Executive Coaching Guru

Support & Challenge is a funny subject for leaders, as intellectually everyone understands that too much:

• Support becomes suffocating and creates dependency
• Challenge dominates and subjugates free will
• No support or challenge leads to apathy and indifference

All of these though can and often do, lead to varying degrees of disconnection; interestingly though teams can benefit from a kind of ill-fated connection of “we’re all in this together”, which is not a strategy I suggest. Working with senior teams gives me the privilege of observing behaviours and interactions in real time scenarios around the board table and one of the biggest indicators of the health of a team is the ability to calibrate the level of support and challenge that is given to each other.

Think of how your team poses questions, ideas, thoughts, questions, praise and conflict, when these things are placed into the conversation do they receive high levels of support and challenge as appropriate, people sit there not participating or are they overly supported and challenged. When teams get the balance right, which usually takes frequent review to calibrate impact, then people are given a license to operate that stretches the capacity of the team to handle issues, tasks and thoughts in a truly adult and productive way.

Consider this like throwing a Frisbee into the middle of the group, the right level of support and challenge keeps the Frisbee afloat, the wrong level sees it falling to the ground.

Consider the dynamics of your leadership community and how they catch the Frisbee.