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PHASE 1—CONTRACTING Find a Way to Be a Partner
If you are familiar with the action research methodology from the organizational development field, you will recognize the four phases of executive coaching I outline here.1 They come directly from that tradition.
The Roots of the Coaching Phases
The five classic phases of action research are (1) entry and contracting, (2) data collection and feedback, (3) action planning, (4) implementation and follow-through, and (5) evaluation, including either termination of the contract or recycling through the steps. The four phases of executive coaching I cover here—contracting, planning, live action coaching, and debriefing—constitute a form of action research.2
I combine the action research model with the systems perspective because each leverages the other for greater results. As I discuss these phases, I highlight areas of systems assessment and intervention. The systems approach—noticing and changing patterns—supports action research methodology. Action research is based on the concept that intervention in any phase, not just during the implementation step alone, can create change. As soon as an organization begins to engage in action research, it creates a heightened self-awareness that readies it for change.
In these four phases, I highlight the critical issues that are often underemphasized in the coaching literature. These include a focus on specific business results and the leader’s need to create organizational alignment.
Contracting
In many ways, contracting is the most important phase. Both parties, the coach and the client, need to build a relationship, and the coach needs to establish credibility. The client wonders, “Can the coach help me?” The coach asks herself, “Is this executive open to feedback?” Together they must establish the goals and parameters for the coaching relationship and set expectations that drive the remaining phases. At this stage, coaches offer clients a sense of what working together will be like.
An executive coaching contract works for two kinds of clients: the new client who wants just executive coaching services and the new or existing client with whom you will work on a large organizational intervention where the one-to-one coaching is only one part of the overall work.
Regardless of type of client, there are a number of important steps in contracting:
• Join with the client.
• Familiarize yourself with your client’s challenge.
• Test the client’s ability to own his part of the issue.
• Give immediate feedback to the client.
• Take a systems view of your client’s issue.
• Establish a contract.
• Encourage the executive to set measurable goals.
• Involve the boss.
The contracting conversation allows you to launch a productive partnership and build elements into it that will keep the other phases on track.
Join with the Client
There is no getting around good old-fashioned social skills on the front end of contracting: friendliness and approachability, a sense of humor, and a sincere interest in the other person. The ease, flow, and even fun in your conversations build strength for the tougher times that will later stress the fabric of your relationship.
A new client needs answers to the following questions: “How quickly can you get on board with me? Do you get what I’m talking about? Are you practical, effective? Do you have some depth to your experience?” She wants to know whether you will really help. She may not explicitly voice these questions. Nonetheless, you must pass the client’s test.
You need to qualify your client as well. This kind of executive coaching requires clients to explore their strengths and drawbacks willingly. Wise executives see themselves not only as an individual but also as a deeply embedded factor in the success and disappointments of an organizational effort. When they readily look at themselves, energy-draining homeostasis is less likely to keep the system from productive change.
Familiarize Yourself with Your Client’s Challenge
The partnership begins when your client talks about the specific issue by which she is currently stymied. The problem could be with one other person (an employee, boss, or peer), or it could be a work group or larger organizational issue (lack of resources, a visioning effort, downsizing, or work redesign). Often just listening, following your curiosity about the issue, and constantly restating for clarity can help the client define the central issue and her opportunities and challenges within that issue.
Use specific listening skills. A whole host of listening skills enhances the early part of the coaching conversation. I highlight four here that I use most often at this stage: concreteness, empathy, confrontation, and respect.3
Concreteness means inviting the client to get more specific about the issue. Executives often speak in global terms and have little patience for details. Do not get intimidated by this impatience. You are not asking details for details’ sake but inviting the client to describe actual behaviors and circumstances so you both can see what she really means by her global terms. Many clients articulate global dissatisfaction, but have been unclear with their staffs about their expectations. By pushing for greater specificity from clients, you do an enormous favor for organizations.
Some questions that elicit a specific concrete response include the following:
• What specifically frustrates you about the situation?
• Can you give me an example?
• What do you mean?
• When did this happen?
• What specifically do you expect from them?
Empathy is your effort to show that you understand your client’s concerns. The more you can express the client’s message in your own words, the more she will think, “Okay, he knows what I’m talking about!” When you nail down the client’s core concern, you address her real issue—not the issue you think she means. Following are some examples of using empathy in a coaching conversation:
“You seem most concerned about the expanding demands of the business and whether you have the staff to cover those demands.”
“Do you mean you are caught between being loyal to the employees who built this company with you and at the same time wanting to take advantage of the hot new stars in the business?”
“It seems you are struggling with giving hard feedback to a couple of long-term employees, and they may be unaware that their performance no longer meets the demands of their positions.”
Showing empathy can help a client sift and weigh her concerns. She can either say, “Yeah, I guess this is a big issue for me,” or she can say, “You know, when I hear you put it that way, I’m actually more troubled about something else.”
Confrontation does not mean inciting a conflict with the client. In this context, confrontation means pointing out discrepancies between what the client is saying and what she actually does. It could be a mismatch between what she said twenty minutes ago and what she is saying now or between her words and her actions. You bring forth the discrepancy in a neutral tone, not with a “gotcha” attitude. You simply hold up a mirror so the client can make her own judgments about her incongruence.
The more neutral you are about showing the mismatch, the more powerful this intervention will be for the client. Neutrality means being descriptive rather than critical or judgmental about the client’s behavior. Here are some ways of using confrontation in a coaching conversation:
“You say excellence is your number one concern, yet you report that you haven’t set competitive standards that are up-to-date in your market.”
“In the past ten minutes, you have given arguments both for and against creating the new position.”
“This is the first time I have heard you question the CEO’s direction and lay out a thorough alternative strategy.”
Spending time on a client’s discrepancies in behavior helps her finally deal with contradictions that she has been living with for months or even years. It helps her get ready to change them rather than chronically tolerate them.
Respect goes beyond holding the client in high regard or admiring her qualities. Actually, it has to do with having a deep belief that she has the capacity and the resources to handle and resolve the situation. You believe and show that the client ultimately has the resilience she needs to address her issues. Respect keeps you in the Client Responsibility Model. The Rescue Model ultimately disrespects your client because the coach takes on the client’s problem-solving accountability. You can use respect in a coaching conversation in these ways:
“You have successfully dealt with challenges like this before.”
“You actually show more knowledge in this area than you give yourself credit.”
“The combination of traits you bring to the issue—practical savvy along with keeping an eye on the larger goal—is what the situation calls for.”
“You have a way of using your sense of humor to keep perspective while you wade through the toughest phases of the project.”
Once you have engaged your client using these four listening skills (concreteness, empathy, confrontation, and respect), she is equipped to better understand her situation. You both will know more about what is at stake and understand the context surrounding your client’s dilemma.
Test the Client’s Ability to Own His Part of the Issue
When entering into a contracting conversation with a client, I determine whether he is willing to explore the possibility that he simultaneously enhances and detracts from his ability to achieve his goals. A client can use coaching as an effective tool only when he is willing to focus on his own performance. Coaching is not effective without this willingness.
At the beginning of your partnership, your client learns that you probe not only for the external factors in the situation, but also for the ways in which he contributes to them. The guiding principle of this kind of coaching is to keep the client’s habitual response to the issue the central focus, even while the goal is creating a change in the environment. There may be many other venues for the client to find the answers outside, such as new techniques or training programs. Clients need to find a coaching partner who helps them develop their own leadership as a way to effect change in the organization.
Keep the client’s habitual response to the issue the central focus, even while the goal is creating a change in the environment.
This is not therapy or esoteric wisdom but the realization that the client’s greatest leverage for change is his own response to the issue. Your contribution is to help him identify his part of the co-created system. You can test the client’s willingness to scrutinize his role by asking the following questions or questions like these. If the client welcomes this kind of self-reflection, you have potentially a good client.
• What recurring patterns or habitual responses are present in your situation?
