Two opposing ideas are dominating the discourse about work and, indeed, about life too. The first applauds multi-tasking and admires people who seem able to do many things at once. The second tells people to live in the present. As Maya Angelou says, “Be present in all things and thankful for all things.”
“I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something …” – Dorothy Allison, Trash: Stories. Photo: Catherine Burrows
We read sensible, helpful articles which give people strategies to manage their emails efficiently, including by only looking at them a few times a day, and promoting the idea of not starting your day with emails but by “eating the frog” of your most difficult and important task.
Then we hear about people whose managers require them to respond to their emails instantly, and be logged onto instant messaging, at all hours. How can a person manage this without multitasking? And what is the cost?
The implication of this, of course, is that the rest of us – 98% – are not good multitaskers. This won’t surprise anyone who has sat behind someone texting at a green traffic light. In fact, David Strayer’s research showed, “Outside the lab…the multitasking deficit held steady. When Strayer and his colleagues observed fifty-six thousand drivers approaching an intersection, they found that those on their cell phones were more than twice as likely to fail to heed the stop signs,” as Maria Konnikova reports.
What about in the workplace? It turns out that multi-tasking can reduce productivity by as much as 40%.
David Sbarra has described how he trained himself to be less busy. He realised he had become “…a robot, programmed to obliterate my to-do list…” “addicted to busyness”. He decided that “To get more out of life — more meaning, more joie de vivre — I needed to start doing less and to become more conscious about my choices.”
His strategies were amazingly simple. He started by being outside and walking more. Next, he tried valuing idleness, left Facebook and got “serious about laughing more”. Finally, he focused on the value of friendships. While it’s a work in progress, he says the result is, “I am feeling better than I have in a long time — more deliberate in the choices I make, more connected to the people around me, and more energized for the demands of the day. The surprising irony here, for me at least, is that by doing less, I am getting way more out life.”
Working with an executive coach can help you to overcome mindless multitasking. A coach can help you identify those tasks you are doing from a sense of busyness rather than necessity. A coach can help you build strategies to focus on what’s important. Finally, if you need to have a difficult conversation with your manager about improving your productivity by not answering every email as soon as it is sent, an executive coach can help with this too.
Dr Lubna Somjee takes an interesting approach to the concept of mentors. She suggests that you can go a step further, by creating a personal board of directors.
When she works with her clients as an executive coach, Dr Somjee suggests you choose a group of people to help you in your career. She advocates you find “…a group of people you can turn to and discuss various career or business issues, obtain advice, and gain new perspectives.”
She suggests the group be as diverse as possible and include both champions and people who will be candid, or even blunt. You can choose someone from within your own industry or someone from another industry to bring a fresh perspective. You can also choose an explorer who “…forces you to stretch your vantage point on yourself and career, and helps you be more self-aware.”
Dr Somjee recommends adding people you find to be knowledgeable or inspirational as virtual board members. She believes that “Assembling one’s own board can be one of the more valuable things you can do if you are wanting to strengthen your career or business…”.
Why not consider your coach as a member of your personal board? Executive coaches can bring objectivity and an outsider’s perspective to the process. They can take the roles you assign to them – explorer, provider of candid feedback or champion. By helping you build your self-awareness, they can also help you choose the right people for your other board positions. Executive coaches can help you end up, long term, with your best personal board of directors.
In Part 1 we looked at the differences between obstructionists and sceptics, and in Part 2, how to work with sceptics to achieve great outcomes. In this post, we will look at champions of change.
Why does someone become a champion? Champions are ready for change and your ideas resonate with them:
They may have experienced the same frustrations or problems that you have
They may have seen the same data as you and reached the same conclusions
They may have been dealing with customer complaints and so understand the imperatives for improvement
Or perhaps they understand the political externalities that are driving your change.
Some will also be new to the organisation and have no allegiance to the old ways of doing business. Generally speaking, seniority doesn’t determine a team member’s attitude to change: you will find champions at all levels of your organisation.
Champions believe in your change and they have faith in you to deliver it, so it is essential that you support them as they encounter difficulties implementing your change. Like you, champions will find working with sceptics difficult, time-consuming and trying.
