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Coaching, Development
Maybe it’s the time of year, and we can that feel spring is in the air and we’re ready for some dramatic change… Have you noticed how many television programmes are about transformation of some sort? Just a quick look at BBC iPlayer reveals these:
- Homes under the Hammer – a long-running property renovation show
- The Great Interior Design Challenge – a competitionabout updating boring rooms
- DIY SOS – renovations to the rescue of people in a health pickle
- Big Dreams, Small Spaces – garden redesign on a budget
- The 100K House – architects helping people recreate their problematic home
OK, maybe this list reveals more about my interests than the state of humankind. It’s still remarkable that the BBC alone has five programmes about transforming our living space right now! In fact, the BBC has no fewer than 570 programmes (radio and television) about homes and gardens, which tells me I’m not the only one with an interest in looking after my living environment.
The hard graft involved
Programmes like the above are are very satisfactory to watch, assuming you are interested in the subject of course. The triumphant reveal at the end is accompanied by a ‘ta-dah!’ soundtrack and a cheerful voice-over listing all the improvements. The ‘before’ flashes across the screen in monochrome before the camera shows us the finished product in Technicolor. As we admire the benefits of the project we all achieve closure-by-proxy.
Lovely stuff.
But for me the end result is only part of the joy. I derive a lot of pleasure from following the DIY-ers’ progress and creative problem-solving prowess. I especially like the ballsy ones that throw caution to the wind and really unleash some inner fury to tackle the task while shouting
Obstacles? Hah! My crowbar and I laugh in thy face!
They’re the ones that appear to undergo their own transformations as well as their house or garden. The bloke who only liked magnolia who paints his kitchen units purple. The mum who turns into a fully fledged bricklayer.
Witnessing transformation
Such programmes are about visible transformations and they are very satisfactory to watch. When I’ve completed a coaching assignment with a client, be it a team or an individual, I’ll tell them that it has been a priviledge to work with them. That’s not an empty phrase to me, because it is humbling to be with someone who is going through such profound change that they come out transformed.
It is humbling because to change you have to be vulnerable, and to be able to be vulnerable with someone else, you have to put your trust in them. Witnessing a client transform through their persistence and effort reminds me what it takes to develop as a person. It isn’t easy. It’s painful because you lose things and sometimes people along the way. And at the end there is no spectacular reveal in Technicolor either…
My job as a coach is to take the client back to the early beginning of the journey and show the distance travelled, because it is easy to forget where you came from if the world looks different now. It never fails to take the client by surprise either when they look back. It’s not the same as popping a bottle of champagne in your fashionably purple new kitchen but I’ll tell you now that such a personal transformation will outlast any such kitchen by decades.
Business, Engagement, Strengths
Like many business owners, I spend quite a bit of time on networking. Opportunities to meet other businesses and make new friends are plentiful in the Thames Valley and beyond, especially once you’ve made it onto the mailing list of a few networking groups – it snowballs from there.
‘Everyone hates networking’
Funnily enough a question which comes up regularly is ‘don’t you just hate having to do your spiel at these things?’. It’s artificial and contrived to go out to meet people, armed with your elevator pitch and cards, and then not do the things all the experts tell you you shouldn’t do, such as asking for people’s cards or – heaven forbid! – their custom.
Except doing business is the very reason networking exists and why we show up at 7.30am at a hotel on a roundabout out of town. The vast majority of us are at least also in business because there are bills to pay. Might it be easier and less time consuming to stand on a chair in the middle of the room and shout ‘come and get your [insert product or service] here, please form an orderly queue’?
I am pretty sure I ‘d give such networking a miss. Besides, I’d also be deprived of the pleasure of networking like 007, something I’d miss! Here are my Bond Strategies for your reading pleasure.
Bond strategy No. 1: Map the room
Being a card-carrying spy, the first thing Bond does when he walks into a room is map it. Not just the exits, the buffet and presumably where the gents’ room is (always useful), but specifically who’s there and what they’re doing.
When walking into a room full of people who are there to network just like you, there is no rush. Take a minute to walk around just to see who you might talk to and if they are ‘available’. Also if there is a speaker later, where would you prefer to sit? Are a few people at tables already, and if so do you see anyone you would like to connect with? Bag a chair and head back into the room, you’ll be guaranteed to sit at an interesting table later on.