• Which patterns work well, and which ones detract from what you’re trying to accomplish?
• How have you responded to this issue before?
• What part of this pattern results from your own knee-jerk reactions? For example, are you often the overachiever, the blamer, the pursuer, the victim, the helper, the avoider, the parent?
• Can you imagine a different pattern resulting from a different response on your part?
• How much stamina do you have to eliminate part of the pattern that is no longer effective?
• How will this help you get to your goal?
• How can I be useful to you moving to that new behavior?
Give Immediate Feedback to the Client
Find a time early in your relationship to give your own feedback and observations to the client. Even if you have just met, you have your own experience of her up to this point. From a systems view, this brief experience with her gives you a picture of her functioning in the organization with regard to the issue.
As I discussed in Chapter Two, the use of immediacy is a potent tool for the coach. Your own interaction with the client opens a window into her characteristic patterns. I encourage you, particularly in the contracting phase, to feed back your own impressions of the client. What follows in the immediacy of this moment should help you ascertain what happens in the client’s work world. The feedback needs to be delivered with backbone and heart. It must be frank, specific, and collaborative without being overly protective.
Ned
Ned, a prospective client, called to ask me to do a team-building retreat because there was a lot of dissent among his staff. As we talked and explored the issues, I declined the offer. I thought the one-day event that he planned would not address the issues. He later called to say his staff was doing a survey feedback process instead and asked whether I would submit a proposal. We talked more, and although I believe in the effectiveness of feedback action planning projects, I judged that he had abdicated his authority in the process, and that would undercut the effort. I told him as much and said that I would include a coaching contract with him as part of my proposal. At the end of the conversation, he declined my offer but said, “I think I just got some of the best consulting I’ve ever had, and it was for free.”
A month later, he hired me to coach him. At the contracting meeting, he talked about the challenges he faced with his team. And he talked. And talked. And talked. I started to have a queasy feeling imagining enduring his verbose style. I knew I either had to give him my immediate feedback and potentially lose him as a client again, or pay for my silence by being a victim of his talking.
I interrupted him after about fifteen minutes, and said, “You know, as I’m listening to you, I find it hard to concentrate on what you’re saying. I get a breathless feeling, and it’s hard to know when I can break in. I also wonder if that’s how your staff experiences you.”
Ned stopped dead in his tracks and burst out, “That’s exactly what I deal with! I’m making so many connections when I’m talking that I lose sight of the conversation.” It was in that moment that he knew he would get the real stuff from me, and I knew that he was open and resilient enough to let it in.
Clients receive this kind of immediate feedback so rarely that it gets their attention and tests the cliché they often say but do not tolerate: “I don’t want just another yes-man.” I call it the stick-myfinger-in-their-chest moment. It can be delivered boldly and respectfully by directly engaging the presence of the client. He may step into the moment, seeking more information and learning about himself. When this happens, he might say, “This is the kind of feedback I can do something about.” Or he could retreat from the frankness, which helps you to decide whether you want to pursue this contract.
A former mentor and coach of mine, John Runyan, called this kind of experience “consumer education.” He recommended finding an opportunity early in the contracting phase to use the immediacy of feedback with the prospective client in order to show the client how you coach. The prospective client then decides if he wants this kind of coaching.
The three necessary conditions for a successful coaching contract are the willingness of the client to (1) see himself honestly, (2) own his part in the patterns at play, and (3) be receptive to immediate feedback making changes in his behavior. For you to say yes or no to the contract depends on whether you have this critical cluster of conditions.
Take a Systems View of Your Client’s Issue
You can pick up information about the patterns in the system very early in the interaction, such as the possible effect of Ned’s speaking style on the team. With systems thinking, you can also wonder about the other elements of the pattern. This client is not operating in a vacuum; he has help from under involved members of his team. To maintain a systems view, you must develop positional neutrality toward the players: there are no pure good guys or bad guys. Everyone is a co-creator. To be effective, you cannot side with one member over another in the system.
A word about neutrality: try as you might to maintain this stance, you can count on being drawn into the system. That is, you will feel the pulls of anxiety the same way the members of the system do. It is not a matter of if you get inducted but when.
The beauty of being pulled in is that you can learn more about what it is like to be a member of that system. The trick is to recognize this response and find your way back out. For example, when the client talks about his situation, you need to watch for the emotional pull in you to take sides between the client and his team as you listen. The questions you ask the client to help him identify his part in the web are beneficial to you as well (for example, “What recurring patterns are present in this situation? What is your contribution?”). They remind you that everyone contributes to co-create the situation.
The identified problem is usually not the real issue. Difficulties stem from how the client addresses the problem. Here is another reason to refrain from taking sides or identifying villains. Instead, you help the system use dormant abilities in all the players—abilities suppressed by their prevailing responses.
The identified problem is usually not the real issue. Difficulties stem from how the client addresses the problem.
Establish a Contract
For the external coach, establishing an explicit contract moves the conversation along to specific goal setting. For internal change agents in an organization, the explicit offer to coach is equally essential. As an internal organizational coach, I learned that I got into more trouble when I did not make an explicit offer to coach the executive. Without it, I entered into conversations to which I was not invited and assumed learning contracts with leaders that I did not have. And I wondered why they weren’t using my wisdom! These situations led to either active resistance or eyesglazed-over passivity. When it comes time to negotiate how you will work together, make sure to define any requirements you may have in the coaching contract (Table 5.1 gives you some ideas for categories). To the extent that you have expectations essential to the coaching partnership, it pays to mention them up front rather than trying to bargain or plead for them later. These are just a few of the ways to include mutual responsibility as an explicit part of the contract. (For more ideas, see Whitworth, Kimsey-House, and Sandahl, 1998.)
The offer to coach includes the ability to describe the options within the role in a simple way. There are two options, which may be pursued either separately or together. The more common option is behind-the-scenes coaching. This includes a planning stage (Chapter Six) that helps the client clarify how she will face a particular situation and a debriefing stage (Chapter Eight) in which she thinks through how she did, celebrates her success, and plans steps for improvement for the next time.
Table 5.1 Topics of a Contracting Conversation
| Scheduling of meetings | How long, how often |
| Agenda management | Who plans the agenda for a meeting; who manages the agenda during the meeting |
| Confidentiality | Who else knows, who tells them, functionally working the triangles in the contract |
| Contracts | Whether a written legal document, a letter of agreement, or a verbal agreement, identify the focus of the work |
| Reports | Written or verbal, generated and distributed by whom |
| Fees | Including payment and cancellation terms |
| Expenses | What is covered by the client, what is covered by the coach |
| Logistics | Where to meet (on-site or off-site), who secures the place, who provides needed materials |
| Contact person | The client or someone else (for example, executive assistant, HR, sustaining sponsor) |
| Accessibility | Expectations around frequency and timeliness of contacts in between business meetings |
| Debriefs and follow-ups | Frequency and scheduling |
| Recontracting | When things “go south,” when the work shifts, when it is time to end the work together |
The second option is what I call live-action coaching or live team coaching (Chapter Seven). In this approach, the coach is present in the room while the client deals with her issue in real time, whether that entails a meeting with an employee or a group, or a coworker.
Encourage the Client to Set Measurable Goals
Once you and the client have settled on a coaching contract, you need to clarify goals and expected outcomes for the project.4
Executive coaching involves working with clients on their own leadership issues and many of the issues that revolve around how they work with others. By the time a coach arrives on the scene, a client may have been mired in a problem for a long time. Sometimes he and his team start focusing only on interpersonal issues or personality traits and lose sight of the business issues.
Less experienced coaches can let actual business results get lost in the process. They get distracted by the client’s interior focus and lack of attention to measurable results. Out of desperation, the client may say, “I need to get along with my team better,” or “I need to be more patient,” or “I need an open door policy.” The coach must help the client determine which of the client’s stated goals will yield the greatest results.
