Coaching for Performance Fifth Edition: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership UPDATED 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

by John Whitmore

The value of choice and responsibility in terms of self-motivation should never be underestimated. For example, if the members of a sales team come up with a goal that is lower than the leader wishes, the leader should consider the consequences very carefully before overriding their figure and imposing their own. They may do better to swallow their pride and accept the team’s figure. Insisting on the leader’s goal may well have the effect of lowering the performance of the team, even though the leader’s target was higher than theirs. They may or may not consider the leader’s figure discouragingly unrealistic, but they will certainly be demotivated by their lack of choice. Of course, the leader has one more option if they are sure of their ground, and that is to start with the team’s figure and coach them upward by exploring and helping them to dismantle their barriers to achieving more. They then retain responsibility for the figure that is finally agreed.

Imposing targets

SMART: Specific Measurable Agreed Realistic Timeframed and also PURE: Positively stated Understood Relevant Ethical and CLEAR: Challenging Legal Environmentally sound Appropriate Recorded

Goals: SMART PURE and CLEAR

Create a big dream. Keep it simple, easily understood, and measured. Attract the right people who work well together. Measure results consistently. You can create, run, or improve anything with this formula.

Dream big, a formula for succes

One distinction between coaching and counseling is that coaching is mainly proactive, looking at the future, and counseling is generally reactive, looking at the past.

Counselling

One reality question that seldom fails to contribute value is “What action have you taken on this so far?” followed by “What were the effects of that action?” This serves to emphasize the value of action, and the difference between action and thinking about problems. Often people have thought about problems for ages, but only when asked what they have done about them do they realize that they have actually taken no action at all.

What have you done (about it) lately

In business coaching scenarios, reality includes raising the coachee’s awareness of the external reality (organizational strategy, policies and processes, political landscape, behavioral norms, culture, unwritten rules, power dynamics, etc.) as well as the coachee’s internal reality (inner thoughts, feelings, beliefs, values, and attitudes). Anyone working in an organization coexists within a system that includes other people and things that may help coachees to achieve their goals, or get in the way. This is perhaps best illustrated by way of an example.

External and Internal reality

There are many more. Note that all of them contain a negative or a dismissal. Good coaches would invite their coachees to ask themselves: What if there were no obstacles, what would you do then? If particular interferences came up, they would continue to use “What if …?” For example: What if you had a large enough budget? What if you had more employees? What if you knew the answer? What would it be? By this process, which temporarily sidesteps the censorship of the rational mind, more creative thought is unleashed and perhaps the obstacle is found to be less insurmountable than it seemed. Maybe another team member knows a way round that particular obstacle, so the impossible is made possible by the combined contributions of more than one person.

Sidestepping the sensorship of the ratIonal mind

How committed are you to this action, on a scale of 1–10? This is not rating the certainty of the outcome actually happening. It is a rating of the coachee’s intention to carry out their part of the job. Completion of the task may depend on the agreement or the action of others, and that cannot be rated. • What prevents it from being a 10? Check the coachee’s motivation, and persist by asking a question such as: “If you have rated yourself at less than 8, how can you reduce the size of the task or lengthen the timescale to enable you to raise the rating to 8 or above?” If the rating is still below 8, suggest the coachee cross out the action step, as they are unlikely to take it. This is not to sabotage completion, as it might appear, but it is our experience that those who rate their commitment at less than 8 are not committed to those actions and seldom follow through. However, when faced with having to admit failure, the coachee may all of a sudden find the necessary motivation.

How committed 0-10?

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.

70:20:10

Defensiveness must be avoided, because when it is present, the truth/reality becomes smothered in inaccurate excuses and justifications, which both coachee and coach may believe and which are no basis for performance improvement.

Avoid defensiveness

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. Meaning is mainly psychological, whereas purpose is a spiritual concept.

Meaning and Purpose

Another key tenet of coaching is not to ask a question of your coachee that you wouldn’t be willing to answer – or haven’t already answered – yourself.

Only questions you answered yourself

Potted history – in advance, ask coachee to prepare a summary of pivotal moments in their life to date (not whole life story); work together to identify patterns of behavior and belief systems.

Pivotal moments in life

Teams are the essential working blocks of an organization. They perform tasks that are interconnected and too time-consuming for an individual or too complex or difficult for a group of individuals working in parallel. The team’s ability to perform does not depend only on the individual talents and skills of team members, but on the way those members work together, and on the degree to which they share objectives, values, purpose, and responsibility. There is great interdependency in high-performing teams. In fact, without interdependency, you could say that a team is just a group. A task can only be successfully performed if synergy and cooperation are present. As such, teams and their power and potential are greater than the sum of their parts. They have an identity of their own that is different from all the individual identities within them.

Definition of a team

four-stage model of team development that is easy to understand – Inclusion, Assertion, Cooperation, Co-creation.

Team dev model

Global mobility brings diversity to teams which requires greater flexibility of mindset. People no longer work in settled groupings but are continually forming and reforming teams. Teams can be project based, functional, matrix based, operational, virtual, self-organized. Some teams are spread across geographical boundaries, making contact more infrequent and more problematic, or entirely virtual in nature. The timescales within which teams are expected to join, form, and perform to meet a business challenge are shorter than ever before. The business challenges themselves have increased in complexity.

Complexifty of contemporary teams

WHY? Why are we making this change? What are the internal and external drivers? WHAT? What are we changing into? What needs to change and what needs to remain? HOW? How will we design and deliver the change? Who will do what?

Scoping change

I learned that I first had to escape from the worst of my parental, social, and cultural conditioning before I could begin to discover myself and my values, and to explore deeper social issues with greater clarity than I had ever experienced before. My concern then shifted away from myself toward others, and I was not happy with what I now saw in the world that I had ignored before.

Parental, Social and Cultural conditioning

So what is vision as a leadership quality? It can be broken down into two parts. The first is the ability to “envision” and dream; that is, to create a clear and bold image of how the leader wants things to be in the long term without the impediment of conventional limits. This includes depth in terms of a lengthy timescale and breadth in terms of a whole-systems mindset, making connections beyond boundaries. The second part of vision is the ability to communicate this image in such a way as to inspire others – to be “visionary.” It is through the communication of vision and the resulting inspiration that followership is created, for what is a leader without followers?

What is visionary?

Performance, learning, and enjoyment are inextricably intertwined.

Performance, learning and enjoyment

A businessperson may be focused on personal achievement and success in the material world and may have become a well-integrated person, a good parent, and a respected member of society, without ever having asked themselves a meaningful question about life. The businessperson might regard the opposite type as lazy, disorganized, a sponger, a dilettante. The opposite type of person leads a contemplative and ascetic life, but seems ill equipped to cope with the realities and essentials of the everyday world. Their home, their finances, and even their personality may be in a bit of a mess. These people live a monastic life of study or art, and readily give gentle assistance to others. They see the businessperson’s pursuits as pointless, ego driven, and often destructive to themselves and to others.

Psychological integration vs Spiritual, businessman vs Shaman