Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Mike Hohnen

Honest feedback that propels you forward!

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There are many ways to make sure that you learn and develop. Last week, I wrote about setting up a mastermind group as one way. This week, I would like you to consider coaching.

Great coaches can do much more than just influence behaviors; they will be an essential part of the leader’s learning process, providing knowledge, opinions, and judgment in critical areas. Which brings us back to the key issue of honest constructive feedback. For many managers, their coach may be the only place they get totally honest unfiltered feedback, from someone who only has their best interest in mind

To begin this process, you need to start the search inside of yourself. No amount of coaching is going to do you much good unless you are highly motivated to change, develop and or learn whatever the case may be.

Part of motivation includes being very clear with oneself that the only time any real learning and development occurs is when we are slightly outside our comfort zone.

“Executives who get the most out of coaching have a fierce desire to learn and grow.”
– HBR survey

Bottom line, do you really want to change and are you prepared to suffer a bit as you do?

If not, forget it.

Assuming that you are ready, you need to be very clear about what it is you would like to be different.

What is the challenge that you are facing? Is it a skill set your need to build? Is it behaviour that you would like to change? How will you know that the coaching has been successful?

Most good coaches work with a specific methodology and within certain fields, and the more clear you are about what it is you would like to work on, the better the chance of finding the right ‘specialist’.

Where are the good coaches?

I have still to come across a good web based ‘find a coach’ service (There are endless directories/listings but that is not much help. What is needed is a review based neutral service, a TripAdvisor for coaches if you like; if you know of one please do let me know). So as with so many things, you need to use the word of mouth method and start asking around.

Reach out to people you know and trust who might be able to recommend a good coach. Ask friends and colleagues, post on Facebook and LinkedIn. Once you start getting some names, you check them out in more details for fit.

A few good questions to ask the person referring a coach:

  • What specific things did their coach help them do?
  • Was there goal setting and were those goals clearly met?
  • What was the most valuable (or a couple of the most valuable) thing they got from the sessions?
  • Did they see a direct impact on their business because of the coach?
  • Did they genuinely enjoy working with the coach and if so why?

Eventually, you end up with maybe 3-5 possible names.

Then you schedule a first conversation with each of them. Most coaches worth their salt will give you a first conversation or shorter session for free. The reason the good coach will do that is that they too need to assure themselves that there is a good fit. (Personally, I turn down as much as 25% of the requests I get because I am unsure about the fit.)

“Good chemistry is a decisive factor in establishing a productive coaching relationship.”
– HBR survey

Online or face-to-face coaching?

Five or ten years ago it would have been a no-brainer. Coaching was almost per definition a face-to-face process. Today that is no longer the case. Face to face is still great but there are a huge amount of people out there who are benefiting enormously from coaching that is either done via SKYPE or even phone.

The perfect coach for you online/phone is in my view still much better than a so-so fit that you can meet with personally.

From a financial point of view, it is also my impression that you get more coaching for your money when you go online as the coach does not have to calculate travel time and expenses into their fee.

So what is holding you back?

Ask yourself that first crucial question. If I was reflecting on this a year from now and looking back on the year that had just passed, what would have happened this past year in order for me to feel that I had made serious progress?

And off you go…


This the seventh blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why and how to develop not just yourself but also the people around you?

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit Chain, we have a special treat for you:

For this month only, you can access The Essential Leadership Instrument course on Mike’s training library for FREE using this coupon A2A3HUVRWV. It is only available for the first 50 people so first come first serve! Sign up HERE!

How are you getting your feedback?

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In my previous posts, I have been stressing the importance of feedback and reflection. In a nutshell, you can say that without feedback, there is no learning or progress.

So if you are interested in the people around you actually growing and developing, you need to give them feedback.

But what about you, where are you getting your feedback?

If you are very lucky, you have a great boss who understands all this and who provides both coaching and mentoring for you.

Alas, for many of you, that is not the case.

