Coaching the Challenge Strategist
Coaching the Challenge Strategist
The way the Challenge Strategist interacts with the Team Leader and the Team is critical for the experience of the team and their success.
The Role of the Challenge Strategist
The Challenge Strategist will provide the inspiration and energy to bring 100-Day Challenges into existence, and will put them on the proper track to run their race. The Challenge Strategist will also cheer the team along during their 100-Day race. In short, it is a very critical role.
Curator of the experience of the Team during the 100 days, creating the enabling environment for Team members
Coach & role model for the Team Coach and Team Leader, helping them reinforce the enabling environment for the Team
Custodian of the Challenge: Ensuring that the Team operates within the framework set out by the leadership stakeholders in the Challenge Note
Connector of the Team with other leaders and stakeholders, and mobilising support as needed.
Tips You Can Offer the Challenge Strategist
Here are some tips you can offer the Challenge Strategist during the 100-Day Challenge. Ideally, you can offer these tips in response to specific situations they describe or guidance they seek. You can also offer these in anticipation of situations.
Offer support and avoid offering solutions
Once the team decides on a course of action, ask: “What support do you need?” It’s important to be honest about what you can and cannot do, and don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know but I will find out.” Then do so quickly!
Praise the 75% that is right, rather than point out the 25% that is wrong
It is more impactful to praise an idea’s positive aspects and ask the team to build on them than to focus on its negative aspects. Instead of being the place where ideas get buried, the Challenge Strategist can become the person the team comes to to bounce ideas off.
"How can I help?"
This is among the most powerful combinations of 4 words in the English language. Challenge Strategists can use it in their informal weekly or bi-weekly check-in calls or emails with team leaders. Along with another powerful phrase: “how are things going?” If this does not open the conversation up, mentors can use some of the follow up questions in the Coaching tool.
Why the Role of the Challenge Strategist
The 100-Day Team operates outside the existing organisational accountability structures. It is commissioned by a group of leaders who typically represent multiple organisations. So, the 100-Day Team is accountable to this group of leaders.
But we all know how hard it is to have multiple people to be accountable to. This is why, in 100-Day Challenges, the group of leaders that commissioned the 100-Day Team ask the Challenge Strategist to represent them vis-a- vis the Team. So the Team has a single point of accountability.
The Coaches, by contrast, are designated b the Challenge Strategist to guide the Team through the 100-Day Challenge race.
The Coach does not represent the Challenge Strategist or the other leadership stakeholders. Their role is to guide and support the 100-Day Team and to advise the Challenge Strategist about their role during the 100-Day race.
So there is an accountability relationship between the 100-Day Team and Challenge Strategist. The Team, or the Team Leader, “reports” to the Challenge Strategist.
However, it is important to note that one of the reasons that 100-Day Challenges are so impactful is that they involve a very unique way to handle power within and between organisations. So even though the Challenge Strategist is in a position of power vis-a-vis the Team, the 100-Day Challenge is an opportunity for the Challenge Strategist to practice “power with” and “power through” the Team versus “power over” the Team.
This is what we refer to as leading from a place of “confident humility”.
So the two roles are different, and both are important and needed. More often than not, both Coaches and Challenge Strategists provide support to the Team (and especially the Team Leader).
At times, the Coach will advise the Challenge Strategist to play a heavy-handed role with the Team if, for example, Team members start drifting away from their 100-Day Goal. This heavy-handed role cannot be played by the Team Coach, as the Team does not report to the Coach.
