Leadership Effectiveness #8 & 9 Coaching Skills for Leaders

[samvara]

Readings:

Anonymous. 2003, Nondirective coaching: A no-fault model to help people change, IOMA’s Pay for Performance Report, Vol. 03, Iss. 6, pp. 2-4. NOTE: Pay to view but... free trial if you're interested. I wouldn't, they ask for too much info up front. Short and sweet, best bit for me was this handy table:

What 'coachees' prefer

Nondirective coaching. The coach acts as a guide, posing questions to facilitate self discovery.	61%
Programmatic coaching	78%
Holistic coaching	85%

What coaches deliver

Directive coaching. The coach explains what needs to be done and how to do it.	51%
Circumstantial coaching	49%
Specific coaching	44%

Coleman, D. 2002. A Coach's Lessons Learned: Principles and Guidelines for Practitioners. In C. Fitzgerald, & J. Garvey Berger (Eds.), Executive Coaching: Practices & Perspectives: 3-25. Palo Alto, California: Davies-Black. NOTE: link to book if you were to buy it, not article. This was pretty comprehensive and worth reading.

• General Principles for Thinking about a Client's Issues
  • Some Weaknesses Are Strengths Overdone
  • Persistent Behaviors Most Likely Have Positive Purposes
  • Assuming Similarities When They Do Not Exist Can Lead to Unrealistic Expectations and Conflict
  • An Outdated View of the Self Can Lead to Behaviors That Are Disproportionate to Current Reality
  • Being Differentiated and Connected is Essential for Effective Leadership
  • The Ability to See One's Responsibility in Each Situation and the Willingness to Take Calculated Risks Are Key to Making Progress
• General Principles to guide taking action with a client
  • Listen, Listen, Listen
  • Observe how the client manages you
  • Begin where the client is
  • Use and build on the client's ideas
  • Act as a bridge to what's missing
  • Formulate changes as hypotheses that must be tested empirically
  • If stuck, move to immediacy
• Five paradoxical guidelines for engaging in the coaching conversation
  • Lead with warmth as well as professional distance
  • Balance challenge with support
  • Link hard with soft, and soft with hard
  • Focus on yourself to clarify client issues
  • Listen well but do not automatically accept the client's framing of the issues
• Practical suggestions that are specifically related to beginning coaches
  • Taking on the Wrong Pole of an Internalised Conflict by Showing Enthusiasm Too Early
  • Taking Debate Personally
  • Sharing Opinions Too Early
  • Avoid: being maneuvered into delivering the performance improvement message; get the manager to deliver that :p
  • Avoid: Offering advice outside your competence
  • Avoid: Confusing their issues with your issues

Nicholson, N. 2003, How to Motivate Your Problem People, Harvard Business Review, January Pp. 57-65. Shiort, full of examples and to the point. Very readable.

• Step 1: Create a Rich Picture - the Manager works to understand where a problem employee is coming from. Drivers / blocks / impediments.
• Step 2: Reframe Your Goals - put together a menu of possible outcomes (this is not 'anything goes,' you have a bottom line)
• Step 3: Stage the Encounter - I have no good concise summary this!

Thach, E.C. 2002, The impact of executive coaching and 360 feedback on leadership effectiveness, Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol 23, pp. 205-214. Waldroop, J. & Butler, T. 1996, The Executive as Coach, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 74, No. 6, Pp. 111-117. Technical discussion of evaluation of 360 review process - may be of interest to some people but I much preferred the other articles.

Seminar 8

I missed the 8th seminar on account of being sneezy and braindead which is a shame because it sounded very cool.

Practising Difficult Conversations

• Practise having difficult conversations
• Bring your own ‘case study’
• Reflect on your strengths and development needs

Guest Presenters: The Australian Institute of TheatreSports

Seminar 9

Mental clearing exercise

1. Awareness of the breath: breathing in focus on the breath, breathing out focus on the count... Up to ten and then back down to one.
2. Focus awareness on muscle tension and release: moving progressively up the body on both sides
3. Awareness of the five senses: touch, taste, sight, smell and hearing
4. Focus on one word: a positive or neutral word
5. Walking meditation: focus on the placement of each foot, taking in what is in front of you, when the mind wanders, come back to your feet!
6. One point attention: focus on a candle, a tree, a body of water.

Coaching... Theory!

Leadership is a Contact Sport - The Follow Up Factor in Management Development.
Study of people doing 360 feedback process - debrief process improved experience

Which of these have you experienced?

• An External coach - a consultant who comes in to coach an individual (costly, mid to senior managers), benefits of no preconceptions, neutrality, no corporate agenda
• An Internal coach - someone, possibly from HR who has coaching skills, advantage of depth of knowledge, availability, lower cost
• A Manager as coach -
• A Culture of coaching

What is Coaching? Coaching is a process focussed on enhancing the performance, learning and ability of another person. An effective coach:

• Provides feedback
• Uses honesty, praise and effective questioning
• Helps the person to help themselves
• Creates in the other person a possibility of change
• Explores various alternatives
• Assists in creating an action plan to accomplish the changes

The meta process of Coaching

• Establish trust and partnership
• Creating awareness of possibility for and benefits of change
• Establishing a GAP analysis (what's needed versus what is)
• Choose a specific area for attention
• Develop an action plan
• Supporting and enable persistence
• Measure and track progress
• Catch them doing it right
• Create a learning environment

What happens in those regular meetings with your manager? The iGrow model

• Issues: what are we here to talk about?
• Goals: what do you/I want to achieve? Talk about and describe what it would look like.
• Reality: what is really happening right now?
• Options: explore! Ask questions, don't give answers!
• Wrap up: summarise where you've been - ask them to do it, then establish action and the next contact point

Exercise! Practice a coaching conversation and debrief. Was ghastly, I didn't have an 'issue' and neither did my partner and we were given topics to be ranty about so she told me how she felt about boat people and I desperately tried to think of a question that didn't give away how incredibly conflicted I felt about her rant. Now that I've had some time to reflect I think it wasn't a safe space and that choking on saying *anything* might have been a sensible form of self preservation and conflict avoidance.

Break! In which I found my team of four for assignment #3. We have to 'coach' each other and write about it.

Coaching conversation demonstration on a student volunteer and subsequent discussion.

Single-loop Learning (control mindset): Actions -> Mismatch or Errors -> back to Actions
Double-loop Learning (creative mindset): Governing Values -> Mismatch or Errors -> back to Governing Values

Back to the Ladder of Inference - start with Data!

• Become more aware of your own thinking and reasoning (reflections)
• Making your own reasoning more visible to others (advocating)
• Inquiring into other's thinking and reasoning (inquiry)

Giving Feedback: using the ladder

• When you... (describe a specific example) eg: come in at 8:30 when I expected you to be here at 8:00
• I interpreted that as...
• Because I...

Massive discussion generated by some of the men who seem to be saying they think this is a nutbag approach and that directive leadership is the way to go. The war cry is JUST FIRE THEM!

Action Philosophy Core-Beliefs
Control Mindset versus Creative Mindset

Indicators of a Control Mindset...

Coaching as Deep Listening

Attitude of Mind

• You want to deeply and fully understand this person
• You give them your full attention
• You turn off your own internal self talk
• You respect the person's experience and ability to find their own solution to their problems
• You do not try and 'fix them up' or to give them advice
• Absorbing the pattern of talk

Practice! Listening and asking in order to clarify and learn. Was very difficult, very hard to not ask leading questions.

Discussion of final assignment - interviews and write-ups. One final collective report. Reflect and link back to material.