With another spring training season well under way for Major League Baseball, spirits in New England seem to get a lift. Spring weather and another trip to Fenway Park are soon to come.
Each new baseball season always raises a question in my mind, though: why do all other professional sports leagues have "head coaches'' while baseball teams have "managers''?
As a professional and a writer who concerns himself with management matters, my mind makes a leap to ask an additional question: Is an organizational manager a coach?
To excel at management, to lead your team or organization, and to meet and exceed your organizational goals, you need to be a good coach. As a manager or leader you have a wide array of responsibilities which go beyond coaching organizational members for success; but if you don't invest the time to coach your team, your ability to put the right resources in the right place at the right time becomes limited.
Becoming a good coach gives you the opportunity to understand strengths and weaknesses, to build complementary teams, to know who to use for what problem, and perhaps most importantly, to build loyalty and commitment in your organization.
Becoming a good coach first and foremost is about establishing a clear vision and direction for your team. What are the goals you need to meet? What are the challenges you need to overcome? What will success in your organization look like? What will success mean to the team and to the individual organization members? Develop and communicate a clear message about who you are as an organization, where you are going, and how you are going to get there.
Coaching involves developing your team members. My grandfather knew this when he wrote in the 1930s: "People like to progress. They like to feel that each day, week, month or year they are taking a step ahead. If you can make someone feel that you can show them the way or help them, you can influence them.''
As a leader, you need to play that role for your team members. Be interested in helping them develop their talents, and both you and they will gain a better understanding of where their professional abilities lie, and where they can improve and how to get help.
As you come to understand the individual abilities and deficiencies of your team members, you will be better prepared to facilitate a high-performance team. Use the knowledge you have gained from your investment of time and resources on the individual level and look for how members may best come together around projects and goals.
Perhaps one team member is good with customer relationships but has difficulty with sales analysis. You could pair this talent with a team member who likes quantitative work but dislikes the pressure of creating new business relationships.
Build on strengths first, and then find ways to compensate for weaknesses. A diverse team gives you the opportunity to create groupings that elicit individual role strengths and success.
Is this work really necessary? Managers today often play multiple roles within an organization, and have their own workload in addition to overseeing a team. In such an environment, you might make the argument that it is better or more efficient to be clear with expectations, set an autonomous work environment, and simply hold people accountable for unmet expectations.
Of course, accountability is a key organizational discipline whether you engage in coaching or not. However, managing solely on expectations and accountability doesn't build a critical component of organizational success: loyalty and commitment.
We are a social species and we need and respond to positive social interactions. This fact doesn't escape the work environment. Management research shows positive social interactions are correlated with professional satisfaction and organizational success. High-performing organizational members and teams have a high level of positive social interaction and support - and it keeps them committed.
As a leader, it is part of your responsibility to create a culture to utilize this basic human need and leverage it to an organizational strength. The supportive, invested and challenging nature of coaching will build a loyal team and retain your top talent.
Stuart G. Danforth is chairman and principal of Danforth Associates Investment Management in Wellesley. He writes and speaks on topics including financial strategy, investment decision-making and entrepreneurial tactics. He can be reached at sdanforth@danforthassociates.com.
