Back to posting after a long August break and a frantically busy first two weeks of September.
On Friday, I had a great example of how a powerful conversation can be triggered by just a tiny prompt - if it is the right sort of prompt. I was coaching a small group in a breakout from a more structured learning programme for global account managers in a large consultancy. As usual as part of group forming, I asked them to share the answers to a few key questions, which I deliberately make a right brain rather than left brain exercise, by asking them to use pictures, stories, metaphors etc rather than simply stating facts.
One specific thing I asked them to do is plot themselves on a graph which has "feeling good" and "doing well" as its two axes. "Doing well" represents the felt sense of success - how well am I doing. "Feeling good" represents the sense of how much I enjoy what I'm doing - not just my sense of satisfaction in success, but how I actually feel. This echoes the end of coaching assessment model I have adopted (see earlier posts), but that's not the main reason I focus on these two dimensions up front.
The exercise typically has two powerful impacts. Sometimes the visual picture of where they are on the "feel good" scale is startling - bringing new consciousness of something they'd usually rather not think about. Sometimes it is simply helpful in opening the conversation about the relevance of emotions in business. On Friday it was the latter which dominated, and because of the level of experience of the participants it quickly led into a much deeper discussion about the impact of negative emotions on performance (see the work of David Rock) and also about new ways to frame conversations with their teams about performance.
Obviously, I can't say much about the specific content without breaching confidentiality, but the flow of connected ideas led from there to some helpful new insights (for me as well as for the group!) about the role of the global account manager in dealing with the emotions of both their teams AND their clients. Which is exactly the outcome we were all hoping for. Brilliant!