What about the team then? Only in the best of cases can you rely on your followers to provide feedback in the positive, constructive way that you actually need to improve at anything. Ask your followers: “How am I doing as your boss?” Put your people in a very difficult position, unless there is an exceptionally high level of trust. The one question that sometimes produces relatively honest feedback is: “Is there anything in your view that I could do differently and that if I did would make your life/job easier?

But most of you will need to source your feedback in other ways if you want to make sure that you are continuing to learn and grow.

As one manager said me to yesterday, “It’s frightening I just realised that at some point, way back, maybe 10 – 12 years, I stopped developing and growing as a leader. Since then, I have just been in firefighting problem-solving mode, basically using the same approach day in and day out. Lots of management, very little leadership.”

Bingo. And he is not alone.

“Anyone who stops learning is old whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays strong.” — Henry Ford

So what are your options?

Start a mastermind group. This is one of the most effective ways to support your now development. Find 2-3 other people either within your own company or from other companies that are also interested in developing as leaders and set up a group. This can be a physical group or it can be in a virtual group working online. I have tried both and both work well.

In my view, a mastermind group is very similar to an action learning group (‘Mastermind’ somehow seems to be the flavour preferred at the moment). The principles are the same, you get together with a small group of people who are all committed to supporting each other’s learning. Each of you formulates a leadership challenge that you would like to work on.

The group needs to agree how often it will meet and for how long and over how many weeks/months. I have participated in many variants, 90-minute meeting every other week, half-day meeting once a month or any other variation that would work for you. What is important is that there is a regular rhythm to these meetings and that they are not canceled or postponed. If you sign up for a mastermind, you also commit to attending, come hell or high water.

It is a good idea to agree upfront on how many weeks this will run for so that the session have a natural ending. Otherwise, they tend to go stale. My preference is the 90-day model. I generally like to work in 90 day ‘years’.

Mastermind groups can be facilitated by a coach or they can run as self-organising. As a facilitator/coach, I run a number of these groups online and it works very well. Drop me a line if you are interested in learning more. New groups will start this summer.

There are many ways to run a mastermind group. This is how I do it:

  1. Agree the time. I.e we will be working here for the next 90 minutes (These meetings should not be allowed to just run on endlessly. They have a start and a finish time).
  2. Check in. Each participant takes 2-3 minutes to respond to the question: How is life and what would you like to talk about today?
  3. Depending on the time allocated, the remaining time is divided into equal chunks, and that is the time slot for each participant (If you are self-organising, the timekeeping is the most difficult and should be assigned to one person or your take turns. But it is important to avoid that the last person is left with 7 minutes).
  4. Take turns in the hot seat. Each participant starts out by describing the issue that she would like to discuss. The other participants try their damnedest TO NOT GIVE SOLUTIONS but to stay curious and ask plenty questions. A good framework to have in the back of your head as a participant is the GROW Model. As that person’s session comes to an end, ask the person in the hot seat: What are you going to do next? What is your commitment until our next session? If there is a facilitator, it can be a good idea to make a note and follow up with participants at the next meeting.
  5. Close the session by doing a quick check-out round answering the question: What was your key takeaway from today?
  6. Confirm or reconfirm the next session

It’s a simple process, but you will see that it is incredibly powerful. Not only does one learn and grow, it makes a big difference in moving difficult projects and challenges to a conclusion. Try it! You will see for yourself.

If mastermind groups are not for you, you could consider finding a coach or a mentor. I will develop ways to do that in next week’s post.

This the sixth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why and how to develop not just yourself but also the people around you?

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit Chain, we have a special treat for you:

 

What kind of manager are you? A,B or C?

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We all learn from the feedback that we receive. That is probably no surprise. Your golf stroke is hard to improve if you are blind-folded, you need to see where the ball lands in order to correct your aim. That is one aspect of feedback.

To get really good, we need more than our own observations in order to improve. We need feedback from others who are also observing what is going on. Maybe even someone who encourages us to believe that we can do better than we thought possible ourselves.

So imagine the following scenario.

We take three people. Stand them in a line next to each other and in front of each of them place a bucket at about 5 meters distance. Once they have seen the bucket, we blindfold them and hand them another bucket with 10 tennis ball in it. Their job is to throw the tennis balls and get as many of them as possible into the bucket.

