By Patrick
Reilly
We have found business focused coaching integrated with
a balanced scorecard and tools for communicating commitment
and resiliency training to be instrumental in facilitating
deep, sustained coaching work. These tools used together define the context, provide an organizing structure,
develop a process for meeting objectives and create a
map to help achieve objectives. There is a synergy that occurs
when the four tools work together, creating opportunities
that do not exist when applied individually. In this paper I will
provide background on the coaching toolset called Business Systems Coaching, describe a brief
coaching case and then examine how I would have worked differently with the toolset above to achieve higher quality
results. At the time the case described occurred, I did
not use the tools of Business Systems Coaching in my practice.
Business Focused
Coaching
The marketplace is glutted with a variety of coaching
tools and experts. After conducting a year of extensive
research, we discovered the best coaching approach for
business people is one Mike Jay of B-Coach Systems developed.
So what is it about the coaching approach that Mike Jay
developed that sets it apart from other approaches to
coaching.
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The coaching is never initiated until a comprehensive
scope of work is completed to determine if coaching
is the best solution to the problem |
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The coaching is based on data gathered
in a variety of ways: interviews, organizational
assessments and individual assessments. The person
to be coached gets input on how others see them
and how they compare to others in terms of their
strengths, preferences, learning styles, and ability
to change. |
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There is a clear, distinct methodology
that the people being coached can follow so they
know the activities they will be participating in,
when they will occur and how they link to their
goals. |
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Performance and development improvements
are linked to business improvements in customer,
process and financial deliverables. |
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There is a sponsor who directly participates
in the coaching process with the person being coached.
He or she has a stake in the outcomes and their
importance to the individual and the organization. |
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The sessions are short in duration,
yet frequent. They fit better with the schedule of
today?s businessperson. |
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The person being coached has an extensive
support network that is part of his/her process.
Every fourth session includes the participation
of their sponsor, who helps in goal setting and
performance reviews. The people being coached choose
a select group of people to provide them with regular
feedback on their progress towards the achievement
of their selected goals and targets. |
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The coaching focuses on improvements
to the individual and the organization. |
Balanced Scorecard
This means engaging key stakeholders in designing an approach
that assesses:
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The financial aspects and implications
of the change process |
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Needed process and/or operational changes |
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Customer or stakeholder implications |
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A rigorous exploration of the human
resources or innovation quadrant of the balanced
scorecard. |
We have found the approach developed by Michael Selby of
Scorecard Partners to be most applicable to the coaching
process. Why? It is simple. Selby?s processes require
leaders to focus on identifying and tracking leading, not
lagging, indicators and rely on organizational strengths
and opportunities. His approach also requires users to
find opportunities squandered often in the past by not
deploying assets from the HR quadrant.
Tools
for Communicating Commitment
Recently, we started working with a communication toolset
developed by Robert Keegan and Lisa Lahey (How the Way
We Talk Can Change the Way We Work) that makes a difference
by ensuring commitment and getting change on issues that
resist changing. The key insight of Keegan and Lahey is
neither about managing resistance nor about getting buy-in.
Their key insight is about gaining insight about our inclination(s)
not to change and in defining an effective approach to
unearth and move forward those things we keep from changing
despite our wishes to the contrary.
This critical aspect of change has been largely ignored
in the past and creates tremendous opportunity for leaders
to uncover blind spots and as a result discover un-thought-of
strategies and tactics to move ahead successfully.
Building Motivation
and Engagement Through Resiliency Training
Reivich and Shatte in their book The Resilience Factor
have done what business people needed with the concepts of
emotional intelligence: they brought them to action.
Resilience is defined as emotional intelligence in action.
Resilience is comprised of seven key abilities: emotion
regulation, impulse control, empathy, optimism, causal
analysis, self-efficacy and reaching out. Our strengths in
each of these areas can be measured through assessment.
Given that adaptability will be key to future business
success we believe that they have discovered the true
?second click? of adaptability and a proven method for
launching it in the real world.
