Nurturing and developing others

If you aren't actively nurturing others as part of your leadership role, you are neglecting one of the most important aspects for long term success.

The Nurturing dimension of leadership is a critical one, that covers how to encourage, enable and actively support the development of others around you. This is a key area of focus for any leader looking to develop the long-term capabilities and success of their organisation. This plays a key role even for leaders who are individual contributors rather than managers of teams or functions, in sharing and developing capabilities in the area of expertise they lead on and guiding the development of others in this domain.

The benefits to the organisation are apparent; developing more capable people across the organisation increases the capability, flexibility and effectiveness of the organisation. The people who are developing, learning and growing get satisfaction from this personal growth and are more likely to stay and contribute effectively.

There are also benefits for the leader themselves. If viewed through a scarcity mindset these might not be apparent, and over the years I’ve met experts and senior leaders who have seen their knowledge and skills as their critical advantage and have hoarded and protected these, thinking they preserve their security (which might be the case in backward, competitive and broken cultures, but not in forward looking organisations). Approaching it from an abundance mindset, developing others and their capabilities creates deep trusting relationships based on shared experience and respect. I hold some of my mentors and coaches in the highest regard, have a lot of time and loyalty to them, and get a huge amount of respect and support from those I have helped develop. It is one of the best ways a leader can create a long-term network of great people that transcends the organisation they are in.

Advising and guiding personal learning

Mentoring and Coaching are two of the most effective methods of developing others and their capabilities. These terms are often blended, merged or even switched in different geographic and work cultures, so for the benefit of clarity I’m going to define what I describe by each for use here. If you’d like to use them differently, go wild. Most important is the concepts behind them.

Mentoring is a relationship where a more experiences person offers guidance, advice and personal insights to support someone’s long term growth. It often focuses around a specific domain or skill, sharing knowledge, experiences and personal learnings to help develop capabilities or navigate challenges.

Coaching is a relationship where the coach facilitates personal reflection, asks open questions and supports the individual to find their own answers and strategies to achieve goals and develop capabilities. The coach helps to develop insights and action without offering direct advice or even necessarily having expertise in the specific domain.

Both of these can be done formally with relationships defined and continued over a period of time, and also both can be used as a style of interaction informally when working with others.

 A leader performing effectively in this dimension will apply both of these styles informally, when appropriate, in interactions with people they work with. They will also look to create opportunities to establish formal mentoring and coaching relationships between people in their teams, also including themselves, to encourage personal development in the most important areas for the individuals themselves and the organisation.

Coaching and mentoring are strategic investments and there is triple value in any of these situations.

x1: The individual develops the skills and capabilities they wish to, and feel invested in.

x2: The mentor or coach gains a surprising amount of value and insight from the activity too. Teaching something to others is the most effective way of retaining knowledge and information [1], so by mentoring you get deeper insights into the expertise you are helping develop. I often get deep insights from coaching sessions that I can apply to myself; a really valuable learning for me during my coaching journey so far has been how to Dip [2]; how to notice these and register them to be explored later, and to bring my full focus back onto the individual as soon as possible.

x3: The organisation benefits from the increased capability, and the increased strength of the relationship between the two people.

So, both coaching and mentoring can be very valuable, formally and informally. The trick is knowing when best to use them.

The Development Ladder

The model I most prefer for this purpose is similar to but distinct from the Situational Leadership model [3], and doesn’t have an established commercial name, so let’s call it The Development Ladder.

This model is a great tool to use to decide when to use coaching, mentoring or another approach to developing others, and is applicable both to informal situations and also useful when establishing more formal relationships.

Applying informally to developing capability in a specific task or domain

It defines four types of action, tell, mentor, coach and delegate. Depending on the confidence and the capability the individual has in the specific context, choose the most applicable method of supporting them in achieving the outcome, while learning and developing themselves along the way.

If the person has low capability and/or confidence in the context(s) involved, tell them how to do it – be clear and give sufficient direction and instruction so that they succeed. Check for understanding and give them the support they need to achieve it. Through successful execution they will develop the capability and confidence in this context to adopt a different approach next time.

When they have sufficient capability and confidence, move to using a mentoring approach. You may also choose to reduce the scope of their action to increase their confidence and capability to enable a mentoring approach. Offering advice, guidance and personal examples, give them the insights they need to perform the activity and achieve the outcome. Check in with them, providing enough space for them to learn through autonomy and also mistakes, without leaving them to fail abjectly. The nature and the context around the task will affect what degree of mistakes or failure can be tolerated. In general, the more space to make mistakes the better the learning, as long as these mistakes do not have significant negative impact. Discuss and agree the level of support and the tolerance for mistakes with them during the mentoring discussion.

