This paper explores an integrative and systemic approach to business coaching which captures the way it interfaces with organisational, interpersonal and intrapsychic systems.
Summary
All of us are running faster and faster as technology shreds our attention. We have confused speed and urgency with impact and productivity. Information overload and fractured attention cost the US economy at least $900 billion a year.1
We desperately need to take back control by learning to stop, reflect, and focus. The discipline of paying attention has an immediate impact on performance and accelerates learning. In this article, I outline how and where to focus in order to learn critical leadership skills, and describe how reflection and mindfulness combine to form a powerful coaching model.
Mindshifting
Linda is a senior executive who started her career as an administrative assistant. Her first role was in a branch office of a multinational financial services company. She was a fast learner with a great deal of energy and the ability to get things done. She was steadily given greater responsibility. She began managing the administrative staff in her office, and then took on the compliance and office management functions as well. Her drive and service orientation got the attention of the district manager, who picked her to run these functions for the region. After just a few years she was promoted to headquarters to run administration, compliance, and office management nationally.
I met Linda shortly after she started her role at headquarters. She was scattered during our conversation and would take phone calls and check email every few minutes. She told me she was frustrated and struggling with the huge volume of work. It seemed every employee and compliance issue in the field would bubble up to her because she knew the most and was the best at solving difficult problems. Her days were filled with back-to-back meetings because everyone wanted her time. She began falling behind on deadlines and would often be 20-30 minutes late for meetings. She would apologize profusely, but was not really aware of how destructive her behavior was becoming for her relationships and reputation. As much as she was drowning, she felt like the go-to expert. She enjoyed seeing her own impact and so it was hard for her to delegate real authority to her staff.
As Linda moved from each level to the next, she needed to change where she focused, what she valued, and how she defined her job. These changes can be described as a series of Mindshifts as you go from individual contributor to leader of a large organization. As I coached Linda to step back, reflect, and focus on her behavior, she was able to see how she had become a bottleneck because she was stuck on the first Mindshift, ‘Doing to Leading’ (see chart below). Ultimately she was able to shift her attention from getting things done on her own to developing her team and facilitating their work. Her job was no longer to assemble the budget and double-check it herself; it was to make sure the right people came together so the budget reflected her whole department’s needs and goals.
Linda also became more aware of her impact and better at setting boundaries, including saying ‘no’ to problems that were not hers to solve. This gave her more time to think about how to improve her department’s performance. After a few years she mastered several more Mindshifts and was ready for another opportunity. Linda is now running a rapidly growing business that is central to her company’s future.
Practice: Mindshifting Self-Assessment
There are seven Mindshifts to make as you go from managing yourself to managing organizations.2 Moving from left to right along each dimension requires a change in how you prioritize and evaluate your success. First consider the Doing-to-Leading Mindshift:
Building a Foundation
The Mindshifts can help you map out a development plan to shift along each dimension. However, you first need to take hold of your attention by learning to stop, reflect and focus.
Practice: Stopping the Action
Our minds need regular rest and reflection. Vacations (from the Latin vacare, to empty) are times to put out our mind’s garbage so we can replenish. By temporarily putting aside our daily challenges and allowing ourselves to daydream, we are able to discover new ideas:
Practice: Leveraging Others for Reflection
We need to ask for help making time to think and taking tasks off our plate:
“As a senior executive my time is no longer my own, yet I desperately need time to think. I get my assistant to schedule thinking time and then protect it. I also ask my colleagues to be thinking partners, because as an extravert, I talk to think and synthesize better out loud. It’s about being disciplined and creating choice. We have choice if we exercise it.”
– Nicoa Dunne, former SVP Human Resources, Misys Technology.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is both a state of mind and an attitude. The state of mind is present-focused awareness, open-mindedness, and acceptance. It takes great practice and willpower to live in the present, rather than ruminating about the past or worrying about the future. In addition, staying open to new ideas can bring up significant anxiety, and accepting reality can challenge our sense of identity. It helps a great deal to cultivate a welcoming, curious, and gentle attitude towards ourselves and our experience. It is the combination of state of mind and attitude that makes mindfulness invaluable.
Studies show that techniques to develop mindfulness enhance a range of positive emotions, emotional stability, and our ability to read social cues. In addition, mindfulness training increases immunological functioning and life expectancy, and reduces depression and chronic pain. When we can accept reality as it is, we become less frustrated by our situation, less fearful it will change, and less depressed about not achieving our fantasies.
We are just starting to appreciate the power that reflection and mindfulness have to facilitate learning. Research by Ellen Langer at Harvard suggests that individuals who apply reflection and mindfulness are able to learn more quickly, problem solve more creatively, and extrapolate their learning more flexibly across settings.3 The more we can tolerate anxiety and discomfort, the more we can take the personal risks we need to learn.
For centuries, spiritual traditions have explored ways to develop reflection and focus. Techniques for cultivating concentration and contemplation are central to the mystical teachings of Judaism, Hinduism, Shamanism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity. Buddhist teachers have developed a range of practices for developing mindfulness, often using breathing as an anchor.
Practice: Mindful Breathing
Reflection and focus are fundamental to developing self-awareness, which is the starting point for developing all leadership competencies. Learning everything from communication and emotional intelligence to strategic thinking and team building depends on our ability to examine our behavior and focus our attention.
