Chapter 7
Creating Solutions Through Coaching

In basketball, it all comes down to 40 minutes on the court.

A recruiter finds the players. The conference schedules the games and playoffs. The coach and assistant coaches train and develop the players. The sports analysts and commentators describe and even predict the games. The fans cheer wildly. But when it comes down to it, the game is played by 10 people on the court for 40 minutes. Those players have to make split-second decisions and reactions, with the responsibility of winning or losing on their shoulders. They need the support of all those around them, but only the players on the floor create the results.

The same holds true for business. No matter how well you’ve laid out policies and procedures, the players on the floor (employees) are the ones who make it happen.

From the hourly temp filing documents and the kid dunking a basket of fries into hot grease to middle- and upper-level managers, workers make dozens of crucial decisions every day. And they have to make them on the run.

You’ll do some of your best coaching (especially with teams) when you run with them, working out solutions and anticipating problems together.

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Most often you won’t be there when those critical decisions have to be made. For that reason, you need a well-coached team of workers, capable of making decisions, taking initiative, and solving problems.

How do you put together a high-performing team?

Hire them carefully.

Coach them well.

Give them room to work.

You want to avoid having to spend your time checking and correcting workers (much less doing their jobs for them). Put in that time up front, coaching workers to do the job right the first time, without having you looking over their shoulders.

If you coach them well, empower them, and trust them, you won’t have to correct them later.

Six Steps to Effective Problem Solving

In problem-solving sessions (especially with groups), effective managers follow these six steps:

1. Define the opportunity.

2. Define the goal.

3. Create the action plan.

4. Set the evaluation standard.

5. Confirm understanding.

6. Plan the follow-up.

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Let’s take those steps one by one.

Step 1. Define the opportunity. It may seem like part of a corny and overused management mantra: a problem is a challenge, a challenge is an opportunity, and an opportunity is a triumph. In any case, defining the opportunity really does help you create solutions if you look at any situation as a challenge or an opportunity rather than as a crisis or a problem.

Whatever you call it, you and your staff need to know exactly what you’re working on. Sometimes that means you, as the coach, need to do a lot of asking and a lot of listening. “How?” questions (How can we move forward? How can we improve? How can we make it even better?) are your best tools here.

You may go into a coaching conversation believing that the problem at hand is Frank’s rotten attitude and lack of motivation. By the time you’re done asking and listening, you’ve redefined the problem (with input from Frank) as a lack of meaningful work for Frank to do. Here’s an opportunity to put Frank where he can contribute more value to the company and find greater job satisfaction.

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Make sure everybody involved has a clear and consistent sense of the opportunity before you move on to step 2. Once they can perceive what’s going on in terms of an opportunity (instead of a problem or crisis), the momentum to move forward toward a solution will be significant.

Step 2. Define the goal. Once you get the opportunity mapped out, the goal usually seems obvious. But that’s often only in appearance. Let’s take an example.

You’re not selling enough harpsichords. You should sell more harpsichords, right? Of course. But to whom, and for what purpose?

Do you go back to your old customers, trying to persuade them to buy another harpsichord or two? If so, for what reason? Do you have a new use for your product? (“The harpsichord—your musical salami slicer.”) How about a new occasion to use it in the same old way? (“The harpsichord: it’s not just for after dinner anymore.”)

Do you try to open up a new market? If so, how will you identify and reach those people? Why aren’t they buying from you already?

“We need to sell more harpsichords” isn’t a clear enough goal.

Let’s try, “We need to develop a market for harpsichords among the nearly 200,000 owners of Harley-Davidson motorcycles in our marketing area.” That’s better. (It may be nuts, but it is a lot more specific.)

As you start to clarify your goal, make sure it is SMART. SMART goals are optimized for success, because they are

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Realistic

Timed for completion

The goal for selling harpsichords in a new market is getting clearer, but can be even more specific. A SMART version of it might read: “We will sell 2,000 harpsichords in the first half of the next fiscal year to Harley-Davidson owners in this metropolitan area with a targeted marketing campaign.” Is it SMART? Let’s check.

Specific: 2,000 harpsichords sold (yes, very specific), also in a very specific market (Harley owners in this metropolitan area).

Measurable: yes—the sales numbers will indicate how many harpsichords are sold, and marketing data will track the effect of promotional efforts. You’ll know definitively whether you achieved this goal.

Achievable: probably, because your target audience is clearly outlined and the sales number is not astronomical. (If you wanted to sell harpsichords to citizens of Mars, however, this goal would not pass the “achievable” test.)

