Understanding our 4 worlds

My last post prompted some questions - great to get a response BTW - about my focus on the "inner world". It prompts me to say something more about the four worlds model - a really helpful way of clarifying where you are focusing your attention at any time.

The model comes from Ken Wilber and, like much of his work, is beautifully simple. It is a classic 2 x 2 model which captures everything within 4 boxes by considering two divisions. One is the division between what is external and what is internal, the other is between what is collective and what is individual. The diagram shows the end result and gives examples of what might be in each box if you were using it to look at everything which relates to behavioural change.

For the individual: the external world contains those things that everyone can see - the skillls, knowledge, physical characteristics etc; the internal world contains what cannot be seen, but affects how the external world is seen - the assumptions, beliefs, biases etc.

For the collective: the external world is similarly about what everyone in the collective organisation can see - organisational structures, explicit rules / regulations and policies, targets and measures (KPIs) etc; the internal world is about shared beliefs that cannot be seen - orthodoxies and prejudices, culture and "unwritten rules", values and expectations etc.

 

My experience is that when seeking to make changes people often give too much focus to the external world that they can easily see and too little to the inner world - both personal and organisational - that is more difficult to access and more uncomfortable to address.

Don't straighten out conflict

As an ex-consultant I love 2x2 models, because the good ones have an instant visual impact - you literally see things differently once you see the model. One I have used for a long time is the Thomas Kilmann conflict model, but just a couple of weeks ago I found a way to give it even more visual impact. I realised that people often see conflict one dimensionally, ie it is a straight line with "I win" at one end and "You win" at the other. Inevitably they end up stuck at the mid-point, which is essentially "Nobody wins". To see conflict differently, imagine bending that line to make two axes. As soon as you do this, you open up the space for the collaborative "Win-Win". It's nothing new in concept, but the visual imagery of "bending the straight line" is a great trigger thought.

Open answers are as important as open questions

I had a somewhat frustrating coaching experience last week. I was working with a group, and each person was taking turns to be peer coached by the group. The group was working very hard at asking "good" (ie open) questions, but the frustration built in me because despite this there was very little new insight being generated, and no progress towards seeing (or doing) things differently. It set me thinking about how often we focus on open questions, and how it might be a more useful to focus instead on open answers.

Reflecting back on that session, there were two unhelpful things happening. One was that, however the question was asked, the coachee was giving their answer extremely quickly and with great certainty. The implication is that the answer is already "known", and if it is already known it is (by definition) not going to result in new awareness. The more certain the answer, the less "open" it is. As coaches we need to ensure that coachees do not feel they should know the answer. It is more helpful to approach every answer with curiosity, ie "I wonder what the answer is". Coaching is a joint exploration, not a Q&A session!

Of course, the other unhelpful thing happening was that the coach(es) asking the questions could recognise that the coachee was missing something, so worked harder and harder at asking questions which would produce the "right" new awareness. Although in form these were still open questions, they were now looking for a particular answer (ie they were really closed). Not surprisingly, these leading questions only re-inforced the pattern of interaction, as neither party was now exploring with curiosity - both were assuming that they knew the answer, so it was anything but open!

So how can you break this pattern? One way, as nearly always, is to use the power of "naming and taming", eg "I notice you are answering very quickly, how might your answer change if you gave yourself more time?". Or "how else might you answer, if you assumed your first thought was only one of several possibilities?"

Another way is to remember coaches are not lawyers! There is a saying that lawyers should never ask a witness a question to which they do not already know the answer. But that is because the last thing they want is to reveal a different way of looking at things! As a coach, the key is to remember that, whatever form your question takes, you shouldn't already know the answer. Framed like this, even a question which in form is closed (ie can be answered Yes or No) is in substance open - because the answer is open.

Finally, my preferred way of avoiding this completely is by setting up the whole session differently. It's why I so often ask people to do something (draw a picture, experience something physical etc) and then get them to talk about it. It helps both because it is using the right brain rather than left, but also because rather than facing each other as we do in a typical Q&A based session, we are forced to explore it side by side together. And that's coaching!

Generating acronyms to apply neuroscience

Yesterday I was at a local interest group meeting of the NeuroLeadership Institute, listening to a presentation by NLI founder David Rock.

