Inspired by Fujio Cho, I learned from Toyota’s leaders their model of high performance coaching. The model is based on the core principle of leadership development to create the next generation of leaders.
Eventually, after deploying the approach in different cultures and business environments, it has proven to be the most effective among the many others that I have learned and applied.
It is a model that is focused on employee learning. A process focused on leadership development and developing more leaders. A process focused on developing the critical thinking of people to achieve everything they set out to do.
The process is defined by three learning and four high performance coaching stages:
How does it work?
The employee’s learning is at the center and goes through three iterative phases that consolidate his/her progress:
- Learning a new way of acting
- Implementing what has been learned in practice every day
- Teaching others to be innovative and to find better ways to
proceed
What does it mean?
Essentially that
people have only understood what they are doing if they can teach it to someone else.
Actually, unless you have been able to teach someone else to improve your practice, you do not know about it yourself.
What is the leader’s part?
The leader directs this growth process through a coaching routine consisting of four steps and six questions designed at triggering critical thinking and self-development of the collaborator.
Rather than guiding the collaborator for an unlimited period of time, the goal is to get each collaborator to develop his/her learning process naturally. This is the nature of high-performance coaching.
When will it be finished?
When the learning collaborator will have made a habit of the process. And when it will have become his/her way of thinking and acting in daily routine and he/she will be able to make others grow by that very process.
