During coaching, the opportunity is to let go of what is important to all stakeholders and co-create from nothing with the coachee — that is when miracles in performance happen.  Sustainable performance shifts come from a shift in the coachee’s thinking.  When a coachee takes the same action and holds a different context from which they operate from….huge and sustainable performance occurs.

 
Something to consider; business stakeholders take a strategic, long term big picture view of how they want their businesses to go…there is an opportunity to be equally invested in taking a strategic inquiry to what our people are interested in and use their interest as a foundation to their personal development plan.  Their goals will illustrate their own performance gaps, coaching and developing them through what their goals are will provide more buy-in from the coachee.  And when an employee is given the time and opportunity to create with their sales manager, the manager would be surprised that more often than not, the direct report’s goals and self identified skill gaps are aligned with the organization.

Giving the direct report the opportunity to self reflect and become self aware provides the sales manager with permission to coach, it grants the sales manager the authority they are looking for to make a difference.  Co-creating a development plan through coaching has proven to be more effective then imposing one.
And…there are times when the sales manager’s role is to be the boss and tell, and there are times with the sales manager’s role is to be the implementer and do!

If we coach to what is important to us, the organization or the client, we miss the opportunity to learn what motivates, inspires and moves our coachee.  When we coach to what is important to us, or anyone other than the coachee we are holding our own agenda as the primary focus.  Coaching is about holding our coachee’s agenda as the focus.  Holding what they want to accomplish as the primary focus.  When we learn what motivates and inspires our coachee and learn what they are committed to on both a personal and professional level we, as coaches are able to take a strong stand for what they want.

 
I would like to create a perspective to consider:  the job or role the coachee holds and the organization they work for is the vehicle for them to express themselves, it is the vehicle for them to accomplish what their goals are.  When we as coaches learn what our coachee’s purpose in life is we can then share with them that the opportunity with the organization they work for is that it is the vehicle for them to express their purpose.  This type of realizations make for huge shifts in behaviour, in commitment, in results, in their experience of joy and fulfilment.  Most times performance issues are related to; a missing sense of purpose, a sense of feeling unimportant, a misunderstanding of their part in the big picture.  When we coach to our coachee’s concerns and desires, when we hold their agenda as the primary focus we create win-win-win situations.  The organization wins, the clients win and our coachee wins!

Secondly, their is your own internal dialogue as a human being and as a coach.  This is your interpretation of what your coachee is saying.  It is vital to the coaching conversation that the coach be present to how they are interpreting what is said as your own interpretations will drive what questions are asked and the direction the conversation will go.   It is important to continually be aware of who’s agenda you, as coach, are serving; yours or your coachee’s.

Some questions to continually ask yourself during a coaching interaction:

1. How might my own assumptions and judgments be clouding my interpretation of what is being said?
2. How do my interpretations impact my feelings and emotions?
3. What am I listening for?
4. Where am I listening from?
5. Do I think the coachee is whole, resourceful and wise and has all the answers?

Knowing that how we be, how we act and the results we produce stems from what is important to us, provides us with the opportunity to coach our people at a deep level.  Coaching at a deep level is an effective way to nourish the soul and affect sustainable behaviour change.

When coaching your people are you coaching to what is important to them? or Are you coaching to what is important to you?  Look at the questions you ask.  Do the questions you ask elicit what is important to the coachee? or Do they elicit answers to what is important to you?  For example: are you asking “why are you not hitting your targets” vs. “what are you committed to?”.

Coaching Questions to ask yourself and to implement in your coaching:

1. What questions are you asking to learn what is important to the coachee?
2. What are you listening for, their excuses and reasons or what their intentions are?
3. What concerns of the coachee are not being taken care of that have them have the results they have?
4. What concerns of yours or the organizations are not being taken care of that must be addressed?
5. What questions do you need to start asking?

Our “Coach-Like” Leader Program: Developing you to develop your people to shift from good work to great work!

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Consider the following:

It’s 4:45 on a Friday, you have 32 emails to return that are of top priority, your voice mail box is full and you are not finished the report you have to hand in to the board before you leave.  At 4:50 one of your direct reports knocks on your door with a question.  The kind of question you think he or she should be able to work through on their own.  What do you do?  Do you tell them the answer, do you tell them you will take care of it and do the work yourself or do you take a moment and ask some questions?

TELLING CREATES BOTTLENECKS!

What we’ve noticed is that in the heat of the moment and to save time, leaders tell their direct reports what to do.  Consider your direct reports want to be developed, they want to empowered to make decisions, they want to expand their leadership, they want to be considered for more responsibility and higher positions.  Consider, somewhere in the background, when you tell vs. coach, what get’s communicated is your self talk, which usually is some version of: “I don’t think you are smart enough”…”I have to do it on my own” ….”I will become obsolete if I don’t have all the answers”…”My way is only way”.  Consider when your people are asking for support they are really asking for coaching.  You telling the answer creates you as the bottleneck.  Consider you are the cap, what you do and don’t see as possible with your direct reports is the cap to their growth and development and to the organization’s results.

