MBA1893 Guest Teacher – Ruchira Chaudhary – How To Become an Extraordinary Leader by Becoming a Great Coach

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Ready to Save on New Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Your daily business out delivered every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episodes we bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today we have Ruchira Chaudhary and she'll be teaching you how to become an extraordinary leader by becoming a great coach. This is such an important episode because no matter how big or small your business is, you're going to have to manage people at some point. And one of the things I learned along the years is that when you coach your team, you get far better results than when you manage them. When you coach, you really show them what they're capable of. You get the best out of them, they become better. Therefore your business becomes better. So in today's episode we got Ratir Chaudhry who's going to be showing you exactly how to do that, what to focus on, what to say and how to say it. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With usaa you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply. When I hire a new team member to join our company, I'm looking for more than just what they can do now, what their experience is and what they're able to pull off, but what their potential is. I'm thinking three, four, five years ahead. How can I support this person, coach them to produce more results, to actually get more out of this hire than Just what it says on their resume. I do this because I see a hire as an investment in my company. I'm bringing on somebody who's going to add value to my product, my services and ultimately my customers. But this doesn't happen by accident. You have to plan for it and you have to be willing to coach your team and not just tell them what to do. And there's a big difference. What's the difference? Well, that's why we brought on today's guest teacher. Richard Chaudhary has been a leadership expert and has been working with large companies around the world to improve their leadership teams. She teaches senior executives, she teaches MBA students, and she's here to teach you how to improve your business by coaching as a leader. I want to pass it on to Ruchira, but I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and give my final thoughts. But for now, take it away, Ruchira.

Hey everybody, I'm Ruchira Chaudhary. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'd like to talk about leaders as coaches. How can you, the leader, build and enable your colleagues and your teams? How can you coach your way to extraordinary leadership? It's a subject I'm super, super passionate about. I write about it in business journals, I teach it at several business schools and I've recently written a book about coaching, the Secret Code to Uncommon Leadership by Penguin Random House. Right, so let's get down to business. First things first, what is coaching? Go to Google and you'll get several hundreds and thousands of hits. But to me, the simplest definition of coaching in this context is coaching is a process whereby a coach leader aims to maximize the current performance and the future potential of others through non directive and self enabling conversations. The keywords for me here are non directive, so you're not telling people what to do and self enabling, that is you help people help themselves. But the obvious question I get asked by a lot of people is why should leaders coach? Well, the answer is fairly simplistic. Every sports team we know needs a good coach to guide and nurture their talent. And the best coaches transform good teams into fantastic ones. The same goes for business. Coaching is the best way to mold effective people into powerful teams. And yes, there are people like us executive coaches. You'll ask me, should we outsource it to them? So here's my view on this. As an executive coach, I do believe that often our efforts should complement but never substitute that of you, the leader. Right, Bring us in when you need to Develop C suite leaders. Remember leaders, entrepreneurs, founders, especially those who are at the top of the pyramid. They receive very little feedback. Bring us in during times of organizational changes and transition. Bring us in when you're going through a career transition. And bring us in to coach the coaches. I think that's where we add the most value. But do remember our interventions are short and focused while yours should be ongoing. It's what you should do as managers all the time, every day. Building the next line of leaders is your responsibility. It's also vital to understand that coaching is about enablement and bringing out the best in others. It's about motivating, inspiring. It's about ensuring your people learn on the job and most importantly, you have to make it happen. Think of yourself as a rudder, the compass that can guide your team and harness their true potential. Coaching has always been important, but never as important as it today. We are going through very turbulent times and the context and definition of good leadership has also changed dramatically. Leadership today is a tough balancing act. It's a highly wired, connected digital era. Being a successful leader today means navigating many facets and all of them rather skillfully. You have to achieve the numbers, build and enhance the organization's brand, its customer base, fix the processes, the governance. And of course you need to inspire and engage your people. Bottom line, coaching can no longer be a specialty. You cannot be a good leader without being a good coach. And coaching. How does it help you and your team members? Well, I tried to put together a simple framework. It's in the book as well. It focuses on key coaching outcomes. And I think you might find your coaching intervention a lot simpler if you perhaps categorized your support around these four cornerstones, as I call them. First, capability. Capability is all about making your coachee or your colleague, your team member, the best