Strategic Thinking
Once we can self-monitor and breathe mindfully, we open up the possibility of strategic thinking. Strategic thinking is the ability to see the big picture, collect information from disparate sources, and envision the future. Strategic thinking is one of the hardest skills for leaders to develop. It does not require genius, just focus. There are four overlapping elements:
Leaders need to not only manage their own attention, but to capture others’ attention. An inspiring strategic vision does this by aligning us around an energizing set of ideals, and by tapping into our needs, hopes, and dreams.4
“One of the chief imperatives of leadership is to have vision. Vision requires a deep understanding of your business and is inspired by out-of-the-box thinking and imagination. Leaders need to make the time to reflect in peace to let their vision come together.”
– Ramesh Singh, former Management Board Member, UBS Investment Bank
Practice: Eliminating Obstacles to Strategic Thinking
The sheer volume of tasks and transactions we face (and take on) each day is the biggest obstacle to strategic thinking (think back-to-back meetings and never-ending email). The stream of alluring details in front of us pulls our attention and we zoom in. We need to break our attention away and zoom out in order to look ahead and anticipate. Anticipation means predicting the potential consequences of our actions, our impact on others, and changes in the business environment.
When we start to shift our attention and think strategically, we are able to make two critical Mindshifts. We can shift our attention from Personal Accountability (monitoring our own work processes, deadlines, and goals) to Organizational Accountability (measuring the whole organization’s success via profit, efficiency targets, etc.). We are also able to focus less on Task Analysis (figuring out the best way to get things done) and more on Market Analysis (looking at what business to be in and strategies to get there). Making these transitions depends on our refocusing our attention from narrow to wide. We need to open up our minds, leaving aside self-focused questions like, ‘Can I complete this task?’ and moving towards holistic questions like, ‘Where do I want to take my business?’
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence (or EI) is the ability to use the information in emotions to make decisions and reach goals. The components of EI are:5
These skills are tremendously important for leaders, and underlie the Mindshift from Self-Awareness (knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your style) to Interpersonal Awareness (managing your emotions and behaviors and their impact on others). Interpersonal Awareness allows you to communicate, negotiate, and influence effectively, as well as build strong relationships and create effective teams.
Practice: Empathy and Emotional Attunement
Adopt the perspective of an anthropologist and study the culture of your organization as if it were an unknown tribe whose language you do not speak. Try to intuit what colleagues are feeling and intending by paying attention to their nonverbal signals. Focus on facial expressions, glances, eye contact, tone of voice, mannerisms, gestures, and posture. With people closer to you, take this a step further by asking them if you are right with your hunches. Though every person’s signals are to some extent unique, the facial and vocal expressions of most feelings are consistent across cultures.6
Notice the impact of your colleagues’ feelings on your own. Tune in to the subtle feelings in your body, particularly in your chest and gut. How do you feel the impact of a colleague’s frustration, expressed in a backhanded compliment or sarcastic comment? Can you feel a twinge in your stomach or do you have some other visceral reaction? Record your observations and hypotheses in a journal. Becoming more attuned in this way provides you with information that allows you to anticipate others’ needs and behavior.
We know that when we are under stress and emotionally raw we are more prone to be reactive, irritable, and insensitive. This is confirmed by research showing that the greater our stress, the less empathy we have.7 So as stress goes up, EI goes down. Conversely, mindfulness training reduces stress and anxiety, and thus is able to counteract the negative effect of stress on EI.8,9
Mindfulness training increases empathy and the ability to read others’ emotions.10 In addition, mindfulness increases compassion and gratitude, along with activity in brain regions associated with positive emotion.11,12 Mindfulness may thus enhance EI via a direct effect on brain function, as well by facilitating our ability to self-monitor and course-correct through greater access to feedback.13,14 When we can accept and ride the waves of our feelings, we can make use of the information contained in emotions rather than avoiding them or overreacting to them.
Mindful Coaching
Combining principles of focus and reflection suggests a model of mindful coaching.
At a macro level, there is a continuous cycle of assessment (seeking understanding) and goal-setting (planning action). This is a common feature of modern coaching and helps clients see pragmatic value because there is progress towards concrete objectives. However, over-focusing on goals and outcomes is a dangerous habit. It can lead clients out of the moment and into frustration and tension where they do not learn. Rather than always checking and worrying about the score, clients need to pay attention to and enjoy the game—in other words, they need to focus on process. Mindful coaching applies intention and attention to this process.
The coach creates a container, a holding environment of mindfulness, within which the client can think, feel, and experience without judgment, and which enables them to gradually reveal and accept themselves.15 The core of this container is silence—an underestimated source in itself, and vital because freedom from interruption and peace of mind are essential for clear and productive thought. The coach also makes the intention to get out of the way by putting aside his or her own ego in the interest of serving the client. This enables active listening where the coach goes beyond what is said to try to understand underlying themes. Focused questions direct the client’s attention toward specific cues inside and around them. These questions shift perspective, challenge assumptions, and open the client up to new possibilities.
“Silence used to make me uncomfortable. Now I welcome it and let it do the heavy lifting. Silence gives my client precious room to reflect. In addition, as I listen from silence and quiet my inner dialogue, I have faith the right questions will emerge. I relax into my body and hold any emotions that come up. I feel into the coaching and trust my gut to gauge what is really going on. I can take more risks and challenge my client. Being fully present with silence gets me to the real issues, to the heart of the matter.”
