Tag: Coaching

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Coaching Leadership

Repeat the Message

Repeating White Balconies in a Large Building
Photo by Joshua Chai on Unsplash

When I turned on the TV the other day, I was lucky enough to catch the end of a teleshopping segment. These shows are real masters of a particular aspect of communication, repeating the message.

It’s something that I often have to remind myself of. Things that are important to me should only need to be said once. It’s important, so people should be paying attention and they should remember what’s being said.

In reality, this is far from true. People may not recognise that it’s an important statement. They might not be ready to hear the importance of it. Maybe something else is on their mind, or they simply aren’t listening.

Teleshoppers know that you may just switch on to the channel, that you aren’t likely to be be paying attention but they want to catch you and get you to take an action.

They endlessly repeat their core message. Pay attention. This thing solves a problem. It’s a problem you have. It’s good value, it’ll be better for you if you buy this thing today.

They also do it in a range of ways. Someone shows the product. They talk about it. Messages scroll across the screen or take over the entire display. The words change, but the point is made again and again until you have no chance of misunderstanding it.

These are techniques you can bring into use when you have an important message to share. Think about how you’ll repeat it. You need to share it more than once, and you need a plan. Use different channels to help it land.

Say it face-to-face. Broadcast in an All-Hands. Send an email newsletter. Repeat it next time. Follow-up to confirm that people know what’s going on an to confirm the message is landing. Adapt if you need to.

Don’t overdo it, and don’t use this for every message, but if you need something important to be understood, steal a leaf out of the teleshopper playbook.

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Coaching Leadership

Helping People

Help Wanted Sign
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

People who aren’t helpful often end up becoming isolated. If you won’t work with others, they’ll find a way to work around you. On the flip side, if all you ever do is try to help others, then you won’t be able to find focus to achieve the things that you are trying to do, so you need to find an effective balance.

The most important thing to understand is that saying yes to every request that comes your way is not going to be the best way to balance providing that help.

Sometimes, it may just be providing a simple bit of info, answering a question that you know the answer to. In that case, just do it! Even better if you can point the person to some extra resources or support so they are able to help themselves in future.

Other times it’s all about making a connection. If you don’t know the answer, maybe you know someone who does and can provide an intro. Again, this is a low effort way to help someone, so you should go for it if possible.

Finally, it might be a request for more time, diverting you from current work. A flat ‘no’ is often unhelpful, but no more so than a ‘yes’ that you don’t intend to actually follow through on. Instead, look at what support you can provide. Is it an important or urgent request that’s worth re-ordering your priorities for? Can you delegate the request elsewhere and provide support there? If you do need to say no, can you still provide guidance on what the requestor may need to do to be successful?

A sincere and thought through response is much more likely to leave someone thinking how helpful you were, even if the immediate answer is no. “I’d love to help, but I’m current working on top priority work that must be completed this week. I can give you some support next week, or I can introduce you to this other team who may have more capacity”.

If you are helpful, people will connect with you, and that really is something that will increase your effectiveness over time.

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Book Review Coaching Leadership

Range

David Epstein’s Range argues that in the modern world it’s generalists who will succeed over specialists in a wide variety of situations.

There are a few narrow fields where early specialism may triumph. Easy learning environments where you get quick feedback on what went right or wrong. Things that have repeatable elements that you can reliably master. Chess, golf and playing certain instruments can all match these criteria, and we can all think of examples of people who specialised early and went on to be masters in the field.

However, wicked problems are not so tractable to the early specialisation. Things that take longer to see success or failure. Areas where novel thinking is required, or connecting multiple dots from different disciplines leads to success. In these areas, early specialisation can be harmful, the focus on mastery of a narrow area leads to solution blindness. Every problem is solved with a hammer, no matter if it’s a nail or not.

The book argues for early sampling before applying focus to attempt to achieve mastery. Most of the most successful people at even the repeatable problems try out a range of things before settling on the one that they connect most with, and that sampling time gives them confidence that they connect well with what they’ve settled on, and the grit to succeed.

It’s not the case that we don’t need specialists, they move forwards the state of the art, they go deep into problems and create something new. Generalists can span across these deep solutions, connect them in novel ways and bring to bear existing solutions from one domain, to solve a problem in a way a specialist would never be aware of.

Epstein also gives practical advice to make use of these generalist successes. Take the time to sample in an area. Support children who are doing so and don’t worry if they ‘fall behind’ early on, once they find fit they’ll accelerate ahead of the early strivers. Don’t get held up on grit to be successful, you need to want to be there before getting gritty matters.

Make use of existing tools. Learn from specialists and take the best of what they know to solve problems in your areas.

Create diverse groups to solve problems more effectively!

