Joe: When I think of coaching, I kind of think of someone that has done that job before, that he knows how to do the job. And I see that in a lot of different areas and so forth. Do we need to make the investment in time and personnel to be able to do that? Do new managers need to come up from lack of a better word, the factory floor or do they need to come up and be trained very much so in the jobs that they are managing?
Dan: Hey Joe, did you see the movie — it was a real Schmaltz fest, but did you see the movie McFarland USA?
Joe: No.
Dan Makovitz: It’s a Disney movie. It came out earlier this year. Kevin Costner is the star, and he is a football coach who gets drummed out of his school and he ends up somewhere in Central California in the farming area, Central Valley. And he is asked to become the coach of the McFarland — well actually, there is no McFarland cross country team but he starts the McFarland cross country team and within eight years, they actually become the California State Champions. He was a football coach and knew absolutely nothing about running. Zero. He was not a runner himself. He was not a competitive runner. He didn’t work with coaches from his other schools, but he built a real juggernaut in a very short amount of time. It was a really remarkable story. It’s a Disney Movie, so it’s kind of Schmaltz, and they shortened some of the timelines, but what struck me about this and what I see elsewhere is that it’s not important, it’s nice if you know the actual processes; that really is a good thing, it’s helpful, but you don’t have to be an engineer to coach engineers. You don’t have to be a machinist to coach a machinist. You don’t have to be an accountant to coach the folks working in the credit or the invoicing department. You don’t have to be a sales star to coach sales people. It certainly helps because it gives you automatic credibility but if you can ask the right questions, and obviously you want to study and learn as much as you can, but if you can ask the right questions and get people to engage in scientific thinking, that is a really important role and an important way in helping people improve; even if you don’t know anything about it. I really think that Mike Rother did the world a tremendous service by writing Toyota Kata where he talks about the improvement question, the improvement content, the questions you ask and the process by which you help people learn. So it would be nice if you know a lot about whatever the subject matter is, but if you can help people through structured thinking, that’s pretty darn good because they have the engineering skill, and you’re helping them with the problem-solving know-how. That was a long answer, but I hoped that makes sense.
Joe: So you’re saying that you don’t have to have the intimate knowledge because you may be able to just draw that knowledge in those people that have that and repeating it will strengthen their own skills because you’re actually asking the right questions maybe, or the ability to dig deeper is the thing that you as a coach is doing, right?
Dan: That’s exactly right and you know the truth is, when you think about it, organizations are large, complex animals, and it’s really unlikely that someone is going to be a particle physicist or someone is going to be a neurochemist or someone’s going to be an expert in pretty much anything. Companies are now so broad and encompass so many areas that it’s impossible for any one person to know all of those things. They can still take what they do know, and they can take their understanding of plan, do, study, adjust scientific thinking, and they can use that knowledge to help improve the performance of people in specialized areas that they may not themselves understand.
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