– Crista Salvatore, Learning & Development, New York Life Insurance Company
In brainstorming, the emphasis is on learning over teaching. The coach is active in providing new ideas, tools, models, and potential solutions. However, the coach is careful not to take over the client’s choice by telling the client what to do. The coach ensures outcomes and results by asking the client to commit to action and execute a plan. The intention needs to come from the client for momentum to continue. The coach helps the client find the motivation to change and the courage to hold themselves accountable.
In addition to Strategic Thinking and EI, Mindful Coaching facilitates the development of a broad range of leadership skills and related Mindshifts. For example:
I find that coaching this way creates more sustainable change than do behavioral methods. One reason is that simply turning mindful attention to our thoughts, feelings, and behavior helps undo self-destructive habits. In addition to raising our awareness, giving ourselves and our symptoms “accepting attention” is healing in itself. Mindful Coaching also helps us reflect on our own process as coaches and manage the uncertainty and ambiguity of our role. Not being the expert and giving up control are anxiety producing and are central challenges for new coaches and leaders learning to coach.16
Linda’s sanity, and my own, depended on my staying mindful during our meetings. When she interrupted herself mid-sentence to check her email, I was tempted to do the same. Instead, I monitored my frustration and observed her without judging. Reflecting back to her what I saw and asking questions about its impact helped her pay greater attention and look at herself with more clarity. Over time, she began internalizing my accepting attention and started to cultivate greater mindfulness to contain her restless energy.
Staying focused and mindful is a tremendous challenge. The exercises are not hard to integrate into our daily routine but the skills take a lifetime of practice. It takes great self-discipline to pull out of our constant swirl of activity and information, and we need a high level of awareness to know when to Mindshift. However, once we sense the power of mindfulness, for both our clients and ourselves, we see there is no higher priority.
This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (October Issue 2010, Volume 6, Issue 3).
1 Basex, Inc., (2010). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basex, accessed 7/22/2010.
2 R. Charan, S. Drotter, and J. Noel, The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership-Powered Company (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001).
3 Ellen J. Langer, The Power of Mindful Learning (New York: Perseus Books, 1997).
4 Warren Bennis, Why Leaders Can’t Lead: The Unconscious Conspiracy Continues (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997).
5 J. D. Mayer, P. Salovey, and D. R. Caruso, “Emotional Intelligence: New Ability or Eclectic Traits?” American Psychologist 63, no. 6 (2008): 503-17.
6 Paul Eckman, “SIOP 2008 Invited Address: Emotional Skills,” The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist 46 (2008): 21-24.
7 Jon Kabat-Zinn, “The Science of Mindfulness,” Speaking of Faith, NPR, New York, NY. 18 April 2009.
8 Ibid., Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness (New York: Delacorte, 1990).
9 Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy, “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time,” Harvard Business Review 85 (2007).
10 Daniel Goleman, “Finding Happiness: Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the Left,” New York Times 4 Feb. 2003, New York edition, sec. F: 5.
11 Matthieu Ricard, “Change Your Mind Change Your Brain: The Inner Conditions for Authentic Happiness,” Google Tech Talks. Google Headquarters, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA. 15 Mar. 2007.
12 S. L. Shapiro, G. E. Schwartz, and G. Bonner, “Effects of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction on Medical and Premedical Students,” Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 21, no. 6 (1998): 581-599.
13 R. F. Baumeister and T. F. Heatherton, T. F., “Self-Regulation Failure: An Overview,” Psychological Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1996): 1-15.
14 B. Alan Wallace and Shauna L. Shapiro, “Mental Balance and Well-Being: Building Bridges Between Buddhism and Western Psychology,” American Psychologist 61 (2006): 690-701.
15 D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge Classics, 2005).
16 David Hosmer, “Cascading Coaching: Building a Model of Peer Development,” OD Practitioner 38, no. 3 (2006): 17-20.
Joshua Ehrlich, PhD, is the founder of the Global Leadership Council www.globalleadershipcouncil.com. He is a leading authority on managing in intense environments and advises CEOs on complex organizational challenges. He is an executive coach, supervisor and accreditor of coaches. Josh is the author of MindShifting: Focus for Performance (Steiner Books)
The focus of the coaching conversation is to help the client work toward achieving their desired outcomes. It is in this process, where coach and client reflect on the client’s experience, that the potential for learning and action emerges. Business coaching has been defined in many different ways, but is essentially a one-on-one collaborative partnership designed to develop the client’s performance and potential, personally and professionally, in alignment with the goals and values of the organization. Business coaching should be aligned strategically with the overall values and objectives of an organization.
However, an important question is raised for executives: if goals are to be motivationally achieved, are they also aligned with the individual’s values, beliefs, and feelings? Often organizations merely pay lip service to organizational values, and don’t necessarily create them as a synthesis of the core individual values that make up the culture of the organization. Ethical dilemmas can arise during the coaching process if the executive needs to make difficult choices that are incompatible with their own value system.
