International Coaching Week

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728x210_ICWWebBannerNext week is International Coaching Week.  In honour of that, I’d like to reshare some of the posts I’ve written about coaching, and ask you to forward them on to anyone who you think might benefit.  Let’s raise awareness about what coaching is/is not, and how it works.

Clare’s coaching manifesto

 

My coaching story

 

 

Performance Coaching and Career Coaching

 

Coaching as a Force Multiplier?

 

Say nothing

 

The Coaching Agreement

 

On Being Coached

 

Safe environment for testing my thinking

 

Accountability

 

Unleash the independent critical thinking of your team members through coaching

 

What’s stopping us from coaching?

 

What’s the difference between coaching, training, mentoring, counselling…

 

Busting the myths about coaching

What’s the difference between good coaching and GREAT coaching

 

Great questions

 

Creating Insight

 

What’s the evidence that coaching pays back?

 

Coaching virtually

 

Triple the Wisdom

 

Making time for frequent coaching conversations

 

 

Raising your auditory game

 

Coaching Certification and Accreditation

 

Coaching vs Instruction

To Coach or Not to Coach

The added value of three way contracting in coaching

Hopeless returns on investment from leadership development

If you just stumbled across this blog, and want to continue to learn about the great conversations you could be having with your people…

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Step 2. Follow Clare’s Conversations on twitter at @clareenorman

And pass it on to all your friends and colleagues, so they can join the movement too.

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Trail blazing for the future

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In my last post, Trail blazing in situ, I wrote about my aha moment that my passion for coaching and my job actually go hand-in-hand.  And while I am happy with that for the short to medium term, I am also figuring out ways to step up a gear.

I am conscious that you might be wondering why I am telling you my story, so before I dig in to “trail-blazing for the future”, let me explain.

I think there are things we can all learn from each others’ stories.  That’s not to say that my journey and your journey will or should look all that similar – if I thought that, that wouldn’t be very coach-like!

Continue reading →

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Trail blazing in situ

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My brain (and probably my heart) has been working on overdrive, since I wrote my post about being a revolutionary, trying to figure out the next trail I want to blaze. 

On the one hand, I felt like I had to move roles, if I was to make the impact I wanted to make.  But then the penny suddenly dropped.  After a series of conversations, some coaching and some individual reflection, I realised that I am uniquely positioned in my current role to do the things I love and to make a difference.

Coaching is my passion.  That’s where I know I can make a huge difference in the world, enabling others to be their best and do their best for the world. 

And my job is all about deeply understanding our people in our organization, their needs and desires, their highest aspirations.  I then feed this knowledge into all of our HR projects to make sure they address these needs and desires so that our people can live their best career story.

There are other coaches around our organization too, all doing 1-1 coaching, but as far as I know, not feeding back any of the trends and themes that they are hearing that need to be addressed at an organizational level.   So I got us all together this week to do exactly that. 

And it was as I was preparing for that call that it clicked for me.  Coaching and my job do not need to be mutually exclusive.  I don’t need to do coaching on top of my day job, which is how I had been thinking about it before, since it wasn’t mentioned anywhere in my job description.

What IS mentioned in my job description is that I need to have a deep understanding of the needs and desires of our people. And coaching allows me to do that. 

That’s not to say that I will break any confidentiality agreements we have in place, but I will continue to bring this group of coaches together to reflect on what we are hearing at a macro level, so that we can feed that back to HR to address systemically.  That’s my passion and my job, and that’s how I can change the world…ensuring that our people can live their best career story, by addressing the obstacles in their way.

 

If you just stumbled across this blog, and want to continue to learn about the great conversations you could be having with your people…

Step 1. Receive Clare’s blog posts in your inbox – subscribe top right

Step 2. Follow Clare’s Conversations on twitter at @clareenorman

And pass it on to all your friends and colleagues, so they can join the movement too.

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On being a revolutionary

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I’ve been pondering something, ever since I wrote the post about the hopeless returns on leadership development.

I’ve been wondering what part I want to play in fixing that.  It links to the results I got from doing Marcus Buckingham’s Standout questionnaire.  It turns out that I am a Revolutionary.  A person who likes to design individualised learning programs to meet urgent needs. 