Focusing on specific outcomes is essential. How will the organization benefit if the client becomes more collaborative, more approachable, more decisive, or clearer? People assume these changes improve productivity in the organization, but becoming more collaborative, more approachable, more decisive, or clearer may not lead to specific business outcomes. It is important that the executive coach not confuse work relationship goals with business outcomes, because clients do it all the time.
Use the Three Key Factors Methodology
You can set up a coaching contract for success by helping a client identify the Three Key Factors around a specific business challenge she faces: (1) the business results that leaders need to achieve, (2) the leader interpersonal behaviors they need to exhibit in their key work relationships, and (3) the team interactions necessary to attain the desired business results (Figure 5.1). These key factors are areas executives manage every day but whose potential is underused.
Figure 5.1 Three Key Factors for Leaders
© 2003-2006 Mary Beth O’Neill.
My motto for identifying and using these Three Key Factors is, “It’s simple, but it’s not easy.” Every executive knows that these three categories are important, but very few executives working under pressure manage all Three Key Factors simultaneously. One or two of the key factors escape the leader’s attention. Inability to manage all Three Key Factors is often the trigger that prompts a call to a coach in the first place.5
The real challenge for leaders and coaches is to ensure that the Three Key Factors are linked and interrelated to each other. They must also incorporate the key factors into the choices the leader makes daily. Identifying and customizing the Three Key Factors to their situation (1) launches the coaching process and (2) produces interrelated categories that can be assessed for the value of the executive coaching work (see Chapter Nine).
Look at the guiding principles under each of the Three Key Factors in Figure 5.1. You will find a three-pronged approach that builds the synergy your clients need to achieve outstanding results on tough business issues. Here is a quick overview of each factor with its guiding principle:
• Business results: “Ensure the results are linked to key behaviors you need from yourself and others.” The coach and the client are like detectives working to put the intricate pieces of a mystery together. The logical discovery process requires that you encourage your client to identify goals that are customized, specific, and measurable. That includes business results, leader interpersonal behaviors, and the team interactions needed to achieve the results. Each key factor list should support the achievement of the other two key factors. Otherwise your client has not successfully integrated the Three Key Factors.
• Leader interpersonal behaviors: “Increase your stamina to meet the relationship challenges you face in order to work more effectively with others.” You know your client has identified a good leader key factor list when a relationship challenge he has been avoiding is included on the list. He may feel some trepidation or resistance to face that challenge head-on, and it usually requires him to bring more backbone or more heart to his work relationships. For example, he might need to provide more clarity where in the past he maintained ambiguity in order to be less controversial and more comfortable. He might have to set aside his defensiveness in order to truly listen to others, even when they give him difficult feedback. You and he have left the world of logical puzzle solving and entered a landscape of emotional reactions and challenges. Your work with your client helps him increase his inner resilience to face these work relationship challenges that block achieving the business results.
• Team interactions: “As the leader, identify and transform ineffective patterns co-created by you and your team.” Your client should discover the patterns at play between him and his team that sabotage his best intentions. Most often, neither your client nor his team consciously recognize these patterns. You can help him bring a thoughtful discovery process to something that is hidden yet so powerful that has negative effects on business results. If teams create effective interactional patterns, they can drive success far beyond what they previously achieved.
Simultaneous work in these three areas can drive a greater synergy compared to focusing your client on any one area. It requires equal doses of intellectual rigor and emotional intelligence on the part of both the coach and the client. Generic lists are comfortable but boring, useless for initiating change, and they keep the client at a safe distance from his challenge. The more specific and tailored each key factor list is, the more it can highlight the work relationship challenges that are most relevant to the business results. In addition, more specific lists are more likely to address the co-created patterns that need to be transformed. This is reason enough to keep asking your client to redefine, refine, and hone the items on each list.
Simultaneous work in these three areas ... requires equal doses of intellectual rigor and emotional intelligence on the part of both the coach and the client.
Anne
I coached Anne when she was general manager of her division.6 I was called because she faced several challenges: she had team members with long-standing interpersonal conflicts, corporate revenue goals were not likely to be met, and Anne’s boss withdrew support because he was frustrated with her division’s problems. Anne was considered a high-potential leader and was respected by many in the company for her demonstrated gifts and skills. At the time I met Anne, however, it was a stretch to get the kind of traction that would impress her boss. This had caused her to lose self-confidence.
Early in our conversations, Anne and I discussed the Three Key Factors and ways she could identify them. At first, she wanted to focus on “improved staff relations” as her business result because she spent so much of her energy dealing with conflict between team members. “Improved staff relations,” however, is not a business result; it is a team behavior. I encouraged her to move it to the team interactions list.
After we explored many of the challenges she faced, Anne chose the business result of increasing revenue. Ultimately that was the results factor that the company and her boss cared most about. In order to boost revenues, Anne thought her own leader behaviors needed to revolve around resolving staff differences. As we talked, it became clearer to Anne that some of these differences might originate from her own lack of clarity regarding her expectations of her staff. So she put “define role clarity” on her leader behaviors list.
Anne perceived that the team members needed her to clarify her expectations so that they could prioritize their work better. The team lost energy to conflicts, both hidden and explicit, which slowed the implementation of all their plans. Clarifying expectations and collaborating to resolve differences mobilized Anne and her team to close in on their business goals.
A great challenge for the coach in working with a leader to identify the Three Key Factors is establishing the linkages among those factors. The factors may seem so self-evident that leaders do not pay much attention to them and consider the factors only on a vague, general level. This disempowers them and their teams. The real challenge comes in working to customize and render measurable each of the Three Key Factors while demonstrating their interrelationships. This is the first building block to establish a return-on-investment approach. “Link and make measurable, link and make measurable” is the mantra of Three Key Factors work.
Thus far, Anne’s work in defining the Three Key Factors was a significant step, but was only the beginning. At that point she had determined business results (increase revenue), leader interpersonal behaviors (define clear roles), and team interactions behaviors (improve staff relations). Were they linked and customized to her situation? Her leader and team behaviors were indeed linked. We suspected that if she further clarified her team’s roles, some of their conflicts with each other would evaporate. But how would that increase revenue?
As an executive coach, an important part of your job is to probe, and repeatedly emphasize, the interdependencies among the Three Key Factors. Rarely should you accept a leader’s first answer. By repeated questions regarding the links among the factors, you can help the client focus on the crucial items under each factor. Your client should identify the ones that give her the most leverage and the greatest chance of success. Your collaborative skepticism, probing until you reach the specifics in each of the factors, builds a growing confidence in leaders that they have identified what is most critical to their situation. You cannot convince them; they must convince themselves of the links by their own repeated refinements.
Define the Measures: How Will You Know When You Get There?
Any item identified by the client must not only be linked to the other factors but must also be measurable. Four basic categories to use in measuring business results are time, money, quality, and quantity. The measurable goals on the leader and team factor lists must be specific, observable, and repeatable.
Exhibit 5.1 sets out a menu of categories that fit into each factor. Each client can choose the items that are most relevant to her situation and most interdependent with each other. This is not an exhaustive list. Nor are all of these menu items specific or measurable enough. They must be made more specific and customized to your client’s situation.
Exhibit 5.1 Menu for Identifying the Relevant Items for All Three Key Factors
© 2003-2005 Mary Beth O’Neill.
Anne, continued
Anne’s assertion that the team needed to “improve staff relations” was not specific enough. They still would not know which behaviors served the goal of improved relations. However, “paraphrase each other’s points of view” was a suitably specific way to improve team relations. Paraphrasing may seem an overly simplistic action, but when the right set of simple interdependent behaviors is chosen and applied simultaneously, they prove to be the key behaviors necessary to break through to a higher level of performance.
