Conscious Capitalism 2013 Simulcast

I am very excited to be preparing to head out to San Francisco for Conscious Capitalism 2013 on April 5th and 6th. This will be my second year attending and I look forward to making new connections and seeing old friends. The conference organizers just announced they will be simulcasting Day One of the event, live from their web site.

You can sign up on their home page anytime this week, including during the program. You will also be able to watch recordings of the event soon after it is over.

And if you would like to join our merry band of conscious capitalists in person, in San Francisco, space is still available. You can register here.  Hope to see you there! If not, enjoy the simulcast.

Nobody Wants to be Managed

Bob Chapman, Chairman and CEO of Barry-Wehmiller said in a talk on “People-Centric Leadership” at Washington University OLIN school of business:

“…Nobody can be managed. Nobody wants to be managed, but we have you take management classes, give you management degrees, give you management titles, and therefore you think you are supposed to manage…”

We all know this is true, yet how are we to drive performance for our many business stakeholders if not by management? Chapman calls the alternative “People-Centric Leadership”.  A quick search in Google or Amazon will show you thousands of articles and books that have been written on the difference between managers and leaders, yet there are still far more managers than leaders in our businesses and organizations. Why is that? We think it’s a skills gap, specifically, a coaching skills gap. Just look at these critical differences between someone who relies on a directive style of communication, versus someone who uses a coaching style.

• A manager gives direction, a performance coach asks questions.
• A manager thinks they have the best answer, a coach believes the person closer to the problem had the best answer.
• A manager tells the employee what to do, a coach listens to help the employee develop their own thinking.

When you look at the above differences, it begins to become clear why a coach approach is the essence of a shift from managing to leading. Unfortunately, the skill of everyday performance coaching is still not widely understood or taught in most organizations.

We will use this blog over the coming year to outline some of the key points that will help organizations and those who wish to become better leaders understand and apply performance coaching in their everyday interactions with employees. Performance coaching is an essential skill that can be taught and learned using a combination of traditional study, self-reflection, peer-practice and on-the-job application. It is a skill required for anyone who would like to lead in the new global economy, not just a specialty calling for those of us who have decided to make other forms of coaching our calling. In our next few blog installments, we will expand on this point to differentiate the everyday skill of performance coaching from the many other types of coaching and mentoring that are often confused with performance coaching as a leadership style.

Transforming the Dreaded Performance Discussion

It’s that time of year… the time to do performance evaluations.  Many managers and associates look forward to these conversations like going to the dentist!  Managers aren't sure what to say, and often fall into the trap of commenting on either the stellar accomplishments, outright disasters or make comments like “you’re doing fine”.   Associates aren't sure what to say either… “do I simply talk about all that I did, do I ask for support , do I share my career goals and aspirations?”.

Perhaps the challenge is distinguishing the dual nature of the conversation.  These conversations are designed to evaluate the associate’s performance and to explore development opportunities.   As I often share with my clients, we first have to begin with “WHY”… what is the purpose of this discussion or said differently, “for the sake of what am I going to have this discussion”.

Performance Evaluation is assessing how one performed in their assigned tasks.    Some questions might include:

·         Were the intended results achieved?

·         Was the assignment completed in a manner that included others, considered short term and long term impacts, and treated others with respect?

·         Were resources used efficiently and effectively?

·         Were assignments completed in a timely manner?

Performance Development is about learning what’s important to the individual, their strengths, areas of unique interest and talent so that these areas can be leveraged in their work assignments.

Conducting the Performance Discussion in a coaching context is the best way to address both aspects.   However, coaching requires the leader to first examine who he/she is being in the conversation.  Do you hold this person as someone with potential, worthy of your time and effort or have you formed some other, less generous judgment of the individual?

Coaching requires the manager to:

·         be committed to the individual’s growth and development

·         view problems or challenges as learning opportunities for both the individual and the manager

·         recognize that the individual has to discover their own solutions to achieve sustainable results

·         be ruthless and compassionate

This guest blog post is from my colleague Susan Alexander. Susan is a certified ontological coach and part-time faculty instructor at Otterbein College. We share a passion around developing coaching skills in leaders.

To Coach or Not to Coach?

I have had the pleasure of working with a large global client for the past year in developing their performance coaching culture. A common question that arises is the question of when to coach or when to use a more directive leadership style. This is a guest blog I wrote in response to that question.

Many leaders new to coaching struggle with the decision about when to coach and when to employ a more directive management style.  As a coach and advocate of High Performance Coaching, my natural bias is to encourage coaching in most situations. However, there are definitely times when coaching is probably not the best approach to take. Let’s take a look at some key considerations and some advice from Accenture leaders who have developed performance coaching as one of their primary leadership skills.

The coaching decision tree suggests that if the employee has brought you a goal or issue that is outside of their knowledge and expertise, you may want to take a more directive approach such as mentoring or teaching by showing or telling them how you would handle the situation.  However, that should be a rare situation. As one Senior Manager put it: “In my current situation, all my folks are coachable. I would turn the question around and ask when not to coach. I believe now (after all my training and putting it to use) that you should always try to coach (the rule) and not coach only for a few exceptions.”