Champions may dismiss objections raised by the sceptics, failing to listen for what is useful in their concerns. If this occurs, especially in the case of newer team members, the old hands will dismiss the champions in turn. Great champions need to learn to embrace the sceptics. Your role will be to model the behaviour you expect to see and to equip the champions with the skills they need.
There are other people who are sometimes confused with champions. Some team members will support your change as long as they perceive you to be sufficiently powerful to take them with you as your career progresses. They don’t need to believe in the change: it is sufficient for them to believe it will be personally and professionally advantageous to support you. They will quickly decide to support you all the way – until there is a bump in the road, at which point their support may be withdrawn just as quickly.
For this reason, it’s important to check the motivations of those team members who are enthusiastically embracing your change program.
Ask yourself how they have come to the conclusion that change is needed and why your proposal is the best approach. Or better yet, ask them. A true champion will have genuine personal and professional reasons for supporting your change, even if they have some difficulty in articulating these. A less sincere supporter will probably have a facile answer which they think is what you will want to hear. By asking probing questions and listening carefully to their answers, you will be able to find the champions you need to get your work done.
Working with an executive coach can be extremely beneficial here. Because coaches come from outside your organisation, they can bring an objectivity to the process. An executive coach can help you build an understanding of whether the people putting themselves forward as champions get the rationale behind your change or whether they have a history of following their leaders, no matter what change has been implemented.
An executive coach can help you build a framework to decide how to assign critical tasks, and develop a plan for better engagement of the less sincere supporters.
Sometimes events can overtake your change so that it does not come to fruition. Champions of your program for change will be at least as disappointed as you. They may have put themselves on the line for you and may have faced significant opposition. In appropriate situations, they will have let your customers know about the improvements that were coming and realise how frustrated those customers will now be. They will also be facing the obstructionists who will no doubt tell them, “I told you so.”
In this situation, it is essential that you support them. Explaining the situation clearly and effectively to the people who have been helping you implement your change, both champions and sceptics alike, is essential. Let them know what has occurred that makes the change impossible and allow them to express their feelings to you. After all, when the next change needs to be implemented, you will want trusted allies who believe in you and your efforts to improve the organisation.
An executive coach can help you:
build your skills in these difficult communication tasks
find the best ways to deliver the bad news to your staff and
assist you to find positive approaches to listening as they express their frustrations.With these skills you will be able to engage your champions in a way that allows them to continue to be your champions now and into the future.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the theory that underskilled people tend to hold overly favourable views of their abilities, with the corollary that highly-skilled people can tend to assume that tasks that are easy for them are also easy for others.
Both of these tendencies present clear challenges in management.
A recent article suggests that the Dunning-Kruger effect is present when leaders self-assess their ability to coach their teams.
Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman reviewed data on leaders who self-assessed their coaching ability, and then had their skills assessed in 360 reviews. They found that for coaching, as for other skills, there is a noticeable tendency to estimate skills incorrectly. About a quarter of subjects significantly over-estimated their skills. Those who under-estimated their skills were also out by a significant margin.
The authors recommend attending targeted training, self-assessing and seeking feedback, to get a clearer picture of both overall coaching effectiveness and specific areas to target, such as listening well, collaborating effectively and encouraging diversity.
360 feedback can be personally confronting, especially for a leader who takes these issues seriously. Engaging with an external executive coach can provide a safe space to work through the results of 360 feedback, and to recognise how to apply the results in developing management skills.
How do you find the right executive coach for you? What should you expect from your executive coach? How can you measure your progress? Should managers use executive coaching to address performance issues or to reward great staff?
Founding Partner, Catherine Burrows, spoke with the foundation members, Marg Lennon, Claudia Lantos, and Trish Kelly, about the big questions of executive coaching. Catherine began by asking how they got into coaching.
Marg said she had been coached as an executive and found it very helpful in clarifying her goals and giving her another perspective on the situations she was facing.
Claudia told Catherine that she is passionate about helping people achieve their objectives, in both business and personal growth.