Another way to test the leader and team lists is to make sure they contain interactional verbs—actions that are directed toward someone. For example, my conversation with Anne was not done when she wrote “decision clarity” on her leader list. “Decision clarity” is a category, not an interactional verb moving toward anyone. When she wrote, “Identify decision-making style, and facilitate closure on decision discussions, summarizing both progress toward a decision and when a decision is made,” that item includes specific interactions required for her team to achieve decision clarity—state her decision style and keep facilitating and summarizing the discussion with her team until a decision has been made.
Figure 5.2 lists the Three Key Factors that Anne chose to identify and manage. In terms of business results, Anne had specific numerical revenue goals for her business unit. She also believed that her team could best meet revenue goals by redesigning their sales process. The time line they had to achieve both the redesign and their revenue goal was one year.
Usually the leader and team behavior lists contain three to five items each. Individual behaviors can then build on one another and form a synergy of key interactions that will make the difference for the business. Anne’s interpersonal behavior list outlined specific ways in which she could continually clarify roles for her team. All team interaction items addressed the issue of improving staff relations. The leader and team lists identified the critical actions they all needed to make on a daily basis in order to achieve business success.
Figure 5.2 Anne’s Three Key Factors
© 2003-2005 Mary Beth O’Neill.
When you believe you and your client have successfully created a measurable list for each key factor, you can take the movie camera test. If the leader and the team pursue these behaviors during day-to-day interactions, could someone watching a movie of these interactions identify the desired behaviors and accurately describe them? Could an observer recognize the behavioral expectations set forth by the leader?
This level of specificity can aid the coach as she encourages the leader and team to use their plan on a continual basis. Both the executive and the coach should assess the frequency and quality of these interactions over time. How many times do they see these behaviors in meetings? Are they consistently and effectively used in every team meeting, whether the leader is present or not? Are expectations clear, and do team members seek the leader’s clarification? Reinforcement of these specific and observable behaviors affects how the team does business.
These lists are not an exhaustive or complete list for any team that needs to increase revenue. Each situation is unique and therefore customized. Although these may seem to be obvious behaviors for achieving business goals, they were built from the ground up so that the client was convinced that this particular combination would make a difference. It does not matter that many of them also happen to appear on generic leader competency lists. For the same reason that leader competency lists rarely stir people to transform their leadership, leaders and teams tend not to mobilize around a generic list as effectively as they mobilize around their lists.
Leaders and teams tend not to mobilize around a generic list as effectively as they mobilize around their lists.
Once the leader and her team incorporate these behaviors into their regular way of doing business, they can transfer these skills to other challenges and business results. These behaviors can be applied to other organizational goals. Once the leader and the team own the skills and have confidence in how they apply them, they can be brought to other contexts in ways they never thought of before. In a twist on the motto, “Think globally, act locally,” this is an occasion where the client “learns locally” and then “applies globally.”
When the list contains interactional verbs, the work relationship challenges of your client can become clear and mobilizing. The behaviors that she has until now avoided addressing often are the very ones needed to accomplish the business result. You know you have a high-quality leader key factor list when your client feels committed to a challenging new behavior but also daunted as to how to enact it. She has, in essence, created the agenda from which the two of you will work together to help her incorporate a new way of acting.
Truth in Advertising: Clients Will Balk
In many ways, working with a client to identify the Three Key Factors seems so straightforward as to be simplistic. However, dealing with a leader feeling pressure in the workplace is another matter entirely. Executives are so compelled by forces internally and externally to act first and think later that they have a hard time settling down enough to be thoughtful, specific, and integrated.
Often when you ask executives to identify the Three Key Factors regarding a business issue, they look at you blankly, or shrug the exercise off as a waste of time, or claim that they already have all of it in place. The problem, however, is an anxious leader rather than an irrelevant exercise. A coach needs to develop a thick skin to an executive’s resistance to thoughtfully engaging with the Three Key Factors.
One way to begin a productive discussion of the Three Key Factors is to start with the key factor that energizes the client the most. The sequence is not important; you can start with leader interpersonal behaviors as easily as starting with either business results or team interactions. Although Anne was quite willing to take ownership for improving her and her team’s performance, sometimes I work with executives who are fixated on laying blame on their teams. In those situations, I reflect and amplify that energy by asking for a list of all the ways in which the team does not function well. The executive typically has no problem creating a list, saying, for example, that they don’t take initiative, they fight among themselves, and they are unprepared for meetings. The list can quite easily convert into categories for the team interactions factor by simply replacing the negative actions with positive ones: they take initiative, they collaborate with each other, and they prepare for meetings. This gives the coach and client a starting point to make specific, proactive, and measurable behavior goals for each item on the team interactions list.
Sometimes a client is much more open to looking at what she needs to do differently if you connect her leader interactions to the team list she just created. For example, you could ask, “Now that you know specifically what changes your team has to make, what are you going to have to do differently to lead them there?”
Defining the Three Key Factors requires discipline on the part of clients (and coaches) to face the complexity of executives’ work situations. The process to finalize the Three Key Factors with a client is an iterative and creative exercise. The clients create their own criteria on which to build a successful enterprise and will know specifically whether they succeed or fail in each area.
Anne’s first reaction to the Three Key Factors was that they were probably another canned coaching tool. It was not until she began using them that she saw their value and how they could help her with her team and business results. She said, “An important lesson for me was that although the Three Key Factors list was a generic learning tool, my Three Key Factors were completely customizable.”
Having an outcome focus can make the difference between the client’s continuing or giving up when she hits daunting obstacles. It keeps me from giving up as well. Sometimes new clients have told me they feel self-indulgent to be “merely” developing themselves with a coach. But it is not self-indulgent when that development is linked to results; their development is essential to the business. Insist that they describe how. In addition, linking the coaching effort to a business result will highlight and prioritize the business and leadership development areas that need attention.
It is important that your client keeps the ownership for deciding which goals and measures to pursue. You cannot have more investment in the goals than your client. It is your job to work hard to help her be specific about her goals, and it is her job to ensure that they are the right goals for the business. The connection builds among the Three Key Factors in the client’s awareness so she knows what to attend to and where to look for gaps. Throughout the coaching process, you can inquire about all three: the business results, the team’s interactions, and the leader’s behaviors.
Building these links into your conversations increases the client’s understanding of the connections, shows her how indispensable it is to keep the Three Key Factors interlinked, and eventually illustrates how valuable your contributions are to her efforts.
Let’s go back to Barbara and see how her goals can be built from her presenting issue. This is another example of helping a client get specific about the Three Key Factors. She wanted excellence but was getting mediocrity from her team. The team was fragmented in their efforts because of an avoid-avoid pattern and a lack of strong sustaining sponsorship among her direct reports.
This conversation is long because it illustrates that a great deal of exploration is required to keep the Three Key Factors in play and interrelating.
Barbara
Coach: You’ll get further and know when you have arrived if you set more explicit goals for the business, your team, and yourself.
Barbara: I’ve got goals. I want us to be the best game in town! Number one in the company.
Coach: But what does that mean? In what area and at what level? If you say, “Jump,” how is your team going to know how high?
Barbara: Well, it’s all about market share this year. We need to increase market share by four points [business results].
Coach: And as you have been learning about what works and what doesn’t work on this team, what do your direct reports—the vice presidents—have to do to make this goal more achievable?
Barbara: Well, it’s ridiculous that all the vice presidents don’t have the same information on the key issues that have an impact on market share. They’re still operating out of their silos and not thinking strategically about what information everyone should share [team interaction factor].
Coach: I see how critical that is, but how would you know if what they changed made a difference? If they just sent reports to each other, it doesn’t mean they’ll read them or use them strategically to increase market share.
Barbara: I see what you mean. We could dream up processes for information flow and still get nowhere. Wait a minute. Maybe the problem is what we cover in our meetings and how the whole meeting is run. I haven’t thought to structure the meeting to match what I want them to be like. I’m going to charge them with restructuring our meetings to meet the information and design needs of the business.