Case
Don is the leader of a large operations organization
undergoing major transformation: it?s market and customers
had shifted dramatically. Don had already initiated a
number of major initiatives to bring new focus and energy
to his organization but recognized that quality leadership that
modeled key behaviors, clarified and communicated direction and held people accountable was essential for a new level
of success. We agreed to work with Don and his leadership team to build the necessary leadership competencies.
Our design was simple but contained a number of key components.
One key piece included the leadership team sharing responsibilities
across the entire organization and working as a board
of directors to manage outcomes in all key business areas.
Providing coaching skills and coaching skills training
to all the leaders became a core part of our program.
We provided coaching to both vice presidents and the team
of directors. One major surprise occurred after we had
developed a coaching skills training, designed a tool
to measure leadership effectiveness based on their specific requirements and launched our program: the directors, to
everyone?s surprise, decided that instead of being coached
by external or internal coaches with HR orientations they
wanted to coach each other in pairs. The process worked
fabulously and continues to flourish today.
One of my responsibilities was to coach Don. Don is a
very capable and engaging leader with significant
integrity. He was also known as the intimidator. In an
organization with a long history of laissez-faire
management and no accountability, he was getting results
and meeting business objectives by holding people
accountable for the first time. He was literally the first
leader of the organization to terminate people for lack of
performance. He recognized that the most important
leadership modeling would come from him. One behavior that
we agreed to focus on was his ?flashing.? Under pressure
or upon receiving negative information, he had a tendency
to ?flash? or to quickly and publicly display his anger or
upset with the information. He knew this tendency caused
people to shut down and to not disclose difficult,
critical business information.
After about six months we had made tremendous progress
on the ability of the team to function as a board of
directors and on their leadership capabilities. The
finance team was in the midst of their monthly report when
the team leader casually disclosed that they were short
$15 million dollars. (Please note that the company is a
large multi-national but $15 million is still $15
million.) Don was sitting directly across from me. He
?flashed.? As he heard the news, his arms gripped the
table and his forearms bulged. The veins on his neck and
head bulged and his face turned bright crimson. The woman
sitting next to him put her arm on his in a calming way
and looked as if she feared if would have a stroke in the
room. The entire room quieted and we all politely asked a
few questions and went about our business.
At the end of the meeting I asked Don if he had a few
minutes. He gave me a look that I will never forget. It
was a
combination of you?ve got to be kidding and reluctant
acceptance. Basically, I was terrified. I figured I was
about to get fired for doing my job. We agreed to meet in
five minutes.
The next 30 minutes were very uncomfortable for both of
us. I feared getting fired for confronting the "flasher."
He squirmed as he recognized that he was at a personal
point of inflection. With the help of Don's personal
integrity and with the support of our agreements for
coaching success, he acknowledged the consequence of his
behavior and its impact
and determined to continue to work on better managing
himself. And he did for the next six months of our engagement.
Despite the difficulty and discomfort, he got hold of
himself and struggled to change behavior that was counter-productive.
What Was Effective
in the Coaching With Don
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Developing value for leadership and
its impact on business effectiveness |
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Making and keeping agreements |
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Elevating significance of values
(like keeping your word not to get angry in front
of the team) and their impact on leadership effectiveness |
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Measuring leadership effectiveness |
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Changing direction and having the
primary focus of coaching be peer to peer |
What I Would Have Done
Differently With the Business Systems Coaching Tools
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More
rigorous scope of work to articulate organizational
and system impacts. Over time we discovered
how limiting the HR organization was in effecting
change. By engaging in a more rigorous scope of
work process around the coaching for Don and his
staff, we could have seen more clearly how negative
the HR organization was going to be and how that
would slow down our process. Their role was to
keep the status quo and they tried to do just
that. They did not think the coaching was a good
idea. |
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Gotten
more active participation from sponsor for VP.
