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December 20 - December 25, 2021
What I mean by performance is the result of reducing interference and increasing potential.
Coaching focuses on future possibilities, not past mistakes
Coaching delivers results in large measure because of the powerful working relationship created, and the means and style of communication used. The coachee does acquire facts and develops new skills and behaviors, not by being told or taught but by discovering from within, stimulated by coaching. Of course, the objective of improving performance is paramount, and how that is best achieved and sustained is what this book reveals.
Performance = potential – interference P = p – i
Internal obstacles are often more daunting than external ones.
Coaching is unlocking people’s potential to maximize their own performance.
It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.
we are more like acorns, each of which contains within it all the potential to be a magnificent oak tree. We need nourishment, encouragement, and the light to reach toward, but the oaktreeness is already within us.
coaching requires expertise in coaching, not in the subject at hand. That is one of its great strengths. And something that coaching leaders grapple with most – but is key – is to learn when to share their knowledge and experience and when not to.
In essence coaching is about partnership, collaboration, and believing in potential.
Old culture New culture Growth Sustainability Imposed rules Inner values Fear Trust Quantity Quality Excess Sufficiency Teaching Learning In/dependence Interdependence Success Service Control of nature Natural systems Degradation Re-creation
The greatest influencers of an organization’s culture are its leaders, so it is not surprising that studies by the Hay Group and others show that leadership behavior affects bottom-line performance by up to 30 percent. It is the leaders who are the gatekeepers to performance, and it is the lever of leadership behavior that we focus on in this book.
The Performance Curve
Coaching is not merely a technique to be wheeled out and rigidly applied in certain prescribed circumstances. It is a way of leading and managing, a way of treating people, a way of thinking, a way of being.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to relate to others from a paradigm of trust, rather than one of fear, and it therefore sits firmly in the interdependent sector of The Performance Curve, which generates high performance.
Emotional intelligence can be described as interpersonal intelligence or, even more simply, as personal and social skills.
Can a leader, therefore, be a coach at all? Yes, but as discussed in the previous chapter, coaching is emotional intelligence in practice and demands the highest qualities of that leader: empathy, integrity, and balance, as well as a willingness, in most cases, to adopt a fundamentally different approach to employees.
Coaching is a way of being that stems from a coaching ethos – a belief in the capability, resourcefulness, and potential of yourself and others which allows you to focus on strengths, solutions, and future success, not weakness, problems, or past performance. A coaching style of leadership requires that you connect at the human level, beyond the task – being before doing – and stop thinking that the leader is “the expert” who has to tell everyone else the best way to do things. Coaching is based on trust, belief, and non-judgment; it’s a culture where “best practice” is not as you know it,
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Telling or asking closed questions saves people from having to think Asking open questions causes them to think for themselves
It is questions rather than instructions or advice that best generate awareness and responsibility.
You must understand the effect you are trying to create – awareness and responsibility – and what you have to say/do to create that effect. Just demanding what you want is useless; you must ask powerful questions.
Questions should begin broadly and then focus increasingly on detail. This demand for more detail maintains the coachee’s focus and interest.
The GROW model
I must stress that GROW has little value without the context of awareness and responsibility and the intention and skill to generate them through active listening and powerful questions. Models are not the truth – by itself GROW is not coaching. Mnemonics abound in the training business. There is SPIN, there are SMART goals, there is GRIT, and there is GROW coaching. These are occasionally presented or misperceived as panaceas to all business ills. They are nothing of the sort: they are only as valuable as the context in which they are used, and the context of GROW is awareness and
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If you get anything at all out of this book, let it be awareness and responsibility, which are more important than GROW.
The most important criterion for examining reality is objectivity. Objectivity is subject to major distortions caused by the opinions, judgments, expectations, prejudices, concerns, hopes, and fears of the perceiver. Awareness is perceiving things as they really are; self-awareness is recognizing those internal factors that distort your own perception of reality. Most people think they are objective, but absolute objectivity does not exist. The best you have is a degree of objectivity, but the closer you manage to get to it, the better.
When employees begin to see each other as a support rather than a threat, they will be much happier to raise their problems. When this happens, honest diagnosis and dialogue are possible, leading to early resolution.
Trying hard or trying to change causes bodily tension and uncoordinated action, which all too often results in failure.