Bond strategy No. 2: Aim
Bond never goes anywhere for no reason. Like businesses he’s usually chasing something or someone, or busy preventing a disaster in order to keep the world turning. He has an aim and a goal and an unwavering focus on achieving it. Bond is also a very busy man, so once he’s done mapping he goes straight for the target.
Set an aim or a goal for each networking event you attend, for example speaking to a particular organisation or individual, or introducing yourself to at least five new people. Give a friendly nod or brief hello to familiar faces – if there is time, speak with them after you’ve reached your goal for the event. Catching up after the event is another opportuity too.
Bond strategy No. 3: Improvise
Of course Bond would be boring if all his mapping and aiming worked all the time, therefore unexpected developments are to be expected. Bond’s improvisation is helped a great deal by Q’s clever gadgets that we were introduced to at the start of the movie and have forgotten about by the time he is in a pickle.
Improvising is about using whatever you have available in a situation, and this is of course helped in turn by preparation as Q knows all too well. Bring some props you might not think you’ll need and use them, for example with people who are not normally in your target audience. What is an overfamiliar example of your product to you could be the very thing that helps another visualise what you do.
Bond strategy No. 4: Follow your hunch
Bond’s spy-business is thoroughly unscientific when it comes to presenting evidence prior to taking action. Part of the fun is of course how he ignores the rule book and direct orders to follow his instincts, and always lives to tell the tale.
If you have a pitch you normally use when networking, try listening to your gut about how to use it. Adapt it according to the event or person you are connecting with, and see how a departure from your usual way of presenting your business lands.
Bond strategy No. 5: Flirt and snog
Surely this one needs no introduction… Now, I won’t be held responsible if any reader takes this literally the next time they’re out there! What I mean by this one is be interested, complimentary, and show your attractive side. Be genuine about your interest; people can sense if you’re just being polite.
Bond strategy No. 6: Come back
Inevitably, Bond suffers from knock-backs, mostly of the literal sort. That’s just as bad because he has a job to do, and he is not one for giving up. Neither should you. So you had a bit of a useless morning at an event: figure out what it was that made it so, make a plan about tackling similar situations in future, put it down to experience and book yourself onto the next one.
Six strategies… would you care to make that 007?
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Coaching, Emotions
Back in the 1990s I learned to drive in Amsterdam. You won’t see L-plates in traffic there because it is illegal to drive a car without a licence and therefore the only way to learn is to take lessons at a driving school.
Amsterdam is an utterly excellent place to pass your driving test. Everyone knows about the cycling anarchists lurking in every street (I was a fully fledged one myself) and the hordes of tourists who mistake its quaint little streets for pedestrianised areas. It gets even hairier the moment trams become involved: these have their own rules and they are not what you’d expect. Argue with a tram at your own peril.
Kevlar drivers
My instructor Sandra was a very chatty type. Right at the start of my very first lesson, told me what the pedals were for, how to adjust the mirrors properly, and that we were going to turn left into the Van Hall Straat. Then she asked me what I did for a living.
Sandra’s philosphy was that behind the wheel there is a lot to manage: kids fighting in the back seat in the middle of road works when you’re nearly out of petrol and running late. Her aim was to deliver kevlar drivers: responsible and considerate people who know how to drive and hold down a conversation at the same time, no sweat.
The no sweat did come after plenty of hairy experiences. I passed my test the first time around despite making quite a serious error after just a few minutes: after being told we’d be taking a left turn ahead I drove in the left lane for a bit until the examiner asked me whether my fellow Amsterdam drivers would appreciate my initiative.
Oops.
I mirrored, signaled and manoeuvred back into my own lane and assumed I’d failed already. The raging nerves subsided and I spent the rest of the test in a pretty relaxed frame of mind because there was nothing to worry about anymore. Afterwards the examiner told me that I passed because he had seen my instincts kick in: no sudden swerving back and calm and confident driving the rest of the way. I was almost sad to pass my test because Sandra and I had had a great deal of fun.
