Business coaching

Oh, how I sinned, dear Lord! For years I thought I had been coaching the top management at Allianz. I advised them on good communication. I gave them – hopefully precious – career tips. I motivated them to learn, be trained and try out new things. I warned them of stakeholders’ complaints. I suggested updating the strategy to adapt to changes in the marketplace. And I called this ‘coaching’. Poor me. One day a good old friend, Nancy Glynn, told me she had changed her career from a senior executive to a business coach. She wanted to become a coach and stop giving people advice but pull the best out of them. I felt a pain in my chest. Coaching is not about telling? No, it isn’t, at least not non-directive coaching, the path she had chosen to pursue.

Figure 4.1 The support for the Listening Leader

She was so energised by the Business Coach programme of Meyler Campbell in London that it was infectious and she has now become my supervisor. And when I was finally admitted to the same programme after an unforgettable conversation with Anne Scoular, the iconic founder of the Meyler Campbell institution and author of the FT Guide on Business Coaching, I started to discover I had been an imposter for many years. What I had done in the decades before my coaching education in London had been advising, not coaching. I was just an expert telling a general manager what options he or she had available. Coaching, instead, is about pulling the best out of the client in order to increase his or her performance. The client of a leader with a coaching approach is their employee.

As Anne Scoular writes about non-directive coaching: ‘So mentoring, training, consulting, put in; coaching pulls out.’¹

‘Good business coaching is so powerful that if it was a drug, it would be illegal. A client walks into a coaching session stressed, overburdened, ready to give up – and an hour later emerges transformed: clear, focused, calmer, fit again to fight and win.’²

Coaching is not about coddling. Still some managers (fewer every new day, fortunately) believe that being coached means showing a weakness or that it is about feeling good. This is not the case. Good business coaching increases performance substantially. Coaching doesn’t need to be bought solely from professional coaches. Leaders can become coaches too. The best schools (Harvard, Meyler Campbell and others) also offer programmes for line and staff managers who want to use coaching techniques to become better leaders.

A Listening Leader is a coaching leader.

Coaching can’t be taught in a paragraph. But a short look at the most common model for a session of business coaching, or, if you want, for a conversation with your employee is GROW, developed by Sir John Whitmore. It illustrates the basic grid of a coaching conversation, shaped by a coach intensively listening for the largest share of this conversation, using her voice to ask stimulating open questions to answer the following four items:

Goal setting for the sessions as well as short and long term

Reality checking to explore the current situation

Options and alternative strategies or courses of action

What is to be done, When, by Whom, and the Will to do it.³

There are improved variations of the GROW model, like the Achieve Coaching Model.

What matters is that this process is carried out using the powers of good client questioning and intensive listening. A coaching cycle may last for a whole year. It’s protected by confidentiality, it is contracted after a first chemistry meeting that allows client and coach to decide whether to enter into a coaching relationship. It is governed by ethical standards (see those of WABC, as an example, on www.wabccoaches.com). It should be non-directive (pulling, not pushing). It should be fully aware of the borders to psychotherapy. It is constantly improved by practise, peer exchange and supervision.

And it is awesome. The moment two people establish a flow that allows them to generate ideas, to gain new perspectives, to suddenly realise important insights leading to a solution to an apparently unsolvable problem on the job is a moment of bliss. That’s what made me thank my employer for entrusting me with a leadership position. That’s what makes me thankful for having undergone first-class training that allows me to coach top managers of multinational corporations facing enormously interesting challenges.

Supervision is key to good coaching. This involves having regular conversations with a peer and generally very experienced coach with whom to discuss difficult cases, figure out blind spots any coach can have, ethical questions and consult on a crucial issue that arises more often than not: ‘Is this client in need of psychological consulting rather than just business coaching?’

Coaching strategy

Every company using business coaches for their employees should have a coaching way to have a greater impact. I’m not referring to the natural instinct of some HR officers to dictate a set of commandments on prices for business coaches, procurement guidelines and so on – all legitimate stuff but nothing to write home about. The use of business coaches within an organisation should be managed by individuals who understand the profession, the market and the added value that such an instrument can bring. If they don’t, well, another lost opportunity for a badly run HR department.