He was talking about learning and memory, and the simple yet powerful image of memory as a big neural net of connections, so that the bigger we make the net, eg by activating neurons in many different parts of the brain at the same time, the easier it is to access it. As part of his talk he explained his acronym for effectiveness in establishing the net - particularly when imparting learning re knowledge, ideas, concepts etc. The acronym is AGES, which stands for Attention, Generation, Emotion, and Separation.

I found the most interesting one to reflect on was Generation, which is about doing something immediately to create personal meaning out of what you have just heard or read. All good teachers know this from experience, but the research shows it is even more important than we think. For example, if immediately after explaining an idea, you ask people to tell you (or their neighbour) when and how they could apply it to a real-life situation, it makes it much more likely that the idea will stick. If they don't, it probably won't. It's worth taking a minute now to think about when you do and don't do this, and how you might do it more effectively, ie in a way which creates the biggest net.

Using acronyms can itself be a mini-application of AGES - but only if they are your own. Making up an acronym is pure Generation. It requires quite a lot of effort (high Attention), there is a sense of triumph on finding a good one - especially if this is preceded by a period of frustration when you can't see it (negative switching to positive Emotion). And I often return to think about it / play with it several times over a period of a week (Separation). It's rare, therefore, that I forget my own acronyms!

But what do you do when someone gives you an acronym? What I always do is try to modify it to make it my own. Instead of AGES, I remember SAGE, which for me links to knowledge and wisdom. And instead of Rock's SCARF for his social threat model, I remember SCARE, which obviously links to threat - simply replacing his F for Fairness with E for Equity. And for his four conditions for allowing insight I remember QUIET PINT, standing for Quiet, slightly Positive, Internally focused, and Not Trying - again the link is obvious!

So I offer you SAGE, SCARE and QUIET PINT... but with some sadness recommend you don't use them. Try to make up your own!

Daniel Ofman's model links it all

A colleague introduced me to Daniel Ofman's work a year or so ago. Just recently, on a programme, I was inspired to re-draw his model in a way which I find even more useful. So here is my version:

Why I like this model so much is that, whatever brings someone into coaching, you can use this to link it back to their strengths (core preferences). It doesn't matter whether the start point is some "stop, start, continue" type feedback, a more positive desire to build on their strengths in a new role, or simply a need to deal with someone they find difficult (in their team or maybe their boss).

The link to core preferences easily takes us to the neuro-psychology of perception bias, and from there to the key coaching challenge which is to develop the self-awareness and "in the moment" self-management to make situationally appropriate intentional new choices.

Feeling and doing GREAT

This is a theme I have posted about before, and talk about a lot, ie the two dimensional nature of success, the connection between the dimensions, and the true direction of the cause and effect. In this post, prompted by a TED video I have just watched (link at the end), I want to focus on the practical steps you can take to feel great, and therefore increase your chance of doing great, at work.

First a quick recap. We know that we literally think better when we are feeling good. Strong negative emotions (fear, anxiety, anger etc) diminish our capacity to think. They can of course help us to act, eg keep us going when we are exhausted or drive us to tackle something dangerous which clearer thinking might lead us to avoid. However, my assertion would be that in the world of business, especially at the more senior levels, thinking is more important than doing.

Unfortunately we are highly tuned to negative emotions - much more than positive. Our neuro-physiology is designed (by evolution) to be particularly sensitive to potential threats. And in our modern world we are constantly triggered by the negative inputs that are fed to us at work and in our wider personal life. So it's hard to feel good!

However, some people can stay less triggered than others, and here's the good news, we can all train our brains to be less triggered. Here is the magic (actually scientific) formula for training your brain. Create a GREAT daily routine:

G = Gratitude: Think of three good things that happened today, ie "count your blessings"
R = Re-framing: Deliberately choose to see positive possibilities from upsetting events
E = Exercise: Use it to stimulate the brain to produce the chemicals which make us feel good   
A = Altruism: Do something out of compassion, eg buy a Big Issue tonight
T = Time Out (or In): Practice a mindfulness-based meditation that helps you regulate emotion 

It's pretty simple. As you will probably realise, all these practices simply involve consciously choosing what to pay attention to. Practicing this literally changes the way our brain sees the world. It's a better place than we fear it is!

PS Here's the video - only 12 minutes: http://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work.html

Is it ok to be happy just as you are?

We all know the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a lightbulb - only one, but the lightbulb really has to want to change. However, in coaching, it's easy sometimes to lose sight of this fundamental truth.

