Leadership
Whoever assesses cannot coach.
Support without assessment power. So you can tell your coach the truth and the company still measures on results.
Inside the letter L
Over the last twenty years, leadership has become the least popular job in the company. You are supposed to develop people, set their goals, assess their performance, fix their pay and be their coach on the side. That does not work. You do not tell the person who decides on your pay what you are currently failing at. FLAIMS pulls that apart. Leadership is the support: coaching, development, a protected space, conflict resolution, and the whole path of a person from recruiting to exit. Assessment, pay and grading sit elsewhere, with Segmentation of Power, fed by numbers. Nothing flows there from the coaching. Never.
The trap
When the same person coaches you and signs off your promotion, you stop being honest. The coaching becomes a performance, and the company loses its early warning system. Most leaders manage instead of lead, and very few notice it.
Mechanics
- 01The Leadership Steward sets the frame for coaching, for the People Lifecycle and for culture and wellbeing. They lead nobody and assess nobody.
- 02FlowCoaches support people without any assessment power: development, uncomfortable questions, a protected space. What is spoken there stays there.
- 03The People Lifecycle runs as a process from L, from recruiting to offboarding. The hiring decision and the pay question are normative acts and sit with S.
- 04Wellbeing has an architecture: forums, repeated practices, purpose and values in everyday work. Not a programme that starts in autumn and is forgotten by spring.
Rooted in research
Each source with a short sentence on what it actually says.
- Deci & Ryan, Self-Determination Theory
People stay motivated when three needs are met: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Coaching serves different needs than assessment, and that is why the two belong apart.
What this does not settle: it does not say which structure delivers that; FLAIMS is one answer to it, not the only one.
- Seligman (2011), PERMA
Wellbeing at work has five building blocks: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. That is what leadership is measured against.
- Ebner, PERMA-Lead
Translates PERMA into a leadership model: leaders are measured on how well they enable these five things in the team.
What this does not settle: a practitioner model with its own diagnostics; the independent efficacy research on it is still young.
- Edmondson (1999), Psychological Safety
Teams learn faster when people can voice mistakes and half-finished ideas without losing status. High safety and high commitment go together.
What this does not settle: necessary, not sufficient; without outcome accountability it turns into a petting zoo.
- Collins (2001), Level 5 Leadership
The bosses of durably good companies combine personal humility with hard professional will. Successes go to the team, failures to themselves.
What this does not settle: the criticism of the study's selection method is well known; take it as orientation, not as law.
- Note: FLAIMS-specific constructs such as Steward, Anchor Core Job, Core Job, Joblet, FlowCoach, Gravity Decision Model and the learning chain are developments of the model out of practice, not cited research.
In practice
Your FlowCoach is on your side and decides nothing about you. Whoever decides on pay, grading or goal attainment does not coach you. And leadership becomes something people take on voluntarily again.