I had a wry smile when I first read those results.  I don’t (or rather, I didn’t) really see myself as revolutionary.  But I liked it, it felt good. So I started to think about my career and the impact I have made, and the innovations I have brought to the table to solve employees’ needs.

Like the Individualised Leadership Program, an action learning program, where 3 people bring their issues to work on, with coaching from the others.  That was in response to a group of managers saying that they felt they needed leadership development, but the one-size fits all training wasn’t going to give them what they needed.  They worked with a coach facilitator, and they learn how to coach, while also receiving coaching.  That was pretty revolutionary, and continues to receive rave reviews.

Then there’s my internal blog, where I continue to bang on about people development being in service of creating value and operating the business effectively.  You get so much more innovation, if you develop your people (I notice that Google is a huge believer in this too).  The blog is making an impact, slowly but surely changing our culture.  Perseverance is key.

And the 30 Day Challenge, where I asked people to sign up for 30 days to take a micro-challenge each day in service of developing their people.  The problem we wanted to solve here was showing that people development didn’t have to take you away from the workplace for hours on end…it could just as easily be a thank you, a quick piece of feedback after a meeting, an invitation to come to a meeting to learn something new.  Four years later, people are still talking about the 30 Day Challenge…and I hear about 30 day challenge offspring popping up all over the place around the business, repeating the successful formula.

Then there was the coaching challenge, now the Emotional Intelligence challenge.  Ok, maybe the challenge idea is no longer innovative!  Find something new Clare.  Hmm, video-blogging, that’s my latest, and people seem to enjoy hearing a point of view rather than reading it.  They read so much all day anyway, that a 3 minute video gives them some respite AND some food-for-thought.

In my current role, we have embraced Human-Centered Design as a new way of developing products and processes to serve our people’s needs.  HCD has been around for a while, but it’s definitely cutting edge for us, and making a huge difference to the usefulness, usability and experience of our tools to our people. 

Last, but by no means least, I’ve been blazing a trail for the value of coaching for ten years or so, and we’re making headway there too.  Managers as coaches, career counsellors as coaches.  I found that talking about coaching didn’t really help – showing them coaching made all the difference, as they suddenly realised that it wasn’t what they were doing all along after all.

Why am I telling you all of this?  Because sometimes we don’t see ourselves the way others see us.  The Standout questionnaire was quite an eye-opener for me.  It reminded me of something a colleague had said to me some years back, that I had forgotten.  She said, “Clare, you are always so far ahead of the rest of us in how you think about leadership and leadership development…it takes the rest of us a while to catch up and really GET that you had a point”. 

So what’s the strength that you’ve been denying? 

My next step is to figure out how I am going to package this uniqueness; what my vision is for leadership development, with me blazing yet another trail - watch this space. 

 

 

If you just stumbled across this blog, and want to continue to learn about the great conversations you could be having with your people…

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The added value of three way contracting in coaching

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I used to think it was enough to have a contract directly with my coachee.  But I have come to see the error of my ways! 

That 1-1 contract is fine if the coachee is paying for the coaching.  But if their company is paying for it, you automatically have an additional client, and multiple stakeholders who have expectations about how this person performs in the context of the organization and its mission and vision.

Peter Hawkins describes the 1-1 coaching contract as personal development.  That’s pretty accurate I would say, as the coachee decides what they want to work on, and it’s often to do with self-leadership. 

I think of leadership as multi-faceted.  There is self-leadership, and we all need to get better at that, before we can have a hope of influencing others around us.  Getting to grips with who we are, what is important to us, how we want to show up in the world etc.

Then there is leadership of others.  Instantly, you have more stakeholders affected by the coaching – the team members. 

Last, but by no means least, you have leadership of the organization, which can only be a collective endeavour – none of us can do this alone, and we need to work with our peers and others to run the business, as well as transform the business.

So when an organization commissions you to coach an individual leader, what they really need (though may not be able to name it as such) is systemic coaching.  Not personal development.

Therefore, at contracting time, we need to identify all of the stakeholders who have a vested interest in this individual stepping up in their world, and what they want the individual to step up TO.  What will they need to be able to achieve in tomorrow’s world, to address the needs of those stakeholders? 