Each person is assigned a manager. And each manager has been instructed to behave (manage) slightly different.

On team A, the manager makes no comments as each ball is thrown but will just count how many balls are in when the session is over and will give the team member a performance review based on that. In this case, the only feedback the team member gets is the sound of the tennis ball hitting or not hitting the bucket.

On Team B, the manager has been instructed to comment on each throw and if it is not in the bucket then point out what the problem is. “Too far, too short, again! way to the side etc.” If the ball is in, the comment is just: “It’s in.”

On Team C, the manager has been instructed to give more detailed feedback on each ball combined with encouragement. “That was just 10 cm too far left but otherwise great shot, try again. Take a breath and focus etc.”

You can try this experiment for yourself. I often do it with larger groups of managers. But you probably do not need to perform the experiment to guess who of the three consistently gets most tennis balls in the bucket at the end of the day.

It’s pretty elementary my dear Watson, as Sherlock would say, but despite that, if you ask employees or middle managers, they are going to tell you that type A or B managers are much more common in their life than type C managers are. From a performance point of view, that is problematic. If we don’t have a positive constructive feedback culture, we will be underperforming, it’s that simple.

So the big question you need to ask yourself is what kind of manager are you?

Take it a step further. Imagine we added a four team, Team D. And here the instruction to the manager is. No matter what happens, just praise and be positive. But no detailed feedback. So this would sound like “Yes! Well done. Wonderfull. Wow!” and so on…

Now I am not suggesting that many managers are giving this kind of useless feedback to their people. No, the problem here is that this is the kind of feedback many managers RECIEVE from their team members. If team members do not feel 100% confident that it is safe to give Type C constructive feedback to their boss then they either say nothing or use some variants of the D style.

How effective is that going to make you? How are you going to know much about how well you are performing as their manager?

So as Ed Catmull writes in his lovely book Creative Inc, “In the beginning, all our movies suck but because we have a culture of candour, we can improve them and make them fantastic.”

You have been reading the fifth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you?

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit chain, we have a special treat for you:

For this month only, you can download Mike’s book Best! No need to be cheap if … for FREE using this coupon JLXW8P9QSE. It is only available for the first 50 people so first come first serve.

Download the book here!

No feedback, no learning. It’s that simple.

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Imagine you were deprived of all feedback, no matter what you did you, had no way of knowing the outcome of your actions.

Terrifying, yes?

Without feedback, we have no possible way of improving what we do. We are flying blind. Everything we actually know how to do, we have learnt in incremental steps. Only by paying attention to the feedback have we been able to get better.

So as a leader, there are two implications to this that you need to be thinking about. And they concern you and ‘them’.

If you find yourself thinking from time to time that this or that person reporting to you could do better (and I know you have these kinds of thought from time to time because in my position as a coach and confidante of many leaders I hear this regularly), then you need to ask yourself how good a job am I doing in giving this person helpful feedback?

Oh come on, Mike…

I can sense you thinking… if you just knew how many times I have told that person that this or that is not working.

You may have told them. But is telling skillful feedback?

Not really, telling is probably the least effective tool at your disposal, yet it seems to be a tool of choice for many managers.

Sir John Whitmore, the creator of the GROW Model has a lovely video where he coaches a beginner in golf.

Notice that all he does is ask questions. What would you like to accomplish? How did that feel? What do you notice about your body? What would you like to do now? And slowly but surely, the power of the questions helps the novice golfer improve considerably in just a few minutes. Watch for yourself here.

What I find even more striking is the comparison with the other novice golfer who is being ‘told’ what to do by the more traditional instructor. The more he gets told, the stiffer and more awkward he becomes.

What is that telling us?

If you would like to see continuous improvement around you, you need to work on your feedback skills. If you feel team members could do better, that is valuable feedback to you. It tells you more about you than it does about them.

Next week, we will explore the other situation that is possibly even more terrifying than finding yourself in a black hole with no feedback. It is the situation where all the feedback you are getting is more or less fake or misleading, and that I am afraid is not as uncommon as you might think.

