Blog
Linguistic Diversity
Linguistic diversity is a diamond mine of new concepts, which can be applied to learning and self-reflection. A recent article in New Scientist introduced me to the fascinating word rawa-dawa, which comes from the Mundari language of the Indian subcontinent and means “the moment of suddenly realising you can do something reprehensible and no-one is there to witness it”. As a tool for helping people understand themselves, this surely has promise. Everybody has such moments (well I certainly do!) and the choices we make at these times can be highly revealing if we take time to reflect upon them.
When did you last feel rawa-dawa? What does your choice at the time tell you about your sense of ethicality, your level of self-discipline, how much your behaviours are controlled by the inner voices of authoritarian others, and so on?
Yet More MDQs
My collection of Massively Difficult Questions continues to grow. Here are some of those gathered so far this year. As usual, I’m always grateful for more. The journal Coaching at Work has a current Linked-In dialogue on great coaching questions and some of the suggestions there are in the list below.
- How do you give yourself permission to dream?
- How do you make sure you are honest to yourself?
- Where do you go to for your inspiration?*
- What’s your unique contribution?*
- What new relationships do you need to make?*
- How can you “do” less and “be” more?*
- What would help you to have more impact?*
- What do you want to be known for?*
- How does your story differ from X’s? What useful insights can you infer from that?
- In what ways are you indispensible? What could you/do you want do to change that?
- If tears could talk, what would they say?
- Do you know that or believe it?
- If you were the person you really want to be, how would they approach this situation?
- In ten years’ time, will you be proud, ashamed and indifferent about this decision?
- If the worst happened, what would the silver lining be?
Courtesy of Phil Morley, CEO, Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Stories of mentoring
I have been trying for some time to collect stories from different cultures, which parallel the ancient myth of Mentor. It seems that the concept of an older, wiser person, developing the wisdom in a younger person, is very common. Two of my favourite stories – one positive and one showing the dark side of mentoring – are below:
Postive: From West Africa. A young boy’s father is dying. He tells his son: "Under the big rock outside the hut is everything you will need to become a great warrior.” Encouraged by his mother, every day the child attempts to move the rock. Although he pushes with all his strength, it does not budge. Eventually, at the age of 16, he feels a small amount of give. Then at 18, he rolls the rock away and finds underneath it a sword and shield. “How will this make me a great warrior?” he asks, disappointed. “Just look at your muscles,” says his mother...
Negative: India (the story of Eklavya from the epic Mahabarat). The poor young boy watches the guru train the children of rich men in archery. He copies what he sees and, through practice, eventually becomes so good that he is able to win an archery competition, beating all the guru’s students. Buoyed up with his success, he approaches the guru to ask if he can become one of his protégés. By custom, the guru may demand a gift from new acolytes. This guru, offended at the young boy’s success, tells him the gift he requires is “Your thumbs”
What stories do you know from your culture or other cultures?
Comedy Course Finale
I try to find at least one opportunity each year to stretch myself beyond my comfort zone, and to learn either a new skill, or something about myself, or preferably both. This year’s adventure has definitely been a case of both. On Saturday night, to a packed theatre in North London, I and the 11 others who had completed the course as stand-up comedians gave our first gig. To say it was scary is an understatement. It was terrifying! But I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds.
Although I’m very comfortable standing on stage, giving a speech, doing stand-up comedy is a radically different experience. Every word, every phrase, every expression counts. Timing is critical. And so is building a personal connection with every member of the audience, from the first few seconds, through to the sign off.
Well, I got my laughs. I didn’t knock my teeth out with the mike. I only fluffed a couple of lines. And the adrenalin rush was fantastic. My objective wasn’t to take up stand-up for a living - though I guess this won’t be the last time I inflict my brand of bizarre humour on a comedy audience – but to add something more to the lectures and workshops I present in my normal working life. I can already see a lot of positive results.
I’d recommend anyone, who makes their living from speaking, to try their hand at this extreme environment. And I’d certainly recommend the tutorial team at the Comedy School in London, who supported each of us through a remarkable transition in a relatively short time.
Achieving authenticity
Authenticity is a concept, which is attracting increasing attention in both coaching and mentoring, as well as in leadership generally. Some stimulating conversations at a workshop for a Polish company last week made me think about how I define authenticity.