Now that is a stretch, for both the coachee, and for us as a coach, to support them in their stepping up to meet the needs of their world.

If you just stumbled across this blog, and want to continue to learn about the great conversations you could be having with your people…

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Hopeless returns on investment from leadership development

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I’ve long said that “training” events where big names and gurus talk to 200 leaders at a time about leadership are a waste of time and money.  I put training in quotes, because these are really presentations, not training, and while there may be a call to action at the end of them, they generally don’t create much transfer of learning back to the workplace.  There’s a lot of excitement, and intention to do things differently maybe, but research by Olivero and Bane shows that even good training leads to just a 20% change in behavior on-the-job.  That’s a hopeless return on investment.

We (the world) spend so much money on developing leaders, and yet what do we get to show for it?  Time and time again, in public service, we see that the leadership is lacking, as reported in public inquiries.

So what are we doing wrong?  I was thrilled to be on a course with Peter Hawkins a couple of weeks back, where he outlined how leadership development needs to move into the modern age.  I couldn’t agree more with his recommendations. Here’s the gist of what he said

Leadership Development needs to move From: To:
Case studies Real-time challenges
Intellectual, cerebral learning: new insights and good intentions Behavioural transformation: new actions in the workplace
Individual, leader development Relational, leadership development
Competency based – for success in the past Involves real stakeholder perspectives – for success in the future
No attention paid to dropping old habits that are no longer relevant Includes unlearning,  addressing of limiting assumptions, mind-sets, habitual patterns

Adapted from: Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leaders by Peter Hawkins

To achieve all of these things, the leadership development of tomorrow needs to focus on systemic executive coaching, systemic team coaching, action learning, learning on-the-job with feedback.  These kinds of learning lead to an 80% change in behavior (Olivero and Bane).  That’s such a huge leap in return on investment – why would we not want that?

It’s not about the classroom anymore…it’s about real-time learning, tackling the problems that our future world and stakeholders needs from us as leaders. 

The expectations of delivering quickly, with higher quality, and lower costs, are only going to get stronger; and the working world is only going to get more and more complex.  So what worked today will not work for tomorrow. 

It’s time we stopped wasting our money on competency development for yesterday’s world; and started focusing our scarce time and money on coaching individuals in their context, coaching teams to live up to their collective endeavours, and challenging people to tackle the real issues and learn from that. 

My thanks to Peter Hawkins for his inspiration.

If you just stumbled across this blog, and want to continue to learn about the great conversations you could be having with your people…

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Step 2. Follow Clare’s Conversations on twitter at @clareenorman

And pass it on to all your friends and colleagues, so they can join the movement too.

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The David Brent Effect: managers think they are better than they are

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I read this article this week, and it reminded me why asking for feedback is so important, to give us a reality check. 

Take a read, and see what you think. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/9241721/The-David-Brent-effect-managers-think-they-are-better-than-they-are.html

Do you think you are better than you are, as a supervisor?  Or are there things you could do differently, better, more of, less of?  None of us is perfect.  So what are you committing to, to become a better supervisor?

If you just stumbled across this blog, and want to continue to learn about the great conversations you could be having with your people…

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Get the monkey off your back

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I want to offer you a challenge…to change one small supervisory habit.

You may have read my post about keystone habits – those habits that have a ripple effect on other habits, and on the people around us. 

Ok, so what is the habit?

It’s about being “Quick to Ask, Slow to Tell”.

So when someone who reports to you comes to you and says: “What would you suggest I do to solve this problem?” or “How would you like me to do this?” your normal response might be to give them the answer…to tell them what to do.  It’s quick, and you get them back to work.

Maybe you also like the feeling it gives you – that ego boost that you knew the answer.

But what’s the downside of that approach?  You miss an opportunity to develop their thinking muscles.   Your job is to enable them to be independent, critical thinkers, people who can solve problems for themselves.  That means that instead of telling them….ask them what they think.

Your reward?

It might be a feeling of lightening the load – that you don’t have to know all the answers. 

It might be placing that monkey squarely back on their back, so that you don’t have to solve this additional problem yourself.

So will you try it out? 

“Quick to Ask, Slow to Tell”. 

Maybe something like: “What do you think about that?”

