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Intelligent
Coaching™: Unleashing Human Potential
Written by: Brett Richards, M.A.
President, Connective Intelligence Inc.
In the December 2003 issue of The Journal for Quality and Participation
I explored the need for organizations to Rethink…Or Else! Increasingly,
there is a need for people, teams and whole organizations to change
the way they think, if they are to adapt successfully to an increasingly
complex world. In my experience working with leaders throughout
North America, I have found that the biggest hurdle when exploring
the topic of coaching is overcoming pre-disposed notions (assumptions)
about what coaching is. More than ever before, leaders need to rethink
the discipline of coaching because, if it is done well, it has the
power to unleash tremendous amounts of human potential, while increasing
motivation and sustaining high performance.
There are a number of models and theoretical orientations surrounding
the discipline of coaching. Frederic Hudson’s, The Handbook of Coaching,
provides an outstanding resource that captures the many faces of
coaching. Although there are a number of definitions and types of
coaching, most practitioners would probably agree that the over-arching
objective of coaching is to improve performance by unleashing human
potential.
Interestingly, there is a wide gap between what practitioners believe
coaching to be and what many managers think about coaching. In my
experience, most managers struggle with the critical link between
“soft” human growth and development and “hard” bottom line performance
improvement. Understandably, from the manager’s point of view, the
whole notion of coaching seems somewhat paradoxical. For example,
how can something that takes longer, speed things up? To unravel
the mystery of such a paradox requires a fundamental shift in thinking
and a willingness to explore the limitations of our own assumptions,
and world-view. First, let’s review the context in which the process
of coaching must operate. Understanding the context is important
because it provides insights about why many managers either fail
to use or resist the coach approach.
The Tension Between Speed, Learning and Innovation
What is the cost of speed? We hear over and over again that the
lack of speed will undermine organizational competitiveness. In
this era of 30-second sound bytes, few would dispute that speed
is crucial to organizational survival. Simply stated, organizations
need to innovate new ideas, products and services faster than their
competitors, or else…! But what underlies successful adaptation
and innovation?
The Organizational
Response Cycle depicts an abbreviated model outlining the core activities,
which underlie the achievement of desired performance results. As
most of us have experienced first hand, either directly or indirectly,
organizations are being forced to adapt to increasingly more complex
and competitive global market pressures. To paraphrase Thomas Friedman
in his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, globalization continues
to exert pressure on organizations to produce faster, cheaper and
customized products and services. Such pressures force organizations
to decentralize decision-making and de-concentrate power in ways
to allow more people to share knowledge, experiment and innovate
faster.
To be sure, successful adaptation requires innovation: the ability
to turn new ideas into value-added products and services. The concept
of ”value-added” is important because it means that an innovation
must either increase the bottom line, or increase explicit knowledge
assets, which help the organization to better respond to current
and emergent competitive pressures. Inherent to the whole innovation
process, then, is the core activity of learning. Is it possible
to innovate without learning?
Coaching operates within the core activity of learning and serves
as a fundamental process to speed up and make more effective individual,
team and organizational learning. Coaching, in fact, is also integral
to innovation as it helps to balance the tension that exists between
the organization’s need for speed and the way people need to learn
and sustain high performance.
Sustaining High Performance
In order to more fully explore the value and the purpose of coaching,
it may be helpful to address two common myths (there are more) about
coaching that are maintained within the minds of many managers.
Suffice to say, myths work within our sub-conscious minds subtly
feeding forward predisposed notions, values and beliefs about how
the world works, or should be. Myths can be maladaptive if they
restrict our ability to learn beyond them.
Myth #1: Coaching is about touchy-feely personal development, not
bottom-line performance.
Myth #2: Coaching is too time consuming.
Rethinking Myth #1: Coaching is about touchy-feely personal
development, not bottom line performance.
Most managers would agree that one of their key accountabilities
is improved performance. Additionally, they would concur that it’s
becoming harder to surpass, even sustain, yearly performance targets.
I frequently ask managers if they are managing for the short-term
or the long-term? Continuous time pressures move a manager’s thinking
and behavior toward the short-term end of the continuum. For example,
managers will often express that they spend far too much time “putting
out fires” and not enough time developing their people or thinking
strategically. Coaching is both a process and a tool, which represents
a style of approach and a values set that fundamentally believes
in the power of human potential. Coaching is in fact about personal
development, and it is undeniably linked to bottom line performance
and results.
A significant amount of research shows that managers who use styles
that positively affect the climate of an organization consistently
achieve better results than those that don’t. To cite one example
found in the Harvard Business Review, March-April 2000, the late
David McClelland, a noted Harvard University psychologist, found
that the divisions of a large food and beverage company led by managers
who scored high on emotional intelligence, “outperformed yearly
revenue targets by 15% to 20%”. Conversely, those managers who scored
low on emotional intelligence, “rarely rated as outstanding in their
annual performance reviews, and their divisions under-performed
by an average of almost 20%”.
On many occasions, I have heard employees describe their managers
as highly intelligent and skillful, however, their people management
skills are so poor that they actually undermine the performance
of their employees. Emotional intelligence is defined by Dr. Reuven
Bar-On, author of the first scientifically validated measurement
of emotional intelligence (EQi), as an array of non-cognitive capabilities,
competencies, and skills that influence one’s ability to succeed
in coping with environmental demands and pressures. Significantly,
research has shown that the organizational climate created by the
leader accounts for approximately 34% of bottom line performance
results. The coaching style of management requires a robust array
of emotional intelligence competencies such as empathy, self-awareness
and social responsibility, to name a few. Not surprisingly, managers
who embrace the coach approach create a positive impact on the climate
and subsequently improve bottom line performance.
