Moving From Command & Control to Coaching & Collaboration: Dominic Ashley-Timms Of Notion On How Leaders and Managers Can Become Better Coaches

The number one leadership initiative in any organization today is improved coaching. Coaching empowers employees, empowerment drives engagement, and engagement drives performance. At its core, coaching is about transformation. Leading distributed teams requires transforming how we coach and changing our play calls and playbooks to get things done. As a part of our interview series called “Moving From Command & Control to Coaching & Collaboration; How Leaders and Managers Can Become Better Coaches,” we had the pleasure to interview Dominic Ashley-Timms.

Dominic Ashley-Timms is the CEO of performance consultancy Notion. He is the co-creator of the multi-award-winning STAR® Manager online development programme being adopted by managers in 40 countries and is also the co-author of new management bestseller The Answer is a Question.

Thank you for joining us to explore a critical inflection point in how we define leadership. Our readers would like to get to know you better. What was a defining moment that shaped who you are as a leader?

Early in my career, I worked as a change management consultant and was often involved in complex projects, working directly with project managers. I noticed that the more questions we asked of the people being affected by the various change projects we were engaged in, the more that the fear of change appeared to subside. I noted that uncertainty was the root of fear in the face of change, and the very act of asking questions encouraged engagement in the answers, allowing them to develop a stake in the change happening around them. This in turn was giving them a higher level of certainty. It was something about the nature of the questions we were asking that engaged the fullest thinking from those being affected that really marked me and became the insight which drove me to start my own business, providing coaching support during change programmes and engaging others through the use of questions.

John C. Maxwell is credited with saying, “A leader is someone who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” How do you embody that quote as a leader?

We have grown our business over the last 20 years, and it has been shaped by the outstanding talent of the coaches we have employed to work on our client projects. Along the way, we have developed a methodology to help managers to manage by learning to use what we call an enquiry-led approach to management, based around our trademarked STAR® model. This is something that I try to use in my everyday leadership working with my team. Being vulnerable and expressing yourself authentically, asking others questions and inviting them to collaborate with you isn’t a sign of weakness — it’s a sign of strength and simultaneously acknowledges that the people you work with also have a valid contribution to make in developing new solutions. This move from the typical employer-employee parent-child relationship to more of an adult-to-adult relationship in the workplace enables everybody to contribute equitably and to have that contribution valued, and I try to embody these values in my own business. More widely, we are on a mission “to develop a million STAR® managers capable of building engaging, productive, inclusive and collaborative workplaces everywhere”.

How do you define the differences between a leader as a manager and a leader as a coach?

I don’t wish to be the fly in the ointment here, but a leader needs to be a leader and a manager needs to be a manager first and foremost. Development programmes intended to impart coaching skills to both leaders and managers are always built around the premise of trying to turn them into coaches. The way they do that is to teach them how to conduct transactional coaching sessions, in programmes that can last anywhere between 30 minutes to several days, teaching them the very same coaching models used by Executive Coaches.

But here’s the thing. An Executive Coach operates to the coachee’s agenda, but when you are your coachee’s line manager, it doesn’t sit comfortably attempting to be a team member’s coach when you clearly have your own agenda for them. And this in-built conflict was something that was never addressed when Executive Coach training programmes were simply rebadged by training companies in their rush to meet rising demand for these new skills.

And the evidence that this approach doesn’t work is all around us — 93% of companies cannot measure the impact of their coaching programmes (and don’t know where to start), and many companies have been burned by extensive investments which have delivered no notable impact on the performance of the organisation. Despite almost 25 years of investment in a whole variety of programmes designed to impart coaching skills, and despite the hundreds of thousands who have been exposed to these skills, the UK still has almost the lowest levels of employee engagement in Europe. In fact, our national productivity is so low and so far behind our G-7 competitors, that it is a significant cause of concern to our government.

We started our conversation by noting that improved coaching is the number one leadership initiative in any organization today. What are some essential skills and competencies that leaders must have now to be better coaches?