We knew that this would be important, attempted to
get sponsorship oversight but ultimately were
unsuccessful. This is a tricky issue because to
push too hard here can cause you to lose. Don?s
boss was supportive, came to a number of events
and took the position that Don was a mature,
senior manager being paid to make quality
decisions. What was missing was the real
opportunity to link Don?s goals with those of the
larger organization through his sponsor's direct
participation. That would have helped us with the
HR impediments and with drag that other
organizations, who needed to know in great detail
(they were
competitive with us) what we were doing, imposed. |
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Had
a more clear, consistent strategic method in place
to guide coaching. The business systems
coaching approach is grounded in a strategic
methodology that is based on the cornerstones of
solid business planning and requires looking in
all corners to develop a comprehensive plan. In
Don's case, if we had used this strategic approach
we would have had more solid anchors to address
current behaviors and their impact on the future
and we would have been able to keep his obsession
with too much detail while planning in front of
him as a limiting action. |
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More
frequent, briefer coaching sessions.
Like most managers, Don got busy with the day
to day activities of running his organization.
Most days had meetings from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. In
this flurry of activity, focus on what he needed
to do personally often got lost and coaching appointments
were cancelled. Shorter, more frequent sessions
would have helped keep his attention on what he
needed to do and would have enabled him to become
more proactive. |
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Involved
network of peers. Don's organization
had a long history of people not quite telling the
truth to avoid being punished. The $15 million
example says it all. If Don had established a
small cadre of folks to inform his coaching
process, our work would have been more laser-like
and time-efficient. The choice of the directors to
opt for peer coaching validated the significance
of peer coaching in the organization. In the
absence of formal requests to provide constructive
feedback, organizational members observe but most
often don't say. If we do not know how we are
doing, we cannot make the appropriate adjustments. |
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Used
communication tools for commitment and resiliency
and scorecard for a clearer and more articulate
framework and map for guiding our trip across
the landscape. A map for moving forward
would have helped us keep focused. In this case,
we could have achieved greater clarity on the
organizational issues that kept this monolithic
organization from changing despite its intentions.
Also, naming and then focusing on emotional regulation
and impulse control (these were the two resiliency
factors most problematic for Don) would have greatly
supported our efforts. In a managerial world that
chooses only the most important activities, we
could have focused more rigorously on the resilience
areas of greatest need. |
Conclusion
The world still improves in a pendulum-like
manner:back and forth. It?s often three steps forward
and two steps back. It seems to be the nature of
progress. As we made significant improvements over time
in cutting costs, improving processes, improving service
to customers, and reducing cycle time, we began to
discover other places where we could improve how we do business. The two primary areas for
improved leverage today are in Human Resources or Innovation,
the lower right hand quadrant of the scorecard and in
the overall balance or alignment of the scorecard. A
standard scorecard looks like this:
| Financials |
Customer |
| Internal
Operations/Process |
Development or Human Resources |
Until now there has not been as much effort exerted
in the lower right quadrant. We believe that the effort
here has not been as significant simply because people
have not had the tools or the vision in the area of
human resources to gather historical data and to measure
progress. Today, the quality of the tools discussed
above and the behavioral data now available provide
us with the potential for improving business in ways
that did not exist previously.
Leaders and managers familiar with the power of aligning
organizational components from past efforts will resonate
with the possibilities and opportunities created by
coaching leaders, launching a true balanced scorecard,
building resilience and teaching people how to communicate
for commitment. Like power that comes in the financial
market from a truly balanced portfolio or from a choir
that has all the altos, sopranos and basses matching
and pacing with each other appropriately, it is balance
that often provides those who are most successful with
the final impetus, poise and power to succeed. Skillful use of the human resource tools now
at our disposal provides us with the potential for balanced
and leveraged improvements not previously possible in the
business world.
One of the key tenets of business systems coaching is
right action. Right action is composed of: right information
+ right time+ right reasons+ right things + right
people. If we had been able to articulate and then
evaluate Don's progress according to this template we would have not only helped
him more but his entire organization as well. Increased
focus in the HR quadrant and a more balanced approach across
the scorecard would have accelerated the results of
his coaching and the leverage it provided for change across his organization.
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