Coaching for personal growth, change and development
In my previous blog post, I mentioned that I have decided to switch format in 2018 and try my hand at vlogging. Here is the first video in a new series about learning developing and getting better at stuff.
Next week, we will explore how your mindset contributes to the knowing-doing gap for many of us.
Seriously.
Let’s first deconstruct how do you know what to work on in order to ensure that you and your team are developing?
One way to get a grip on that would be to ask yourself: “If I was doing this reflection one year from now and looking back on the year that has passed, what should have happened during this past year in order for me to feel that I and/or my team have made serious progress?”
Because as Peter Drucker famously said: “What managers manage is change. The rest is admin.”
So that is the project.
That is what needs to change in order for you and/or your team to feel that you are actually developing. And as I have written about earlier, development is not only important because it means that we are making progress, it’s a key to our well-being, motivation and job satisfaction
But a whole year’s worth of change is a lot of change. So what typically happens is that we undershoot the runaway and don’t get to where we wanted to be. It was a nice dream.
We fall short of our own expectations.
The problem is not that we are being over ambitious, we need to be ambitious. The problem is that we are trying to chew off too big a bite.
So now ask yourself the same question but reframe it to just 3 months, the magic 90 days: If I was doing this reflection 90 days from now and looking back at these 90 days that have passed, what should have happened during these 90 days in order for me to feel that I and/or my team have made serious progress?
This is a horizon that is within our reach, we can almost see the contours of the finish line as we get going. It’s not that far, we can do this. We have set a goal that we can see ourselves completing within a reasonable time frame.
So personally I have given up yearly goals and targets. I have a long-term plan, which is more a direction that I am heading than it is a measurable goal. With that direction in mind, I work in 90-day sprints. It gives me a completely different sense of accomplishment.
Try it out for yourself.
And if you need more resources to get you going, here are my favourite tools:
Best self 90-day planner – This is at the core of my productivity.
If you would like to study this 12-week-year principle more in depth, here is a great book that originally inspired me:
The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months
This the ninth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? If you would like to read other posts in this series, don’t forget to check out Mike’s blog.
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’.
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:
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
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?
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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:
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:
In my previous post, we looked at two very different ways of seeing the world of work: Transactional and Transformational.
So the next obvious question is why don’t more companies teach their leaders to be transformational?
Organizations have grown skilled at developing individual leader competencies, but have mostly ignored the challenge of transforming their leader’s mind-set from one level to the next. Today’s horizontal development within a mind-set must give way to the vertical development of bigger minds.
___John McGuire and Gary Rhodes Transforming Your Leadership Culture, Center for Creative Leadership
The challenge is that being transformational is not a skill. It’s a way of making sense of the world.
So it is not a question of adding more skills and competencies. What is needed is a different way of thinking.
As human beings and as leaders, we can develop ourselves fundamentally in two different ways. We can add skills and tools to our toolbox, if you like. We often call that horizontal development.
The other dimension of our development is vertical. It is about our growth as human beings. We go through different stages of growth from when we’re born; and these stages are, first and foremost, about how we understand the world. How do we make sense of what is happening around us?
These vertical developmental stages are very apparent when we observe small children, in whom each stage happens over a relatively short time. So, we easily notice the difference.
With grown-ups, it’s slower, and at some points, most of us stagnate at some levels.
It was the Swiss child psychologist, Jean Piaget, who was the pioneer in this area. His work has since been followed-up by researchers such as Jane Loevinger and later Susanne Cook-Greuter.
More recently, Bill Tolbert and Robert Kegan at Harvard, have both worked on grown-up vertical development and what that means in a leadership context.
Kegan describes that grown-ups typically have the possibility to develop in three overall stages. The first one he calls ‘dependent and conform,’ the next one ‘independent and achievement-oriented,’ and the last one is ‘interdependent and collaborative’.
Depending on which of these stages of development you find yourself in as a leader, your approach to a number of classical leadership competencies will be very different.
If we take some of the typical issues that we identify as leadership competencies, they could be strategic thinking, change management, conflict management, and leadership across boundaries.
And depending on where one is in one’s development, one will approach each of these very differently. In the figure below, you will see illustrations of the three developmental levels and how they are handled at each level.
| Competencies |
Dependent – conformer |
Independent – achiever |
Interdependent – collaborator |
| Strategic thinking | – Short-term view – Tactical tasks – Black and white – Either/or – High need for certainty |
– Medium-term view – Sees is parts of the system – Sees is some patterns and connections |
– Long-term view – Sees many shades of grey – Sees many patterns and connections – Accepts uncertainty as the norm |
| Leading change | – Change to come from above – Needs and trusts authority to give direction – High need for certainty |
– Has own views about best change – Sees the mechanics of change needed – Success is achievement of individuals and teams |
– Change is a collaborative process – Comfortable with ambiguity – Success means realisation of a shared vision |
| Conflict | – To be avoided – Authority is in charge – Feels torn by conflict |
– Worked out behind closed doors – Produces winners and losers |
– Healthy view together more viewers – Something to be encouraged – Increases learning and performance |
| Leading across boundaries | – Trusts analysing people you know – Them versus us – Distrust of outsider |
– Able to think from others’ perspectives – Horse trades for favours – Focused on success of own self |
– Sees the world through others’ perspectives to understand more – Shares knowledge across boundaries – Works in partnership with other functions |
If you look more closely at the matrix, you will also see that this is where we find the key as to why we are not seeing as much transformational leadership as we maybe would like.
It’s only at the third stage of development in Kegan’s model, the one that is called ‘collaborative and interdependent,’ that the leader has a mindset that enables a transformative approach — the short explanation as to why this is so, is that, in the two earlier stages, the leader is often more concerned with himself.
The first stage, the dependent stage, is all about fitting in and conforming to the prevailing culture.
In the next phase, independent and achievement-oriented, it’s all about the leader being so oriented towards his own achievement that he risks falling into the trap that it’s all about his project: Better results, market share, new products, or whatever. The leader really wants to succeed personally, often in order to further his career or qualify for a bonus, or whatever. But, because it then becomes all about him and his project, he often doesn’t manage to get everybody else with him. (Followers will engage around ‘our’ project but will tend to disengage if it is just about ‘your’ project.)
It’s only when you, as a human being, have developed to the stage where you are more inclusive and collaborative, have a higher tolerance of others, and are not as focused on yourself – and your personal success – that you actually are capable of inspiring everybody else around you to contribute to what everyone will see as ‘our’ project.
