Coaching in the East

I have the pleasure of working with leaders from around the world and am always struck how conceptions of leadership vary depending on cultural background. I've just come back from a week's stint in Singapore working with a cross-section of leaders from across Asia and noticed how much we assume Western European notions of coaching and leadership are shared and understood globally.

Coaching, at least non-directive coaching, is predicated on the idea that boss and subordinate can have adult-adult conversations, in which the ideas of the subordinate are valued and encouraged. However in East, the relationship between leader and subordinate is much more deferential (and respectful) ... did you know that a subordinate in Japan would never initiate a handshake but must wait for the boss ? This means, for example, that open coaching questions can be met with incomprehension and anxiety rather than as an invitation to creative thought.

Does this mean that coaching won't work in the East? While these cultural impediments exist, the organisational culture and expectations are also hugely important in shaping leadership behaviours. It is just not as simple as saying one cultural group is ripe for coaching and another isn't. The group last week while initially mystified were ultimately keen to give coaching a go with their teams.

The slopey shouldered 'coach'

One of the big pay-off's for managers learning to coach, is the idea of using their new found skills to keep responsibility for tasks with their teams. Most leaders I've worked with recognise their tendency to pick up their subordinates tasks - especially when under time pressure - and end up doing not only their own job but everyone else's job. Coaching can seem like a god send for getting those jobs back where they belong.

However, I've seen this taken too far. Only this morning I was talking to a manager who's boss has just been on a 'coaching' course. The boss now habitually pings back a reply of "What have you done so far?" to all requests for help , irrespective of  need or urgency. This as you can imagine is driving his team mad, and the good name of coaching is getting sullied.

Coaching is not about being slopey shouldered, deflecting all requests with a deft clever question. Coaching is first and foremost about being in service of the coachee, and helping them to perform/learn/grow. Constant deflection may serve the interests of the manager, but is annoying and counter-productive very quickly.

Power up your questions

We all know that questions are a core tool of the coach. However novice coaches struggle with two aspects of questioning - firstly knowing which question to ask and secondly keeping their questions genuinely open  i.e. avoiding leading. Finding the 'right' question is an art in itself and something that only comes with practice and not a few mistakes along the way.

Not all questions are equal - different questions have different purposes and impacts. Really powerful questions feel like blows to the chest and just have you speechless while you try to collect an answer. Try on Peter Hawkins powerful question for size -- "What can you uniquely do that the world of tomorrow needs?". See what I mean.. a very powerful question and not one that is easily or glibly answered.

So here is a way of thinking about the power of questions:

• Level 1 Non-questions - these are typically leading/closed questions or questions where the coach already knows the answer.  "Don't you think you should take that new job"  ... and the implied answer is of course "yes". These questions are really statements dressed up as questions
• Level 2 Questions of Inquiry. These sorts of questions are asked from a place of genuine curiosity and are used to gather facts and feelings about the issue the coachee brings. "What sort of job are you interested in?" . These sorts of questions are of course vital for establishing the parameters of the coachees issue but doesn't usually move them forward
• Level 3 Questions of Ignition. This is where the Peter Hawkins type question comes into play. These sorts of questions push the coachee to think broader/wider/differently and played right can be the key to unlocking a stuck situation. 

If you want to know more about 'Powerful Questions' try the following article

Managing the gap between intent and impact

Giving negative feedback is never easy for most of us. It takes a big man (or woman) to hear bad news about ourselves and take it on the chin. The fact is most of us find negative feedback a subtle form of attack and up go the defences. It doesn't make any difference if the feedback is right or wrong - our primordial selves are programmed for fight or flight if we perceive incoming.

One of the most common defences is the 'Intent Defence', for example  "I didn't mean to upset the team", or "Its not what I was trying to do..." or even "I was trying to help her". All these are defences of intent vs impact. We didn't mean to upset someone else but somehow we ended up doing so. Most (all?) of us have hugely positive intent but somehow our impact was different on our off days.

When we are giving feedback therefore, the territory to operate on is impact rather than intent. While we can acknowledge and even understand the positive intent in someone's actions, its the gap between this and their actual impact that we need to focus on. Otherwise we are setting up our feedback sessions for stalemate and stand-off's.

A bad case of binary thinking?