- My analysis of authenticity is that it has three perspectives:
- The aspiration perspective, which explores and seeks understanding of
- Who we could become
- What that would mean for ourselves and for others
- Benefits and advantages of being that person
- The choices we can make in who we could becomeThe values that underlie our vision of “becoming”
- The reality perspective, which relates to:
- Who we are now and who others perceive us to be
- The rules that we apply and live by and the self-limiting beliefs that flow from these
- How consistently we behave in line with our values
- How we currently make choices
- The acceptance perspective, which concerns:
- Recognising what we don’t have to change
- Valuing who and where we are
- Where appropriate, challenging the rules that limit us or make us feel guilty
Taking a multiple perspective approach to coaching conversations about authenticity could arguably provide a basis for helping clients develop greater understanding of what being authentic means for themselves and how to become more authentic. Definitely a work in process here!
Making your own luck
A recent Bottom line programme on BBC interviewed three CEOs about the role luck had played in their success. All agreed with Thomas Jefferson’s famous quip that the harder he worked, the luckier he became. All said they felt lucky and that they deeply enjoyed their work.
The CEOs presented various theories or ways of interpreting their own experience, but all amounted to either the level of attentiveness to or the level of flexibility they displayed. On attentiveness, they painted a picture of constantly thinking about where they and their businesses were going. Said one: “Work is like music that’s always in your head”. On flexibility, they talked about pursuing goals obsessively for a year, then stepping back and completely remaking their plans, if needed, for the coming year. Said one: “You have to keep your ear to the ground and seize opportunities as they arise.”
These themes are very similar to the evidence David Megginson and I have been gathering about goals within coaching. It seems that goals need to be neither too narrow nor too broad; and that a combination of attentiveness and flexibility help raise awareness of opportunities and create the will and initiative to take advantage of them.
Managing organisational politics
Every so often, I come across a book that it is both informative and practical, on a topic that’s relatively little explored. Corporate politics is one of those topics that tends to get skirted around in management development. Political Dilemmas at Work by Dr Gary Ranker, Colin Gautrey and Mike Phipps (Wiley, 2008) is just such a book.
Coach education typically acknowledges the existence of politics as a recurrent issue for clients, but doesn’t offer a lot of advice on how to help clients deal with it. These authors both provide generic guidance for steering through corporate politics and a rich array of examples, drawn from commonly occurring situations, such as power vacuums, when an influential player leaves the company, being caught in the middle of a turf war, or how to deal with external consultants, who have the CEO’s ear, but are giving bad advice.
Among the key principles of managing organisational politics are:
- Never say “I don’t get involved in politics” – leaders have to be political whenever they make difficult choices
- Be authentic – faking it only works some of the time
- Never try to beat rivals by copying their behaviours or strategies – play to your own strengths instead
- Be authentic and communicate the values you work to
- Get to know the informal organisational chart and who the inner circle are – understand the latter’s agenda and communicate accordingly
It seems that self-awareness and authenticity are the bedrock of an effective political leader in the workplace. Of course, manipulative sociopaths do sometimes get to the top by fooling most of the people, most of the time, but being true to yourself has better odds. For coaches and mentors, then, helping leader clients keep in the flow of politics but not distracted or corrupted by them, is an important role.
New York
It was a pleasure to be back in New York last week – and to beat the snowstorms out. The occasion was The Conference Board’s annual coaching conference. I facilitated a preconference workshop on return on investment from coaching and gave a keynote speech on e-coaching.
One of the useful lessons for me from the workshop was the difference in expectations of coaching between the US and Europe. US heads of coaching – or at least the sample in the workshop – are under much less pressure to demonstrate value for money from coaching than are their European counterparts. Top managers are more prepared in the US to take on faith that coaching is beneficial and cost-effective.
The debate on supervision is also much less intense in the US than in Europe. Relatively few US coaches have formal supervision and clients rarely question whether their coaches are supervised. By contrast, in Europe, there is increasing questioning of the quality of coach supervision. It’s tempting to assume that the US is somehow “behind” Europe, but I suspect that these differences are more to do with different priorities, both in businesses and within the coaching profession. Either way, there is room for valuable exchange and learning.
Still on differences, I began my keynote with the comment that the US and the UK are “two nations divided by contradictory definitions of ‘regular’ portion sizes”.
Every year I engage in some learning activity that will really stretch me. This year, I have signed up for a course on stand up comedy! The end-point is a live gig in a comedy theatre. Scary!!!
Comments
How definite should a definition be?
A current project from the EMCC is to clarify whether and how members in the various countries separate out the concepts of coaching and mentoring. Not surprisingly, there is a wide variation of perspectives and views. The project started (perhaps naively) as an attempt to provide greater precision about the differences and similarities – a common assent to a single set of meanings. Of course, it hasn’t worked out that way. What has been revealed instead is much more valuable – the richness of different experiences, applications and expectations.