Coach: Great. Now think about them working well. What would be happening if your VPs got out of their silos more and were better informed? And especially think of what they would be doing that would help increase the market share by four points.
Barbara: For one thing, we need to shorten our response time by a week between getting the latest sales figures and tweaking our sales tactics [team interaction goal].
Coach: Okay. That’s a start. As you continue to work on this, you may discover other issues. You also need to define more specifically your expectations for team behaviors—how individuals need to act differently, to shorten their response time and to turn this whole thing around.
Barbara: Yeah, they need to step up more and deliver world-class performance.
Coach: And by “stepping up” you mean ...?
Barbara: Do I have to spell everything out? These are vice presidents, for goodness sake! By now they should know what it means.
Coach: If that were the case, Barbara, you wouldn’t be in the situation you’re in and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You have really bright people reporting to you. But they’ve been pulled in so many directions lately that they have lost focus.
Barbara: So what are you saying? That I have to tell them how to be a team player? Isn’t that insulting? I hate cheerleading senior people. It’s demeaning.
Coach: I’m not talking about cheerleading or talking down to people. I’m talking about setting expectations that get everybody focused on key team behaviors that make a competitive difference. We’re talking about soft skills, but it takes hard-nosed businesspeople to be explicit about them. When you think of your meetings, what about them would you say doesn’t show world-class behavior?
We’re talking about soft skills, but it takes hard-nosed businesspeople to be explicit about them.
Barbara: Lackadaisical commitment. They say they’re on board, but then they don’t drive their managers to get the results.
Coach: You’re talking about mobilizing team commitment. You’re not going anywhere without higher commitment from them.
Barbara: How am I going to get that?
Coach: Exactly. How are you going to get it? Now you’re talking about what you are going to have to do differently to have more committed VPs as sustaining sponsors. What more could you be doing [necessary change in leader interpersonal behavior factor]?
Barbara: Well, for one thing, I could talk more about the pressure I’m getting from my boss about market share. And I could be more active about talking to each one about their commitment too—especially their concerns. I know I’m not getting at the real stuff from them.
Coach: That would be great, because if you get the real stuff, you’ll probably learn more about what they need to get more committed. By the way, what would be a measure of stronger commitment on their part?
Barbara: They would stop going around me to the HR director to find out what I want. And they would be commenting on the key issues, giving their best thinking, whether it directly affects their own area or not. Then I would know they were informed and up-to-date. They would be coming to me with ideas on how they’re going to close the gap on market share that would include coordinating with other departments [team interaction measures].
Coach: If that’s how you’re going to measure it, you’re going to have to track it, be aware of when it’s happening and when it’s not, and whether you’re doing what you said you needed to do to get there as well.
Barbara: I think if we improved our decision making, we’d get there faster too.
Coach: Now you’re on a roll. What’s the problem?
Barbara: In meetings, the decision making is pathetic. It takes forever; then people don’t remember what decisions were made, and so they have to get remade.
Coach: You run those meetings, Barbara. What do you need to do to improve that [necessary change in leader interpersonal behavior]?
Barbara: If I knew, I’d be doing it.
Coach: Often leaders don’t tell people the kind of decision they are making, for example, if the decision is going to be consultative to the leader or consensual by everyone. Team members don’t know how to be productive in the conversation. That’s one thing you could do right away to make a change: be more explicit about which kind of decision you’re making [leader interpersonal behavior measure].
Barbara: I could do that. I don’t tell people the decision style I’m using. You’re right about that; it could be confusing.
Coach: If you go in that direction, what do you want from them?
Barbara: I want them to give their input on decisions. I want to hear their reservations, and I want to hear alternative solutions. And I want everyone to remember what the decision was and follow through with their part of it [team interaction measures].
Coach: You’ve just named the measures for this one. What would be the easiest way to know that your team was on track?
Barbara: It would be easy enough for me to facilitate a summary coming from them at the end of each meeting about what decisions were made and the kind of decision each was. That way I could test against their understanding just how clear I was with announcing the style of decision up front and whether I stayed faithful to it. I could also scan to see whether I got sufficient participation and commitment from all the VPs.
Coach: To the extent that you tell them right away whether they got it, you will be concurrently measuring your progress on leader behaviors while giving them immediate feedback. Immediate feedback is a powerful tool toward improving bottom-line results.
These conversations are arduous but worth the investment the client and coach put into them. Barbara was able to identify goals and measures in each of the areas: bottom-line results, leader interpersonal behaviors, and team interactions. She made a connection between raising market share and increasing the quality of her business meetings. What is more, she knows her obligation to be clearer about the decision-making process in those meetings. Figure 5.3 shows the Three Key Factors that resulted from the conversation with Barbara.
Figure 5.3 Barbara’s Three Key Factors
© 2003-2005, Mary Beth O’Neill.
The team interaction and leader interpersonal behavior goals are always the toughest to measure. The point of identifying measures for them is to provide a way for executives and their teams to know whether they are making progress toward those goals.
The ultimate measure is whether they make their bottom-line goal. But it is the team interactions and leader behaviors that will get them there. The measures for these goals provide the leader and the team with growing knowledge of the specific actions that directly affect business outcomes. They will be more likely to commit to changing their actions when they see that new leader and team behaviors directly affect results.
Slow Down Goal Setting to Speed Up the Action Later
Clients are often impatient to begin the coaching work during the contracting phase. Once they feel confident that they can work with a coach, they want action. However, without clear goals and measures for those goals, neither client nor coach is focused enough to know the most effective course of action. Clients are often impatient and irritated with protracted goal conversations. The time it takes is a real problem for them.
I used to think, “They’re busy executives. Maybe they’re right. I’m being too picky.” Actually the client lashes out with impatience at the process because he draws a blank on getting more specific and more rigorous about his goals. It is too uncomfortable to experience the void in the conversation that stems from the leader’s lack of clarity at the time. He would rather pop out of his discomfort and head for the action. He has been living, as have most people in modern organizations, in a fire-ready-aim mode. It is astonishing how often leaders ignore the goal-setting process. The task—finding the sweet spot between people processes and hard-line results—is easy to understand but difficult to attain with high quality.
A client’s crankiness with you when you persist in a conversation that seeks specific goals and outcomes has little to do with you. It has more to do with his own reactions to doing the hard work of aligning himself and the organization and honing in on specifics. Stay with him, and keep inquiring about goals.
This is one of those opportunities to get a reputation for being a hard-nosed businessperson—not a bad rep to have!
This is one of those opportunities to get a reputation for being a hard-nosed businessperson—not a bad rep to have!
Although it may seem like swimming against the current, you need to slow the executive down long enough to establish clear goals so he can be productive during the implementation. With no clear guidelines, the action phase of a change effort slows down because of hurried, misdirected efforts. You need to keep the client from bullying you out of a clear goal-setting process. You must bring backbone and confidence to your conviction that there is efficiency in doing it. If you must, be a broken record about your conviction.
Now, there is no reason to be a perfectionist about this. Sometimes a business situation is too ambiguous to know confidently what team interactions goals would achieve the bottom-line results. A way to proceed is to encourage the client to establish, as best as he can, team interaction goals and measures that he believes will affect the bottom-line results. Then he can establish midpoint checks of the measures to calibrate them and see whether they take him and his team in the right direction. The specifics set at the beginning can be adjusted later if needed, but spend the energy up front to set them, and monitor them as the client proceeds with the action.
When the client connects improvements in his leadership to specific business goals, he builds in his own biofeedback system. He realizes how his own efforts have helped or hindered goal attainment and how he can sustain success. With success in the experience of setting Three Key Factor goals, clients can get motivated to become more specific with other projects besides those discussed with their coach.
Involve the Boss
So far I have been talking about setting up a coaching contract with a client as though the client and I will be working in a vacuum. While it is tempting to develop a strong one-to-one working relationship with a client and believe that his motivation to learn is enough to carry him through, the client works within a system, and that system has to be acknowledged, honored, and mined for invaluable data and direction for the coaching contract.
