Do you ever find yourself being frustrated when someone tells you how to do something? I bet someone else’s way doesn’t work quite as well for you.
A friend of mine once asked his sons’ school teacher why it was that, even though he set a really positive example to his boys and never chastised them, his boys still did things their own way. The teacher said,”You know, Keith, all children, when they reach about 10 or 11, need to find their own way in life. They’ll look at how their mother and father do things and try every other way first just to see what’s out there. Eventually they’ll find a way of doing things that is very similar to their parents but not exactly the same”.
Of course it might be that children have that need to find their own way from very much younger but 10 or 11 is the age when they start secondary school and start to venture further from home. Mark Twain and Winston Churchill are often paraphrased as saying that “When I was 15 I thought my dad was an idiot. When I reached 21 I was quite surprised at how much he’d learned.”
Everyone has to find their own way of doing something. That way will be based on the circumstances and a person’s own strengths, weaknesses, preferences and values. Their values will be shaped by their parents, hence their way of doing things will mimic closely their parents’ eventually. As the saying goes: You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. All an outsider can do is suggest a goal and help provide a motivation for reaching that goal.
That’s why coaching is so powerful: it works with the client’s own goals and intrinsic motivation and occasionally helps the client see other ways around the problem. How effective are ‘leaders’ who try and tell the workforce how to do something? Inevitably that workforce will be trying to do it someone else’s way so won’t be as effective. A good leader articulates the vision and encourages the team to strive for that goal. A bad leader tries to tell everyone else how to do it. Anyone trapped in a bureaucracy will have experienced this phenomenon.
Just because a certain way of doing something was, perhaps, reasonably effective when the bureaucracy first started to solidify doesn’t mean that way still works. The army marches up and down because once it needed to treat the soldiers as part of a machine that fired rifles at the same time or locked shields together for mutual protection. In any other skill that embraces a person’s brain the teachers and leaders would help deliver a much more flexible and effective package if they set the task and articulated a vision and assisted the student or follower to achieve it their own way. Listen for how many times you hear someone say of someone else, normally with a sense of exasperation, “…even though I told him to do it that way.”
In the military’s flying world, and probably many other ‘learning environments’ there’s a popular myth that it’s much better for students to fly with lots of different instructors so they can learn all the top tips. Interestingly it has almost exactly the opposite effect. Students spend most of the time working out what nuances a particular instructor displays rather than learning to fly. The ‘motivation’ is mostly how best to stop the ‘noise’ coming from the instructor’s seat. Most people learn to drive with one driving instructor. When they’re released out onto the open road, the ‘L’ plates a distant memory, they more or less learn to strap the car on and drive the same way as other people. The only ones who don’t are either too arrogant or ignorant to notice how their driving too fast or too slow or not bothering to use lanes properly is affecting others.
Think about this next time you’re trying to learn something or lead or teach others. If you find yourself ‘telling’ someone how to do something you and the team probably aren’t being as effective as you could be. If you’re struggling to do something yourself ask yourself what it is you’re actually trying to achieve and see if there’s a different way of reaching that goal. Failing that give me, or another coach, a call and we’ll help you find the best way for you.