This attitude was common among Senior Executives who have been through High Performance Coaching training. When asked, “How do you decide if it is worth taking the time to coach?” this was a typical response: “It’s always worth taking the time to coach – assuming there are no time constraints and the person has the knowledge.” When asked for insights or comments about when to decide to coach, we were told:  “Always assume that coaching is the right approach – and then be surprised when it’s not. In this way, you’ll find you’re surprised less and less. “

In a recent coaching class, someone suggested that performance coaching should be focused on average performers, not the people at the top or the bottom. Let me address the top first. Not developing your top performers is an all-too-common mistake. In fact, they should get additional coaching in a high-potential leadership program. Remember, performance coaching is aimed at developing people’s thinking, and that pays huge dividends when you are working with the best and brightest.

Now what about those struggling to perform? Certainly, you should provide training and direction if people are inexperienced or lacking some critical skill needed to perform their job. You can also provide a special type of coaching, often called “performance improvement” coaching to help get low performers back on track. But performance coaching is one of the best ways to determine if an employee is salvageable or would be better served in a different job or career.

Coaching is both an art and a science, and learning to use your intuition to decide is critical. As one Senior Executive put it: “I know my people quite well, so I consider their preparation to be coached, which is more about their mental status. Sometimes it takes little time to get into coaching. I must admit sometimes it is intuitive decision.” Another Senior Executive put it this way: “Sometimes it also helps to probe a bit to ascertain if they have experienced similar things in the past and even use that as a lead to coach and get their learning’s from that to bear. It’s also important to understand the emotional state of the person – to decide whether to advise / mentor or coach and what would work best….or do nothing, but listen and then set a follow-up at an appropriate period of time.”

So coaching is not always a clear-cut decision. You need to be able to read the coachee and their readiness. Most of all, you need to believe that your coachee has the best answer inside of them, the solution that is closest to the problem and the solution most likely to be successfully implemented because the coachee has ownership of that solution. Our experienced coaches did have some advice on when coaching is clearly not the best solution:

•   When you are in a critical situation that demands an immediate response such as an executive escalation.
• When an employee exhibits an inappropriate attitude or behavior in violation of company values or ethics.
• If an initial coaching conversation attempt hits a brick wall due to lack of coachee experience.

Too often leaders choose not to coach simply because they are feeling rushed or are uncomfortable with their coaching skills. As we have seen, there are legitimate reasons not to coach in any given situation, but feeling uncomfortable or rushed is not a legitimate excuse. I’ll close with the advice of another client Senior Executive: “As I have become more comfortable, my initial coaching conversations are significantly shorter, and far more succinct. And my follow-up coaching conversations to drive new habits take only about 5 additional minutes. By contrast, simply offering my advice and mentoring to solve a problem takes a short amount of time, however this perpetuates the person coming back to me constantly and makes them feel less committed to the solution.”

2012 NeuroLeadership Summit Live Streaming

I have taken a couple of trainings from David Rock's NeuroLeadership Group and found them very useful. One was a program on how to facilitate group coaching and one was on the topic of facilitating coaching, meetings and trainings effectively in a remote/virtual environment. All of his programs are grounded in the latest findings of neuroscience and the brain-based implications for leadership and organizational development.

His 2012 NeuroLeadership Summit is coming up soon, on October 15-17. For those of us unable to be in New York for this amazing event, this year the NeuroLeadership Institute is offering free live video streaming.

Visit the live streaming page October 15-17 (US ET) to watch the sessions from your home or office and join the conversation on twitter by using the hashtag #2012nls.

To see which sessions will be available, including local timezone information click here. Recorded sessions will also be available for purchase after the Summit.

Developing Your Inner Game for Bigger Impact

Gandhi admonished us to be the change we wish to see to see in the world. Einstein reminded us that we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Good advice, but just how do we go about transforming our own consciousness so we can become the transformation we wish to see?

It’s clear that our impact as change makers is defined and limited by our own inner game. Our fears, limiting beliefs and self-doubt do far more to hold back our impact on the world than anything else. It’s our inner game that either unleashes or inhibits our outer game.  That’s why my friends at the True Purpose Institute established the Gathering. We have been guided to convene an ongoing series of monthly calls to inspire, equip, and support you in mastering your inner game, supported by a community of like-minded souls.

The first of our monthly calls launches this Wednesday, October 3rd. I hope you can join us live on the call so your voice can be heard and your wisdom can be added to the discussion.  The topic this month is the Inner Requirements for Change Agents with our guest Tim Kelley, author of True Purpose: 12 Strategies for Discovering the Difference You Are Meant to Make. If you sign up, you will receive call details, monthly reminders and recordings of any call you have to miss. I hope to see many of you on the call. You can sign up here.

Leadership Imperative: Learn to Coach!

Most business leaders are ignorant when it comes to coaching. If you went around and asked a dozen leaders in your organization about the uses of coaching in the workplace you would get a dozen different answers. Terms that would come up would include: executive coaching, team coaching, high-potential coaching, career coaching, and coaching to salvage poor performers. If you dive a little deeper and ask them how they use coaching on the job, it is likely they would say they coach their people often. They would say that they like to be available to their people, to share their expertise and show them or advise them on how they would handle the situation under discussion. That’s all well and good, but that’s NOT coaching!