“What have you thought of so far?”

“What options do you see?”

And come back and tell us what the ripple effect is.

If you just stumbled across this blog, and want to continue to learn about the great conversations you could be having with your people…

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Building Collaboration Muscle

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We all know that it takes frequent and consistent effort to build our body’s muscles.  It’s the same with habits.  We need to practice new habits frequently and consistently in order to see different results.

So when I decided that I wanted to become better known as a leadership and coaching expert in the external marketplace, I knew that meant I needed to build new habits, new muscles.

I had some experience of this inside the company I work for.  I started blogging in April 2007 (crikey, that’s nearly 6 years ago – how time flies when you are having fun!).  My motivation for building that collaborative muscle was simply to reach supervisors and people developers in their workplace, where they could put the things we talked about into practice right there and then if they chose to.   

To do that, I needed to build a habit of consistent and frequent blogging about things that interested people.   Seems to have worked – the blog now has over 8500+ subscribers, and another 2500+ followers.

Some time into that 6 years, I also started micro-blogging internally, sharing interesting articles about people development, and plugging away at the message that people development shouldn’t be shoved to the bottom of the to-do list, where it would never be put into action.

I do feel proud of the collaboration habit that I have got into…blogging at least once a week, and micro-blogging whenever I read something interesting, with plenty of people joining in the dialogue through the comments.

So what learning could I take from that into the external collaborative world?  Well, blogging seemed like the obvious answer, as I was getting good at that.  I also (reluctantly at first) started tweeting.  So really, I was replicating what I did internally, for an external audience.  I hooked all of this up to my Linked In profile, and to Facebook, so that every time I blogged or tweeted, all of my contacts in these different places would see what I was publishing.

I know I could do more to get my name out there, but for now, these new habits have actually led to me being in the top 10% of most viewed Linked In profiles – that is amazing to me, and meets my need of being more visible out in the external marketplace.  No, I am not looking for a job, but one day I might, and this will have been an investment, as organizations will be able to see who I am and what I represent.

So here’s the thing about building your collaboration muscles.  What are you doing it for?  What is your motivation?  You can see that in both cases – internal and external – I had very clear motivations for collaborating and sharing.  It’s a good thing to do for the benefit of the company, sure….but I needed to feel a sense of personal motivation before I would change my habits.  I challenge you to think about your motivation too, and see if that makes a difference to the frequency and consistency of your collaboration with others.

Then put cues in place to remind you – I have an action in my to-do list to blog each Monday, which I stick to.  Even now, 6 years in, I need that reminder. 

And my reward?  Long-term, seeing our culture change, little by little; and being in the Top 10% of most viewed Linked In profiles!  Short-term, seeing the comments coming in, as people build on the conversation so that we can all learn together.

What’s your motivation to build a new collaboration habit?  What’s the new habit? What’s your cue? And the immediate reward that will keep you collaborating? 

 

If you just stumbled across this blog, and want to continue to learn about the great conversations you could be having with your people…

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And pass it on to all your friends and colleagues, so they can join the movement too.

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Reflections on coach supervision

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I recently started a new period of study, learning how to be a coach supervisor.  having received coaching supervision in the past, I recognise how important it is to keep us all sharp.  It’s so easy to lose our edge, and supervision can prevent that, so that we give EVERY client the best coaching we can EVERY time.

So what did I learn on the first module?  A few little nougats to share with you…

1.  Supervision is working with an experienced practitioner in the same field.  That’s one difference from coaching, where you do not need to be an expert in the coachee’s industry, but rather an expert in coaching.  The other difference is that supervision looks at all of the stakeholders involved in the coaching – even those not in the room.

2. Good supervision is when both parties are exploring new territory.  I need to be on the edge of my comfort zone too.  I guess that applies to coaching as well, but it was a good reminder to challenge myself in this regard.

3. Never know better, never know first.  Never withhold your experience or awareness where it could serve your coachee, or your supervisee.

4. Shift happens.  95% of the stuff is not personal.  The skill in supervision is in modelling being ok with not being ok.

What are you reflections on coaching supervision? 

 

 

If you just stumbled across this blog, and want to continue to learn about the great conversations you could be having with your people…

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