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January 5 - February 13, 2018
However, the wake-up call has been sounded and that is the changing expectations of younger staff. At job interviews they want to know what training and development opportunities and what management style they can expect. They do not seek – nor do they want – a job for life, and they will leave a job if their needs are not met. And those needs are for things that will help their self-belief, such as a coaching management style.
All instruction, all criticism, every reduction in choice, every manifestation of hierarchy, every act of secrecy subtly lowers people’s self-belief. Coaching, trust, openness, respect, authentic praise, freedom of choice, and, of course, success raise it.
self-actualizing. This is sometimes called the level of service. Service is often seen as the answer to the search for meaning and purpose, something that people used to gain from their religion but now look for elsewhere, including while at work. Service to others manifests in a wide spectrum of forms, is very fulfilling, and is the universal way to meeting this need.
In practice, our level on the ladder has little to do with age, and increasingly younger people in the workplace are displaying levels of maturity beyond their years and beyond their superiors, creating an inversion in maturity – and in respect – in the office.
Meaning is the significance we ascribe to an event or an action in hindsight, while purpose is our intent to embark on a course of action.
COACHING QUESTIONS FOR MEANING AND PURPOSE
Amazing questions that lead to defining your meaning and purpose.
The worst feedback is personal and judgmental The most effective is subjective and descriptive
Feedback from ourselves and from others is vital for learning and performance improvement. That feedback needs to cover both the results of the action and the action process itself. For example, where the golf ball lands is the result and the golf swing is the process.
Why, then, do we persist in employing the least effective means of feedback? Because we look at it from our point of view, rather than that of the performer; because we say what we want, without understanding the effects of what we say.
Praise is another form of feedback. It tends to be sparingly offered and hungrily received in the workplace, where criticism abounds.
Praise insincerely or gratuitously given is hollow indeed and does more harm than good, for phoneyness and manipulation are far more readily recognized than the perpetrators realize.
Appraisal systems are common, unpopular, misused, limiting, and yet necessary.
In a learning, no-blame culture, they can be very beneficial to all concerned. But when they categorize only past performance and not future potential, or are judgmental and not descriptive, they are beneficial to no one.
SELF-ASSESSMENT
A nice section on how to use self-assessment as a self-coaching tool
A great deal of importance is attached in business to assessing others – peers, subordinates, or even bosses – but self-assessment is, in my opinion, the most productive form of assessment.
Ratings on skills and qualities given by and to others are best regarded as feedback, valuable stuff on which we can choose to act, rather than as a judgment or the trut...
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Coaching offers personal control. A primary cause of stress in the workplace is a lack of personal control
For example, if a team is in the cooperation stage and one of its members has a bad day, the others will rally round and support. If it is in the assertion stage, the others may quietly celebrate the fall of a competitor. If it is in the inclusion stage, few will know or care.
On the other hand, if a team is in the cooperation stage and a team member has a personal triumph, the rest will join in the celebration. However, if the team is in the assertion stage, the rest may become jealous. If the team is in the inclusion stage, the others could even feel threatened.
A manager only has two functions: first to get the job done and second to develop people
Meaning and purpose are what drive people, and a lack of them leads to lethargy, depression, and poor health.
The greatest barrier is the inability to give up what you have done before
To see all people as having the potential to be great in their chosen field, just as an acorn has in its field, is a far cry from the more common but outmoded perception of people as empty vessels of little worth until given outside input.
The greatest barrier without a doubt is not the inability to coach but the inability to give up telling, to give up what you have done before in each circumstance, to give up your old habitual management or teaching behavior.
Any change of behavior by a coach or manager is viewed with fear and suspicion by some and may be met with a level of resistance.
Most people have a long history of being told by parents, by school teachers, and by their first bosses, so naturally they expect to be told and may find it strange being asked for their opinion.
When our parents asked us questions, it was often because we had done something wrong. There was no safe answer to “Why did you do that?” – we were in trouble anyway. When our schoolteachers asked us questions, it was to test either our knowledge or whether we had been paying attention. In either case it was important to get the answer right, so questions themselves came to be seen as a threat.
There are seldom “right” answers to coaching questions, just honest ones.
Let me quote a user of coaching, a production-plant manager with a pharmaceutical company. Everything I do is essentially performance-aimed. I use coaching as a means of getting my staff to a level where I can delegate work to them which I would otherwise have to do myself. I see the time I spend coaching very much as an investment, the dividend from which is the far greater time I save myself through delegation.
Underneath, the majority of us crave responsibility, in part because it provides us with a measure of self-worth. Those with very low self-worth have a hard time with responsibility.
A few of the relevant coaching questions might be:
Very good questions on injecting or raising responsibility.
One of the classic ways of avoiding having to change is to claim that you already do it.
Keep it simple; the whole process is simply variations on the following theme: What do you want? Goal What is happening? Reality What could you do? Options What will you do? Will
Once they do let go of the old, the new rushes in to fill the vacuum. Remove the blocks and the potential emerges.
Where there is confusion, coaching can bring clarity. Where there is fear, coaching can build trust. Where there is concern, coaching can bring hope. Where there is isolation, coaching can bring connection. Where there is competition, coaching can bring cooperation.
The workers were policing themselves. Once they felt trusted, they became trustworthy.
Carrying our parents on our backs, long after we have grown up and they are dead, is a burden we don’t need.
I hope that this brief personal revelation illustrates the type of steps that can be taken if we choose first to become values driven and then to zero in on those values, which in turn can guide us to reset the sails of our lifeboat.
Unfortunately it doesn't !
To achieve authenticity is an endless journey. It is about freeing ourselves from parental, social, and cultural conditioning, and also the false beliefs and assumptions we have accumulated along the way. It is also about freeing ourselves from fear: fear of failure, fear of being different, fear of looking stupid, fear of what others might think, fear of being rejected, and many more egocentric fears.
The term agility conjures up images of youthfulness and physicality. It is a widely held belief, and to some extent a reality, that we become less agile as we get older.
A positive attitude leading to a fair dose of self-belief reinforced by a good workout in the gym may not have much direct physiological impact, but it can act as a more powerful placebo than any pharmaceutical cocktail.
After all, habits are the safe repetition of fear-avoidance behavior.
Breaking habits gives access to new avenues, makes life more interesting, opens the door to new discoveries, introduces new friends, makes you a far more interesting person, and may even give you tears of joy.
Anyone who aspires to be a leader needs to develop his inner alignment. If he does not, others will experience him as somewhat schizophrenic and they will not know where they stand with him – they will not know who they are dealing with.
Emotional intelligence is in fact nothing new, though the term is. It can be described as interpersonal intelligence or, even more simply, as social skills. This can be divided into five domains: knowing one’s emotions (self-awareness), managing one’s emotions, motivating oneself, recognizing emotions in others, and handling relationships.
Goleman’s research indicated that emotional intelligence is twice as important (66 percent to 34 percent) as academic or technical knowledge for success at work, for everyone not just leaders, both in terms of relationships and productivity. For leadership roles the ratio is even greater (85 percent to 15 percent).
Much of the psychological dysfunction in the world stems from frustration about the lack of meaning and purpose in our lives
We could claim, and I do, that purpose is transpersonal, and meaning is humanistic.
A psychosynthesis-trained coach will invite the coachee to reframe life as a developmental journey, to see the creative potential within each problem, to see obstacles as stepping stones, and to imagine that we all have a purpose in life with challenges and obstacles to overcome in order to fulfill that purpose.