I spend a lot of my time teaching managers and leaders core coaching skills. They bit they most consistently struggle with is being non-directive - asking rather than telling. You can clearly see that this does not compute for many of them. "Isn't leadership about setting direction and providing clarity for others" is the direct or indirect challenge. "Why shouldn't I give them the answers if I know them?".

I think they have a point... up to a point. Leadership is indeed directive; its about providing others with a sense of where they are going, and it is about providing clarity. However leadership is also about bringing out the best in others, and developing autonomous contributors independent of the boss.

So I don't see this as either/or binary argument. Leadership has to be about asking and telling - and often all in the same conversation. Its just that many managers are much more skilled and familiar with the directive end of the spectrum than asking genuinely open questions, listening fully or delivering skilful feedback. Great leaders know when people need certainty and clarity, and when its best for them to figure it out for themselves.

The too helpful leader

We've all heard of the 'micro-manager' - the guy/gal who is always hovering on your shoulder and deep down doesn't really trust us to get on. However just as common, but less acknowledged, is the 'too helpful manager'. These are the well-intentioned folk who can't help taking other people's problems on themselves, and define leadership in terms of the number of issues they've managed to fix in the day. Throw in a soupçon of control freakery and you've got a wonderful recipe for dis-empowerment.

For these managers coaching is often a struggle, as they see their role as the expert who has to provide all the answers. Coaching someone else to learn for themselves can therefore come as a bit of a shock, and more than the odd  leading question is known to creep into the dialogue. 

While of course problems must be fixed, the too helpful manager  deprives their team of the opportunity to find their own way and make their own mistakes ie. grow and develop. Net result - the too helpful boss perpetually has to keep helping out and becomes a bottleneck on their own team performance.

Perhaps time for a redefinition of what is helpful?

Thanks to Jock McNeish for the wonderful cartoon.

In praise of confusion and uncertainty

I got off the phone this morning with  my mentor thoroughly confused, and feeling grumpy as a result. I'd gone from a surety that  "I've got my ducks in a row" to feeling that the whole duck pond had been unexpected emptied. However I also know that this will be to the good eventually as a better plan will emerge once I've have time to stew.

This experience got me to thinking about the value of feeling confused. Isn't a good shake up of one's certainties and assumptions actually the stuff of learning and growth? Like most of us, I'm not keen on the feeling of confusion and can rush on in an attempt to get back to the comfort of  'certainty' rather than tolerate the discomfort of confusion and not knowing. However, I know from experience that the 'not knowing' place is often the place where I find genuinely fresh perspectives ... if I am prepared to give it the time it needs.

I notice when I work with novice coaches they are often very keen for their clients to reach clarity and are often dismayed if a way forward doesn't emerge quickly. Consequently the work can become a rushed problem-solving session rather than a thoughtful and considerate examination of the assumptions and beliefs underlying an issue. Result - a superficial quick-fix that doesn't stick... perhaps tolerance of confusion and uncertainty is a muscle more coaches could usefully develop.

Contracting for the internal coach - issues in coaching

The complexity of the role of the internal coach hit home to me again last week. I was talking to Derek --not his real name -- a newly appointed internal coach who was struggling with the many competing demands on his time and the conflicting 'pulls' he was experiencing from different stakeholders.

To me this all came back to contracting - the practice of clarifying upfront what can be expected of the coach and the coaching relationship. Rightly, this is given emphasis in the external coaching world, with subsequent problems often tracked back to a failure to contract adequately. However contracting can often be underplayed in the organisational context where it can be assumed that roles are clear or conversations about 'ways of working' unnecessary.

Derek's life would have been simpler if it were just one client he had to worry about - his problem was that he had not one but multiple clients - his coachees, his boss, his divisional Director, the HRD etc... you get the picture. None of these agreed or indeed were very clear about what they needed of Derek and his role was in danger of becoming confused with the line manager or worse...some sort of organisational stealth police. Not good and can be avoided with some honest conversations upfront.

Here's some 'how to' advice on contracting - click here for more info.

Support and Challenge - issues in coaching

I work with a lot of leaders to help them develop and hone their coaching skills. A common misapprehension amongst them, especially in the early days, is that coaching is some sort of cosy supportive relationship -- usually involving a lot of open ended questions and not a lot else. The phrase 'pink and fluffy' comes to mind.