Range is a great book to look at what learning techniques and approaches work well in the wicked modern world, how we’ve fallen for some bad assumptions on specialisation and how we can balance the two to be more than the sum of our parts.

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Coaching Leadership

Blank Slate It

Blank piece of black paper with white pencil
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

A great technique to fight against a Sunk Cost problem is to take it back to a blank slate. It’s all too easy to get stuck when we’ve invested a lot of time or money in a course of action, going back to basics is a way around it.

Consider a project that’s difficult, maybe not going how you’d expected and it’s overrunning. Rather than just continuing to bash away, stop. Get honest with yourself and the team. What’s left to do to achieve a valuable outcome? How long is it really going to take? What else could you be doing instead of this work.

To be successful with this review, you need to clear away the history of what’s gone before. You need to understand where you are, not the effort you’ve put in to get there so far.

It’s not an easy technique. It’s really easy to get attached to the work that you’ve done, or the investment made so far. You might not be successful the first times you try.

Watch out for statements that look back to what’s gone before. “It’s cost so much already”, “We’ve put in so much effort”, “We have to finish this”.

If you can’t break free from this, you might need to call in someone with fresh eyes. The quickest way to the blank slate is sometimes through a person who hasn’t been close to the efforts so far.

If it feels like a slog, that you aren’t getting there and you never will, then try starting from a blank slate to make a good decision with your future efforts.

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Coaching Leadership

Surely they must understand

What do you mean?
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

In big orgs, it’s really easy to fall prey to the assumption that people have the same context as you, the same incentives and the same decision making approach.

It becomes most obvious that you are falling in to this mistake when you work with a group that you aren’t used to working with, and you have a big break in communication. Something that your team considers vital is not even a consideration to them. You get frustrated, it’s obvious. Surely they must understand what you want is the most important thing, and how you want to do it is the right way.

If the other group think in the same way, then there’s never going to be a solution. You’ll bang up against each other, each thinking you are right, that you are doing the thing that best for the org, and that the other side is just wrong.

The best way I’ve found to manage this is to bring in your coaching skills of questioning and listening. People are neither evil nor stupid, and the vast majority believe that they are doing the best thing based on their current context.

So if you hit this disconnect, start asking questions to understand more:

  • What’s your top priority right now?
  • When can you support our needs?
  • How would you solve our problem?
  • What other approach could we take?
  • How can we help to find a solution?
  • Who can break this deadlock?

By understanding more of the context, and sharing more of your own, you build the pool of understanding across the group. You can determine what the right way forwards is, and rather than two sides fighting against one another, you come back to the single team seeking the best outcome for the larger group.

Don’t get frustrated if people don’t immediately do what you want, be ready to do the work to share the why, and to help them understand rather than falling to the fallacy that everyone always thinks the same as you.

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Coaching Leadership

The Finisher

Having a reputation as a finisher is a great option to build your influence in an organisation. It’s all about making great commitments and then following them through to the end.

Not everyone is a finisher, especially those who are visionaries, focused on generating ideas rather than getting in to the execution. Even so, visionaries need to find some finishers to work with, to build trust that their ideas will actually come to fruition.

As always, it’s important to recognise the role that suits you, and to make sure you are filling it well.

Finishers make sure that things get done. They either do it themselves, or more likely they divert resources, people and focus on to getting something over the line.

The reputation gets built by finishing things that aren’t easy. Innovation, changes to practices or processes and complex projects where other people have failed are all rich areas to get some big wins and build a history of success.

A really important area to work on is not taking on too much. Finishers fail when they are chasing too many projects at once. Recognise your capacity to achieve great outcomes, and practice saying no to things you can’t commit to completing.

This gets harder as you become more successful and where your reputation starts to spread. More people will ask for your support, and want you to get things done for them. You need to step up to higher impact efforts, and find some people earlier in the finisher journey who you can delegate on to.

Finishers are highly valued in an org. Ideas are nothing without execution. If you want to take this role, figure out your capacity. Say ‘yes’ to important things and deliver on them every time. Say ‘no’ to things you can’t fit in, and get comfortable delegating as you grow.

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Coaching Leadership

Decisions, decisions

Scrabble tiles showing the words Decide, Commit, Repeat
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

A really fast way to fail is to stop being able to make decisions. It manifests in lots of ways in an organisation, from tiny things needing multiple sign-offs, through to people chasing just “one more data point” before committing to doing something.

If you aren’t shipping you are losing, and if you aren’t making decisions, then you certainly aren’t shipping anything.

So how to fight against this and keep moving forwards?

Don’t sweat the small stuff – Do some due diligence on the big spend, but just let people do something small without major chains of approval. If you can’t change that process, then do whatever you can to make it easier for people. Try to say ‘yes’ wherever you can if it’s not going to break the bank.

