What is a Culture of Development?

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Your goal as a leader of an organization is to create more leaders. To accelerate those skillsets and empower other people.

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The problem is that most leaders are stuck on leadership requiring positional authority. Members of your organization think that they must be a manager or a director in order to lead.

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The truth is that leadership is ultimately about the development of other people.

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Therefore we must create a culture of development to develop more leaders in our organization.

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Shift from positional leadership to a focus on the development of your team.

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To begin with, creating a culture of high development requires more than completing an annual employee survey and then leaving managers on their own - hoping they will learn something from the survey results that will change how they manage. You need to take a closer look at how critical engagement elements align with your performance management and human capital strategies.

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High-development companies have a clear purpose behind their strategy for employees. They know the specific behaviours they are trying to achieve and why those behaviours matter for success. We have to get clear on which behaviours we want to coach for.

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Before continuing, watch this video for my 3 secret tips to achieve peak team performance.

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Laws of Learning

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John Wooden was a basketball coach at the University of California, Los Angeles. He had led UCLA to nine national championships in ten years. Even ESPN named him the greatest coach of all time in any sport.

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One of Wooden's most frequent forms of teaching was this three-part instruction where he modeled the right way to do something, the wrong way, and then he remodeled again the right way.

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What looked like this flow of improvised drills and coaching is actually something that was extremely structured and focused.

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He was making it easier for the players to know what to change and building on learning circuits by seeing and fixing errors.

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He had his own laws of learning. He would teach in chunks, or what he called, the whole part method.

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This is a big part of Daniel Coyle's research, it shows how the whole part method, the chunking method of learning, is extremely effective and the most effective way to learn.

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This law of learning has five components: explanation, demonstration, imitation, correction and repetition.

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Quite simple, yet powerful in its approach for teaching, learning and coaching.

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"Don't look for the big quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens, and when it happens, it lasts." — John Wooden.

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Repetition is key to learning.

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What we learn from John Wooden here is that we must think of coaching our direct reports and our team with these short bits. These constant short bursts of feedback. These constant short bursts of accountability. These constant short bursts of demonstration and imitation and repetition of new ways.

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Speaking of constant conversations, below are five coaching conversations your managers should be having with their employees.

The Five Coaching Conversations

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Coaching conversations are the accumulation of everything we’ve been learning thus far.

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A coaching conversation must create psychological safety. It has to make someone feel like they belong, has to include vulnerability. It must be individualized to the person through their own personality, it must empower the coachee with more clarity on their roles and goals, while still keeping them in the decision-making seat. It must offer high energy and engagement when you're communicating. It has to include radically candid praise and feedback.

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Without any intention Wooden (the coach we referred to above) used Gallups 5 Coaching conversations:

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1. Role and Relationship Orientation

2. Quick Connect

3. Check-In

4. Development Coaching

5. Progress Review

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We break down each coaching conversation on our blog, The Coach Approach: How to go from Boss to Leader.

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But how do you prepare to have these conversations? Well, we use a framework.

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Keep reading to understand what we mean 👀

Effective One-On-Ones

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The most effective one-on-one are the ones we prepare for, that we have plans for, and that we actually have spent time thinking about.

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But we don't always have that time to plan.

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At Unicorn Labs, we’ve come up with this set of questions to help you coach during your one-on-ones rather than what you're probably used to which is giving all the answers.

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Let's dive into this a little more.

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Giving advice is easy. People like to hear it and they think that your advice is good. However, the real value of coaching lies in asking questions instead of giving advice.

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Asking questions can be a little awkward. It’s important to ask them if you want to improve your employee’s performance, but it may feel like they’re not very helpful at times.

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Advice is overrated. I can tell you something, and it’s got a limited chance of making its way into your brain’s hippocampus, the region that encodes memory. If I can ask you a question and you generate the answer yourself, the odds

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Questions make conversations slower. It’s EASIER  to be in control of the conversation rather than let it take its own course. Asking questions means you’re no longer in control, and that can lead to awkward situations.

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Now that we understand the values in question. Here are seven types of questions to get your managers have insightful career development conversations with staff.

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