Tag: Practice

Categories
Coaching Leadership

Practice

Person playing the piano
Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash

Practicing helps you to be prepared for what’s coming up. Doing it by yourself is certainly effective, but it’s even better if you enlist some support.

Practicing in the open, with some trusted support, can really help you get on top of the extra value you could provide. It’s all about how what you are doing will land with others, which is super important in a business context.

Getting support in this way is where you take the practice to the next level.

Imagine you are giving a 10 minute presentation. Create your outline, put some slides around it and get your script in place. Work out the big blocks, and then you are good to get some support.

Book an hour to practice in person. Go for a first run through. Ask your supporter “What did you take from the presentation?”. If they hit your key message, then that’s great, jump to refinements. If not, shift up the approach to try and land that core message.

If you are refining, then ask about what felt weak, and what felt strong. Squash the weak parts, edit out the waffle, reframe so the punchy statements hit first.

Make sure that the strong parts come together nicely, that you have a good pace and the story flows.

Then go again, start by giving the slides that you’ve changed the most. Are they landing well with the audience? If not, go again.

Run this loop for the middle 30 minutes of your session.

In the last 15, give the presentation again, and take a fresh round of feedback. It should be loads better. Stronger message, better put together and lands well with your audience.

Preparation is key, practicing in the open takes it up to the next level.

Categories
Coaching Leadership

STAR

Brightly coloured star

As with all things, interviewing is a skill that you can improve upon with practice and focus. A major focus of the people running the interview is to determine if you will be able to do the job. It’s your goal to convince them that you can.

A powerful way to do this is to find examples of times that you used the skills or capabilities that the interviewers care about, and to communicate them in a tightly focused way.

You need to do this whether interviewers are using highly structured competency based questioning, or if they are just freewheeling around various areas of interest.

The model that you can use is called ‘STAR’:

  • Situation – What was the scenario you were in? People involved, deadlines, risks and opportunities etc.
  • Task – What were you tasked to do. This is the last time you can say “we”
  • Action – What did you do. Get specific here, this is the key point of the narrative
  • Result – What was the outcome of your actions, how did they achieve the task and why was your specific contribution important?

There’s often a follow-up question regarding what you learnt or what you’d do differently next time. This is also given significant weighting in the assessment, so make sure to have an answer here.

For any given role, there are probably fewer than 10 core competencies that interviewers will ask for. In a leadership role that might be things like:

  • How you bring people together to complete a project
  • How you inspire your group
  • How you deal with difficult situations
  • How you make tough decisions
  • How you coach or mentor more junior people
  • How you encourage innovation and improvement

For each of these likely competencies, think about a strong example of showing those skills, ideally at levels pushing at the edge or beyond your current role.

Write them down, practice saying them out loud. Get your situation and task outline down to less than a minute. Research the particular common competency areas that align to your role, and make sure your actions tie to the positive indicators of that role.

Build up a bank of these answers that you can bring to bear during an interview. Many of the questions you will be asked will looking at similar skills, so pick something from your list that’s close match, and go with it.

Prepare for these structured sections, practice your answers and you’ll be nailing any interviews you take part in.

Categories
Coaching

Intro to Coaching

I’ve recently been giving an “Intro to Coaching” workshop to current and aspiring People Managers. It’s a great way to focus down on what’s really important, and to figure out ways of sharing that with people in a compelling and engaging way.

I start off by breaking down some of the theory of coaching for performance, what it is, and also what it isn’t. Then we move on to some tools and techniques that you can apply in a coaching situation. Finally, we look at how you can apply them in the management context, in the few minutes here and there which are often all we have to spare in the busy day-to-day.

This is a forty-five minute blast of content, it sets some groundwork and gives ideas for future practice.

For the rest of the workshop, we break into small groups and practice applying the techniques and tools we’ve just learnt. This practical session is by far the most valuable time. Once you have the tools, then using them is the only way to get good. This is as true of coaching as anything else.

In the practical session, we have a coach and a coachee, and a supervisor watching to provide feedback. After a ten minute session, the supervisor provides feedback and the coach reflects on what went well and what could’ve gone better. Once this is done, the group swap roles and go again.

I’ve had great feedback from a wide range of people, from those who’ve benefited from a concentrated refresher, to those who’ve encountered these ideas formally for the first time and to managers who have never reflected on their approaches before, and learnt so much in the process.

For me, sharing these approaches with more people is incredibly rewarding. It sharpens my own thinking and practice, whilst giving so many people a great grounding in the world of coaching and a springboard to the start of their journey.