WHAT IS COACHING?

Coaching is holding your direct report as resourceful and wise.  Coaching is about listening at a deeper level.  Its about listening for your direct report’s feelings, concerns and commitments, it’s about knowing that your direct report is committed to higher levels of performance and something is in the way.  It’s about asking questions to raise your direct report’s self awareness, it’s about sharing new perspectives and providing direct communication so they identify what is in the way, and it’s about co-creating action plans to hold the direct report accountable to their growth and development.  Being “Coach-Like” in your leadership is the most effective way to hold people accountable.

DEVELOPING AND COACHING YOUR PEOPLE IS THE ACCESS TO PRODUCING MORE WITH LESS RESOURCES!

Ask yourself:

1. What are you doing Telling or Coaching?
2. What is your self talk that has you tell vs. coach?
3. What is the impact of not coaching your people to higher levels of performance?
4. What cap are you on results? Yours, theirs and the organizations.

• Check out our  ”Coach-Like” Leader Program.  Become more “Coach-Like” and expand results!
• http://www.skillshift.com/wp-content/uploads/coach-like-leader-program_Final_forWeb.pdf

The question there is to ask ourselves is: “how open am I really” to learning that something new, that something that will make the difference I am looking for?  Often times we attend these learning sessions and something of the following is hanging out in our mindset:

Thoughts:

• I already heard this before
• I already know this
• There is nothing new here
• I have a hard time saying I don’t know so I’ll come up with an answer
• I’m concerned what others will think so I won’t ask questions
• I don’t want to look dumb
• I remember the last time I participated….that didn’t go well
• This isn’t the way a seminar is supposed to be
• I don’t need to know this

Ways of Being that are barriers to learning:

• Being way too serious
• Uninterested
• Distracted
• Aloof

Consider all of these thoughts are “barriers to learning”, they all will stop you from hearing that something that you are looking for, that something that will make the difference for you.

Coaching Questions:

1. What support do you need to identify your barriers of learning?
2. What are your barriers to learning?
3. What impact do your barriers have on you?
4. What will you do next time to quite your barriers and be fully present to the learning?

Check out our “Coach-Like” Leader program.  Develop yourself to be able to identify Enemies of Learning for your people so that you can inspire higher levels of performance:

http://www.skillshift.com/wp-content/uploads/coach-like-leader-program_Final_forWeb.pdf

These are common complaints we have been hearing on a regular basis from some of our top leaders in our biggest North American companies.  The other day an associate coach and I were sharing and she said that “the higher the position in an organization, the less power they have”  What an interesting comment, it is almost counter intuitive.  Let’s consider it for a moment….who do you have less power with?  After some discussion with her she shared that at the top, our leaders have less power with their clients – because they are not client facing.  After I thought about it for a while I thought it was a very accurate statement.

Our organizations want to grow, some exponentially and yet our leaders are saying that targets are too high and if they don’t do the work themselves targets will be missed.  They don’t take the time to develop their teams so that everyone is more skilled with the clients.  Imagine, if this is the case, how many of your clients are not getting the “client experience” you intend?  This mentality is the exact mentality that causes bottlenecks, escalations and line ups outside your door.  Leaders that have this thought process also complain that they have no time, all they do is put out fires, some even think their team is under qualified or incompetent.

Take a moment and think, do you ever hear theses comments running through your mind.  Let’s consider what the emotional status of these leaders is.   Under this type of pressure and lack of team, these leaders also share that they are frustrated, upset, disappointed, worried, angry, anxious and concerned….they are FUDWAAC’d.  Being FUDWACC’d is an emotional state that our leaders are dealing with that causes tiredness, rash decision making, unapproachability and ultimately costs us our organizational results.  In the background what is screaming is “I don’t believe this can happen”.

Think about that, if our leaders don’t believe in the targets then how will our teams?  If the leaders are not buying into the vision, then how will they empower our teams to be engaged and aligned?  Most often we hear our leaders complain that their teams complain the targets are too high.  We say, ask yourself, as their leader do you think they are too high?  Engagement and Alignment start at the head of any organization.  During our leadership workshops, leaders start to realize that they too don’t believe, that they are not buying in, that their engagement is purely driven from from fear of failing.   Take a moment….is this happening to your organization, your leaders, your teams?

Consider the higher you are in an organization the more “Coach-Like” and focused on developing your people you have to be.  We coach leaders to embrace coach-able moments and take the time to develop and expand their team’s leadership capacity.  Leaders we have worked with share that they have more time, higher results and a sense of fulfillment.