As soon as they have sufficient competence and confidence to, move on to a coaching approach. This is often more time consuming than mentoring, but the pay-off is well worth it. By asking open questions, giving much less direct advice and guidance and encouraging the individual to come up with their own ideas, approaches and options, the learning is much deeper and this enables capability not just in this domain, but across other areas of work and life too. Telling is giving them a fish, Mentoring is teaching them to fish, and Coaching is guiding them on how to build an effective business in fishing, or even in other industries. There is a whole separate dimension in the model devoted to coaching so we will go deep into it there. The fundamentals are simply this; be curious, present and positive, ask clean and open questions, and support them on the journey through the conversation to the outcome. If you do that well, you’ll develop a very effective coaching leadership style.

Coaching: be curious, present and positive, ask clean and open questions, and support them on the journey through the conversation to the outcome.

With high competence and confidence in the relevant contexts, move to delegation. When the person no longer needs coaching support on this context, you can simply delegate to them and provide sufficient information and support so they do it successfully. I really like Covey’s delegation model [4] for delegating effectively; defining the desired results, the key guidelines, what resources are needed and available, standards for accountability (on both sides) and the consequences of success and failure. Do this as a two-way conversation using a partnering framing for optimal outcomes.

This model is really useful for developing someone from the basics to expert level in a given domain or context, and also selecting the best approach in a specific situation that crops up.

In practical application, things are often more complex. A task or project is likely to involve multiple different types of capability – the technical skills, behavioural skills and knowledge needed to achieve the outcome, and the person may have different levels of capability and confidence in each. Have an open conversation about the task or project, and work out together the most suitable approach for all relevant contexts; which aspects can be directly delegated, where might a coaching approach be useful, what would they like to be mentored on and what aspects do they just need telling what to do in. This is a great example of how the coaching leadership style can be used informally and in conjunction with other forms of nurturing. As part of your usual conversations, you drop in some coaching questions where you feel it is most appropriate, along with giving advice and other support as needed. 

Applying to enabling formal development relationships

The Development Ladder is also very useful in establishing whether to use a coaching or a mentoring approach for formal situations. If the individual is looking to establish a basic or intermediate level of competence in a discipline, skill or behaviour, then pairing them with a mentor is often a key part of that learning journey. If they are already skilled but wish to take it to an expert level, then they either need a deeper expert in the field to mentor them, or to have supportive coaching to help them reach a higher level of expertise. This is where coaching really comes into its own; you don’t need to find the definitive expert in the field to make sure the advice is fully relevant, and the coach helps them to create their own expertise in their own way, and in their own style. It also shows how when developing skills to the expert level some informal or formal coaching can be paired effectively with mentoring.

If you have the time and the inclination, it is often advantageous to coach key members of your team yourself as this really deepens the relationship and the trust further. Clearly you can only mentor them if you already have deeper experience in the context than they do. As a leader, though, it is also your role to enable these relationships with others. Help them find the most appropriate people to coach or mentor them, and support the process as their capabilities develop.

I advise a one coach and multiple mentor approach. Coaching tends to work best if it is a widely scoped and fairly long-term relationship, only having one formal coach at a given time. You may arrange a coach for someone (including yourself) for a 6-12 month period targeting specific personal development goals, allowing these goals to evolve over the time, and then take a break from coaching for 6-12 months to focus on consolidating and integrating the development made.

It is important to evolve the goals as the person develops but also important to round off the coaching phase appropriately. These sessions and relationships can be very familiar and supportive and this support may feel hard to relinquish, so it is important to set a defined end to the coaching phase and take a break before setting new goals, even if with the same coach.

People often return to the same coach for the next phase of development, taking advantage of the deep relationship and trust already built, but if the next focus is particularly different you might well seek out a new coach to work with. Coaches do not need deep expertise in the context, but different coaches have different styles and strengths, so choose someone you trust and respect whose strengths match what you need.

There is a recurring theme in the business world where people tend to choose a coach who has deep experience in a similar role to theirs in the past. Ex-CEOs coaching CEOs, Ex-CTOs coaching CTOs. This is clearly necessary for mentoring but not for coaching. If the coach is very disciplined and experienced as a coach it can work and enrich the relationship with effective mentoring, but if not, there is a danger there will be too much mentoring and a less successful outcome. Even if you're fresh to the role and feeling totally out of your depth, I'd suggest pairing a coach with a mentor rather than going for an 'all-in-one package'; this way you get a more diverse perspective and can have more autonomy in designing your approach and style.