Daloz's Support & Challenge model

While I do believe part of the role of a Coaching-Manager is to support their team, I also believe that they are there to challenge them to do more and continuously raising the bar. The balance of support and challenge is therefore crucial to effective coaching - too much support and coaching becomes a cosy chat, too much challenge and the team will head for the hills. This is a case of 'and' not 'either/or'. When the balance is right, coaching is both fun and stretching, working right at the edge of what is possible.

Coaches and Coaching Managers therefore need to know which they find most challenging  - being supportive or being challenging - and learn ways to ensure they bring both into their work in the right quantities and at the right time. No challenge there then!

Source: Daloz,L. (1986), Effective teaching and mentoring: realising the transformational power of adult learning experiences.

Don’t coach me, just tell me!

It happened again this week. I’m working with a group of leaders on their coaching skills and we’re talking about potential objections to using a coaching approach with their teams. “My team don’t want loads of questions, they don’t want me dancing around the handbags with them, they just want to be told what to do !” one manager pronounces.

I think this comes back to what you think coaching is... if you believe it us some form of elaborate guessing game then I can see how you can get in this sort of tangle. It would indeed be perverse to withhold useful information or expertise from a team member, making them play ‘read the bosses mind’ instead. No wonder their people regard 'coaching' as time wasting and potentially manipulative. However if you see coaching as a thinking partnership between two consenting and informed adults then maybe these confusions can be avoided.

Great coaching is always based on a relationship of trust and openness - leading questions and pointless obstruction destroy both.

Coaching the team - the 'shared history'

I was recently coaching a team and used an old favourite of mine - the 'shared history' - as a way of catching everyone up with the 'story' of the team. It involves sitting everyone in the order they joined the team and briefly telling the tale of how they came to join and what was going on at time. What usually emerges is a rich picture of the team's back story which gives a sense of the struggles and successes to date as well as the personalities involved.

The exercise had the reaction I often get - the old hands are amazed at how much water has passed under the bridge  - "I'd forgotten about ....I hadn't realised how much we've done!". The new joins are mightily relieved to get a handle on the context they now find themselves operating in and why things are the ways they are - "It all makes a whole lot more sense now!"

The membership and purposes of a team are always shifting yet we often talk and act as if a 'team' is a static entity. How would it be if we considered the team to be new team every time a new member joined? What would it take to pay more attention to their integration and assimilation into the team story?

Elbow room? Do as you would be done by

I spend a lot of time working with managers on their coaching skills and encouraging them to take a coaching approach to their leadership, and have become increasingly fascinated by resistances to coaching in managers. While pretty much every manager I meet want lee way and personal discretion in how they operate .. however... this doesn't necessarily extend to their subordinates. "They just want to be told ..none of this dancing around the handbags asking questions" they report emphatically.

Where is reality in all of this? Do subordinates only want to be told or do managers enjoy telling too much? I know there are times when I need and welcome direction however someone being directive (ie overly controlling) will generally get my hackles up. Mostly I want space to think and act for my self and yes I want someone to consult with just in case my ideas are flawed or too limited. I also know that different people have different needs for elbow room - some folks seem to need acres of personal discretion while others are anxious with anything less than close marking

Part of the issue I think is that it much easier to think about leadership in binary terms - I tell or I coach, I give direction or I consult. What is far tougher ... but vital...is to be choiceful in approach to people management. One style does not fit all situations and reading the situation to make an informed choice of what is required is skill that can be developed.
(Thanks to the work of Emery, Trist et al)

Coaching upwards?

I was asked last week if you could coach upwards - this question was met with cackles of laughter and ribald humour from the rest of the group. "I'd like to see you try" said one, "Sounds like a career limiting move" said another. Much sucking of teeth and rolling of eyes ensued.

I found myself having mixed reactions - if we honestly believe that during a coaching conversation the parties concerned are equals then there ought not to be a barrier to coaching .. in either direction. However folks in organisations don't tend to leave their roles and positions at the door - there are power inequalities whether we like it or not. The boss does have the power to shape the work environment.

I think what my audience were reacting to was the idea that a boss might need help with his thinking or might have space to develop a bit and that is something on the whole they might not want to show to their subordinates. Give feedback to your boss - not a chance!

So.. what is permissible in your organisation. Could you give the boss feedback? Could you coach your boss?