BestYou have been reading the fourth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you?

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit chain, we have a special treat for you:

For this month only, you can download Mike’s book Best! No need to be cheap if … for FREE using this coupon JLXW8P9QSE. It is only available for the first 50 people so first come first serve.

Download the book here!

Some experiences provide more learning than others

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Challenge

In our series on cultivating learning and development in yourself and others, we examined how we learn from experiences last week. If you missed it, you will find it here.

The next natural question to explore is: Then do we learn equally well from any type of experience?

Obviously not. Taking the bus to work each day is normally not a great learning experience, nor is doing the weekend shopping with the family, unless of course there is a challenge involved.

When something becomes challenging, we have a great opportunity to learn. And often we quickly solve the challenge and then pat ourselves on the back: “Well done, you are making progress.” Or we pat our associates on the back and tell them: “Well done! Nice job. I see you are learning a thing or two.” The learning that takes place here we sometimes also refer to as external. We are learning something about how the world outside ourselves actually works. This learning is often also context specific. Under these circumstances, this is what one needs to do. But when the circumstances change, as they have a tendency to do, then that learning is not always so useful.

So quite frankly these are not the challenges that maximise our learning. True learning begins when we hit serious resistance. Things are not working out the way we hoped. Maybe we are even experiencing serious setbacks and even failures. These situations provide some really interesting learning because of our lack of success.

These are the situation where we learn about ourselves more than anything else. And the learning does not arise for the external event but from how we choose to respond to whatever is going on.

This is where we learn:

  • To resist the temptation to blame others for the situation
  • We see how stepping back from the situation helps us gain perspective and as a result, we learn how we are possibly contributing to the mess that is being created.
  • How to develop resilience in moving beyond the unpleasantness or pain of the experience and commit ourselves to do something about our personal limitations
  • In short, this is where we learn how to grow.

Challenges that start out as failures and setbacks thus provide som of the richest learning environments that we can possibly encounter. Most of us get this on a personal level. “Makes sense. I screwed up on that assignment but I learnt a lot.”

But do we apply the same tolerance and understanding attitude toward the members of our team who screw up from time to time? Do we see that as a valuable part of their learning process or do we see them as a problem?

Maybe our learning should start there…

BestThis blog post is the third in a series of blog posts where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you?

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit chain, we have a special treat for you:

For this month only, you can download Mike’s book Best! No need to be cheap if … for FREE using this coupon JLXW8P9QSE. It is only available for the first 50 people so first come first serve.

Download the book here!

Converting knowledge to wisdom

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SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

“What use is it to have a bellyful of meat if one can not digest it? If it cannot transform us, if it cannot improve us and fortify us?”

Wrote Michel de Montaigne back in the 16th century in one of his many rants against a French school system that “requires you to just parrot back everything you are told”.

So how do we actually convert knowledge into leadership wisdom?

The key word here is experience, experience not as in breathtaking customer experience, but learning from experience.

Because we all agree that we learn from our experiences, or do we?

If you have ever made the same mistake twice, you will have to agree that we do not consistently learn from our experiences.

When then do you learn from your experiences?

Elementary my dear Watson: Whenever you take the time to reflect on your experiences, you make deeper learning possible.

Reflection can be a personal reflection, or it can tackle the form of a team reflection.

Our reflection can be a surface reflection:

  • What happened?
  • Which actions were taken?
  • What were the consequences that we observed?

Or we can choose to do a deep reflection:

  • What did I learn about myself through this experience?
  • What are we learning about how this team functions and handles conflict through this experience?
  • What broader issue can we see arising from this experience?

Surface reflection helps us understand past actions and behaviours. Deep reflection helps us examine underlying beliefs and assumptions.

Both are important. But even more important is to start developing a practice of reflection. Make a habit of having a regular end of day/week or month reflection session with your team. Develop a personal particle of reflection. The best way to do that is to start a journal and spend just 10-15 minutes a day noting down your answers to:

  • What has been my focus today?
  • What have I observed?
  • What am I learning?
  • What will I focus on tomorrow?