Let me take as an example a client I have been working with for a few sessions now. Essentially this is someone who has great potential and has been offered coaching to help them move from a seniorish role as a manager into a genuine senior leadership position. To do this would require various shifts, eg less focus on short term problem solving and more longer term envisioning of the future direction, less use of command / control and more influence / inspiration, less managing of the team and more managing of the politics, less hiding behind the functional role and more personal exposure.

I am confident that this person could make these changes but I also realise that the idea of change is very uncomfortable for them. They have a very strong sense of themselves - "I do this, I don't do that". And they don't want to disturb this certainty about themselves, because at their core is a fear of losing their competence and a preference for the known / certain as opposed to the unknown / uncertain. And the crucial point is that they say they are happy both with themselves and with their role level - "It's ok for me."

So what do I do? I think what I have to avoid is getting caught up in my own stuff, which is why I go to supervision - to help sort it out. I have some similarities in personality with my client, and my own leadership development journey took me through the transition my client is facing. And although it was a little uncomfortable, it has had a wonderful payback not only in my career but also in my wider personal life. So it's easy to assume it would be great for my client.

However, one aspect of my personality that might be different to my client is that I find it very hard to be content with things staying the same. I see opportunity rather than threat in change - the threat is in the future being the same as the past. It's why I am still on my lifelong journey of attempted personal development, and probably why I am in this business! But that is me!

For my client, therefore, rather than trying to push them to change, I am simply ensuring they fully understand the consequences of not changing (to quote Marshall Goldsmith's book title: "What got you here won't get you there"), and helping them to understand better the psychology of change, by offering some new / different perspectives on personality and the drivers of habitual behaviour.

What I don't want to do is subtly project my own desire for change onto them, making them less happy with themselves - if they are ok as they are that has to be ok by me too. In fact, sometimes I wish I could be that happy with myself!

Creating SPACE

I'm facilitating a small group on a programme this week and it's reminded me of a helpful acronym I use (and share with the group) about creating SPACE. We often talk about the importance of creating space for people to do their development work, but how do you do it? Clearly it's not just a mechanical process, but I offer you these practical points as a useful framework to kick things off:

Story: Tell the story of a specific event as it happened. And go slowly - don't skip over or rush the uncomfortable bits!
Personal: Talk about your personal experience of the situation, rather than talking conceptually or objectively about it.
Attention: As a listener, pay attention to the whole person, not just their words. And listen with your whole body.
Curiosity: Wonder about what's going on, with compassion for their difficulty, rather than judging whether they are right or wrong.
Empathy: See if you can connect with their experience from the inside. What would your experience be if you were them?

Transitional space is all about the shared experience of two separate but connected minds.

Dialogue helps to produce clarity

This is an ancient truth, and probably an article of faith for a coach, but I am triggered into writing this post by having to re-develop my website www.corleoneconsulting.com.

The whole process made me realise how much I use the web-site as a way to dialogue with myself about what I do and why. And how much this has helped me develop me over the years. I have always added and edited bits and pieces as my work has given me new insights or new ways of explaining things to people. But there is always an element of being constrained by the structure that is already there and the ideas you started with. Having to start again from scratch allowed me to look at everything on my site afresh and structure the new site in line with my current thinking and practices. It was reassuring to find how much coherence and clarity I now have! I'm not saying I have a perfect model, simply one that works for me and is well integrated - one of my key goals. And it really focuses me on whether I am consistently doing what I say I do.

So if you have a web-site yourself, don't just let it be a glorified business card. Look at it and change it regularly. Challenge yourself to ensure it really reflects your thinking and your practice really reflects what it says. You might find it a dialogue that works for you as well.

Meta skills developed by coaching

Two conversations in the last week have made me think about the meta skills developed by coaching - both when you are doing the coaching and when you are being coached. Meta skills is a very jargony word, so let me explain what I mean more simply.

In one conversation, we were talking about the fact that although in our coaching we were working on various explicit areas, the key development the coachee was gaining from the process was the meta skill of beng able to observe, notice and reflect on themselves and their behaviour in various situations and interactions. Through the coaching they were learning to be their own coach.

In the other conversation, we were talking about leaders on a development programme being asked to take on a formal coaching project, ie to coach someone more junior within the business. At the explicit level this is about developing coaching skills - essential in a leader. At the meta level, the most important skill it is developing - necessary in order to be a good coach and to be a good leader - is to be able to be fully present and connect with another person. This internal development has nothing to do with the external process of coaching.

It just goes to prove that everyone should coach... and be coached!