Trish said that, as GM of HR, she had seen the power of coaching, for individuals and organisations. She gained great professional and personal satisfaction from working with people to help them achieve their potential and find solutions to issues they were confronting.
Catherine asked what people should look for in an executive coach and how to tell if an executive coach was a good fit.
All our coaches spoke about the importance of trust. As Claudia said, “The executive coach should build trust and a safe environment to share things in.”
Claudia also mentioned the importance of feeling comfortable with the coach, both their personality and professional background. Clients should be confident that the coach can guide them to achieve their goals and they should feel good about the executive coach’s track record and results. Finally, the client should “feel the coach has empathy and knows their world”.
Trish Kelly & Claudia Lantos, foundation members
Trish believes the client should be comfortable with the coach’s style and feel they will be able to build an open and trusting, collaborative relationship. The coach should have a proven track record and the leadership and coaching experience to provide value. A coach who is a good fit will show that they are genuinely interested in their client’s goals and will encourage them to openly pursue the achievement of those goals in a flexible, respectful and, at times, challenging way.
Marg told Catherine it could be useful for the coach to have had executive experience, although not necessarily in the client’s field, because this “aids understanding of aspects of executive work that cross all professional categories.” A solid coach training background is important and the coaching approach and methodology should be considered too. A client could consider the merits a coach of a different gender might bring. She added, “If you find the questions the coach asks hard to answer, in that they cause you to think about things in a different way, then they might be right for you.”
An issue coaches often discuss is how clients should measure their progress when working with a coach. Our foundation members took different approaches to answering this question.
Claudia Lantos & Marg Lennon, foundation members
Claudia noted the use of 360 assessments and third party interviews, before and after coaching. Observations and feedback from their manager, colleagues and peers could be useful. The client’s own experience during the coaching program could assist too: for example, a client might recognise that they have become a more effective communicator. Clients should expect a change in behaviour and more richness in the tools available to them if they put in the hard work.
Marg told Catherine that clients should expect to begin their work with a coach by creating some goals to be achieved by the conclusion of the coaching process. Although these goals may change as the process unfolds, it’s useful to have agreed goals to start with. Marg noted that the client’s manager should usually be involved in the creation of those goals. A client could expect regular discussions about their goals and progress toward achieving them as part of their coaching experience.
Trish emphasised that a client should not expect the coach to provide them with answers. They should feel listened to, supported, energised and sometimes challenged to think about their goals and issues, often in ways they might not have done before. The client should also feel that they are able to take away actions they have identified that will progressively help them reach their potential.
Some coaches express strong views about whether coaching should be used as a way of addressing performance issues or whether it should be reserved for use as a reward for great performance. Catherine asked the group what they thought.
Trish Kelly, foundation member
Trish feels coaching is a method of supporting individuals to achieve their goals, so this means people are coached for a range of reasons. “Many managers and organisations do not deal with day to day performance issues and don’t have clear and meaningful discussions with employees when an employee is not performing to the standard required.” Programs to support employees to address performance issues need to be customised: while coaching can certainly have a place in this, it is likely coaching will have a focus on improvement.
Marg feels that in addressing performance issues, the client, their manager and the coach need to get very clear on the outcomes, so everyone knows what success looks like. Regular reviews are useful to ensure progress towards these agreed outcomes. When coaching is a reward for high performing executives, “a key success factor is that the client needs to want to be coached, to do or think differently.” Here, she said, goals were still useful, along with the development of a vision: the sessions would have a focus on improvement and clients could expect to participate in conversations and answer questions that would stretch their thinking and thus their actions.
Claudia said that while both approaches are valid, she is passionate about people who are truly interested and committed to reaching their best potential: this could be whether they were not yet performing well or when they were performing well but wanted to do even better. “Also, sometimes it’s a more personal journey, with a lot of insights and a new awareness of themselves, their job or their purpose. I love it when it’s all of the above.
Catherine Burrows, founding partner
Two of our foundation members were formerly very senior HR practitioners, so Catherine asked them about choosing coaches for other executives.