Goals, Motivation, and Performance
If you wish to help your clients improve their behavior and performance, it is useful to understand the psychology behind adult behavior, goals, and motivation. Alfred Adler, who worked with Sigmund Freud for ten years, reasoned that adult behavior is purposeful and goal-directed, and that life goals provide individual motivation. He focused on personal values, beliefs, attitudes, goals, and interests, and recommended that adults engage in the therapeutic process and reinvent their futures using techniques such as “acting as if,” role-playing, and goal setting. All these tools are utilized and recognized by well-qualified business coaches worldwide.
Motivational theories primarily focus on the individual’s needs and motivations. I have typically worked with coaching clients to help them understand more fully their intrinsic motivators (internal drivers such as values, beliefs, and feelings), and how to use extrinsic motivators (external drivers such as relationships, bonuses, environment, and titles) to motivate their teams. If an individual’s goals are not in alignment with their own internal, intrinsic drivers, there will be difficulties for them in achieving those goals.
In an International Coach Federation study (ICF, 2008a), Campbell confirmed that coaches often assume clients are aware of their values, but within the confines of the study this appeared to be incorrect. The clients interviewed indicated they were not aware of their values, and that acquiring a process of awareness and reflection led them to become more aware of their emotions, their values, and the need to clarify their goals. Whitmore (2002) supports this and states that the goal of the coach is to build awareness, responsibility, and self-belief.
The coach’s intervention and questions help the client to discover their own intrinsic drivers or motivators, and allow both coach and client to identify whether the client’s personal, professional, and organizational goals are in alignment.
Adult and Experiential Learning
Adult learning theory has influenced coaching from the start: the goal of adult learning is to achieve a balance between work and personal life. In the same way, most business coach-client relationships involve an integration of personal and systems work. Personal work is intended to help the client develop the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual competence to achieve their desired goals; systems work may be found within a partnership, marriage, family, organizational team, or matrix structure.
Another powerful influence on goal-setting in coaching is experiential learning because it emphasizes a client’s individual, subjective experience. In this process, coach and client probe the essence of an experience to understand its significance and to determine any learning that can be gained from it. The importance of experiential learning is that coach and client use the business coaching conversation to actively reconstruct the client’s experience, with a focus on setting goals that are aligned with the client’s intrinsic drivers, i.e., values, beliefs, and feelings.
Other considerations may be language, social class, gender, ethnic background, and the individual’s style of learning. In learning from experience, it is useful to understand which barriers prevent the client from learning. Often it is a matter of developing self-reflective skills as much as self-management skills. What clients learn from their experience can transform their perceptions, their limiting and liberating assumptions, their way of interpreting the world – and their ability to achieve results.
Types of Goals
The coach is responsible for ensuring that goal-setting conversations get the best results. O’Neill (2000) differentiates between two kinds of client goals, business and personal, and links the coaching effort to a business result, highlighting and prioritizing the business areas that need attention. Business goals are about achieving external results; personal goals are what the leader has to do differently in the way they conduct themselves in order to get the business results they envision.
Yalom (1980) talks about two types of goals: content (what is to be accomplished) and process (how the coach wants to be in a session). However, he also describes the importance of setting concrete attainable goals – goals that the client has personally defined, and which increase their sense of responsibility for their own individual change.
Developmental Goal-setting
If the client is to learn how to learn, they need to cultivate self-awareness through reflection on their experience, values, intrinsic drivers, the impact of these on others, the environment, and their own future goals. This process is often implicit in the coaching relationship through the process of questions and actions that develop critical reflection and practice. As a coach, you will be asking questions to help clients reflect, review, and gain useable knowledge from their experience. A useful structure for your work with business executives is along the continuum of a development pipeline developed by David Peterson (2009). Your questions and challenges in your coaching sessions can help your clients reflect in five areas:
Business coaching places great emphasis on clarifying and achieving goals. Often within the complexity of the organizational environment, the client’s overarching goals may be set by a more senior power; where that senior individual may have different worldviews, paradigms, and limiting or empowering assumptions. It is crucial that the client have a “living sense” of what their goal may be. In other words, goals must be aligned with the values of the individual as much as with those of the organization if they are to be achieved. This article is adapted from “Goals and Goal-Setting” by Sunny Stout Rostron (COMENSANews, February 2010 (www.comensa.org.za).
This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (June Issue 2010, Volume 6, Issue 2).
Griffiths, K. E, and Campbell, M. A. (2008). Regulating the Regulators: Paving the Way for International, Evidence-Based Coaching Standards. International Journal of Evidence-Based Coaching and Mentoring, 6(1):19-31.
International Coach Federation (ICF). (2008a). Core Competencies. Lexington, KY: ICF.
International Coach Federation (ICF). (2008b). ICF Code of Ethics. Lexington, KY: ICF.
O’Neill, M. B. (2000). Coaching with Backbone and Heart: A Systems Approach to Engaging Leaders with Their Challenges. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Peterson, D. (2009). Executive Coaching, A Critical Review and Recommendation for Advancing the Practice (in S. Zedeck (Ed.) Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.
Stout Rostron, S. (2009). Business Coaching International, Transforming Individuals and Organizations. London: Karnac.
Whitmore, J. (2002). Coaching for Performance: Growing People, Performance and Purpose. London: Nicholas Brealey.
Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.
Dr. Sunny Stout Rostron, DProf, MA is an executive coach and consultant with a wide range of experience in leadership and management development, business strategy and executive coaching. The author of six books, including Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching (2009), Sunny is Director of the Manthano Institute of Learning (Pty) Ltd and founding president of COMENSA (Coaches and Mentors of South Africa).