A strategic conversation is not a conversation about strategy!

This was prompted by some work I did on a programme for global relationship partners in a professional services firm who were being encouraged to have more strategic conversations with senior management contacts at their clients. Hearing the usual responses of "But I'm not an expert in strategy" reminded me how often people confuse a strategic conversation with a conversation about strategy!

I would define a strategic conversation as any conversation which makes a significant impact on the other's long term thinking and hence future actions. Since thinking and decisons are driven by emotions, you could also say a strategic conversation is one which has a significant impact on how the other person feels. Some examples would be:
(a) A coaching conversation = using a balance of support and challenge to help someone change habitual patterns of thinking and hence open up new strategic possibilities, which neither you or they anticipated.
(b) A heart to heart conversation = personally connecting by sharing what you truly think and feel rather than hiding behind your role and task agenda, or by showing empathy. The strategic impact is in deepening the relationship and building trust.
(c) A difficult conversation = daring to raise an issue that everyone else is avoiding, eg a conversation about a problem person in their management team that they aren't dealing with, or even the bit of the strategy that you just don't get ("the emperor has no clothes").

Sometimes, these all go together! Certainly, what's common to all three is that they are:
"Real" - you reveal who you really are, and invite the other to do the same
"Risky" - you expose yourself, a sign of trust and an invitation for them to trust you
"Relational" - you presume a desire for a deeper relationship, an invitation to build it

And how do you prepare for these strategic conversations? Not by learning about strategy but by:
(1) Awareness of who you are (at your best) and what gets in your way when you avoid the strategic conversation which might show it.
(2) Focus of attention on the quality of the interaction (or connection) rather than the content.

"Why?" is not a very helpful question

The importance of getting away from the question "why" came up several times last week in slightly different circumstances each time.

A couple of clients were working on improving delegation. In both cases I had offered my version of the situational leadership model (see "useful 2x2 models") and we were exploring how they could use coaching more effectively to develop both competence and confidence in those they were delegating to, and so avoid bouncing straight back from delegation to detailed direction or doing it themselves.

What became apparent was that the question they often had in mind when coaching was "why?", as in (at least as a sub-text) "why didn't you do what I asked you to do?" Not helpful! The implied criticism triggers a threat response which is not good for learning or confidence, can create defensive reactions, and usually leads straight back to a repeat of directive instructions. It's like coaching someone to play tennis by asking them "why didn't you hit it over the net?" The much more useful question is "how?", as in "tell me how you approached x". In the tennis analogy, this is equivalent to saying "let me see you hit the ball again". Once someone is telling (or showing) you what they are doing, it is easy to notice, and help them to notice, things that are unhelpful that they might do differently next time. At one level, this is the essence of coaching - particularly when it is focused on improving performance in a task. It might seem as if it contradicts the famous saying "Leaders are the masters of what not how". However, really it supports it. You want your reports to be the masters of how, so you want them to tell you about the how - not you to tell them.

Another client was focusing on managing unhelpful emotions. For them the unhelpful "why" they had too much in mind was "why do I feel these emotions?". Again, more helpful is focusing on "how", as in "how do I manage these emotions". It's a little bit more complex in this scenario, as labelling is part of how you might manage them, and to label requires some understanding of "why". Also, we are clearly working at a deeper psychological level. However, what is clear is that "why" is rarely the most helpful question you can ask.

3 lenses on preparing for meetings

After taking the whole month off for a variety of holidays (and variety is the word - the month started with a week of Tai Chi training and ended with a week in Ibiza) I am back and preparing for a number of coaching sessions later this week. So it struck me it would be good to write something about my learning around preparation - particularly for coaching, but equally applicable to any business meeting.

My approach mirrors the way I help clients to look at what is really going on by using three lenses. FIrst I pay attention to myself - how am I feeling, both physically and emotionally, what am I thinking about, what will I need to do to be able to be fully present (ie at my best)? Second I focus on the other person and wonder about what is going on for them. What do I know about who they are, their character style, preferences etc? I also notice how I am feeling about meeting up with them again. Finally, I think about the (coaching) context and the assumed roles we have taken in our previous (coaching) meetings. How helpful are they to achieving our mutual goals?