Now your are on track to convert knowledge into wisdom.

BestThis blog post is the second in a series of blog posts where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you?

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit Chain, we have a special treat for you:

For this month only, you can download Mike’s book Best! No need to be cheap if … for FREE using this coupon JLXW8P9QSE. It is only available for the first 50 people so first come first serve.

Download the book here!

Why developing others should be high on your agenda

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Learning

When implementing the philosophy of the Service Profit Chain, we often look at three core parts:

And all three are driven by the continuous development of your team.

Employee engagement is closely linked to job content. What do I get to do at work (the other part of a job is job context which is all about the condition you get to do your work in)? A key component of job content is the perception that I am growing and developing myself.

Any book or article you read about creating a customer-centric approach inevitably will talk about value. If we are not providing value, we do not have a business, not for very long at least. But values in a service business is a result of employee competencies. This has to do with the notion that services are asymmetric in their nature. What the client buys is not what we sell. The client has a need and we translate that need into our product. If you are going to do that better than your competition, it requires competent people.

And finally, customer loyalty is developed through skillful interaction that produces an emotional connection with our customers. Delivering the basic product according to specifications just ensures satisfaction; getting to loyalty requires so much more.

So you can do what many organisations do, hope that they will improve as they go.

Or you can do what the top performing service companies do, you can develop a culture of continuous improvement and learning that drives everything that you do.

If you are wondering what works best, let me help you…

Think about any type of human endeavour where we can observe that high performance is vastly different from just ordinary performance. Playing the piano, ballet dancing or competitive swimming just to name a few. In virtually every arena in which we observe excellence, we also see a commitment to continuous improvement…

We also know from research on learning that if you are good at something and you just do what you are good at every day, your performance will gradually deteriorate and get worse. Don’t believe me? So if you have had a drivers licence for more than 5 years, do you think you could pass a driver’s test tomorrow? See what I mean?

Only if you continue to practice can you maintain or even improve your performance.

So how do we build continuous perfomance into our day to day work? What can we do to make sure that our people are always learning and developing? That is going to be the theme for my next series of blog posts.

BestDuring the months of April, May, and June, we will be focusing human development. Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? And what are ways to do it when we already have plenty on our plate as it is?

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you would like the full concept served up in one go, you will find Mike’s book Best! No need to be cheap if… HERE.

For this month only, you can download the book for FREE using this coupon JLXW8P9QSE. It is only available for the first 50 people so first come first serve. Download the book now!

What makes a lousy job a great job

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How to make a lousy job a great job

First, we need to understand that there are two parts to any job. There is the context and the content. Context is all about the environment in which I get to do my job. Content is all about the job that I get to do.

So context would be work conditions, schedule, uniform, tools, leave, canteen and all that god stuff.

Content, on the other hand, is all about autonomy, variation, recognition, feedback, sense of belonging, meaning making.

Context is what drives basic satisfaction – it is what people feel they need to have. Content, on the other hand is the big driver of employee  engagement, and it is more in the category nice to have. This is all well documented in research after research.

So the big challenge in the service industry is that many jobs don’t provide much content. Dishwashing, cleaning, housekeeping, laundry service and similar position all fall in this category.

The work is hard, the pay is low and there is not much recognition from the rest of the organisation for doing a good job.

So how do we provide job content for these positions?

Here is a clue:

“The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.” – Jim Collins

The secret here is to create and environment where we focus on enabling the social connections. If we can help these teams form good relationships with each other: camaraderie, having fun together, seeing themselves as comrades in adversity then that contributes enormously to job content.

Some of the best housekeeping managers I know invest considerable time in proving opportunities for their teams to spend social time together, and they have the great-place-to-work score to prove that it is well worth the time and resources.

This blog post is part of a series of answers to frequent questions that I get around the concept of the Service Profit Chain. In future posts, we will continue to explore other key points. If you would like the full concept served up in one go, you will find Mike’s book “Best! No need to be cheap if…” HERE.