I speak about the huge potential of insight that business coaches have and that remains untapped by companies, even by those who have professional HR practices and are used to working with coaches.

There are two things that a company can learn from the collectivity of coaches working with their staff:

• Look behind – unveil the hidden state of the organisation. Trends, red flags, hidden rules on the culture, the present stress levels and possible root causes, the implementation of new processes or the diversity policy. Without breaking their vow to confidentiality, coaches can share their insights on the company in an anonymised way, still providing the client company with relevant input of what is concerning their managers when they can vent their feelings in a safe environment.
• Help to match personal motivation and purpose of the company. It is important to constantly look for mutual benefits between the company and its management in terms of pursuing aligned purposes. The more the personal and corporate purposes are aligned, the higher the motivation will be and the more successful the company will get. Coaches are well trained to detect discrepancies and ask inspiring questions. You are well advised to consider another employment if you notice that the two purposes drift apart. Coaches aware of these shifts can be a very useful litmus test for both the company and the coachee.

Mentoring

Mentoring is when an experienced person guides a less-experienced person. Or, more formally: ‘Mentoring is a formal or informal relationship established between an experienced, knowledgeable employee and an inexperienced or new employee. The purpose of the mentoring relationship is to help the new employee quickly absorb the organisation’s cultural and social norms.’⁴ Even beyond the world of employees, as mentioned in this definition of mentoring, mentoring can be applied across different organisation types, from advisory and supervisory boards, to start-ups and students.

With Franca I had found the first of my many mentors whose wisdom and guidance I have enjoyed over the years. A good mentor can be life changing. Become one yourself. A Listening Leader is also always a mentor.

A mentor is more senior and is there to answer questions by the mentee. A good mentoring relationship is based on the initiative being taken by the mentee to engage the mentor in questions where the experience, skillset and knowledge of the mentor is used to improve the performance of the mentee. Needless to say that mentors benefit enormously from good mentees: they’re being asked the relevant questions they may not reflect enough about. They may be confronted with fresh, different views. They may benefit from a totally diverse perception of the business reality and thereby gain new insights.

The ‘deal on failures’

‘We either learn to fail or we fail to learn’, says Harvard psychology professor and author, Tal Ben-Shahar.

One of the biggest obstacles to people taking on responsibility and acting as empowered corporate representatives is the fear of failing.

Attitude and culture are tantamount for a ‘learn from failure’ environment. And you have to lead by example: Be a healthy optimist and not a negative perfectionist.

If you have a clear set of rules, of dos and don’ts, you can always revert to the rulebook to take decisions and let the responsibility remain with the power that delegated you to represent it.

Is this enough? No, because this will not allow you to enthuse your stakeholders.

Strike a deal with your staff – but don’t forget the other stakeholders: What happens when we fail with customers? Do we become defensive? Do we regularly assess the impact of this failure on stakeholders? How do we reduce or eliminate the impact of this failure? Do we apologise? Do we share our learnings with the stakeholders?

Is this enough? No, because this will not allow you to enthuse your stakeholders.

Make sure you discuss failure within your team. Dedicate a team meeting to the contract you want to sign with your team, the ‘deal on failures’. How shall we deal with the responsibilities for failure and how do we learn from failures? Address all open issues and create a simple set of rules, ideally not more than five or six, something like:

1. We learn from failures.
2. We volunteer any information concerning a failure; we address mistakes proactively.
3. We don’t judge; we try to listen attentively and strive to understand.
4. The standard is set by the manager who leads by example.
5. We accept the emotions that go with the failure instead of immediately trying to ‘fix it’.
6. We assess the impact of the failure on every stakeholder.

Every failure dealt with according to these jointly developed rules will not be sanctioned but rewarded. A bonus? A recognition? The task to lead the next project? Your call, depending on the motivational structure of your team.