The most common misunderstanding is confusing coaching with mentoring. This confusion is natural. Most of us first experienced coaching as children growing up and playing sports. Sports coaches give us drills and have us work on fundamentals. They often step in and show us how to execute a particular skill, and then have us mimic their movements until we get it “right”. A sports coach is actually a sports mentor, someone who guides you, shows you, and advises you on how to perform activities according to the way they performed them or according to generally accepted best practices. Sharing expertise like that is a great thing, and something good leaders often do, but it is NOT coaching.

Creating a Coaching Culture in Your Organization

Whenever I start a program to instill a coaching culture into an organization, I ask the senior leaders to rate themselves on a simple 0-10 self-rating for these two items: How often do you choose coaching as your leadership style and how good are you at coaching? Most leaders will rate themselves average or slightly above as a coach and say they use coaching as their leadership style 40% or 50% of the time. As our program goes on, and they begin to learn what coaching really is, they have an epiphany and adjust this baseline self-evaluation down significantly. The sad truth is, even senior leaders with 20+ years of successful leadership under their belt are woefully ignorant of what it means to coach as a leader, and are a complete novice at coaching their direct reports to high performance. Do you find that hard to believe? Let’s look at a simple quadrant chart that defines the primary difference between coaching and other primary leadership styles. As we discuss each quadrant, consider your own leadership style and see where you spend most of your leadership time. The quadrants are defined by the simple leadership focus choices you face when an employee brings you a dilemma: Do I ask or do I tell? And do I focus on the problem or on the solution?

Understanding the 4 Primary Leadership Style Choices

Let’s start in the most common leadership style quadrant: Directing or managing by telling people what they did to cause the problem.  This is a natural response, well documented in many leadership and management books. Ken Blanchard used a classic example in his best-selling management book, The One Minute Manager. He asks to imagine your boss is standing at the end of a bowling alley and there is a curtain in front of the pins. You, the employee, roll your ball and you hear a crash of pins. The manager looks behind the sheet and then holds up two fingers, telling you how you did. Does that mean you knocked down 2 of the 10 pins? No, it means you missed 2! This is the most common management approach for many reasons: our brains are uniquely wired to look for problems, our management training is focused on problems and “gap” analysis, and most of us were raised in environments where well meaning teachers, coaches and parents tried to keep us on the right path by pointing out when we went off course. This leadership style has its place, but it is grossly over-used, has severe limitations, and does little to develop the employee so that the same type of problem and poor performance is likely to recur.

A second, softer, approach is to ask about the problem. This is the counseling approach. In business, it is often reserved for discussion around big issues, such as career guidance. Many people confuse this approach with coaching. Asking probing questions about the problem in the hope of getting the employee to examine all sides of their dilemma can be an effective approach at times, but is also limited in its effectiveness, as the new sciences of positive psychology and neuroscience so clearly show. 

As leaders mature, their years of experience prepare them to become good at mentoring. This third leadership style is the one most senior leader’s confuse with coaching. It is a natural style for an experienced leader, since it is likely that any dilemma an employee brings them is likely to be one where they have “been there, done that.” Most employees value mentoring, since they get to benefit from the leaders sage advice to help them quickly solve their dilemma. Mentoring has an added hidden benefit for the employee: if the advice does not work, the responsibility for failure is shared with their manager who gave them the advice! Mentoring does have its place in your leadership repertoire, it is particularly useful if the employee has limited experience themselves with the dilemma they are bringing to you, or the problem is so urgent that you need to act with extreme speed to address the problem.

A Special Kind of On-The-Job Coaching that Solves Business' Biggest Challenge Today

Finally we get to coaching, that most misunderstood of leadership styles. Specifically, we are talking about coaching on-the-job and in-the-moment, a leadership skill that has come to be known as Performance Coaching. This leadership style was first documented for the business world by Sir John Whitmore in his classic text: Coaching for Performance. Now in its fourth edition, it outlines a simple 4 step model for coaching that is focused on asking questions of your employee so that they can discover their own best solution. This approach has been further developed and refined by David Rock, who brings in some of the latest findings in neuroscience to explain why performance coaching is often superior to any other management style. For the senior leadership teams I have been privileged to work with, the results of adopting a performance coaching style are truly transformative. Here are some common testimonials to what adopting a performance coach approach has done for some very seasoned and already high-performing leaders:

“This (performance coaching) is the single most impactful leadership skill I have ever learned.” 

“I wish I had learned this (performance coaching) 30 years ago.” 

“Coaching is our future.” 

An August 2011 strategy paper by Bersin and Associates named the managers’ inability to coach as the most severe performance management challenge facing business today. It’s no wonder, even the most experienced and enlightened leaders have only the slightest clue as to what it really means to coach. My next blog post will go into performance coaching more deeply, in the hopes that leaders can begin to understand, learn and adopt this most essential of leadership styles.