Coaching Questions:

1. Thinking of the targets you are faced with, what is your belief?
2. What are you doing to be “Coach-Like” and develop your teams?
3. What do you spend your time on: Doing the Work, Making Decisions or Developing your People?
4. What impact does “Doing the Work” vs. “Developing your People” have on the organization’s results?
5. What learning would make the difference to develop you as “Coach-Like”?

Develop yourself as a leader that inspires, impacts and influences higher performance with our “Coach-Like” Leader Program:

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As business people and as human beings we are continually seeking to successfully adapt.  We all innately want to be successful.  We want our business to flourish, our families to prosper and our communities to thrive.  What we don’t notice is that our old ways of making our decisions from logic, rational analysis, control, order and certainty is no longer sufficient to support our futures.  Our old belief that we can know how the world really is through science has misguided us and has left most of us dissatisfied and experiencing and a sense of emptiness in our work and in our lives.  Essentially, our people have become disconnected to what is important to them.

What this means for our organizations is that people no longer see value in what they do on a day-to-day basis.  Without being able to identify their value they pull away from the strategic vision which results in low engagement.  People then start to form small groups and gossip, sabotaging their leaders and the organization’s performance or they get consumed by numbers and act as lone rangers, hoarding information and disseminating all sense of team.

Our output is minimal and subpar compared to what is when we have purpose and meaning to our work.   When our souls are nourished the organization is nourished.  When we have purpose and meaning to our work and our lives we are more creative and innovative, ideas flow freely, new energy enlivens us, we find shortcuts to productivity and we experience more fun and ease as a team and as an organization.

What is it going to take to have us find meaning in our work so that we can thrive as organizations?

It is time to look at our mindsets, how we approach change, how we perceive situations, how we interpret challenges, what we see as opportunities and the actions we take.  Shifting from a fixed mindset to one of being flexible and adaptable is going to support our success.  Consider, how we learn is in question.

We are now in a time where are leaders have the opportunity to provide coaching, learning, community and companionship to our teams.  We are now in a time where our leaders are in a position to empower and enable us to develop new ways of perceiving, thinking and communicating.  Those leaders that leverage their teams and create community and collaboration on their teams will provide their people with a sense of togetherness which supports a sense of purpose and meaning.  Results will be silo busting, increased engagement and innovation.  People will feel connected to their work, experience a sense of pride and seek out opportunities for their organization.

Leaders now have an opportunity to create new ways of learning for their teams, new ways of having team members hold each other accountable, new ways of interacting with one another.  These new ways of interacting and communicating with each other is what people are yearning for.  Those leaders that have the insight to see this will be the catalyst for their organizations.

Coaching Questions:

1. Describe what type of leader you are?
2. What type of leader do you want to be?
3. What do you want people to say about you when you are not present?
4. What do you want your legacy to be?
5. What is important to you about leading and developing people?
6. What learning and development do you need to support your leadership?

Check out our “Coach-Like” Leader program.  Develop yourself to inspire higher levles of performance from your people:

http://www.skillshift.com/wp-content/uploads/coach-like-leader-program_Final_forWeb.pdf

• For some it looks like silo busting
• For others it’s about navigating change or growth
• For some it’s hitting sales targets
• For some it’s about hitting tight deadlines or completing a big project
• For others it’s about elevating the professional maturity
• For some it’s about getting a new team up to speed
• For other sit’s about increasing engagement and alignment

What we have found is that the highest point of leverage in high performing organizations is with it’s leaders and that many organizations have not invested enough time or energy in developing their leaders.  Leaders are expected to take their teams to higher levels of performance and yet they never really get the development they need.

We coach and develop leaders to take a strategic look at the HOW:

• How their team communicates and share information
• How their teams interact and relate to each other and
• How engaged and aligned their teams are to the strategic vision

When organizations look at the HOW they learn:

• Where they are really spending their time
• What conversations are necessary and which are missing
• What’s working and not working
• What’s hidden from their view
• How to work together differently and
• What they really want

From the new learnings leaders and their teams find:

New energy, new ideas and innovative and creative ways of doing things that save time and money, increase productivity and revenue and have everyone experience more fun and ease.

The issues of performance and productivity and profit cannot be divorced from how people relate to each other in the workplace.  The ways people communicate, relate and cooperate with each other in doing their work impacts what does and does not get done, the quality of what gets done as well as creativity and innovation.  How the team relates and interacts determines what the team sees as problems, what is seen as possibility and what solutions are thought of.

How your teams think, communicate and interact will either support or sabotage your organizational strategy!

How are you developing your leaders so that you hit your 2012 goals?