What matters is not necessarily the wording of your ‘deal’, it’s the attitude and spirit of the team and their participation in crafting those rules, in their ownership of the deal.

The way we deal with mistakes and failures, even the smallest ones, may be a key criterion to kill or grow the proper culture that nourishes communicative leadership. Mistakes occur all the time – the real challenge is to make sure that you are aware of the mistake, that you truly understand it, before you start thinking of how to fix it. Learn what happened in order to learn how not to do things.

Counselling

When you advise someone who is not an expert in your field, you are counselling this person. That’s what communications people normally do with CEOs or lawyers.

If you play the blame game, not only are you not a Listening Leader, but, much worse, you are risking your job. Next time people may try to hide the mistake, blame someone else or simply avoid making decisions. This will backfire on you. And turn a mistake into a failure, a small lie becoming a big lie.

How one can effectively learn from failure is the sense of another interesting story my coaching friend Claudia Danser recounts:

Redistribution of power

How to divide up power and turn it over to the bottom of the organisation may be considered an art, but basically it’s a skill you can learn.

• First comes a brief reflection on what powers you have in your role.
• Then comes the litmus test of character: How much of this is really your prerogative and how much can you cede to your staff in order to allow them more freedom?
• Third, try out if it’s working and if not, adapt it.
• The most important thing to do, however, is to ask your team: What do you need from me to be more effective and take decisions that advance our objectives and save us time?

Now, and only now, you can start thinking about how you ensure that things don’t get out of hand and you are kept abreast of developments that you finally have to sign for with your own boss.

Link strategy to intrinsic motivation

To deploy the full power of enabled team members there is a seamlessly endless source of energy: the motivation of your people. The motivation is at its best if it is in keeping with the purpose of the company. This is why recruiting the right people is so important. To recruit, develop, enable and empower the right people you have to get to know them and check whether they match the company. Both partners need to be aware of the purpose of the other. The popular business writer John Strelecky calls it the ‘Purpose for Existing’ that needs to be aligned between staff member and company.⁶

Learn to deal with dilemmas

In trying to avoid mistakes one looks for a grid allowing us to know what the right thing is: it’s either good or bad and you should follow the good path. What a nice world IT managers have created for themselves. The core of the billions of actions that their systems spark off is based on the simple alternative 1 or 0, yes or no.

But the world isn’t that simple. Balancing different stakeholders is a daily exercise where no rule-book can tell you what is right and what is wrong.

I sometimes ask my students to enter into a dialogue with me on some questions of general interest. Then I ask them to tell me whether they are in favour or against child labour. No hand is raised to defend child labour, of course. Then I ask them whether they have ever seen a picture of a child on the lap of a sturdy Western tourist in a Thai brothel in some news magazine. Or maybe the picture of a child-warrior from the Ivory Coast. Or whether they have heard of young boys in Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar or Vietnam selling opium and becoming addicted themselves in order to become reliable salespeople for the organised crime. These are all child labourers. The families of these children need money. Now, is there a difference between being forced to kill, prostitute or become a drug addict for money and sewing leather footballs in terms of psychological and physical impact on these children? When my students nod, I ask them if they could approve of child labour that has no impact on their health and that would only last four hours a day plus four compulsory hours of schooling every day. When the first student understands and suddenly defends the soft version of child labour, I stop the enthusiasm reminding them I didn’t want to make them change their mind in favour of some sort of child labour. What matters is the reflection on the matter. Considering the causes of child labour, the poverty, the fight for survival of families and the different intensities of exploitation of a child. This conversation is what matters.

Every day in companies dilemmas arise between stakeholders, between the interests of the shareholder and of the customers, between the interest of the employee and that of the consumer and so on. There very rarely is a digital answer, ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

How to deal with dilemmas

The best way to deal with the dilemmas is to make them explicit to both parties, to all involved stakeholders. Why is there a difficulty of choice? Which commitments (to the customer, to the capital markets etc.) can turn into conflict?

