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Sometimes I wonder what universities would be like if more of us were trained as coaches. One town hall meeting from a few years ago comes to mind. The president of my university was sharing financial, retention, and admission data along with projections of how the university would need to respond to the current higher education market. Not surprisingly, faculty responded with questions that made clear that they perceived lines having been drawn and the need to challenge the placement of those lines.
A moment like that can go two ways. In one, each side listens for what it needs to rebut, and the exchange becomes a contest over where the lines belong. In the other, people listen for what the speaker is seeing. Since becoming a coach, I realize my automatic response has shifted toward the second. The faculty questions carried real knowledge about students, about classrooms, about what the data cannot show. The president's projections carried real knowledge about what the institution can sustain and about the larger higher ed landscape. Heard generously, and explored with follow-up questions to make sure the point is fully understood and appreciated, both were important contributions to finding a path forward.
A coaching culture is less about making support available and more about people listening to one another for the wisdom in what is said.
Listening this way is rare for understandable reasons. It is seldom needed for early success and seldom developed later, when deadlines, crises, and time crunches abound. Coaching develops it through practice, including when what we hear conflicts with our own views. The costs of its absence are familiar to any leader. Good ideas go unspoken, and small misunderstandings harden into grievances. When people are listened to generously, they tend to offer ideas earlier and extend the same generosity to others, because that is how they are treated.
Imagine a campus where most people, at every level and in every office, automatically listened in this way. Disagreement would still happen, but it would begin from the assumption that the other person knows something worth hearing. A hard question at a town hall would be received as information about what a colleague is seeing, and the people asking would expect to be heard that way.
The stakes reach well beyond the meeting room. An institution listens through its people, and how its leaders listen shapes how the whole campus does. When leaders hear a difficult question as information and pause to better understand the genuine concern of the speaker, others learn that questions are welcome, and that habit spreads to advisors and faculty and to the students they serve. Students were not in the room at that town hall, yet much of what was said concerned them. Students are always telling a campus something about what they need, and a campus can only respond to what it has learned to hear. That is why a culture of coaching matters at every level and not just in a few offices.
At LifeBound we introduce participants to this way of listening and help them develop the skill through practice, feedback and practical guidance. Begin building a coaching culture on your campus by sending a group to our monthly introductory coaching course. Our October class begins tomorrow. Click below to sign up!
To learn more or explore which option is right for you, visit www.lifebound.com.
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