Measure reality – Hypothesis and theories are great to point us in a direction, but the truth is found out in the world. Figure out the fastest way to get to measuring real behaviour, implement that and then iterate on the results you get. The majority of value in your analysis comes from the early effort, get enough confidence to try something and then go from there.

Reduce the risk – Don’t do a big bang release, instead roll-out to a few customers before ramping up over time. Test a solution with a few simple cases to see that it solves them before investing in solving every possible thing. Turn decisions into two-way doors so you can undo them if it doesn’t go well.

Sometimes you have to put the effort in, do the due diligence and make sure that you have everything that you could possibly need lined up and covered off before you make a decision.

That’s really rare! Don’t let it become the default or the gears will stop turning and you’ll never progress.

Use the techniques above to keep moving, keep learning and you’ll keep on delivering massive value!

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Coaching Leadership

Fix the Small Things

Man tying shoes
Photo by Shelbey Fordyce on Unsplash

In any organisation, there’s always a lot of really big things going on. The bigger the org, the larger they are likely to be. They are also going to span over ever longer periods of time, as more people need to be consulted, included in the loop or given the chance for a final review.

Sometimes, we get so fixed on the big things and how difficult they will be to fix, we let the small things go, even though they are causing us pain right now.

I’ve talked before about how we can fix small problems to build traction on solving the big stuff, or get some big improvements from a small fix, but sometimes it’s worth just fixing a small problem that is causing you a minor amount of pain, just to clear that distraction out of the way.

If you get a stone in your shoe, you can stop right away to get it out and stop the irritation. Sometimes you are rushing because you are late, so you don’t stop to make this quick fix. You suffer the pain all the way to your destination, leaving you with some longer lasting damage and maybe even ending up getting there later than if you’d just stopped to make the quick fix.

The same logic holds true in the workplace. Those big things are going to take time, and you should put your consistent effort in to build up the flywheel effect.

Sometimes, you’ve just got five minutes spare. Use that to fix a small pain point. It might just have an outsized effect, and it’ll certainly make you and your team feel better.

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Coaching Leadership

Give it Some Slack

In any complex system, small changes can have big impacts. That’s especially true if the system is under stress, or running at almost full capacity.

There’s lots of research on this, but the basic advice is to target no more than 80% utilisation, if you go for more then your wait time gets longer much faster than expected, you can’t react to changes or anything that’s unexpected.

Building software is a classic complex problem with changes and unexpected problems. Sometimes you’ll discover a team that is running slowly, often missing commitments and not delivering the value that they are focusing on. Often they are the most optimistic team you know, sure that they will turn it around, or that next quarter will deliver double.

If you dive into it, then it’s often a problem of capacity and utilisation. For whatever reason, the team thinks and plans as if they can always work at 100%, that there will be no changes or surprises and that every problem will be solved externally to them.

Rather than trying to fix these symptoms, strip it back to that utilisation belief.

Be ruthless, and cut back heavily on what the team is trying to achieve. Cut it in half, free up time for the team to get back on an even track.

Go back to some key agile practices. Prioritise the most valuable things first. Make the work as small as possible. Ship value as soon as you can. Cut back on work in progress, and start saying no to increasing this value.

When you’ve done this, you’ll find the team turns around. They are able to deliver faster as they aren’t overwhelmed, and the utilisation becomes more healthy.

When the unexpected hits, they are able to absorb it and keep going. They become predictable, and the time to realise value goes down.

So keep some slack in your schedule, and you’ll actually go faster and do more!

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Coaching Leadership

Personality Tests

Scrabble tiles spelling out "Who are you"
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

In the corporate world, you are certainly going to encounter a range of personality tests. I’ve previously talked about not ending up in a box, but rather to take what you can from the test.

One way to do this is to take a range of tests, as this can both help you pull out some themes, and not get too stuck into that single focus from a one-off result.

So whether that’s Clifton Strengths, Management Drives or something else, have a go and see what comes.

There’s not necessarily a lot of real science behind these tests, but if you take them honestly, you’ll probably find something that resonates with you. A major benefit is the language that they use to talk about certain personality traits. Particularly if the test is favoured by your org, it can build in some useful shorthands.

The best tests are the ones that open you up rather than close you down. Thinking about how to be more successful by leaning on your strengths or being aware of blind spots is always powerful. It’s the process and time that you take to reflect that gives you that chance to grow.

You aren’t a giraffe, you aren’t green. You aren’t a Judger and you aren’t an Alchemist. You are a person who can learn and grow and change, and you can do that the best when you focus on the practice and reflect on your journey.