Realistic: Yes. (You might not pass the “realistic” test if you wanted to sell a harpsichord to every Harley owner in the area, or if there were only 500 of them.)

Timed for completion: Yes, a six-month timeline is clearly indicated, with start and end dates (beginning of fiscal year to mid-year, which may vary depending on the fiscal calendar used by the company).

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A bridge step between defining the goal and getting to the action plan is to create the action statement. How are you going to market those harpsichords to Harley owners? You need an action statement.

The action statement recasts the definition of the goal and explains in broad terms how it will be achieved: “We will sell 2,000 harpsichords in the first half of the next fiscal year to Harley-Davidson owners in this metropolitan area with a targeted marketing campaign that includes sponsoring events, social media marketing, direct mail, and live in-store promotional events.”

Step 3. Create the action plan. Look at your action statement part of your goal: “a targeted marketing campaign that includes sponsoring events, social media marketing, direct mail, and live in-store promotional events.” This statement includes the seeds of your actual action steps. Break it down: What action steps happen to begin sponsoring events? You might brainstorm that this involves finding national, regional, and local events; approaching organizers about sponsorship and promotional opportunities; putting together materials to give to attendees of these events; and a follow-up and data tracking plan. Social media marketing will break down into such steps as creating a Facebook fan page, a blog, and Twitter ID; hiring writers to provide content; developing special promotions to be delivered this way; and tracking data.

Brainstorm with your team, throw out all the ideas you have, then start picking among them to create a doable plan.

Don’t adjourn the meeting until you’ve got a specific plan—if not the entire process, at least the first few steps and who is responsible for what. Everyone should leave with a clear idea of what they’re supposed to do next and how soon they’re supposed to do it.

Step 4. Set the evaluation standard. How will you know if you’ve achieved your goal? This is called the evidence procedure. If your goal is SMART, you’ve made sure it’s specific, and therefore you’ll know unequivocally whether you’ve achieved it.

It’s amazing how often people launch action plans without considering how to investigate the value of each step or the overall plan. Many people forget to check with the overall goal, and simply assume that when a particular action step is done, they have achieved the goal. It’s important for each action step to have its own evaluation standard, so its effectiveness can be judged.

If the action step is simply a canvass of every Harley-Davidson owner in the area, then a chart, a timeline, and a marking pen are all the evaluation tools you need. When you’ve checked every name off the chart, you’re finished.

If you expect something to happen as a result of this action step, evaluation becomes a bit trickier. Define the desired result qualitatively and quantitatively. What do you want the Harley-Davidson owners to do as a result of the action? Send for more information? Sign up for a free trial harpsichord lesson? Give you a down payment? How many of them do you need to get to do it for the action to be considered a success (or, conversely, at what point is the payoff not worth the effort)?

For instance, if you track the social media campaign marketing harpsichords to Harley owners, you might decide that you want sales of 300 units from these efforts alone. You find that the blog gets the most readership (tracked with online analytics), but other media efforts really help boost awareness, which drives attendance at events and word-of-mouth, and the total for sales resulting from this category of action is 400 units. You also realized that the costs to implement this campaign were fairly low. Perhaps you only need sales of 40 units to simply break even, so you learn the profit margin from these efforts was particularly high.

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Step 5. Confirm understanding. Before you end the session, make sure that everyone has a clear understanding of what has been decided. Ask them to repeat key points to you, especially their areas of responsibility.

Step 6. Plan the follow-up. Make sure everyone has specific marching orders and a time for the next session, if any. Don’t leave it open-ended. The follow-up plan to a particular meeting might look like this:

Dave types up the draft memo and gets it out by e-mail to the rest of the group by the next morning.

Every unit manager gets his or her input on the draft back to Dave by noon.

Dave sends out a final draft by 3 p.m.

Managers circulate the memo to members of their divisions and get as much feedback as possible.

The group meets again in one week (same time, same place) to compare responses and draft the final report.

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Follow-up also offers an important aspect: accountability. If people know what the next step is and when it’s due, they have a deadline for jumping into their action plan. Action steps that are not scheduled or followed up on will continually be pushed away in favor of more urgent projects and items.

Solution-Focused Coaching

There are many different “flavors” and niches of coaching (coactive coaching, spiritual coaching, career coaching, and so on), and one of the most popular and broadly applicable kinds is known as solution-focused coaching. At its essence, this powerful technique is about focusing on the desired state or goal and working to achieve it. As a manager, you have many ways to apply solution-focused coaching with your employees, and it works extremely well in one-on-one sessions.