All affected parties should be:

• aware of the positions of all involved parties including their goals and objectives
• open to accepting the realities and constraints, analysing the context and the relevant players
• ready to discuss options and choices with their consequences.

They can mutually decide whether to tolerate, to accept the counterpart’s position or whether to change their own position, strike a deal, a trade-off or simply walk away as customers or employees. It is necessary, though, to understand where the other person comes from, what objectives they have, what values, time constraints and so forth. In other words, you may have guessed, to listen to their concern. Even if you can’t reach an agreement, at least you can learn to accept the other’s point of view. A brilliant book has been written by the Ghanaian-American philosopher Kwame Appiah about dealing with the modern, global dilemmas we’re increasingly faced with.⁷

Have a break: let others lead

I’ve been there: a control-freak gifted with constructive paranoia, always on the prowl to listen to weak signals and prepare my company to deal with them. The smartphone always turned on, 24/7/365, night and day, on the job and on vacation. There’s a nice German song from Tim Bendzko, called ‘I just have to quickly save the world.’ It goes like that:

I would have loved to be there, but I’m so busy. Let’s talk later. They need me out there, the situation is underestimated. Maybe our lives depend on it. I know you mean it and you can’t do without me, but don’t worry, I’m not going to be away for long.

I just have to save the world, then I fly to you. I have to check 148,713 emails, who knows what’s going to happen, because so many things are going on. Let me just quickly save the world and then I’ll be with you.

I admit, I sometimes felt like the guy from this song or Atlas, with the burden of the whole world resting on my shoulders. The brave boy I’ve always been, I would always be on duty. I am irreplaceable, of course.

For a number of reasons I decided to quit Allianz in 2011 and had agreed with the CEO that I would leave six months after his successor would have taken office. The date of the change at the helm wasn’t clear, but his current contract would expire at the end of 2014 and I had some time to deal with a couple of challenges and prepare my exit. One of the tasks to address was to find some good candidates for my succession. Incidentally, the company was on a journey to improving work–life integration and intended to promote sabbaticals. But no one in the top management had ever taken a sabbatical.

I was tired and strained by almost two decades of permanent duty, I needed to find a successor, no top manager was available to take a sabbatical and state an example: a wonderful coincidence. So I asked for a sabbatical, which was granted. And I decided to take a month off every year in summer for the rest of my time in the company. Good opportunities to test candidates for my succession. Turning off my smartphone and seeing whether I really was irreplaceable.

I wasn’t, of course. The colleagues taking over in my sabbatical and the longer holidays could try out my job. And my boss and his executive board colleagues could test them, see them in action. Without a puppeteer in the backstage, since I started to enjoy holidays without daily interruption and crisis calls. You all know what happened: the world did not collapse, the planet didn’t need me to be saved. I could identify a couple of candidates for my succession, they were tested by the C-suite and when I left, a brilliant successor was chosen and I am long forgotten. With the additional reward of four marvellous summers.

Let go from time to time. It pays off.

How to get and give the break

Are you one of those stressed managers I described at the beginning of this chapter? Have you ever had the impossible dream of taking a sabbatical? Or of doing an MBA? Or of increasing your already stellar performance with good business coaching? Have you been asked by your partner to take a parental leave? If you have answered ‘yes, but I don’t have the time’ to these questions, you may have good reason to read these lines.

Of course you have the time. Not only that, but if you do take this time to learn or recharge your batteries or spend a particularly important period caring for your sick parents or helping your partner to manage private challenges, not only will you do something that matters greatly to you or that positively impacts your health, but you also get to empower your own people. A sabbatical is a wonderful opportunity to test someone from your team: can you take over while I’m on a sabbatical? What unique training for that person; what a growth opportunity, a learning occasion. Kill two birds with one stone: enjoy a break and develop your people. Maternity or paternity leaves are another great opportunity to gain time for your family and let someone else in your team take over and learn. Let others lead while you’re off on your summer vacation.

If you do so, discuss a questionnaire with the person substituting you – questions for an anonymous survey after that period in order to gather feedback about this leadership experience. Or simply both take a 360-degree survey.