that they can be. It helps unleash their true unique potential, sparks creativity, makes them more innovative, helps them think laterally and helps them excel and hack their way up that ladder. Coaching is also about giving them more consciousness or making them more self aware. It's importantly about giving them confidence and the self belief to go forward. It's also about giving them a lot of clarity and direction and in a sense helping them arrange the knots in their head and forming distinct patterns. And all of this comes alive when you consciously build a culture that encourages a coaching mindset, an ecosystem where people seek feedback and you gift and receive feedback, Right? But that's not all. Coaching also helps you the leader. When you coach others, you build your own capabilities because by now you're delegating tasks that in the past you were not. So, coaching will empower your team, but it will also set you free from execution responsibilities. It'll give you additional bandwidth and more capacity to focus on your strategic years. And yes, of course, when you coach, you leave behind a legacy and make a difference. As Mahatma Gandhi once famously said, a sign of good leaders is not how many followers you have, but how many leaders you create. And I hope you do create many, many leaders. Right. Now that you're ready to get started on your coaching journey, a few tips and tricks to help you lift off. But first, we use the term mentors and coaches quite interchangeably. But frankly, they're not the same. So important to know the difference. Mentors are usually older, those who can influence and guide us as we plod along. They're not a direct bosses. Typically there are people who have a lot of influence. They provide direction. But that direction usually comes in the form of telling people what to do. They dispense wisdom. Coaches don't offer directions or answers. A good coach helps a coachee find their own answers. So they ask, they don't tell, right? And as a coach and leader, you do not provide that direction from a distance. You right there on the dance floor where all the action is taking place. A mentor watches it from the balcony. You, on the other hand, are observing, providing real time feedback, nuggets of wisdom, encouragement, and sometimes nudging and sometimes directing. Right. I hope we've got that sorted out. Now a few pointers. If you feel you're ready to coach or you want to enhance your coaching repertoire, do a few things. I think that will help. First, as I said earlier, actively seek feedback. The best kind of feedback, according to Gallup, is the kind you seek. So proactively ask your boss, your manager, and encourage your people to do the same, right? It changes the whole dynamic and boosts engagement in the organization. Two for genuine, really genuine relationships. So when you meet people during coffee breaks or down a corridor, smile at them, you know, remember their names, find out about them. And yes, in the virtual world, it's going to be much, much harder. But don't let that change your intent. Find those bite sized conversations, find those moments to have those conversations. WhatsApp messages, phone calls. Fix the time, but make it happen, right? The third, and I think perhaps the most important, is trust. According to an HBR study, the one thing that seems to hold us back is that executives are unable to forge and maintain trusting relationships. So build that envelope of trust. Assure your teams that you can count on them, that you will help them when they need your support, that you will roll up your sleeves and get into team the trenches to help them solve those problems. And yes, please listen, right? One of the most overlooked qualities of a good coach is that we often are too quick to judge to offer solutions. But being silent and being intently focused on the person or actively listening to them can go a very long way in forging their trust. I do want to say that one of the other things good coaches do is they have a growth mindset. The Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck talks about it in her book Mindset the New Psychology of Success. A growth mindset is really the belief that everybody can grow and develop and potential is nurtured, not predetermined. Right? And lastly, don't treat your coaching sessions as a special occasion. It can be formal, of course, but it can also be informal in the moment. So sort of be spontaneous and seek out those moments where you can help somebody become a better version of themselves. Right? I hope you're all prepped up and ready to lift off on this coaching journey. A quick recap of all the major points we discussed in our lesson today. We've talked various junctures about the basics of coaching, what coaching is, why should you coach? What are the benefits for your people? Then we talked a little bit about coaching as a leader. We discussed the outcomes of the 4C model. The four cornerstones, capability, confidence, consciousness, and clarity. Then I armed you with some food for thought as you prepare to embark on your coaching journey. Lastly, a quick one. What is coaching? It's asking, it's not telling. It's the what, not the why. Coaching is not about talking, nor is it listening to the sound of your own voice. It's about actively listening to your coachee. Right? It's also about guiding and advising, but not solving someone's problems for them. I'll say this in closing, very inspirational Sheryl Sandberg, who's also endorsed my book when she returned to her alma mater to celebrate their 50th anniversary of the women's admission to Harvard Business School. This is what she said. Leadership is all about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that that impact lasts a long time. So please do that. Shine the light on others. And believe me, you will shine brighter. Happy coaching and leading. All right, this was me, Ruchira Choudhary. If you want to continue learning about this topic, leaders as Coaches, you can visit my website, ruchirachowdhary.com and thank you again for joining me today. Now back to Omar. Cheers.