At a conference last week I presented a couple of definitions of team coaching – one from two US academics, one that I currently use to try and distinguish team coaching from other group learning activities. I invited the audience to critique both – and they did. One comment was that academic definitions don’t cut the ice with executives in the real world. Other participants offered a whole range of additional phrases and concepts, which could have been included; yet acknowledged that the more detailed the definition, the less clear it becomes.
A metaphor I like in this context is the butterfly. Alive and free, it is unpredictable – a source of wonder and inspiration. Captured and pinned to a board, it loses all that vitality. In the same way, perhaps the more we try to pin down concepts like coaching and mentoring, the less we truly understand them….
Provoking question: What’s the right balance between precision and uncertainty in issues you are tackling?
Stress and performance
Watching my learning disabled son on the ski slopes recently was a fascinating lesson in the links between stress and performance. Trying to get Jonathan to concentrate on his technique on easy slopes was very frustrating for his coach. Moving onto tougher, steeper surfaces with some ice, however, and everything improved immediately. Yet when it came to slopes that were more difficult again – steep and with deep snow – his technique reverted to that in the low stress situation.
Finding the right amount of stress for a task can be the key to performance, both for individuals and teams. A useful exercise for self-development may be to monitor your level of stress as you approach tasks and use this data to plan how to inject the “right” amount of stress when it matters
Provoking question: How can you turn stress into a practical resource to improve performance?
Are coaching and psychology good for each other?
Psychologists and coaches have often been at loggerheads, with each feeling that the other is encroaching on their territory. So it was a pleasure to spend the best part of a day with members of the Society for Coaching Psychology, which bridges that gap, at their annual conference.
Coaching and psychology have, in my view, been good for each other. Coaching has acquired from psychology a wide range of tools and approaches, an evidence base, some of the ethical foundation and a level of professional discipline, which we now see emerging within APECS and the EMCC in particular.
Psychologists have been able to absorb from coaching practical ways of working with the functioning well. Coaching may also oblige them to examine the power dynamics within helping relationships. The therapist brings to a relationship a sense – overt or covert – of expertise, which can induce either compliance or defiance in the client. Indeed the very notion of “client” suggests a level of inferiority. Additionally, many psychiatrists and clinical psychologists find it difficult to switch off the analytical instinct that leads them to decide in their own minds what is “wrong” with a client. Once that notion is established, it is very hard not to let it influence the coaching process, creating a power imbalance.
In any coaching or mentoring relationship – but especially in those where the helper brings the power of expertise - it can be helpful from time to time to consider:
- What power differences may be at work here?
- Where does the power lie? (In the coach / mentor, in the coachee / mentee, or in the space between?)
- What can I do to equalise the power within the relationship and in this conversation specifically?
Also interesting for me is the topic, which I raised, of the relationship between coaches, who are psychologically qualified and those, who are not. Clearly, non-psychologically qualified coaches need to know enough to recognise the boundaries between practical help with someone’s thinking and dysfunctions, which require therapeutic intervention. But equally coaching psychologists can refer clients to, say, performance coaches, who may in some circumstances have a deeper empathy for and contextual understanding of the client’s situation. I suspect there is significant value in creating “coach clusters”, where coaches from different backgrounds can support and educate each other. Indeed, my own experience of working in this way has been generally positive.
Coaching clusters provide a pragmatic means of ensuring the emerging coaching profession does not disaggregate into a plethora of cliques, each competing for the high ground. Given that a core value of both coaching and therapy is Egan’s mutual respect, then gaining better understanding of the intent and practice of other kinds of coach, and helping to spread good practice and ideas unilaterally, must be a positive step for coaching generally.
Another kind of coaching .....
It’s very easy to become stuck in a narrow perspective of what coaching is, based on the kind of practice we do. Last week, I finally took my exam and assessment as an ice skating coach. (I’m still waiting for the verdict.)