Avoid the monkey

Imagine you’re rushing to a meeting you don’t want to be late for. Suddenly Susan is in your way. Yesterday you had given her a task she has to deliver by next week – nothing spectacular, a small report. She stops you to complain about the complexity of the task and how much she has on her desk and – look! – how the first numbers she calculated don’t add up … you sigh and think how easy that task is. In half an hour you would manage to do what Susan fears not being able to do in a week. You tell her you will prepare the report yourself. Susan has just given you the monkey, uploading further burden onto your shoulders.

The exact opposite of empowerment is having new monkeys to manage every day. People will off-load their tasks onto you if they’re not empowered. Empowerment allows them to shape their day, their agenda and to take stock of their new freedom to better serve the company, take better decisions, listen and respond more efficiently. Empowerment therefore allows you to avoid the monkeys, work less, grow and develop your staff members. While accepting the monkey will lead straight to overwork, burn-out, stress and dissatisfaction for you, the leader.⁸

Structure

Autonomy and flexibility are hailed as the non plus ultra for millennials. And this is true. But only if there is underlying structure. With that I don’t mean bureaucratic processes, or a step-by-step guide to each task. We are instead talking about the framework. Employees of this generation like to work knowing the values of the company, its goals and specific project aims, the expectations from stakeholders towards them and deadline details. Whether they are working towards a specific professional plan or not, they like to know their options, so career progression prospects are of interest to millennials.

However, what they would like to put their personal footprint on, mostly regards the approach to work. This can include dress code, structuring of working day or week, modes of learning and working. We are possibly a little egocentric, it’s true, but it also means we have evaluated our own preferences and talents and entered the workforce with a good idea of how we work best. We would probably not so easily accept a company culture of ‘This is the way we do things around here.’ We would ask: ‘Can I do it my way if I still deliver?’

Identity

Labels. We hate them. Many millennials might not even want to be called millennials. One day we might be actively opposing factory farms, the next our fighting spirit is targeted towards cyber-spying. But we might neither be vegetarians, nor hippies.

Rather than belonging to specific groups, we identify with principles or strategies of many of them, and accept the fluidity of our identity. This enables us to see problems from different angles and to apply knowledge from different perspectives to issues at hand. The coupling of entrepreneurial and business sense with societal issues is just one example.

Collective intelligence

Global digital connectivity has allowed us to gain great conscience about world issues. Armed with not just ideals or abstract concepts, but also a sense of reality and a strong backing from the community, we feel entitled to challenge the big powerhouses. It is interesting to see how our mistrust towards these holders of power and the scepticism meet the idealism of youth and optimism, which is born out of the possibilities available to us today.

We can start our own companies and provoke action through the airing and discussing of our opinions on social media. We can also plan for alternatives to the concentration of power we see today. There is this belief in collective power among us, which has surely been shaped by our connectedness online. It is also the power we see as most legitimate. While previous generations might have accepted that seniority, age or experience in part legitimate power, we strive for meritocracy and democracy.

In our opinion, the best work is achieved by building upon each other, utilising each other’s strengths and evaluating issues from different points of view, be they cultural, educational or personal. The global exchange between people has also allowed us to increase our knowledge about cultural differences and be tolerant and understanding towards these differences. This might impact different ways to go about empowering your stakeholders in a very collectivistic or in a pronounced individualistic environment, in more egalitarian rather than more hierarchical societies and cultures.⁹

Power goes hand in hand with responsibility

Tainted by scandals and horrid shows of abuse of power, there is now increased focus on the responsibilities that come along with power. As mentioned above, this generation is acutely aware of the issues that affect today’s and tomorrow’s world, be they social or environmental or about human and civil rights. It is unbelievable to us (perhaps this shows our naivety) that the big deciders in the world fail to tackle these issues. Just think that only 42 percent of young Americans support capitalism today.¹⁰ If this mindset is maintained and channelled correctly, this could mean a revolution in power structures and exertion: The question of who decides what and how, in the world of tomorrow.