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The previous six steps of effective problem solving definitely come into play, and you can combine them with solution-focused coaching techniques.

The essence of a coaching session that is focused on solutions comes down to four main questions:

1. What do you want?

2. Why is it important?

3. How will you get it?

4. How will you stay accountable?

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Let’s look at each of these questions in turn.

1. What do you want? This is a key coaching question. As we have mentioned earlier, never assume that you know why someone is coming to you or what they want to talk about. You may have an inkling of what’s up, but let them define the topic in their own terms. This question elicits responses that help define the opportunity and the goal (remember to help the employee make it a SMART goal).

2. Why is it important? Although this question may not appear in the six steps to problem solving, it can be critical in helping someone find personal motivation to make a change. Sometimes this question throws people off, so another way to word it is “What will that do for you?” Help the other person go big! How would achieving their goal pay off for them personally, and how would others (their coworkers, the department, the company) be affected?

For instance, if Bob has the goal of learning to be a better speaker, the payoff might be that he makes more money (through sales commissions and bonuses), which allows him to afford a trip to Europe on his next big vacation, something he has always dreamed of doing. Suddenly, a work action has a significant personal payoff. In addition, his coworkers might respect him more and model his behavior, and the whole department increases sales, which leads to recognition from the company and the opportunity for promotions and bonuses.

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3. How will you get it? This is where the raw brainstorming and creativity start to flow, similar to developing an action statement. As the ideas start to come forth, the employee will start narrowing down which ones to implement or try out (the action plan step). This is a good opportunity for creating back-up plans, too, in case something gets off track. For instance, a planned family leave or unplanned sick leave (due to illness or injury) might seriously derail an action plan. Having alternatives in mind can be helpful (although limited, as we can’t possibly see all potential disruptions).

4. How will you stay accountable? This is a very important question, especially in one-on-one coaching and for personal goals. Some people are very accountable to themselves and work hard to meet their responsibilities. Others need support. Sometimes, a regular coaching session (say, once a week) is enough for someone to stay accountable, if he or she has to report to the coach whether the previous action steps were done. Other options for accountability include finding a “buddy” to work with or report to (say, if the goal was to start running regularly, finding a running buddy might be helpful) or giving oneself a reward of some kind when various benchmarks are reached.

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Degrees of Difficulty

We just presented a formal process for creating solutions and some techniques for one-on-one solution-focused coaching. We stressed up-front planning and discussion, with clear communication and feedback to remove misunderstandings, before the job begins. We also offered techniques for finding motivation, creativity, and accountability.

Now we offer some examples of how issues of various degrees of difficulty might be handled with these processes.

Low Degree of Difficulty: The Clogged Commode

“Hey, boss! The toilet’s backed up in the men’s bathroom.”

“Well, let’s unplug it.”

“You want me to call a plumber?”

“No. We can handle this. There’s a plunger in the utility closet off the entry-way. If that doesn’t work, we’ve got a snake in the basement.”

“By ‘we,’ you mean ‘me,’ right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. I’ll get to it right after I finish the …”

“You’d better do this first.”

“Yeah. I guess you’re right.”

“Let me know when you’re done. If you have any problems, give a holler.”

Believe it or not, even this simple exchange follows the six-step process. Take another look. They’re all there (more or less).

1. Define the opportunity. “The toilet’s backed up in the men’s bathroom.”

2. Define the goal. Unplug the toilet. Also, the action statement was created: “You want me to call a plumber?”
“No. We can handle this.”

3. Create the action plan. “There’s a plunger in the utility closet off the entryway. If that doesn’t work, we’ve got a snake in the basement.” “By ‘we,’ you mean ‘me,’ right?”

4. Set the evaluation standard. Again, this is implied. When the toilet flushes freely, you’ve reached the goal.

5. Confirm understanding. “Okay. I’ll get to it right after I finish the …”
5a. Clarify confirmation. “You’d better do this first.”
5b. Reconfirmation. “Yeah. I guess you’re right.”

6. Plan the follow-up. “Let me know when you’re done. If you have any problems, give a holler.”

A lot of the steps of solution-focused coaching were also covered, although very implicitly and without a lot of give-and-take in this situation (not every situation requires coaching!). “What do you want?” is implied (a free-flushing toilet in the men’s room). “Why is it important?” is also not spelled out but is fairly clear (generally, you want to avoid a mess and a major repair). How to go about it is very clear: options include calling a plumber, using a plunger, or getting the plumbing snake. The options are narrowed down to using the plunger, with the snake as a back-up. “How will you stay accountable?” is also clearly delineated, by letting the boss know when you are done.