Coaching as an Experiential Learning Conversation
One of the core areas where coaches work with clients is that of learning. However, the conversation with your client centers on what is meaningful to them. If significance and relevance are to emerge from the coaching conversation, it doesn’t matter what is relevant to you; it matters what is relevant to them. It is therefore important to be aware of your own assumptions about what the client needs.
If you are guiding, directing, and giving your clients all the information they need, it will be difficult for them to ever be free of you. It is helpful if the client embodies new learning personally and physiologically; you can’t do their learning for them. What you do as a coach is to help them reconstruct their own thinking and feeling to gain perspective and become self-directed learners. At the end of each coaching session with my clients, we integrate their learning1 with the goals they have set, confirming what action, if any, they are committed to:
Nested-Levels Model
Although models create a system within which coach and client learn, it is essential that models are not experienced as either prescriptive or rigid. If the model is inflexible, it means it is fulfilling the coach’s agenda, rather than attempting to understand the client’s issues.
This nested-levels model was developed by New Ventures West (Weiss, 2004), and introduces the concept of horizontal and vertical levels in coaching models. The nested model works first at the horizontal level of “doing,” eventually moving into deeper “learning” one level down; reflecting about self, others, and experience at a third “ontological” level where new knowledge emerges about oneself and the world (Figure1).
In her article, Pam Weiss talks about the two different camps of coaches. In jest, I call them the New York versus the Los Angeles camp. The New York camp says, “I’m the expert, let me fix you,” while the L.A. camp says, “You are perfect and whole and have all of your own answers.” Joking aside, each of these camps comes up short, even though coaches often fall into one or the other. The role of coaching is actually about developing human beings. It is not really about “I have the expertise” versus “you already have all your own answers.”
The Expert Approach
Contrary to what experts might think, clients are not broken and are not in need of fixing. Clients may be anxious, stressed, nervous, overworked, and even narcissistic—but they don’t need fixing. They are mostly healthy human beings going about their jobs and lives, experiencing their own human difficulties. Your job as coach is to help the clients learn for themselves, so that when you are no longer walking alongside them, they have become “self-directed” learners (Harri-Augstein and Thomas, 1991) and do not need you anymore. The second view about “expertise” also has limitations. The role of expertise is that, as coach, you are an expert; but coaching is not about the coach giving all the answers; that tends to be the role of the consultant, i.e., to find solutions for the client.
The “You-Have-All-the-Answers” Approach
The “you have all the answers” assumption is partially true, but there are several limitations. The first one is that we all have blind spots, and it is your job as coach to help the client to identify their blind spots. Secondly, it’s perhaps a bit of “mythical” thinking that the client has all of the answers already; the flip side of that argument is that, if it does not work out, the client assumes blame and fault. In other words, “If I have all the answers, I should be able to do it myself without help.” If that is not the case, they could feel, “Oh dear, if I am not able to do it myself, then perhaps I’m a failure.”
Both of these approaches are “horizontal,” i.e., they skim the surface of the work you can do with the client. Both help people to maintain the lives they currently have. The expert “New York” approach helps the client to do it better, faster, and more efficiently, and the “Los Angeles” approach may withhold key insights and observations from the coach that could help build the client’s awareness of their blind spots. What is important, rather than “fixing” the client, is the skill of “observation” on the part of the coach. There is no problem in helping the client to do it better, faster, or more efficiently—that is often what the organization hopes for in terms of performance improvement. However, it is important for the client to gain the learning they need to address blind spots and to build their own internal capacity and competence.
Learning Level
If you continue to help people accomplish tasks, achieve goals, and keep on “doing,” they risk falling into the trap of being “busy” and possibly overwhelmed. They may not, however, necessarily get the “learning” they need to develop self-awareness and self-management. I know all too well about this trap of being excessively busy. If we keep “doing” without reflection, we eventually burn out. To keep individual executives performing better and better, they need to work at one level lower-at the level of learning. They need to learn how to “do the doing” better. As soon as an executive begins to work with a coach, they begin the possibility of working at one or two levels deeper.
As coach, you will be asking questions to help clients reflect, review, and gain useable knowledge from their experience. In the nested-levels model, the higher levels don’t include the lower ones, but the lower levels include the higher ones. So we need to help clients address their purpose one level down, at the level of learning. At this level you may ask questions such as, “How are you doing? What are you doing? What are you feeling? How are your peers/colleagues experiencing you/this? What is and what isn’t working? What is useful learning for you here? What needs to change and how?”
Ontological Levels-Being and Becoming
The third and fourth levels of the coaching intervention using this model are that of who the client is and who the client wishes to become in terms of thinking, feeling, and being. Your questions move from “what do they need to do” and “how do they need to do it” (doing), to “how does their style of learning impact on how they do what they do; what do they need to learn in order to improve thinking/behavior/feeling/performance/leadership” (learning); to questions about “what do they need to understand and acknowledge about themselves, who are they, how do they be who they are, and what needs to change (being and becoming)?”
So what assists people in getting things done? Above all, it is about clarifying goals, creating action steps, taking responsibility, and being accountable. In order to perform more effectively, we need to help clients shift down a gear to learn how to work with competence (a set of skills) rather than just learning a specific new skill.