The coach is an adjunct resource in the client’s system, not a replacement for any other role in his system, and certainly not a replacement for the boss-direct report relationship. And although many bosses wish otherwise, executive coaching cannot substitute for in-house performance management. All this requires that the boss stay involved with the client in the role of boss and evaluator and that the executive coach meet with the client’s boss as part of setting up the coaching contract.
This is tricky terrain to travel. If I had a dollar for every time a boss met with me with the intention of delegating his responsibility to me, I would be a multimillionaire (okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you get my point). Often they come to the meeting with an executive coach and say, “I’m glad to tell you what’s needed and the background situation. My employee has a lot of challenges to face if she is going to perform at a higher level. Once you get into the work with her, let me know how she’s doing. I really appreciate the work you’ll be doing with her.”
What the boss really means is, “Thank goodness you’re here! I’ve avoided being straight and direct with my employee, and she hasn’t gotten any of my hints or tips or advice [neither have I delivered any consequences]. Maybe you can light a fire under her. I’d also like you to evaluate whether you think she’s truly executive material and tell me what you think.”
Your first job meeting with your client’s boss is to let him know that he will remain in the boss seat while you coach his direct report. Once that is clarified, the real reason to meet with the boss is twofold: (1) find out what he cares about the most regarding his employee’s development and performance, and (2) provide some “guerrilla coaching” of the boss to improve his supervision of his employee. By “guerrilla coaching,” I mean that the boss certainly does not see himself as the coachee or recipient of your coaching services. But he will probably learn more about how to be a better boss through his meetings with you than he ever imagined. And you can often turn these guerrilla coaching moments into a minicontract to coach the boss to improve his supervisory skills.
Usually my engagement with the client’s boss involves three types of meetings.
First are the preparation meetings, which have the benefit of a well-thought-out approach to the employee. This is the main agenda:
• Identify how the boss views the essential elements of the client’s Three Key Factors: the client’s business results, his leadership behaviors, and the team interactions that need to change on the client’s team of direct reports.
• Discover how the client’s Three Key Factors, if delivered well, allow the boss to obtain success with his own Three Key Factors: the boss’s business results, leader behaviors, and the boss’s team interactions. Get the boss to be specific about how these two sets of Three Key Factors, his direct report’s and his own key factors, reinforce each other.
• Help the boss identify new leader interpersonal behaviors that he needs to change in supervising his direct report to increase the chances of success in the coaching contract.
• Discover the boss’s time frame for when he wants his direct report to achieve the measures of the Three Key Factors and how he will monitor this progress.
• Prepare the boss for a three-way meeting with the boss, his direct report, and the coach. Offer to coach the boss during that meeting (see Chapter Seven for live-action coaching).
In three-way meetings, both the client and the coach experience the boss at the same time and the same information is shared with both, neither having to hear it second hand. In these meetings:
• The boss communicates his expectations to his direct report, sharing the Three Key Factors expectations, working on gaining clarity and commitment from his direct report regarding these issues.
• Client, boss, and coach cover when and how the boss will monitor progress.
• The boss offers the services of the coach to the direct report. He makes a distinction between the goals for the client (required) and how he gets there (optional use of a coach).
• The coach helps to keep the boss on track with his goals in the meeting.
Three-way meetings should be held over the course of the coaching contract so the boss can stay involved in his direct report’s development.
Finally, periodic follow-up coach-boss meetings heighten the boss’s level of responsibility to supervise. These meetings:
• Help the boss clarify his satisfaction with the client’s progress and what areas need ongoing work.
• Identify an action plan the boss will carry out for any of the following: getting the information he needs to assess his direct report’s progress, giving feedback to his direct report, and coaching the boss on his own progress on his new leadership interpersonal behaviors with his direct report.
All of these meetings provide rich material to work the systemic patterns that have been created between your client and her boss. If you work just with your client, you cannot easily change your client’s behavior because she is constantly being reinforced in her current behavior by her boss even as the boss says he wants change in his direct report.
There are two important systemic principles embedded in the previous set of meetings. The first is to help the boss identify new leader interpersonal behaviors that he needs to change in supervising his direct report to increase the chances of success in the coaching contract. Most bosses have no idea how they perpetuate the undesirable behaviors in their direct reports. They do not see their contribution to a pattern that has been established between them. One of the best contributions you can make is to help the boss see this. But insight is not enough. You must challenge the boss to change his behavior with his direct report. The boss needs to see his new behavior as a significantly new leadership tool that he adds to his repertoire. This focus will help the boss to be more effective not only with your client but also with his other direct reports. The guerrilla coaching that the boss never asked for but now receives will have a longer-term effect beyond the results he originally imagined you would help achieve.
Help the boss identify new leader interpersonal behaviors that he needs to change in supervising his direct report to increase the chances of success in the coaching contract.
The second principle is to identify how and when the boss will monitor progress. Every boss I have ever worked with asks, “How is he doing?” Or, “Does she have what it takes to get to the next executive level?” Or, “Does he have the capacity I need in that area, or is it just beyond his ability and always will be?” Or, “Is she truly motivated?” And it is sorely tempting to answer the boss’s questions. But that will place you squarely in the Rescue Model of Coaching. If you answer these questions, you accomplish two things: (1) you feed your need to be seen as valuable to the boss without challenging the effects of feeding that need, and (2) you let the boss off the hook of his own responsibility to his direct report. You risk two things by not answering these questions: (1) the boss could get angry that you won’t answer “a simple question—you’re the one who’s spending time with her and sees the real stuff,” and (2) there is valuable information that may get lost if you do not share your assessment of your client’s progress with the boss. What to do?
My policy is not to answer any question the boss asks that requires me to tell him my evaluation of his employee. This is beyond the issue of confidentiality. It’s not that the boss is asking what is said in the meetings. This has more to do with the boss wanting my sense of my client as a whole.
Politically, it would be career limiting to give the boss your evaluations. When your clients find out that you shared an evaluation of their performance with the boss, they will lose all trust in you as their coach. They will lose the motivation to do anything more than try to look as good as possible. In addition, it will get around the company that you are in the back pocket of management and cannot be trusted.
There are also systemic reasons for not answering the boss’s question that go beyond politics. Going back to the systemic principles of the triangled coach, how do you work in the midst of the boss-direct report relationship? It is the executive coach’s job to keep the relationship between the boss and direct report the primary relationship. The relationship you have with each of them is secondary to their relationship to each other.
From the Client Responsibility Model’s perspective, evaluating your client to the boss degrades the boss’s responsibility to evaluate his direct report himself through direct experience. He is depending on your judgment rather than his own judgment. He is not standing on his own two feet to discern his employee’s performance. If I am not the conduit of information between the two players, the boss must get that information from his direct report and the direct report’s team by observing the real action himself. The real action is not happening inside my wise understanding of the client, no matter how insightful I think I am or the boss thinks I am. Therefore, resist the boss’s attempts to either flatter you or threaten you into an evaluation of his direct report. It is more disabling than empowering to the performance management relationship.
What you can do is offer to coach the boss on ways he can get the information he needs to make an evaluation himself. He may even need help identifying what criteria he wants to define to evaluate progress, development, or performance. He may need help in thoughtfully weighing a direct report’s strengths and challenges and how to communicate the results. This approach leads to much more useful and capacity-building coaching conversations that you can have with your client’s boss.
Greg and Dan
An internal HR consultant had suggested that Greg call me to coach his direct report, Dan. Greg was VP of quality, and Dan was director of the customer service department. The department’s job was to ensure not only a high level of responsiveness in its call center, but also that the customer service records and processing of issues were coordinated well with the information technology department, which handled the information storage and reporting.