I'd definitely choose a coach who is interested in and keen to work in the given domain with a basic level of understanding, but expert experience can be detrimental. I coach a lot of CTOs and senior technology leaders and stay very disciplined with the coaching approach. There are benefits to having a deep understanding of the context but I need to avoid becoming distracted by the technology, and I'm very careful not to offer advice unless we agree that mentoring is needed and identify it as mentoring. Even though I stay up to date with latest technologies, they get a much better outcome and develop their capabilities further if they develop their own ideas and new ways of thinking rather than following advice. Choose your coach based on the suitability of their coaching style to your needs, and the level of trust you develop when exploring chemistry and contracting.

For mentoring, this tends to work best if it is more narrowly defined and specific, and it is acceptable and even encouraged to have multiple mentors for different areas of expertise. One of your leadership team might have a coach to support their overall personal and career development for the year during a year of significant personal growth, preparing for or establishing themselves in a new expanded role. Alongside this they might have several mentors, advising and guiding their development in specific areas, such as financial planning and management, developing their specific industry knowledge, or dealing with difficult situations. These topics will likely be the most important areas they wish to develop their competence and confidence in, and as they develop this the mentor can move towards more of a coaching style, and their coach will be aware of the mentoring being done and can also ask coaching questions to evolve the capability further. 

Growth mindset and culture

Another key aspect to this dimension is creating a nurturing culture in the organisation, and developing and framing to encourage everyone in the organisation to have a growth mindset, and to prioritise learning with the importance it deserves.

This involves modelling this attitude and mindset yourself, encouraging others to do the same, and creating expectations that learning and developing oneself and others around is a core part of the job and as important as delivering the core product.

It is so important to align actions with the vision of the organisation you intend to create. Emphasising and encouraging a learning culture where people can develop skills is key, but just as key is to ensure that you and the other leaders in the organisation create time and space for this to actually happen. If not then the illusion of prioritising learning can be detrimental.

70:20:10 – learning as part of the day job

The importance of this is reinforced by the 70:20:10 learning model [5], which is still widely recognised as valid and backed by the insights on how we learn gained from neuroscience since it was first published.

The model indicates that for effective learning, most of this should be experiential, done on-the-job and through stretching to different proximate work and challenges. The 70:20:10 is not empirically validated or calculated, the 7:2:1 proportions are a guideline and the best split will vary by person and by topic. The 20% corresponds to social learning; where the formal and informal coaching and mentoring take place along with eliciting feedback and creating reflection time. The 10% is the formal structured learning, programmes workshops and reading.

A 70% focus on experiential helps reinforce the learning, causing these neural pathways to strengthen and the knowledge and skills to be retained.

Use it or lose it

Hence it is critical to the success of the learning to pair learning programmes, coaching, mentoring and other learning activities with tangible projects or stretch activities to enable people to actively practice the skills and behaviours they are developing, and to apply the knowledge they have just gained to help them embed it. All of the learning programmes I design and run bring experiential learning into the classroom, embed mentoring and coaching, and create a framework to enable this 70% of experiential learning both in the day job and in important projects where the skills can be practiced. You should plan for this too – both for yourself and the learning for people within your organisation. Make sure there is scope and support for experiential learning of the key skills, behaviours and knowledge being developed. Without it, the learning is a waste of time. With it, it becomes a powerful and lasting learning experience.

You might say that performing formal learning without planning meaningful practice to embed it is like throwing jelly at a wall and hoping it sticks. I'd say the formal learning is buying the paint, the coaching and mentoring is opening the tin and priming the surface, and the practical application is applying the paint to the wall. Prioritise and plan strategic and effective learning, enrich this with coaching and mentoring, and then create a culture that enables learning and encourages a sustainable pace to make sure the paint gets on the wall and the benefits and ROI are fully realised.

Invest time and focus in nurturing and developing others, for them, for you and for the organisation.

I also publish shorter articles that support these topics in this other linkedin newsletter. All these articles are feeding into a series of practical leadership books that will be published soon. If you are interested in receiving a draft copy to be an early reader and reviewer and a free copy of the finished books, please contact me. I'd greatly appreciate your contributions to help make these books even better.

[1] The “Learning Pyramid,” often attributed to the National Training Laboratories (NTL), expands on Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience (1946), though the specific retention percentages have no confirmed research basis.

[2] Tan, Chade-Meng. Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace). New York: HarperOne, 2012.

[3] Hersey, P., Blanchard, K. H., & Johnson, D. E. (2012). Management of Organisational Behaviour: Leading Human Resources (10th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education.

[4] Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. New York, NY: Free Press.

[5] Lombardo, M. M., & Eichinger, R. W. (1996). The Career Architect Development Planner. Lominger Limited, Inc.

This content by James Carter is licensed under CC BY 4.0