Learning
Your job as coach is to help the client be open to possibilities of learning something new, and to help them relate to themselves and others at a deeper level. To use the nested-levels model, you could ask questions such as:
Our aim with this model is to shift any limiting sense of who the client is so that they can interact and engage with the world in new ways. As clients begin to shift, it has an impact on others with whom they interact in the workplace. It also means addressing issues systemically, from a holistic perspective, whether those issues revolve around health, stress, anxiety, performance, or relationships with others. Our task as coaches is to widen the circle, enlarge the perspective of the client, and help them learn from their own experience how to reach their potential.
A great way to start any coaching intervention is to ask your clients to tell their life story. The coach begins to understand some of the current issues and presenting challenges, and begins to observe patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior. Because we work with Kolb’s theory of “understanding experience in order to transform it into useable knowledge,” this model helps us to determine the context in which the client operates, where individual and systemic problems may be occurring, and how organizational values and culture impact on individuals and teams. It is at this level that the coach’s ability to observe, challenge, and ask appropriate questions can be most transformational.
In Conclusion
Coaching models help us understand the coaching intervention from a systems perspective, analyzing the “structure” of the interaction between coach and client. This series of articles takes a practical look at how coaching models are constructed, and how they can help you to flexibly structure the overall coaching journey as well as the individual coaching conversation with your business client. In my next article, we will explore the use of the U-process model, sometimes known as the “process of transition,” typically represented in Scharmer’s U-process. This article is adapted from Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching (2009, Johannesburg: Knowledge Resources). Business Coaching International will be published mid 2009 by Karnac, London.
This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (June Issue 2009, Volume 5, Issue 2).
Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Stout Rostron, S. (2009). Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching. Johannesburg: Knowledge Resources. Stout Rostron, S. (2006). Interventions in the Coaching Conversation: Thinking, Feeling and Behaviour. Unpublished DProf dissertation. London: Middlesex University.
Weiss, P. (2004). “The Three Levels of Coaching.” Available at: http://www.newventureswest.com/three_levels.pdf.
1 “Learning conversations” refers to research into learning conversations and self-organized learning, developed by S. Harri-Augstein and L.F. Thomas (1991:24).
Dr. Sunny Stout Rostron, DProf, MA is an executive coach and consultant with a wide range of experience in leadership and management development, business strategy and executive coaching. The author of six books, including Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching (2009), Sunny is Director of the Manthano Institute of Learning (Pty) Ltd and founding president of COMENSA (Coaches and Mentors of South Africa).
Coaching seems simple enough. You help your clients define their most important long-term goals, break their goals down into short term milestones, hold them accountable, keep them focused and volià… success.
In fact, it seems so simple that if you are a potential client, why would you even need a coach to define what’s important to you and then, like a “nagging-but-loving” parent, make sure you do your homework? That’s easy. In spite of your best intentions, if you are like most people, you become distracted. A “nagging-but-loving” parent or coach may come in handy–whether it is to make sure that children get their homework done or that you make it to the goals you set for yourself.
How about you if you are a coach? You love coaching, you love helping others and dang it, if only people would hire you, they would love the results you can get for them…But to hire you, they have to find you. Oh, c’mon; that’s just wishful thinking. You have to find them and then convince them that what they need (that is, you, in order to reach the goals they set for themselves that they can’t reach on their own) is what they want.
This is called marketing and selling. Marketing is getting yourself in the position to offer your services–getting to the telephone or face-to-face conversation with a potential client. You must then sell your services in such a way that a potential client hires you.
As a potential client, you get this–you expect people to lay out their USP (unique sales proposition). But if you’re a coach, although you wholeheartedly agree with how coaching can help people define and reach their goals, you may feel a knot in your stomach about anything related to marketing and selling.
Despite knowing what you each need to do in order to become more successful, your self-defeating behavior may often get in your way. If you’re a potential client hiring a coach, or if you’re a coach committing to marketing and selling your services, you may instead either procrastinate, get defensive, make excuses, quit too soon or engage in some other self-defeating behavior. There is almost no limit to the number of ways you can defeat yourself. I’ve written two books that cover 80 of them.
Human nature doesn’t exist, only animal nature
and the human potential to not give in to it.
Unknown
Whether you’re a coach or a client, you both know that you get in your own way. What may be less clear is why you do it. Understanding how and why people in general, and you in particular, engage in self-defeating behavior will enable you to take that first step toward getting out of your own way.
Success: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back (Figure 1)
From your first breath to your last, you are stepping into the unknown. Your first baby step is daunting, yet exhilarating. The real challenge to your evolving personality occurs when you take that first step and fall down. To be successful throughout your life, you want to make sure you take two steps forward and one step back, instead of no steps forward or one step forward and two steps back.
Think of an infant taking his first step. He crawls, then stands holding onto a chair or his parent’s leg, and then ventures out into the world of homo-erectus. He steps away from any supports, balances precariously, and looks back at his parent (developmental psychologists refer to this stage with the French word, rapprochement, which means “looking back”). He feels reassured and ventures forth.
Sooner or later he falls and cries. One minute he felt like Superbaby; the next he found himself a helpless little creature. He turned out to be as fragile in the next moment as he felt powerful in the first. He looked back at his parent for reassurance (in other words, coaching–see far right column in Figure 2) that what he had experienced was a slip–it doesn’t mean he has fallen through the cracks and can’t get up and try again. Taking in his parent’s reassurance, he does get up and try again. This occurs over and over, until one day he is able to walk on his own.