When we first met, Greg impressed me as both friendly and decisive. He talked about Dan’s strengths and weaknesses and why he wanted to get Dan some coaching:
Greg: Dan was promoted to director a year ago. He did quite well in his old job, and the company believes he could go far. He’s great at making presentations to upper management and customer groups because he really understands his stuff and knows how to convey the most relevant information. He cared about quality work and delivered on his results. But he has stumbled since his promotion.
Coach: In what ways?
Greg: He intimidates his staff. If something goes wrong, he stresses out and takes it out on them. And then he doesn’t fix the problem; he acts more victimized by the IT department and accuses them of messing things up. He doesn’t address the issue and doesn’t involve his staff in problem solving. When I see him in cross-functional team meetings, he clams up and doesn’t contribute anything to the agenda.
Coach: How do you account for his behavior?
Greg: I think he really cares, but his personality causes him to pull in and mull things over when he’s under stress, and then the whole thing caves in on itself. He probably needs help knowing how to adjust to this new level of managing. I think with coaching from you, he could adjust to his new position and learn how to include others more. I really want to invest in a coaching resource for him to keep him on track.
Coach: How much time have you spent orienting him and coaching him in this new position?
Greg: (jovial tone) Wait a minute! This isn’t going to be about me is it?
Coach: Well, you don’t want to waste money on an outside coaching resource when there are things you can do better than anyone on the outside. Do those first. Save your money for when you’ve done all that you can do and he’s still stumbling.
Greg: Okay, so I could be spending more time with him telling him what I want, but I still think he’s going to need help getting over some of his habits. I just don’t get why he turns inward all the time, broods about what’s stressing him, and then lashes out at his staff.
Coach: Have you asked him about it?
Greg: I’ve told him that his staff has gone to HR complaining about him, and they’ve just finished a 360 process on him; I’m going to share that information with him next week. He’s pretty nervous about it. I told him this isn’t a discipline thing, I think he’s capable, but he’s got to turn this around if he wants to succeed.
Coach: That’s a good start, but you’ll need to be more specific, and you’ll need to get his commitment to change.
I talked to Greg about having very explicit expectations for Dan in the Three Key Factor areas: business results, Dan’s behaviors as a leader, and Dan’s team’s interactions. We spent a couple of sessions helping Greg get clear about his expectations of Dan and how he would deliver that message. Figure 5.4 is Greg’s first draft of what he sees as Dan’s Three Key Factors, which shows how these lists began to shape up through the course of the evolving conversations with Greg.
Coach: Now that you are beginning to clarify the Three Key Factors expectations for Dan, it’s time to make sure they dovetail with your Three Key Factors: what you need to accomplish in your job so you will obtain the greatest leverage from the changes Dan will make.
Greg: I see how linking the Three Key Factors up and down the division helps power up everything more effectively in my organization. Then I’ve got everybody working on what feeds success for the next layer.
Coach: Now let’s customize your leader behavior list to this specific situation with Dan. Which of your leader behaviors do you need to alter to support the change you want to see in Dan?
Greg: Here we go again, making this about me! I didn’t hire you to coach me. I’m hiring you to coach Dan!
Figure 5.4 Dan’s Three Key Factors: Draft 1
© 2003-2007, Mary Beth O’Neill.
Coach: Look at it this way: so far, whatever you have or haven’t done with Dan hasn’t changed his behavior. It’s worth looking at how the two of you interact. There could be something you are unaware of that’s reinforcing Dan to stay the same. If that’s the case, it doesn’t matter if I work with Dan to change his behavior. I’m an outsider, and I’ll be leaving when my work is finished. Everyone pays much more attention to their boss than to an outsider in terms of making behavior changes. Let’s make sure you’re doing all you can to support his change.
Greg: I’m not going to get out of this, am I?
Coach: Not when you work with me. My work is to make sure that the system between you two is effective, as well as helping Dan change his behavior.
Greg learned through our conversations that he was doing something to enable Dan to maintain his current behavior. When Greg approached Dan about his passivity, Greg would turn on his promoter self and work to convince, advise, prod, and exhort Dan to change his behavior. It was as though he were trying to cheer lead Dan into a change. Dan learned to withstand this chronic state of affairs. His boss tried to convince and cajole him to change, and then he would leave Dan to do what he did before. There were no consequences other than a few uncomfortable moments in these periodic conversations. Dan had only to act thoughtful and cooperative until the end of the conversation. Then he reverted to his old behavior.
It turned out that Greg was uncomfortable insisting that Dan change, getting his commitment to change, and establishing consequences when Dan did not. I encouraged Greg to think of a continuum of consequences that he could put into place with Dan and suggested that it was up to Greg to ensure that he did not lapse back into his old behavior. Here is the consequence continuum that Greg developed for his work with Dan (lowest to highest consequence listed):
1. “This isn’t up to standard.” (Have a discussion with Dan about how it happened. Dan gives lots of reasons why it didn’t happen the way it should have. Previously, this is the only option Greg used with Dan.)
2. “This is unacceptable. I’m disappointed.” (Greg had never let Dan experience Greg’s disappointment in him and feel the uncomfortable emotional sting of letting his boss down.)
3. “This is unacceptable. Do it over, and get it right.” (This consequence goes beyond their conversation about it.)
4. “This is unacceptable. Do it over, and go public with it. Tell other key players you messed up and what you’re going to do to fix it.” (Insists on initiative from Dan.)
5. “This is unacceptable. This will affect your performance pay.” (This consequence goes beyond day-to-day problem solving and affects Dan financially.)
6. “I’m putting you on a performance improvement plan.” (This consequence contradicts the assumption that Dan is secure in his job.)
This list of escalating consequences provided Greg with his own map that gave him more flexibility in supervising Dan. It also gave Greg and me a map to use in subsequent conversations, as well as a way to talk about how Greg was monitoring Dan’s progress. It signals to Greg that he needs to pay at least as much attention to how he manages Dan as to how Dan improves his behavior because of coaching.
Involving the boss in this way supports three sets of partnerships: the boss/direct report partnership, the boss/coach partnership, and the direct report(client)/coach partnership. When these partnerships are set up well, each relationship is effective and productive and supports the other partnerships. At the end of your contract with your client, he and his boss will have a greater chance of sustaining the changes they hired you for.
The example I use in this section on involving the boss has to do with an employee who was faltering in his performance. This may lead you to believe that involving the boss is used only with clients who are in trouble. That is not the case. I learned that it is important to involve the boss even with high-performance clients who were motivated enough to call me on their own. It is amazing how the bosses of these high performers are not clear about their expectations and how the lack of expectations can cause even high performers to derail. They did not involve their boss enough in their development work and headed in the wrong direction. That is when I learned that involving the boss is for clients anywhere on the continuum of performance in their positions.
When the client is a high performer and initiates the call for executive coaching, the sequence of involving the boss happens somewhat differently. You can do the preparation work with your client first. After helping her identify her Three Key Factors, you can meet with the boss and have him identify his direct report’s Three Key Factors from his perspective and then initiate the three-way conversation. When the boss initiates the call to the coach, the boss runs the first three-way meeting. When the client initiates the coaching, the client can lead the three-way meeting.
A Word About Assessment Tools
Many executive coaches use assessment tools in their work with clients, either 360-degree surveys or any variety of style or type inventories such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Most businesses, as well as nonprofits and government entities, use these same instruments.
I travel another path regarding assessment instruments. Too many times organizations rely on the information from inventories to replace important face-to-face conversations. That work should include performance management, direct feedback, coaching, and building relationships in the workplace. How many times has a boss avoided performance management of his direct report by relying on her to get the information through a 360-degree process? How many times have people not given feedback directly to a boss or a peer and unloaded it in a 360-degree survey? How many times has a leader been bewildered by the feedback from 360-degree tools because it was the first time she received such a message? How many times has an executive been given an assessment and then not been given a coaching resource to help her develop to the next level of their skill? Too many times.