Please don’t misunderstand me, we are passionate advocates of everything and anything to do with utilising coaching within organisations. In fact, it was 15 years ago when we noted that there were a number of missing elements related to the way that coaching skills were being taught. I’m talking here about the behavioural underpinnings concerning the managers’ mindset, their personal and situational awareness when interacting with others and their belief set concerning the potential and capabilities of their team members. These were the areas that we began experimenting with in our change work with organisations. And it’s through this work that we realised that it was the coaching-related behaviours themselves that really made the difference when interacting with team members, not the episodic and transactional sit-down formal coaching sessions which were altogether too uncomfortable.

Helping managers and leaders to adopt these coaching-related behaviours into their everyday management style generated real engagement, and we began to see team members flourish as a result. Learning how to ask more powerful and intentional questions, actually learning how to use an enquiry-led approach, changed the power dynamic between managers and their team members. It moved the managers’ mindset away from being the owner of the solution, to becoming the enabler of the solution by engaging the full talents of their team.

Developing seriously improved active listening skills and changing our mindset to be alert to things going well in the immediate environment, meant that managers were then able to provide more appreciative feedback, which in turn stimulated more willing contributions as team members tuned in to the behaviours that they were employing that was making the real difference.

We’re all familiar with the adage, “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” How are you inspiring — rather than mandating — leaders to invest in upskilling and reskilling?

When, as managers and leaders, we labour under the mental model most of us hold, that we’re responsible for the productive effort of the team and for offering solutions to every problem, fixing and firefighting our way through each day, what we’re actually doing is stepping into almost every problem we’re presented with, repeatedly taking on aspects of that work ourselves. And we’re suffering as a result. We have higher levels of mental well-being issues and executive burnout now than at any time previously. We simply cannot keep on at this pace.

Changing our mental model and utilising a new style of management that engages team members more fully means that we prevent ourselves from stepping into every problem that’s brought to us and instead help team members determine a simple first action that they can take themselves which can begin to resolve the issue. Where we’ve worked with large groups of leaders and managers, one of the first things we hear is that they’re beginning to win time back and often this is 20% or more that they can now use to reinvest in the development of the team, and also to focus on the higher value aspects of their role that perhaps they hadn’t been addressing as fully before. The truth of this is self-evident and attracted the interest of the UK Government recently who wanted to understand how the programme might measurably improve UK productivity. Subsequently, the Government funded a large-scale research project into the approach we’d developed, conducted by the London School of Economics, that proved that managers undertaking the programme increased the amount of time spent coaching others by 70%.

Rather than tell-based training that mandates that managers and leaders need to do this, the STAR® Manager programme has been constructed to offer a learning journey that is more invitational and reflective. Each learner undertaking the programme develops a very personal set of insights about themselves, how they’re perceived by others and how effective they are as managers and leaders. Through practice, they adopt those behaviours that fit with their natural style until they have developed their own enquiry-led approach.

Let’s get more specific. How do you coach someone to do their best work? How can leaders coach for peak performance in our current context? What are your “Top 5 Ways That Leaders and Managers Can Be Effective Coaches?”

As managers and leaders, coaching people to do their best work requires a change in our belief set that everyone has it in them to do amazing work. We have to facilitate that, firstly by not micro-managing. As we’re promoted into new roles, sometimes it’s difficult to let go of all of the aspects of the job you used to do, so the tendency can be to dive back down to solve the problems that your team members should now be stepping up to solve. Recognising this is important for helping them to learn for themselves how to do some of those things you used to do. Actively stopping, preventing yourself from stepping into the problem and asking only questions that would benefit a team member’s own thinking is a powerful way to do this.

An added advantage is that we have now begun to develop the confidence and competencies of our team, and in organisations where succession development is found to be wanting, you can see that purposefully finding those opportunities to help people solve the problems of the day for themselves is a powerful way of learning on the job.

Using a sustained, enquiry-led approach is something that we now call Operational Coaching®, to distinguish it clearly as a management competence and to separate it altogether from the more familiar idea of 1-to-1 Executive Coaching which is the predominant training approach for managers and leaders — teaching them how to be a Coach.