Nothing to it, right? At least, not at this low level of difficulty, with a simple, clear-cut problem.

Medium Degree of Difficulty: The Personnel Pigsty

1. Define the opportunity. You’ve gotten a lot of complaints about the break room. Folks are leaving dirty coffee mugs in the sink, nobody’s cleaning the coffee filter, and the pot hasn’t been washed since the invention of decaf. There are little live things trying to creep out of the refrigerator. The door of the microwave has crusted shut.

2. Define the goal. At a monthly department meeting, your group quickly reaches consensus on the goal—get the place cleaned up before you have to hire a bulldozer and level it.

Next, create the action statement. Agreement is a lot harder at this stage. In fact, discussion gets rather heated. Some potential solutions are presented:

“Naming no names, but the whole mess is being generated by just a few. I say we make them clean it up!” [That suggestion generates a rather strenuous discussion.]

“I say leave it as it is. If people want to wallow in a pigsty, let ’em.” [This suggestion is greeted by a chorus of “Right on!”]

“Circulate a memo outlining a policy on cleanliness, with clear penalties for noncompliance.” [This is met with widespread groans and scattered hooting.]

“Hire a cleaning service.” [General cheers.]

“Shut it down. If people can’t behave properly, they don’t deserve the privilege of a break room.” [The person making the suggestion is invited to swig poison.]

“Make the brass use the same room as the rest of us. They’d make sure it got cleaned up soon enough.” [Laughter.]

“Why not just rotate the duty? Have a sign-up list for making the coffee and cleaning the pot. Everybody washes their own mugs. We clean our stuff out of the refrigerator on the last Friday of the month. Last one out unplugs. We rotate who cleans it out the following Monday.” [Silence. A few nods. “Yeah. That makes sense,” someone mutters. An action statement is born.]

Refine the action statement. When someone says, “I never use the break room. Why should I have to clean it?” You respond, “Good point. We’ll limit the clean-up duty and coffee making to the people who use the room.”

3. Create the action plan. Here’s where a good, simple plan can fall apart. Everyone agrees on it. With the best of intentions, they leave the meeting, confident that “we’ll get that break room cleaned up now.” Then nobody does anything because a clear action plan with responsibilities has not been outlined.

In the absence of volunteers (a common situation, unfortunately), you’ll assume the leadership role, appointing someone to make the signup list (or doing it yourself) and getting things going. (Try to resist the natural temptation to automatically select the person who came up with the suggestion. You want to encourage innovation, remember?)

4. Set the evaluation standard. Does somebody have to be “in charge”? That’s a tough question. Human nature being what it is, if everybody is equally responsible, then nobody’s really responsible. But avoid setting anybody up as a “cleanliness cop”—especially you. Let the users set the standards; if it’s good enough for the folks who take their breaks there, it’s good enough. Nobody said anything about bringing in placemats and cloth napkins.

5. Confirm understanding. “Okay, Francisco. You’re going to post the sign-up list and take coffee duty for the first week, right? We’ll all get our stuff out of the fridge by Friday afternoon, or else it gets pitched. I’ll take first crack at mucking the thing out Monday.”

6. Plan the follow-up. “Let’s give it a month to see how it works out. At our next meeting, we’ll decide if it’s working.”

High Degree of Difficulty: The Thumb Drive Conundrum

A play in one act with two roles—the Coach (you) and the Assistant (Connie).

You’ve got half a warehouse full of 8 GB thumb drives.

“I guess I overordered,” Connie says.

You mentally note that she doesn’t make excuses or try to pass the buck.

“Looks like it,” you acknowledge, “or else we undersold. Either way, we’ve got an opportunity on our hands.”

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Connie grins. She’s used to you using words like “opportunity” when you really mean “monumental screw-up,” but it still makes her smile.

“What should we do?” she asks.

You fend off the initial flood of anxiety that comes naturally to all of us who have been trained to believe in the doctrine of management infallibility. It’s taken a while, but you’ve learned better. The boss doesn’t always have the answer. But the coach can help create one.

“Let’s talk about it,” you suggest. “What do you think we should do?”

Connie’s used to this approach, too. She’s not scared or defensive, thinking you’re just turning the gun back on her. She knows you intend to help her.

