, but you need to be very clear about where you draw the line. And you need to be very clear in your communication that I'm here to support you and you will fail and I will be there to pick you up again. And there are only that many times that you're going to do it.

So, and let's try to fail cheaply. Let's try to learn cheaply and fail a little.

Fail fast. Yes, absolutely.

Now, part of that question I found amazing. Um, it was asking, how do we get our top performers to be our— to be coaches? But are your top performers usually your best coaches?

Um, the book talks about, uh, that.

Yeah, I know, I read it. That's why I'm asking you the question. I know you got the answers.

Yeah, but it's a very long-winded answer, so I'm trying to compress it, right. Time and again, whether it's sports or the corporate world, our best performers actually don't make the best leaders. They don't make the best leaders because they're not great coaches. Because as I was saying earlier, our best and brightest can't automatically morph into these leaders. We just assume because they're so good at their craft, they will automatically be good at leading people. Remember, even the best need to be coached and nurtured so they can coach others. That's the biggest thing. We don't coach them, whether it's the field of sports or— I've talked a lot about cricket and other sports, right? That's one. The other is when we give our best and brightest, our blue-eyed people, inordinate amounts of resources and power and make them believe that they're invincible, like an Uber or an Enron, and they can do no wrong. It becomes a sense of entitlement, not responsibility. Leadership is a huge responsibility. You have to take people along in the journey, you have to take them with you, right? And when you start believing it's an entitlement, that changes the dynamic because all the sort of traits, ambition and passion that was great when you were a fantastic individual performer does not translate to great leadership. Leadership needs a few other things. It needs empathy. It needs collaboration. It needs better communication. And we never taught these people how to do it. We've just been telling them, hey, you're fantastic. There, bonus. Hey, promotion. So there's a huge dichotomy in there in terms of your best and brightest not automatically morphing into your best and brightest leaders.

So to be a star and to be a leader is not necessarily the same thing.

Mostly it isn't. In fact, there are aberrations. There are other reasons as well, right? I've talked about the cricketing superstar, and he is, I think, till date perhaps the best leader, the best individual performer we've ever had in the world of cricket. It's a book commissioned in India, so you need something that binds us all. Now, Sachin Tendulkar is the best that the game has ever seen, but his captaincy is largely forgotten. Now, his His dilemma is different. He wasn't somebody who was— he was ambitious, but he didn't want the burden of captaincy. We didn't groom him, we didn't coach him to be that captain. We said, hey, you're the best that we have, and you will be our next captain. He was reeling under the burden of his own performance and taking people along in the journey. It didn't come to him naturally. And a lot of these superstars, these are so focused on their craft. They're so brilliant at what they do. They find it very hard to envision or understand the capability gap, right? Cj Meadows is a fantastic educator. She does things intuitively. She has an understudy who's not quite there, but Cj can't get it because she's so brilliant that for her to truly appreciate that there is a gap between where she is, vis-à-vis where somebody else is, It's hard work. So there are a variety of reasons why these superstars don't morph into superstar leaders, right? And we truly need to make concerted efforts, one, to coach them, and two, to identify if everybody is leadership material. Not everybody needs to be leadership material.

So again, it comes back to those career ladders and, you know, be who you are. I think there's a wonderful quote out there. Don't be someone else, they're already taken.

I've forgotten my own quotes.

Ultimately, we need to have organizations that let people be who they are and leverage the best of all the people in the organization.