Gallwey’s theme that the player of the Inner Game improves performance by seeking to remove or reduce the inner obstacles to outer performance.
questions should most often be initiated by the interrogatives “what,” “when,” “where,” “who,” and “how much.” As already discussed, “how” and “why” should be used only sparingly or when no other phrase will suffice. These two words invite analysis and opinion, as well as defensiveness, whereas the interrogatives seek facts.
When you are sure that you have no more ideas, just come up with one more
Coaches will do all they can to draw these options from coachees or from the team they are coaching. To do this, they need to create an environment in which participants will feel safe enough to express their thoughts and ideas without inhibition or fear of judgment from the coach or others.
A recent McKinsey Quarterly article by Ewenstein et al. stated that many companies, such as GE, the Gap, and Adobe Systems, “want to build objectives that are more fluid and changeable than annual goals, frequent feedback discussions rather than annual or semi-annual ones, forward-looking coaching for development rather than backward-focused rating and ranking.” The shift here is to development and continuous learning through a different type of feedback.
To set up accountability, the key questions to ask are: What will you do? When? How will I know?
The purpose of reviewing someone’s actions and progress is development. Developing people on the job has been shown to be the most effective form of learning – the often cited 70:20:10 model for learning and development indicates that for successful and effective leaders, most learning (70 percent) happens through experience on the job, while 20 percent comes from learning from others and only 10 percent from “formal” learning such as instructional training and coursework.
In order to answer the coach’s questions in E, the coachee is compelled to engage their brain and get involved. They have to recollect and formulate their thoughts before they can articulate their responses. This is awareness. It helps them to learn how to evaluate their own work and thereby become more self-reliant. In this way they “own” their performance and their assessment of it. This is responsibility. When these two factors are optimized, learning occurs.
Feedback is actually a coaching conversation all of its own.
GROW Feedback Framework.
What happened?
What did you learn? How will you use this in the future?
GROW Feedback Framework – tips
Gone is the traditional approach of delivering a message to an employee that they are broken and need to be fixed. Instead, the coach and coachee partner to explore what is going well and where the opportunities for growth are. The focus is on learning.
The point is not to become a leader. The point is to become yourself, and to use yourself completely – all your gifts and skills and energies – to make your vision manifest. You must withhold nothing. Warren Bennis
Management became about the operational, getting the job done, about the process and the present. Leadership, on the other hand, had its focus on development, vision, and the future. However, in today’s fast and complex world, the lines between management and leadership are blurred, especially when it comes to day-to-day business.
Plan–Do–Check–Act
Coaching, on the other hand, uses a process of exploration. It helps you find your own best way of achieving that particular job. That allows you to explore potential and possibilities, rather than being fixed on an idea that there is just one way of doing a task. In the process, coaching grows self-belief: as you find your own way and recognize your own progress, so your self-belief can grow. It’s also a more enjoyable way of learning, which means that in terms of being able to replicate performance, it should be easier to do.
MORE TIME FOR THE LEADER Team members who are coached welcome responsibility and do not have to be chased or watched. Leaders report feeling a weight being lifted from their shoulders, less stress, and having more time to step back and think strategically, rather than getting sucked into day-to-day operations.
Over 10 years ago, Performance Consultants developed an evaluation methodology called Coaching for Performance ROI to measure the impact of behavior changes on the bottom line. When we share it with clients, we repeatedly hear a collective sigh of relief, because they haven’t seen anything like it before. We are consistently able to show an average ROI for coaching engagements and leadership development of 800 percent. Part of our mission is to professionalize the coaching industry – to create the excellence and standards for coaching in organizations. To this end, we are making our
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The methodology is based on adult learning theory; doing this evaluation with your coachees will help them to be more conscious and therefore own and sustain their development more fully. The methodology is entirely facilitative and respectful of confidentiality, and is fully in line with the principles of coaching.
The recording of actions and progress needs to be done in a shared document. If things are not written down, they cannot be captured and referred back to. Too many coaches are lazy about this. However, if you are working in a business environment where you are being paid well for your coaching services, you need to hone your administration skills around record keeping, lest all your great coaching, not to mention your coachee’s great work, is left unacknowledged, because neither of you is clear on where you came from and what progress has been made.
