Type the words “top leadership skills” into the search engine of your choice and you’ll get an endless list of lists.
“Top 20 Leadership Traits” comes up first, followed closely by “16 Skills for Effective Leadership” and the “8 Key Leadership Skills You Need to Know.” And those are just the first three results; scroll down and you’ll see pages and pages of similar articles with nearly identical lists.
All the lists contain some version of “self-aware,” “compassionate” and “collaborative.” But what you won’t find in any of those lists is “coachability.”
After many years of working closely with business leaders, that strikes me as an enormous oversight. The best leaders I know share a lot of great qualities. But at the top of my list is their willingness to seek out feedback—and even criticism—and use it to boost their performance.
Coachability is more than just a skill; it’s the cement that binds together a whole host of skills and allows leaders to accomplish great things.
How do I know this? I learned it from Michael Jordan.
Nobody can cite exactly when or where he said it, but someone asked Jordan—arguably the greatest all-around basketball player in history—what made him so great.
"My best skill was that I was coachable. I was a sponge and aggressive to learn."
In case you doubt Jordan’s assessment of his own qualities, that view was shared by legendary coach Phil Jackson.
Over his career, Jackson coached and won championships with many of the greatest players of all time. In interviews, Jackson has said that of all the players he has coached, Jordan was the best because he “was always extremely coachable.”
When I hear those quotes, it makes me wonder: Why can’t business leaders embrace the same principle?
I once offered help to a fellow leader in my organization who was struggling. Although he accepted my offer, as soon as I started providing my frank assessment, I could tell that what I was selling, my colleague wasn’t buying.
Arms crossed, expressionless, his body language was an obvious tell: This leader was not going to listen to me or anyone else talk about what he could have done differently or better. I finally asked him, “Would you like my feedback in the future?” This leader said “Yes,” but his whole being said “I don’t want this.”
In case you were wondering, this is not an example of being coachable.
Being coachable means being willing to constantly, aggressively learn. It means being collaborative rather than dictatorial, being a good listener and applying hard lessons to future leadership decisions. It means focusing on the message instead of the messenger.
It also means inviting and absorbing the hard truth about our opportunities for growth as leaders and using those insights to become better at our jobs.
In the end, we all have the choice about what kind of leader we can be.
We can be a know-it-all leader, or we can be a learn-it-all leader. The former cuts us off from valuable insights and sentences us to repeating our mistakes; the latter is a pathway to bigger, better and more effective.
Wanting to be coachable is not the same as being coachable. It’s a good idea to figure out whether you have the capacity to be coached or you need to make behavioral adjustments. Once you decide to give yourself over to this process, remember these important principles:
Nobody can force you to be coachable or to seek advice about your performance. And there’s always the possibility that even without aggressively seeking feedback, you can still be a good leader.
But your chances of going from being a good leader to a great leader might rest with that one quality that is missing from all those lists of leadership skills: coachability.