Some would say that this indicates the need for coaching to be applied to an executive’s growth initiative after being put through these assessments, and they would be right. “Assessment + Coaching = Development” is a good development formula. In fact, I often meet prospective clients when they have recently finished a 360-degree process. The client’s motivation to take on developmental challenges they would characteristically avoid can be increased by taking these assessments.
But there is something inherent in assessment tools that helps individuals in the work environment avoid each other. They rely on a tool, whether it’s a feedback instrument or a style inventory, to do the job to deliver feedback instead of expecting themselves to deliver it. People can hide behind their anonymous feedback and hope that someone else-such as the boss, the coach, another peer, or another direct report—will face the leader in question with the feedback. Everyone hopes that anyone else will deliver the feedback instead of themselves.
Everyone hopes that anyone else will deliver the feedback instead of themselves.
This indirect feedback mechanism promotes hiding out in organizations, which subsequently creates an overly politicized and unproductive environment that impedes effectiveness. This is why I have taken the position that assessment and style instruments are not part of my coaching services. When a client already has such feedback, I am happy for her to bring the information into our conversations so she can make plans to address the feedback. My main work with clients, however, is to help them promote giving and receiving feedback directly, not triangulating their work relationships through another person or an instrument.
You may ask, But what if the executive is so intimidating that she creates a costly environment for anyone who gives her feedback, particularly her direct reports? If that is the case, then that issue becomes a cornerstone of the coaching contract. I then coach my client to:
• Develop open-ended rather than closed questions for her direct reports regarding her behaviors—for example, instead of asking, “Do you think I’m intimidating?” use, “What do I do that shuts you down in meetings?”
• Show she listens to the feedback nondefensively—for example, “I see how my interrupting you wears down your initiative.”
• Create a collaborative action plan based on the feedback—for example, “Here’s what I’m going to do differently, and here’s where I could use your help to change my behavior.”
I also create coaching contracts with each of the direct reports, which include:
• Identifying the kind of feedback they have to give their manager—for example, “My boss doesn’t trust me.”
• Making that feedback more useful by making it more behaviorally specific and actionable—for example, “When you interrupt me and problem-solve an issue I bring to you before I ask for help, it seems to me that you don’t trust me.”
• Deciding what they can offer collaboratively to help their boss change their behavior—for example, “When you do that, I will remind you that I already developed a plan that I want to share with you, and that I’d like you to listen to me first.”
When we conclude this preparation work, the client has a series of one-on-one conversations with each of her direct reports at which I am present and have contracts for live-action coaching for both parties (see Chapter Seven on live-action coaching). I help the client ask for and receive feedback productively and without reprisals. The direct report gets my help in giving behaviorally specific and actionable feedback. The conversations are initially uncomfortable for both parties until they realize that the discussions are neither dump sessions nor opportunities for punishing retribution.
It is exactly this transformation in work relationships that organizations need and often avoid through an overuse of assessment tools and an underuse of follow-up resources for executives. My own position not to use assessment tools at all and go immediately to developing direct relationships is my contribution to course-correcting assessment tool overuse by organizations.
I do believe it is possible to use assessment and style inventories in coaching in a way that gets to the same goal of developing direct feedback in work relationships, and many coaches have a robust method to get there. The thing to be wary of is the way in which your client organization may need help in becoming more direct. For example, your client’s boss may be too eager to have you work with his direct report on the issues in the 360-degree assessment or style inventory as a replacement for his own direct conversation with his staff member. If that is the case, he is not facing his own job as a boss by establishing clear expectations, gaining commitment to the growth plan, fostering development, and monitoring his direct report’s interactions over time.
This is another opportunity to involve the boss and coach the boss of your client to help him be the one to mobilize the direct report’s attention and energy for the development ahead. Mobilizing a direct report holds a different level of responsibility and commitment on the part of the boss. He has to involve himself and give direct feedback to his direct report. If he does not, then all you have is a hearty yet passive hand-off of his direct report to you with a pile of assessment data attached. Your job is to ensure that the boss mobilizes his direct reports for growth, even if his first impulse is to pass that job off to you. When you take on the challenge of helping the boss be direct with your client, you develop the capacity of two people to increase their level of directness (your client and your client’s boss) and the larger organization benefits from it.
Chapter Five Highlights
Join with the Client
1. Begin building a foundation for the relationship.
2. Engage in mutual assessment of the fit for a working partnership.
Familiarize Yourself with Your Client’s Challenge
1. Listen. Follow your natural curiosity.
2. Empathize. Show you understand the client’s core concerns.
3. Confront discrepancies. Help the client notice inconsistency in thought and action.
4. Show respect by demonstrating your belief in the client’s capabilities.
Test Your Client’s Ability to Own His Part of the Issue
1. Keep the client’s response to his challenge as the central issue.
2. Test the client’s willingness to reflect on his part of the issue.
Give Immediate Feedback to the Client
1. Feed back your impressions based on the here-and-now experience of the client.
2. Make your feedback relevant to the client’s business issue.
Take a Systems View of Your Client’s Issue
1. Identify both sides of a pattern shared by the client and the team.
2. You will feel the same pulls the members of the system feel.
3. Find your way to positional neutrality.
4. Identify how your client is creating a problem by her response to the problem.
Establish a Contract
1. Make the coaching offer explicit.
2. Describe the options.
• Behind-the-scenes planning and debriefing
• Live-action intervening
Encourage the Client to Set Measurable Goals
1. Set specific goals the client will work on during the coaching contract.
2. Do not confuse work relationship goals with business outcomes.
Use the Three Key Factors Methodology
1. Coach the client to identify the business results, her own leadership interpersonal behaviors, and the team interactions she needs to be successful.
2. Business results: Ensure the results are linked to key behaviors you need from yourself and others.
3. Leader interpersonal behaviors: Develop the stamina to meet the relationship challenges you face in order to work more effectively with others.
4. Team interactions: Identify and transform ineffective patterns co-created between you and your team.
5. Customize, and make specific and measurable, the items for each key factor.
Define the Measures: How Will You Know When You Get There?
1. Use four categories for business results: time, money, quality, and quantity.
2. Help the client create team interaction and leader interpersonal behavior lists that can be described, replicated, and enacted on a continual basis to achieve the business results.
3. Work with the client to build his team and leader lists from the ground up for his unique situation.
Truth in Advertising: Clients Will Balk
1. Resist the client’s impulse to act first and think later.
2. Start with the key factor that energizes the client the most.
3. Keep the ownership with the client—not you—in deciding which goals and measures to pursue.
Slow Down Goal Setting to Speed Up the Action Later
1. Do not take the client’s resistance to goal setting personally.
2. Encourage the client to use the Three Key Factors in other projects to continue to connect improvements in her leadership with specific business goals.
Involve the Boss
1. Find out what the boss wants most out of his employee’s performance. Help him identify his direct report’s Three Key Factors.
2. Provide guerrilla coaching of the boss regarding his supervision of his employee. It may give you a platform for an explicit coaching contract with the boss.
3. Conduct three kinds of meetings with the boss: preparation sessions for the three-way meetings, the three-way meetings themselves, and periodic follow-up meetings.
Leverage Change in the Boss-Direct Report System
1. Help the boss identify new leader interpersonal behaviors she needs to adopt in supervising her direct report to increase the chance of success in the coaching contract.
2. Identify how and when the boss will monitor progress.
3. Decline the boss’s request for your evaluation of her employee.
4. Offer to coach the boss on ways she can get information to evaluate performance.
A Word About Assessment Tools
1. Promote giving and receiving direct feedback among people in organizations rather than letting them triangulate their relationships through assessment tools.
2. Help both sides of a challenged system—the leader to receive feedback productively without reprisals and the direct reports to give behaviorally specific and actionable feedback.
3. Involve the boss of your client in giving assessment feedback directly rather than through you.
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