Emotions and recall
Emotions occur when an individual experiences something important. Strong emotions influence our recall of events and can even lead us to construct a different version of events. Some researchers suggest that the more we want to suppress a memory of a highly emotive event – say an intensely stupid error during a driving test – the higher the cognitive load, which in turn reduces the reliability of how we recall the details of the event.
In other words, we reconstruct the event because our emotions more or less tell us to. When I think about my driving test in Amsterdam in the 1990s, I know for a fact that I was driving with my examiner sitting in the passenger seat on my right and that I was driving (mostly!) in the right-hand lane. However, my very vivid recollection is that he is in the passenger seat on my left, and during my error I drove the car in the right-hand lane.
Why emotions matter in coaching
According to my fellow coach Peter Duffell, who is fast becoming the UK’s leading reearcher into coaching and emotions
people may bring fragments of memory together and construct rather than re-construct memory
Duffell and Lawton-Smith, The Coaching Psychologist, Vol 11, No 1, June 2015
This is why it matters to coaches to attend to the emotive domain in sessions. Quite a few coaches feel (see what I did there?) that emotions are out of scope in organisational coaching. I can give you several reasons why this is limiting to the degree of being harmful to the client, but I’ll stick to one: without exploring the emotions involved, we cannot rely on a client’s recollection of an event if it is clear that strong emotions have played part in it. We need to be equipped to bring the emotions into the session safely and most importantly, recognise when it is appropriate to do so.
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Change, Leadership
Twenty years ago John Kotter published his famous article on organisational change, Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail (you can read it here). Kotter sets out the steps required for successful transformation in organisations, and explains the common pitfalls that cause 70% of change initiatives to fail. In summary, these causes of failed change according to Kotter:
- Lack of sense of urgency
- Lack of a powerful ‘guiding coalition’
- Lack of vision
- Undercommunication
- Not removing obstacles
- Lack of planned-for short-term wins
- Declaring victory too soon
- Not anchoring the change in the organisational culture
What underpins these causes is the psychology of change, and to be more precise: the barriers we humans throw up to sabotage our own initiatives. Few but the most disenchanted employees will openly admit to sabotaging change. Few of us are ready to commit career suicide in that way, so we do it under the cover of pretense, or even without knowing it ourselves. We therefore need to consider the psychology of change as fully as we can.
What is the psychology of organisational change?
Plenty of books have been written about this, and I will not attempt to write one here. Let me instead pull one of those books into Kotter’s theory and give some examples of what I’m talking about. Robert J Marshak is a distinguished organisational dynamics scholar with an impressive organisational consulting record. He wrote an excellent book on what we (choose not to) see during organisational change: Covert Processes at Work. Managing the Hidden Dimensions of Organizational Change (2006). Marshak argues that rational argumentation about the change is easy by comparison, because
considering the covert, unconscious reactions and dynamics is almost always considered off-limits in the workplace
– Robert J.Marshak, Covert Processes at Work, p.13
Dimensions of organisational change
Marshak identifies one overt and five covert dimensions which impact on organisational change:
- Reasons for change: the rational and analytical logic behind the change
- Politics: people’s interests – individual and group
- Inspirations: values-based and visionary aspirations
- Emotions: affective and reactive feelings
- Mindsets: guiding beliefs and assumptions
- Psychodynamics: anxiety-based and unconscious defenses
No prizes for guessing which is which! Now, let’s see what Marshak’s dimensions have to say about Kotter’s common causes for failure.
Cause 1. Lack of sense of urgency
Sure, people can fail to be convinced by the arguments supporting the change, and counter them with ‘rational and analytical logic’ one by one. Often there are also other reasons why people fail to mobilise: they feel they lack opportunities to help shape the vision for example. A sense of ownership is required, and not being able to shape even a small part of the new world undermines the need for urgency.
Cause 2. Lack of a powerful ‘guiding coalition’
This one can be very tricky to navigate because of inevitably conflicting interests in organisations. Good and honest insight into the political interests at work is crucial to creating a strong coalition that unites people across divides, yet is often overlooked. Stakeholder analysisis of crucial importance here.
Cause 3: Lack of vision
A shared vision shapes beliefs and principles that guide people’s decisions, which becomes even more important in uncertain times. If the vision is not clear, or it is not clearly and consistently communicated to stakeholders, staff will have great difficultly translating that vision into the mindset required to make the change a success – and stick.
