American investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett (Yes, that Warren Buffet. The man who became wealthy through buying shareholdings in companies which he then expanded through encouragement rather than interference) has long relied on a very simple philosophy when it comes to building leadership capacity among his ranks: “Find the .400 hitters and then not tell them how to swing.” If you’re not a baseball aficionado, you may miss the metaphor. In Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, historian Stephen Jay Gould explains that the .400 hitter is a “benchmark” offensive rate statistic that represents an extreme outlier in Major League Baseball.
The .400 benchmark hasn’t been reached since Hall of Famer Ted Williams hit .406 eighty-four years ago for the Boston Red Sox. Williams is alleged to have said, “If I had known hitting .400 was going to be such a big deal, I would have done it again." But he never did. Nor has any other major leaguer since 1941, when the Splendid Splinter, as Williams was known, achieved what is widely regarded as an insurmountable feat. As a corollary to Buffett’s big-hitter philosophy, uber-successful Bill Gates’ best advice to people who strive for success is to get out of their own way. He discusses his philosophy in his introduction to Tim Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance. The message is clear: we are often our own (or our team’s) worst enemy.
A coaching pioneer in corporate America, Tim Gallwey based his approach to coaching on the principle that his protégés are their own worst enemies: They beat themselves. Whether on the tennis court or in the board room, getting in our own or our team’s way plagues a great many leaders of all types and across all industries. The good news is that it’s fixable. The bad news is that if it were an easy fix there wouldn’t be such a demand to transform organizational cultures away from traditional performance-management practices (set measurable outcomes, mentor, and evaluate performance) and toward coaching-up protégés. To coach-up is to unlock the potential in people to maximize performance, heretofore tethered by conventional approaches. Instead of managing performance, leaders as coach cultivate it. While mentors impart knowledge, coaches help people discover it themselves.
Coaching isn’t a benevolent form of sharing your experiences with somebody less experienced or less senior (that’s called mentoring). Instead, coaching is a way of asking questions that act as catalysts to spark insights to help protégés grow. If a leader’s job is to unlock their team’s potential to maximize performance, then it makes sense that great leaders have mastered both the arts of imparting knowledge and helping others discover it themselves.
The question is: How can school districts develop coaching capacity among their leadership team, and subsequently the entire organization? Developing leaders has historically been an uneven process that is dependent upon the hierarchy of the organizational chart. Assistant Principals are developed by principals. Principals are developed by their supervisor, directors developed by assistant superintendents, and so on and so forth. I was lucky enough to have outstanding supervisors on my journey to my superintendency. Many served me well as mentors and advisors. But only one coached me. He came to school administration through athletic coaching and embraced the work of Gallwey and the GROW coaching movement. Dan was my principal and elevated me to an interim assistant principal position at the middle school where I was one of his teachers (I had recently earned my preliminary administrative services credential and expressed an interest in leadership and administration). He convinced me I had “what it takes” to succeed as a school leader.
Dan took it upon himself to coach me up from that point forward. He was never judgmental. His interest lied in understanding what was happening rather than simply noticing how well or how badly it was happening. When I came to him with a problem, he didn’t offer a solution. Instead, he asked me what my instincts and proclivities are telling me. As a novice, I didn’t trust my instincts and I didn’t understand how proclivities drove behaviors. But he convinced me that it’s best to learn early on whether your instincts and proclivities lead you to success or lead you astray. He needed to know too. He reasoned that if a leader’s instincts and proclivities led them astray, they ought to know. It's possible they are not cut out for leading others (at least not naturally, though they can learn).
What’s the moral of this story? It’s simple. Find a bunch of .400 hitters. But if you can't, coach up who you have.
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