In the next five minutes of discussion, you quickly decide on the goal—to get rid of all those drives (the “what do you want?” part of solution-focused coaching)—and a secondary goal—to avoid making the company look foolish for ordering too many of them (the “why is it important?” component, although you can certainly come up with more reasons).

Getting to the action statement takes a little longer. Your discussion generates these possibilities, among others:

Get loyal customers to use more thumb drives by creating a marketing campaign (possibly with a celebrity endorsement) based around being organized and having multiple backups.

Soak the drives in some mild corrosive so that the USB contacts break easily, rendering them useless after one or two plug-ins.

Slash the price of the drives drastically, or use them as value-added giveaways to other products.

Take a page from the baking soda people and create new uses for the thumb drives—as high-tech Legos, fashion accessory, MP3 player, and so on.

Burn the warehouse and claim the insurance.

You settle on a solution. You’ll launch a celebrity testimonial campaign, using Leo Laporte, well-respected technology analyst, as your spokesperson. As fate would have it, Leo uses a lot of thumb drives. Your slogan: “Leo gets it right!”

Once you’ve decided on your solution, it’s a downhill ride as you frame your action plan and means of evaluation, confirm your understanding, and schedule the follow-up.

The more you use these techniques of problem solving and solution-focused coaching, the more you’re likely to find that the solution isn’t really the major challenge. You’re apt to encounter the highest hurdles when you try to define the opportunity.

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Let’s look at another example.

Sales personnel at your retail outlets don’t seem to be sensitive to fluctuations in the pricing structure. (Translation: They aren’t changing the prices when you tell them to.) That’s what doctors would call the “presenting symptom,” like a bad rash or a persistent cough.

What’s at the heart of the problem here? There are three possibilities:

1. You’ve got idiots for salespeople. If so, you should have other evidence of the idiocy. Heart of the problem: The wrong people were hired.

2. They have some reason for defying the “edict from on high.” That possibility might be worth talking about. Heart of the problem: The sales force is unmotivated or even demoralized.

3. They aren’t getting the word when you think they are. Heart of the problem: a breakdown in the line of communications.

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Put your money on the third possibility—though you might need to do a bit of investigation of the other possibilities as well as options for correcting the problem before you move on to the action stages.

You’re currently getting the word out on prices through a confidential bulletin, which goes out via e-mail the last Thursday of every month, and there’s a monthly conference call with regional managers of the retail outlets. The salespeople should be getting the information pretty much immediately, which gives them some time to implement changes before your deadline of the seventh of the next month.

In case the bulletins are getting lost, delayed, or bounced back, and managers skip the conference calls, you start faxing the notices, but nothing improves.

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A little sleuthing reveals that the salespeople aren’t reading your bulletin. (It has, in fact, become the ultimate “confidential” bulletin: Nobody knows what’s in it.) Many of them weren’t even aware that they were receiving it. In an e-mail inbox filled with spam, it’s hard to spot the important messages. Some managers still don’t process their e-mail in a timely way.

Now you’re ready to brainstorm solutions. You might pursue “ways to get them to read the bulletin.” (Redesign. Bribery. Pop quizzes tied to salary adjustments.) By limiting yourself to that focus, you ignore the broader question: Is an e-mail bulletin the best way to communicate this information? How else might you do it? Ask the people involved.

Asking the right people the right questions is the essence of good coaching. You’ll get your players involved in the process, you’ll get a better answer, and they’ll all own that answer when it comes time to put it into practice. And that generally means less effort.

Structure problem-solving sessions so that everyone participates in creating the solution, and everyone is clear about who does what to make it work. Use solution-focused coaching one on one to tap the creativity and potential of your employees.

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Creating solutions may well be your most important—and most challenging and stimulating—role as coach. You have other crucial functions, which we discuss in the next three chapters.

The Coach’s Checklist for Chapter 7

An important goal of a good coach is to help people learn how to solve problems on their own. To do that, you should hire them carefully, coach them well, and then give them room to work.

Here’s an effective six-step methodology for coaching employees to solve problems: (1) define the opportunity (problems are always opportunities in disguise), (2) define the goal, (3) create the action plan (with an action statement), (4) set the evaluation standard, (5) confirm understanding, and (6) plan the follow-up.

Solution-focused coaching works well in one-on-one sessions with employees. You’ll ask what they want, why it’s important, how they will get it, and how they will stay accountable.

Understand, as a coach, how to apply this methodology to problems of different levels of complexity.