Coaching in this environment is heavily skills based. It differs from the developmental coaching I experience in business on a number of counts:
- Client safety takes a much higher priority – ensuring that they do not injure themselves or others
- Coach subject expertise is critical in explaining and demonstrating the skills required – it’s important to understand how the body and the blades interact to make complex moves possible and safe
- Chunking (breaking movements down into manageable smaller elements) is a key task
- Learning takes place by the coach engaging all the client’s senses – visual, auditory and kinaesthetic
It’s fashionable for some executive coaches to denigrate this form of coaching as somehow inferior to their own approaches, but such elitist attitudes can prevent them learning from the richness of well-delivered skills-based coaching. That’s especially true in the context, where I focus my skating coaching – young people with learning disabilities. Executive coaching can sometimes be fun, but it rarely achieves a sense of joy. I see joy week after week, when young people, whose disability constrains their lives in so many ways, acquire simple skills on ice, overcoming their fear and their self-limiting beliefs. Shortly, some 30 learning disabled young people – including one I am working closely with, who is hemiplegic (only her left arm and leg work properly) – will be in the local Christmas Ice Show. If we could transfer just a fraction of the joy these youngsters experience to the mentally and physically able executives, with whom we work, wouldn’t that be a marvellous achievement?
EMCC Conference
Last week was the annual EMCC conference – always a stimulating event, with a high quality of papers and presentations. With the keynote speaker for day two falling ill, David Megginson and I had to step into the breach. Our double act covered our research into goal evolution within coaching and mentoring and the return on investment on both internal and external provision.
My planned presentation was a review of how coach assessment centres work and how coaches can prepare for them. The audience for this session obliging split into small groups to consider the issue that was most likely to cause them difficulty, if they were faced by an assessment panel. These were:
- Personal philosophy of coaching
- Understanding of the business context
- How you use supervision
- How you maintain professional development – and can demonstrate how you have applied learning
- How you identify and manage boundaries
- Your personal journey as a coach
- What kind of clients and situations you work best with
- What you want to learn from the experience
Interesting for me was how evenly distributed the coaches – many of them highly experienced and knowledgeable – were in selecting amongst these issues. Even outside the context of assessment, it seems that these issues are important for all coaches to reflect on. Developing our own narratives about each of these must surely be beneficial in improving the self-awareness of our practice overall.
As always, lots of sessions I’d liked to have been in, as well as those I attended. In the small group discussions, one metaphor I liked emerged from a trio, of which I was part. Some stage magicians are skilled at creating very large bubbles, which assume remarkable shapes. Some can even create bubbles within bubbles. If the creative, reflexive conversation is the bubble, then the coach’s role is to help the client maintain that delicate, awe-inspiring structure until they are ready to let it go. And when they do let it go, it is to fly, rather than to burst. The contrast, suggested by another member of our trio, was the small insignificant bubble that occurs in carbonated drinks. So many inexperienced coaches simply stir up a froth, which rapidly dissipates. And that thought led, of course, to the concept of the “champagne coach” – lots of froth, but really expensive!
Cheers!
Mentoring to Support Immigrant Women
Some events have great potential to challenge thinking. Last week’s international conference of KVINFO, a Danish organisation, which uses mentoring to support immigrant women to become integrated in society, find employment and progress in their careers, was just such an event. KVINFO supports hundreds of mentoring pairs and is in turn supported by the Danish Government. It is expanding its work to women in countries, from which immigrants come and to immigrant men. The conference attracted specialists in women’s development from across the world, including Canada and Morocco.
Among the things that impressed me was the pragmatism demonstrated by the speakers. While there was clearly a sense of idealism behind the many programmes and approaches described, the primary interest was in what worked and how to make it work better. An example is Audur, an Icelandic investment company that describes itself as being run “on feminist lines”. What this meant in practice was that it took a more risk-averse approach to its investment portfolio. As a result, the company is one of the few (perhaps the only) bit of the Icelandic economy that is thriving.
The theme of pragmatism was echoed in many ways. One that struck a chord with me particularly was the research by Kirsten Poulsen’s (a Danish colleague specialising in mentoring programmes) that looked at the difference between mentoring relationships, where meetings were managed through a pre-arranged schedule, and those that simply took place when the mentee had a need. The former demonstrated much higher levels of relationship quality and reflection by the mentee. The more formal approach to meeting scheduling was also associated with pre-emptive discussions – in other words, problems were more often identified before they become crises.
Also interesting and down-to-earth was the work by Canadian Maureen Brown, a Jamaican by origin, examining the “dance” between mentors and mentees in a diversity setting. The dance theme is one I have explored in the context particularly of line manager as coach, but it has relevance to all learning dyads. For deep learning to occur, both parties must have the confidence to hold each other, to familiarise themselves with the steps together, and to allow the “music” of the conversation to bring structure to the conversation. Maureen provides a lot of practical advice on the dance of diversity in her publication Cross-cultural and cross-racial mentoring: Strategies for Mentors, Protégés and Mentoring Organizations.
Paula