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I absolutely loved today's lesson by Richira Chaudhry. If you want to learn more from Richira, check out our website richirachaudhry.com R u c h I r a chaudhary.com One of the best golden nuggets in that lesson was the concept of asking questions. The best coaches I had in my life, my best mentors, my best bosses, have been the ones that allow me to solve my own problems. The but they guide me with some guiding questions. They encourage me to ask questions maybe I'm not used to answering. One of my favorite questions to ask my team members when they're tackling a tough problem, when they feel overwhelmed, I ask them, if this was easy, what would it look like? And what this does is just kind of unlocks your brain. It stops you from thinking in a limited way and more of an unlimited way, more of like, what would this look like if this wasn't a pain, if this wasn't hard? Often when we're trying to solve a problem or improve a system, we're not really sure what we want. And that's a good starting point. What do you want? What do you want it to look like? Because what's the end result? What does the puzzle look like once it's all together? What would this look like if it was easy? And often just exploring this question helps solve so many problems. Another coaching question I like to ask my team is, who else on our team can you ask about this problem? Sometimes we think we have to work alone, that we have to solve this problem. But you have a wealth of resources of all these great people you work with, people with various backgrounds, different skills, side hustles, side hobbies, and often it just kind of prompts them to say, oh, maybe I should just post this in our group chat, in the general chat, and maybe somebody will have some ideas from the team and it just gets things going a little bit. Questions make you think differently, make you act differently, make you kind of survey the options instead of being stuck in a rut. Questions are also great when you're evaluating your team members is what I found. That's why when we do our annual evaluations, the evaluation forms are self reflective. They're actually asking questions and evaluating themselves based on their performance. And the reason why we do this is because really the only way you're going to improve is that when you admit you need to improve. So if you don't start there, then you're really never going to actually have any improvement. So we actually have to spend some time where we allow people to think about, hey, what am I good at? What did I do well this year? What can I double down next year? What are some things I need to improve on? What are some things I was kind of barely getting right and need a little help? Questions are golden. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, make sure you hit subscribe. Follow whatever you see on your podcast app to make sure you get the next episode automatically. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the biggest value adds you can give any employee, any team member in your organization is being a great leader, being a great coach to them. I remember when I was in teaching and I was in a 9 to 5 job and I had a boss. My life was totally different. My job satisfaction was incredibly different. When I had a good boss that I learned from that taught me things. I looked forward to going to work every day. I felt like I was growing, improving versus when I had a boss I just didn't learn anything from they were okay, they weren't mean or anything like that, but I just didn't get anything out of the relationship. I didn't actually improve as a professional. I wasn't being coached, I wasn't being mentored. I really didn't feel like I was stretching myself. And at the end of the day, you need to provide something other than salary to make people feel like, yes, I want to go to work every day. I'm getting better, I'm improving. This is the place where I belong, where my career, where my skills, where my future is in good hands. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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