What I don't spend a lot of time on nowadays is thinking about my coachee's challenge. I maybe over-emphasise this point because I know that with my natural preference for problem solving and task achievement, I could easily become pre-occupied with it. And the purpose of coaching is not for me to work out my solution to the challenge, it's to help them work out theirs. Even in my consulting career, I learnt early on that content is only a small part of preparation. Some wise words from one of my early managers come back to me: "If you want to spend x% of the time on the client's agenda, only prepare (100-x)% of the content". I guess in coaching I now want to be virtually 100% on my client's agenda so I try to plan virtually 0% of the content.

A simple example from a while back will maybe bring this to life. Preparing for my third session with a client, I noticed I was working much too hard thinking about their challenge and how they could make progress on it. I realised this was because I was feeling anxious about whether I was really helping - not my best state for coaching. I then also remembered that my client was very introverted (vs my extraversion), so there might be a lot going on for them below the surface and my "pushing" to make "better" progress wasn't going to help it emerge. I could also see its potential for creating the wrong dynamic between us - me taking too much responsibility in my role and them taking too little. As a result of this preparation, I relaxed and (with a quieter mind) became more receptive, I created space to find out what was going on for them (by sharing my anxiety and listening to their perspective), and we actually had a great session exploring some areas they had been reflecting deeply upon following our previous session.

So even in preparation, the power to change comes from what you become aware of because of what you pay attention to.

Are you a "push" or "pull" leader?

I was recently supporting the observer team on a programme where groups of consultants worked for a whole day on a business simulation exercise. There were many learning points, but one that set me thinking was about the assumption, which virtually all the participants made, about how a leader should lead their team. This assumption was that leaders should try to lead by rational persuasion.

This is undobtedly a useful approach, but it has limitations. So I shared with them, and will now share here, a simple 2 x 2 model of influence styles, which in this context can also be called leadership styles. One dimension distinguishes between "push" and "pull". The other distinguishes between "rational / impersonal" and "emotional / personal". So we get four styles (or families of styles):

Rational push: These are the "Persuading" styles - eg "You should do x because ..."
Emotional push: These are the "Requesting" styles - eg "I want you to ..."
Emotional pull: This are the "Attracting" styles - eg "Imagine how you'll feel when you've done x!"
Rational pull: This are the "Exploring" styles - eg "How would you deal with x?"

Too often we get stuck in the first, and far too seldom do we use the others - particularly rarely the last two. And yet here are two good reasons for trying them. (And yes, I realise I'm using a rational push approach right now!) Firstly, push approaches inherently tend to produce a defensive push back. And the harder you push the harder the push back. So these approaches often result in stalemate. The pull approaches are inherently less likely to produce resistance. Secondly, the emotional approaches produce connection via the right brain and limbic, whereas the rational approaches primarily involve the (non-connecting) left brain. That's why a leader who can clearly communicate an attractive vision will create the most strongly connected followers.

So try flexing your influence / leadership style. You might be amazed how much less effort it takes to pull rather than push!

The therapeutic coach

The title of this post came out of a group supervision session today - don't worry, I'm not breaking confidentiality as it was my issue that I brought to the group and this title sums up what came out of it for me.

I was looking at whether working with a particular new client was really coaching or was straying over the boundary into the area of therapy. And where is that boundary anyway, given that the process of coaching is for me undoubtedly a therapeutic process - using the relationship between coach and coachee to bring about change. What brought new clarity to a distinction I had always worked with (ie that the difference is not in the process but in the objective) was a physical mapping process using objects to represent me, the coachee and the issue we were working with.

In a coaching context, the coachee and I are both facing towards the issue in a sort of triangular arrangement. The arrangement if I were to stray into therapy would be that I would simply be facing the coachee and they would be the primary issue we were working on. If the difference in these images doesn't speak clearly enough to you, I also articulated how the goal could be expressed differently in each case. In coaching the question is "How can I help you (ie someone with your personality and history, strengths and weaknesses etc) deal better with this issue, eg a work situation or relationship?" It is not "How can I help you change yourself?"

Of course, the self-developing nature of people (even the way our brains re-wire themselves) means that in finding new ways to deal better with something you will (over time) be changing yourself - that's how therapy works. But that is a secondary outcome, not the primary goal. So I am not a therapist. But I am a therapeutic coach.

10 minute coaching - what's that about?

Last week I was on a stand at the HRD 2011 conference at Olympia, working with some colleagues under the banner of "10 minute coaching". Our plan was to offer a true experience of deeper level coaching to HR professionals who, although they may be responsible for procuring coaching for business managers, or for encouraging a coaching culture within the business, have had little or no experience of receiving coaching, hence sometimes don't really get what it's about. It was such a good experience I have to write about it!