Marg was Vice President of HR and Organisational Development in an ASX 100 company. She looked for qualifications first when choosing coaches. She then asked about the coach’s methodology, including how they planned to communicate and involve the manager, where this was appropriate. She also asked about their experience across a variety of industries.
Trish was General Manager HR in a huge public sector agency. She first ensured the executive and their manager were committed to coaching. “I also ascertained, in broad terms, why they were pursuing coaching to enable me to identify possible coaches with the relevant background and experience.” Trish would have an initial discussion with potential coaches to assess whether their style and approach was likely to be a match for the executive. She then arranged for an initial meeting between the executive and the potential coach. Following each assignment, she sought feedback from the executive and their manager to assist with sourcing future coaches
And executive coaching as an experience?
Catherine concluded, “As these observations show, executive coaching is as individual as the clients and coaches themselves. It’s such a personal experience. One thing comes through above all, however. It’s the quality of the interpersonal relationship between the client and coach, the trust that develops between them, that makes executive coaching so powerful – and so rewarding.”
In her article, ‘I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Coach!’, Amy Smalarz raises the question: “Why is there a stigma attached to Coaching as we get older?” She examines some coaching myths and concludes, “Coaching is the universal language of change and learning.”
This article made me reflect on my own experience. In 2009, I had just achieved the promotion to the executive position I’d long aspired to. My predecessor had retired after many years in the job and I knew I didn’t have her experience. My new job was exciting and challenging – and very daunting. I was worried my boss, the CEO, thought I wasn’t up to it.
Then the CEO called me into her office and said, “You’re getting a coach.” It was at that moment I knew for sure she thought I wasn’t up to the job. I was dashed.
Then I worked with the executive coach – and what an inspiring experience it was! Coaching gave me a safe space to work through complex issues and conflicts. Because my coach had been in a similar job to my own, I also had a mentor to work with on the challenges of my new role and to explore new ideas and approaches before taking them to the CEO.
Coaching helped me set a course to do my new job my way. And I did.
Later, I discussed this with my boss who told me that she had wanted to support me in the new role and thought executive coaching was a great way to do it. She was right.
In fact, I found the process so inspiring that, when I left that job, I moved into executive coaching myself.
Contributor: Dr Catherine Burrows is a Founding Partner of Executive Coach Exchange and the CEO and owner of Innoverum independent consulting.
Here is a perceptive article which goes beyond the usual “day in the life” style to offer insights about coaching and the role of the coach.
Sandra Richardson explains that in coaching executives, she is also teaching them how to coach their staff. “I … go into organisations and teach their leaders how to bring coaching into their leadership style. Research shows that either a coaching or a visionary style of leadership are the most effective over the longer term. I help leaders put together both styles and this in turn enables them to help their staff take responsibility and move forward in their roles.”
Beth Armknecht Miller has written an interesting article which succinctly summarises some of the common challenges the manager as coach often faces. She is focusing on the manager as coach but we think the ideas have wider applicability.
One of these, which we think is a very common problem, is “Am I doing the heavy lifting”. Ms Armknecht Miller explains the importance of using good questioning to help the ‘coachee’ find her own answers, so she grows as a professional. “Your job is to ask the powerful questions to get the coachee to develop his own solution.” She also notes, “successful coaching is about getting someone to change and be accountable for his future”.
Perhaps a more controversial assertion made in this article is that “arrogant people aren’t coachable.” She goes on to say that arrogant people need to be challenged on how they are perceived and the impact of this on effectiveness and relationships.
She concludes with a statement about the different roles of the coach and coachee: “…your success as a coach is about both you and your coachee working together, you acting as guide, and your employee doing the hard work of change.”
What do you think? Have you had similar or different experiences?
When she works with her clients as an executive coach, Dr Somjee suggests you choose a group of people to help you in your career. She advocates you find “…a group of people you can turn to and discuss various career or business issues, obtain advice, and gain new perspectives.”
Some will also be new to the organisation and have no allegiance to the old ways of doing business. Generally speaking, seniority doesn’t determine a team member’s attitude to change: you will find champions at all levels of your organisation.
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Here is a perceptive 
Beth Armknecht Miller has written an interesting