More transactional, task-focused styles of management can certainly
drive, if not coerce, people to produce results, but for how long
and at what cost? Managers need to shift their thinking away from
achieving short-term goals to creating the conditions for sustained
organizational performance.
David Whitaker, a colleague of mine, and an outstanding coach in
the U.K., introduced me to a very simple, yet powerful model to
help capture the essential drivers of sustained performance. As
we’ve already shown, learning is fundamental to innovation and successful
adaptation. If managers create a climate that is primarily performance
or “achievement” driven, without “learning” or a sense of “enjoyment”,
then performance will decline over the long-term because people’s
sense of personal satisfaction and motivation will decline. On the
flip side, learning without results, or too much enjoyment without
the accountability to achieve real results will also undermine long-term
performance.
Rethinking
Myth #2: Coaching is too time consuming
In reality, effective coaching can occur any time, anywhere and
some of the best coaching interactions are quite brief. To magnify
this point in workshops, I conduct an exercise called “silent coaching”.
I ask workshop participants ranging in size from 8 to 130 participants,
to reflect on a current business challenge in which they could use
some coaching. Within a ten minute timeframe, I ask them approximately
ten questions which help to develop focus, clarity, exploration
and commitment. Interestingly, I have no idea what their coaching
challenges are, and yet within just ten minutes an average of 95%
of the participants feel re-energized and ready to address the challenge
with new tangible, options they had never thought of before. Two
points to consider: 1) I did not have to be an “expert” in their
line of work, nor did I have to know any of the specific details
surrounding their workplace challenge, and 2) I created a positive
climate that encouraged them to think for themselves. Clearly, they
will be more committed and accountable to addressing their challenges
because they came up with the solutions themselves, I did not tell
them what to do. Effective coaching is a powerful tool to inspire
personal learning, increase energy and motivation and increase ownership
and accountability. And it does not have to take too long!
The Tell/Do Trap
Traditional thinking would have us believe that to improve performance
or to make someone better we must tell them, or show them what it
is they are doing incorrectly so that they will not repeat the same
mistake. Within a short-term context and frame of mind, this approach
can certainly be effective; however, again, if we look at the sustainability
of performance model, over-use of this style of approach will undermine
efforts to achieve long-term performance.
No doubt, there is a pervasive climate in many organizations of
time urgency. Rushing to and through meetings, rushing through halls,
rushing through lunch, rushing to meet deadlines of all kinds. Under
such conditions, the lure for managers to just tell their people
what to do can be very strong: “Don’t ask questions, just trust
me on this”, or “Don’t think about it, just do it now and ask questions
later”!
Ironically, the intention for most managers is to help their people
get better because in many respects it’s in their interest to do
so. More effective people means higher performance, and presumably,
less handholding, freeing the manager up to do more strategic things.
The intention to “help” is sound, but the process to carry out the
intention is flawed. What in fact happens to many managers, who
fall into the Tell/Do trap, is that they inadvertently create an
over-reliance on their own skills and abilities, which precisely
undermines their intention to off-load more work.
In effect, managers create an easy way out for their employees,
who are also a part of the same climate of time urgency. It becomes
easier and faster for the employee to simply ask the manager for
advice. Also, they learn to wait for the Tell/Do manager to provide
instruction because that is the usual dynamic experienced with their
manager. What emerges is a vicious cycle of telling and doing, where
the employees over-rely on their manager’s know-how and are not
compelled to think for themselves. The vicious cycle undermines
the employee’s ability to solve future problems because real learning
has not taken place, and so the cycle continues. To conclude, managers
who believe coaching is too time consuming may need to rethink their
concept of time because a) an effective coaching interaction need
not take more than a few minutes and b) time is not saved by quickly
telling, if is at the expense of true learning.
Intelligent Coaching: Aligning Brains and Emotions
The process of unleashing human potential involves an understanding
of how people learn and think, as well as an understanding of what
motivates them to achieve sustained high performance. Managing and
leading involve both conceptual and emotional activities. Effective
managers must have the capacity to conceptualize and think well,
in order to navigate successfully through ever increasing rates
of change and complexity.
However, the landscape of organizational life is also emotionally
charged. Continuous change and transition produces a whole array
of personal feelings from excitement through to insecurity. Therefore,
effective managers must also have strong emotional competencies
to navigate their own feelings as they personally struggle with
change, and, perhaps more importantly, to effectively address the
emotional energy of those they lead.
An “intelligent coach” understands and develops the necessary conceptual
and emotional competencies needed to engage people in such a way
as to unleash their full potential. At the root of intelligent coaching
lies a passionate focus on performance improvement. Sustained, long-term
performance can only be achieved when there is an intention to think
long term. Intelligent coaching develops an organizational climate
that is rich in learning, enjoyment and achievement through the
fundamental belief in the unlimited potential that lies waiting
within the hearts and minds of people.
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About
Brett Richards:
Brett is the President of Connective Intelligence. He is a performance
coach and a certified North American Effective Intelligence™ Master Trainer.
He is dedicated to helping people, teams and organizations realize
their full potential, by helping them to transform their brainpower
and intelligence into more effective action.
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