When a child internalizes this new skill, a little piece of self-confidence develops and he integrates it into his evolving personality. As his personality develops into his own distinct identity, he becomes more and more an individual, and a confident one at that.
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to
lose sight of shore for a very long time.
Andre Gide
This process continues all the way through life. Our personalities and identities are constantly evolving in this two-steps-forward, one-step-back dance of learning–falling, pausing, refueling, retooling, and retrying. Along the way, we make mistakes and learn from them; over time, we can develop perseverance, persistence, and effectiveness.
When you make forward progress, you feel vital, effective and empowered. You seek out opportunities to test your mettle in the world. The world is one giant opportunity and your oyster to explore and enjoy.
Self-Defeat: What Goes In, Comes Out (Figure 2)
So what happens to you when you defeat yourself? As a baby, if you take that first step into the unknown, go to take a second step, fall, look back, and your parents do not respond to you with encouragement, you become stalled. Worse, you may slide further back and regress. You feel tentative, ineffective, disempowered. You seek out any mitigating behaviors that give you relief from these feelings. You adopt so-called “quick fixes”–ways to cope that give you momentary relief from the trauma of falling from Superbaby to Powerless Baby. The problem is that quick fixes fix nothing, and actually hurt you in the long run.
What happens when Superbaby is criticized (and feels as if he has done something wrong), ignored (and feels alone in his helplessness), or coddled (and then feels confused when not coddled)? Superbaby’s reaction is fear, guilt, shame, anger and confusion. Negative messages about the meaning of what he’s experiencing begin playing in his head. He is suddenly knocked off the resilience track. He doesn’t have the self-confidence he needs to get up and try again on his own.
And instead of becoming effective, he seeks relief. Anything and everything he does in reaction to feeling “upset” triggers a negative coping reaction that works to make him feel better in the short run, but in the long run turns into a self-defeating behavior (SDB).
What’s done to children, they will do to society.
Karl Menninger
These behaviors waste time and squander his potential. Instead of seeing the world as a terrific place to explore, he views it as a terrifying place that can trip him up at every step. This causes him to stall in his life and his career. If he repeats these behaviors often enough, they become habits. Eventually they become internalized parts of his personality that are very resistant to change. That is why you must not become discouraged if you are not able to stop and overcome these self-defeating behaviors overnight. Becoming impatient with yourself is in itself self-defeating.
When you run into adversity in your adult life, the trick is to cut the endless playback loop of the old negative messages so that you can develop the inner strength and resolve to become effective in your life and work. This means replacing the abusive, critical, avoidant, neglectful, or overindulgent and authoritarian voice in your head with the voice of the supportive, authoritative role model, mentor or coach.
At first, you may want to conjure up the image and voice of that supportive person telling you to pause when you most feel like reacting or doing something impulsive. In my case, I brought to mind the image of Dean William MacNary. Dean MacNary, who passed away fifteen years ago, was an advocate for me during some difficult times I had in medical school. When I would run into stress and was about to do something foolish, I could see him in my mind’s eye making a Rabbinical shrug (despite his being an Irish Catholic) and saying to me in his Bostonian accent: “M-a-a-h-k, c’mon; take a deep breath and don’t do what you’re about to do. Let it go.” I would occasionally get into an argument with him in my mind, but “Mac,” as I and my fellow medical students called him, would usually win and prevent me from shooting from the hip and then shooting myself in the foot.
Over the years I have internalized his voice as part of my personality, but on those occasions when I want to dip into the gratitude I feel towards Mac, I’ll still imagine his Rabbinical shrug and steadying voice keeping me in line.
You might want to do the same with the people who have helped you along the way. It will help you feel less alone, and fortify you when you’re battling those impulses that could derail you from your goals. In addition, you can enlist the help of a coach so that you can begin to internalize that supportive, authoritative voice. And ultimately, you’ll replace those self-defeating messages and behaviors with confidence, motivation and determination to succeed.
This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (Fall Issue 2005, Volume 1, Issue 3).
Mark Goulston, M.D., is Sr. Vice President Executive Coaching and Emotional Intelligence at Sherwood Partners. He writes “The Leading Edge” for FAST COMPANY, “Directions” for the National Association of Corporate Directors’ Directors Monthly, and is the author of Get Out of Your Own Way at Work… and Help Others Do the Same (Putnam, available October 6, 2005).
As a practicing executive coach and a professor of leadership coaching, I am often asked, “How does one get a traditional manager to rely less on power and control and become more of a coaching leader?” This is a tough question, because it sounds like the coach is being asked to change the heart and soul of another human being. And as we all know, the only heart and soul we can really change is our own! And yet, the most powerful coaching is when real transformation occurs in our coaching clients — when they realize they have learned something powerful or new about themselves. With that transformative learning, the coaching client begins to behave and relate to the world around them in an entirely different way.
In our book, Leading from the Inside Out: a Coaching Model (Bianco, Nabors, & Roman, 2002), we define coaching leadership as “…a way of being based on the commitment to align beliefs with actions. Coaching leaders communicate powerfully, help others to create desired outcomes, and hold relationships based on honesty, acceptance and accountability.”