Cause 4: Undercommunication
Communication is often woefully underestimated by change makers. Yes, it is hard to imagine not knowing anything about it when you’re at the centre of it. Another reason is genuine anxiety around having to broach a difficult topic. Interests may clash and complicate the process, and also most people dread being the bearer of difficult news. The creeping sabotage of unconscious defenses in individuals is very often at the root of undercommunication during change.
Cause 5: Not removing obstacles
Here too we see psychodynamics such as avoidance and denial at work, along with a reluctance to challenge vested interests. It requires identifying and naming interests which so far have been operating under the radar and in fact have relied on not being called out for a long time.
Cause 6: Lack of planned-for short-term wins
Short-term wins are an important motivator and can boost confidence, which can ‘sell’ the change to people who are unconvinced or undecided. Reporting and celebrating interrim results is important as they reveal more about the vision for the future one step at a time.
Cause 7: Declaring victory too soon
This will be grist to the political mill of those opposed to the change and a perfect opportunity to reinforce their position. For others, such disappointment leads to anxiety and stress as more uncertainty and ambiguity ensues. It can be fatal to the aspirations of those who have been supportive yet anxious at the same time.
Cause 8: Not anchoring the change in the organisational culture
Organisations are made up of people who all move at their own speed. Adjusting to the new world takes some of us longer than others, and this will be felt in the time and effort it takes to see significant changes in organisational culture. Mindset, vision, aspiration, assumptions, beliefs and the stories we tell each other all influence organisational culture. These need time to evolve.
The way an organisation goes about designing and implementing change is indicative of its culture. It is the organisations that know how to tend to the unseen dimensions of change that are likely to be the most successful.
As the ancient Chinese proverb goes:
Grass doesn’t grow by pulling the blades. It grows by tending to its roots.
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Development
If you gave me a penny for each time someone uttered to me “I am not the creative type” I’d be rich. The remark often comes in the context of discussing resilience in coaching or team development sessions, and is also a word that features in conversations about strengths.
When the conversation develops around the theme of creativity, it often emerges that the word is synomymous to possessing artistic talent for many of us. That is in fact is a very narrow definition of the word creativity and what it means to be creative, because it is only part of the deal.
How to define creativity?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘creativity’ as the faculty of being creative; ability or power to create. That’s not the most helpful definition here, so let’s have the definition from that fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia:
Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and somehow valuable is formed. The created item may be intangible (such as an idea, a scientific theory, a musical composition or a joke) or an original physical object (such as an invention, a literary work or a painting).
– Wikipedia
The above explanation gives us more: to create something is to form something which wasn’t there before, and this can be something other than an artistic expression of our imagination.
What it means to be creative
One of my favourite coaching tools, the VIA Strengths Cards offers the idea that there are two paths to creativity:
- producing ‘original, novel or unusual ideas’ and being ‘passionate about scientific or artistic endeavours’
- ‘finding novel and productive ways to achieve your goals’
The first is a close fit with the Wikipedia definition, while the second essentially describes problem-solving.
In the context of helping people develop professionally, creativity is very often about problem-solving ability. It is about seeing links that are not apparent, uncovering the hidden by allowing the mind to leave familiar thought patterns, and the freedom of mind to consider these new insights unencumbered by self-imposed limits.
We are all creative beings
Humans possess an innate ability to be creative; for anyone looking for (admittedly selective) supporting evidence may I recommend your nearest museum of archaeology for a closer look at prehistoric tools? We know we are creative as a species, yet as individuals we tell ourselves that we are not if we are convinced we cannot draw more than a stick man.
This intrapsychic perception of our creativity equals a limiting belief which can seep out into our interpersonal lives and influence how others perceive us in terms of creativity. Of course this has an impact on how we work together and combine our ability and capacity to solve problems together.
It’s when we come to see that the improbability that we’ll ever be writing the next Booker Prize winner has nothing to do with solving the problem of removing a crossbar from a telegraph pole in the middle of nowhwere with only one wrench at our disposal that we start to see another side to being creative.
It goes by many more names: ingenuity, imagination, resourcefulness – or teamwork.