The five skills that managers need to develop in order to adopt an Operational Coaching® style of management would include:

• becoming more self-aware and learning how to manage your state so that you are more open and available to being approached by others.
• developing the mindset to be looking out for what’s going well so that you can give appropriate appreciative feedback.
• developing more of a mental model as a manager that you are there to support the development and active engagement of your team.
• active listening, but learning to listen more deeply at an intuitive level, sensing almost what isn’t being said.
• learning how to ask intentional questions for the benefit of other people’s thinking.

We’re leading and coaching in increasingly diverse organizations. And one aspect of workforce diversity on the rise is generational diversity. What advice would you offer about how to effectively coach a multi-generational workforce? And how do you activate the collective potential of a multi-generational workforce?

Research has shown that the three most populous generations value the quality of management, and the youngest generation entering the workforce now wants to be coached and developed but also wants to be given the opportunity to show what they can do. And they’re more likely to move jobs if those opportunities for personal growth aren’t available.

The challenge presented by a multi-generational workforce is that each generation has different values and a different perspective on the part that work plays in their lives. Trying to adapt to the needs of each can be a challenge if you’re still using a more directive approach. But everyone is stimulated by questions, they are almost irresistible and we cannot help but reflect when asked a question. Asking an authentic question also contributes to an adult-to-adult relationship and indicates a desire to hear the answer to the question.

By taking the position of stimulating the thinking of others, we’re also indicating that we believe it’s within their capability to resolve the matter at hand for themselves, and so we are both acknowledging and respecting the other person. We have found in our work that people pick up on this questioning style and it can become infectious. We see in turn that they themselves ask others questions but also think through options before coming to you as a manager with issues, almost like self-coaching. At this point you have the basis of a real coaching culture taking hold, which can really change not only the internal language, but also the sense of contribution to the organisation.

You’re referring to emotional intelligence, in a sense. What are two steps every leader can take to demonstrate a higher level of emotional intelligence?

It’s interesting in that we work across all sectors and of course experience varying levels of emotional intelligence, and for those who might be more technically minded (a subject matter expert for example), there’s no point in trying to make them into what they’re not, i.e. “people people”. Fortunately, the ability to ask stimulating questions can be learned by anyone, and for those who might not have the highest EQ, for all intents and purposes, the very act of asking authentic questions can make up for that and engage team members effectively.

Words matter. And we’re collectively creating a new leadership language right now. What are the most important words for leaders to use now?

Developing a coaching mindset is important and the language around developing an Operational Coaching® style of management, we have found, has helped a great number of managers and leaders to make the distinctions they need to begin coaching others effectively in the flow of work. Surfacing conversations about intentional enquiry, coaching culture, authenticity, equity and shared accountability across the team and the manager are all important aspects of language that can help to foster more of a coaching culture within organisations.

I keep inspiring quotes on my desk. What’s your favorite “Life Lesson Quote,” and why does it mean so much to you?

That is a great question and there are so many quotes that have affected me. One in particular is “Decisions are the Stepping Stones of Progress” and this speaks to me because so many people are trapped by their limiting beliefs, and oftentimes we only have to ask ourselves a single powerful question to make a breakthrough. Prevarication and indecision is the killer here — we all have a limited amount of time. Arriving at decisions sets out for us the actions we know we must take and provides a new map for the journey ahead, and it’s the decisions we make and act upon that propel us along the course of our lives.

Our readers often like to continue the conversation. What’s the best way for readers to connect with you and to stay current on what you’re discovering?

We share our work as a global performance improvement company on our LinkedIn company page Notion — STAR® and I’m happy to connect with anyone who’d like to follow my musings on LinkedIn as well.

For those more actively interested in learning more about the STAR® model for managers and leaders, then our recently published book The Answer is a Question pushes the development around the science of asking intentional questions. It also explores in detail the research undertaken into the new management discipline Operational Coaching® which the UK Government put to the test in a large-scale randomised control trial across 62 organisations in 14 sectors conducted by the London School of Economics (LSE). It proved, to a level of statistical significance, that managers and leaders undertaking the STAR® Manager learning programme changed their behaviour at scale, increasing the amount of time that they were coaching team members by an average of 70 per cent.

Thank you for sharing your insights. We appreciate the gift of your time and wish you continued success and good health.

About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000 organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations define, design and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book Success from Anywhere and by connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.