Is there a shortcut to stimulating this kind of learning in the leader of an organization? Over the last twenty years of working with leaders from all types of organizations, my business partners and I have observed a phenomenon discussed in any basic psychology textbook — people will repeat a behavior that gets them the outcome they desire. So, there are two relevant questions: 1) what are the outcomes the leader is striving to achieve? and 2) what behaviors are most likely to achieve those outcomes?
The outcomes that most leaders expect from employees today haven’t changed much over the last fifty years. They want their employees to be accountable for their performance. What has changed is the realization that the traditional management methods of directing, advising, coercing and controlling only work in the short-term to produce desired performance. Long-term performance accountability requires coaching behaviors: influencing, teaching, questioning and enabling.
Use Inquiry and Advocacy to Communicate Skillfully as a Leader
These coaching behaviors of influencing, teaching, questioning and enabling can be seen in the conversations a coaching leader holds with others. Coaching leaders communicate to understand, not to convince; test their assumptions; ask powerful questions; question organizational and team discrepancies between behavior and outcomes; and reach agreements that lead to higher levels of performance. These leaders communicate quite differently from traditional managers. They share their reasoning, perceptions and beliefs with openness, and change their points of view if presented with new reasoning or data. They ask their employees to back up their points of view with facts and defensible reasoning.
Let’s return to the original question. “How does one get a traditional manager to rely less on power and control and become more of a coaching leader?” As a coach, a good place to start is to focus on behaviors. Such “advocacy” and “inquiry” skills can be learned, practiced and reinforced in the coaching relationship. Following is a chart of short “recipes” that coaches can help their clients to start using in staff meetings, performance discussions, planning meetings, and countless other settings.
| Advocacy | Inquiry |
|---|---|
| I came to this conclusion because… | How did you come to that conclusion? Or Why do you say that? |
| I’m making the following assumptions when I make this statement. | What assumptions are you making when you say that? |
| The following facts lead me to believe that… | What information did you consider when you came to that conclusion? |
| I think…because…I assumed…because… | Help me to understand your reasoning/thinking here. |
| I see the situation as… | How do you see this situation? |
| Testing Your Reasoning | |
| Here’s the data I looked at. | What other data would be important to look at? |
| I infer that you mean… | Am I making an accurate inference? |
| I assumed that… because… | What other assumptions could I make? |
| I came to this conclusion because… | What conclusion would you come to? Have I missed anything? |
The Results of Skillful Communication
Coaching leaders communicate skillfully by balancing advocacy and inquiry. Results can be astounding. At the individual level, employees feel more valued and they are able to contribute their ideas more fully. At the team level, the promise of synergistic team problem-solving is more fully realized. At the organizational level, higher levels of performance are achieved in the bottom line. At the heart of the skills of advocacy and inquiry is the insistence on learning instead of judging. As leaders begin to focus on the behaviors of coaching leadership, they may begin to change their heart and soul and truly become a coaching leader.
This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (Summer Issue 2005, Volume 1, Issue 2).
Cynthia Roman, Ed.D, PCC, is an Executive Coach and Partner with Strategic Performance Group and a Professor of Leadership Coaching at The George Washington University. She also teaches Leadership at University of Maryland, University College. She is co-author of Leading From the Inside Out: A Coaching Model (2002, Sage Publications). Read more about Cynthia’s work at http://www.strategicperformance.net.
How do we Executive Coaches and Organizational Consultants help our clients create the cultural conditions for sustainable high performance? We need to look no further than the powerful process of coaching. We already know that coaching assists individuals to grow and develop. Imagine what would happen if the entire organization were able to tap the power, ideas, and wisdom of its own members…through people learning how to deliver and respond to feedback in powerful and healthy ways.
What is the vision of a “coaching culture”?
A coaching culture is present when…all members of the culture fearlessly engage in candid, respectful coaching conversations, unrestricted by reporting relationships, about how they can improve their working relationships and individual and collective work performance. All have learned to value and effectively use feedback as a powerful learning tool to produce personal and professional development, high-trust working relationships, continually-improving job performance, and ever-increasing customer satisfaction.
How do we know we have one? It looks like this…
The 7 Characteristics of a Coaching Culture
The Emerging Results
Organizations have seen the powerful impact on the effectiveness of Executives who retain external Executive or utilize internal Business Coaches. They are also beginning to connect-the-dots and extrapolate the incredible power of an organization whose capacity for growth and change is enhanced through the systematic practice of coaching.
Crane Consulting is actively engaged with several leading organizations that are focused on creating their own coaching culture. We see this work as the nexus of BOTH continuing external coaching with Executives AND showing their organizations how to coach one another. Rather than reduce or eliminate the role of Executive Coaches, this transformational organizational work actually provides Executive Coaches more to work with their executive clients on…how THEY become coaches for the teams they have the privilege of leading!
This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (Premier Issue 2005, Volume 1, Issue 1).
Thomas Crane, M.B.A., is an experienced OD consultant, coach, author, and speaker who specializes in working with leaders and their teams to build “feedback-rich coaching cultures” that create and sustain true “high-performance.” His book, The Heart of Coaching, is published by FTA Press, San Diego, CA. His next book, “Creating Coaching Cultures — The Next Wave” will be available in the fall of 2005. Read more about Tom’s work at www.craneconsulting.com.