Firstly, let me explain about the 10-minute tag. Many people came to see us assuming we had some special "fast" methodology. But actually we had the opposite. What we were seeking to demonstrate was that the true power of coaching is not in any methodology, it is in the ability of the coach to give full attention to their client and to be fully present with them. If you can achieve this as a coach, even for 10 minutes, something useful will happen for your client.

And this proved to be the case. We set up two leather armchairs behind a silk room divider and created a quiet space. Appointments were at 15 minute intervals to allow a few minutes for changeover and we alternated coaching sessions, one of us recovering while the other coached behind the screen. It was amazing (even to us if I am honest), and also uplifting, to see what people got out of these sessions. So thank you to all who visited us, and to my colleagues. I'm now wondering how we take this "guerilla coaching" one step further. Maybe we take our two chairs and the screen to Liverpool Street, Waterloo, or Canary Wharf? Watch this space!

New (neural) paths through the wood

Talking to a colleague I used an analogy to describe the process and impact of our coaching which they really liked and suggested I share more widely. I don't think it is original, but I do think it is quite useful / helpful.

We were talking about patterns of behaviour being determined by the neural pathways in the brain, and I suggested that these neural pathways could be represented by paths through a wood. Our repeated pattens of behaviour are like the heavy traffic of repeated journeys which create a broad clear path that is easily followed. In fact the path would appear to us to be the only route through the wood. The coaching process is like helping somebody strike out directly through the undergrowth to find a new route through the forest. Lots flows from this analogy, both about the process of coaching and it's long term impact.

The coach may not know any more than the coachee the exact path we will take, or even where it will end up, but their job is to stay close and give confidence that it is ok to keep going. As an experienced guide they may play a big role in clearing some of the tangling undergrowth, and they may suggest changing direction or retracing our steps if it looks like we're in danger of getting lost.

And once the new path has been taken, for a while at least, it is clearly there to see as an option. The more times you take that option, the clearer and more permanent that new path becomes. But if you don't ever choose that path it soon grows over and disappears again. And this is exactly what happens literally with the neural pathways created by new ways of thinking.

"It's not them, it's you"

I have a great example which illustrates this both in my client's situation at work and in my interaction with them (a "parallel process"). I think I can tell the story without giving away anything confidential by making the real point of the story about me not them.

My client was on a programme rather than having chosen to do one to one work with me (the significance of which will become clear very shortly). Listening to their story it was clear that they were deeply frustrated by their situation - incredibly angry but holding their anger in rather than being able to vent it, use it, or otherwise dissipate it, so that it was building and building (to quite a dangerous level). They were in a double bind of contradictory forces. The grip of their character style (by which I mean their deeply held but unconscious beliefs and attitudes - "Guardian" for those who know the Centaur model) meant they were clear that others' behaviour was "not ok", but they were equally clear that telling them directly was also "not ok". They were clear that others needed to change, but equally clear that they themselves didn't need to change - after all, they had done nothing "wrong"!

This was a really stuck situation. And my heart went out to them - I desperately wanted to help them see what seemed obvious to me, ie that what was keeping it stuck was not the others, but them. So I tried really hard using all sorts of approaches in the very limited time we had. And I failed completely - in fact I think I probably just made them angrier and more frustrated!

I was myself very frustrated about this for a while until, in a "supervisory" discussion, I saw the parallel to their situation in the dynamic between us. What was preventing me helping them wasn't them, it was me. Because just as they were gripped by their core character style in their work situation, I was gripped by my core character style ("Warrior" in the Centaur model) in this programme situation, causing me to push too much to try to achieve something specific to help them (eg a "solution" to their problem).

If we had been in a one to one coaching relationship, I hope I would have been working from a deeper place. We might have got more quickly to the discussion we did eventually have at the end of the programme (which I believe actually was quite helpful in highlighting the parallel to their work situation) about why behaving in line with my core character style was particularly unhelpful to them, and how the best way for me to allow them to help change their behaviour would be to focus on changing mine.

Re-drawing the situational leadership model

More and more these days I try to use experiential or "Right Brain" approaches in my coaching, in order to directly work at the limbic rather than neo-cortical level. But there are some 2x2 models I do use which actually fit this approach, because it is the visual message (rather than the analysis) in the model which is important and the visual speaks to the limbic.

So I was really pleased the other day to hit upon a way of re-drawing one of the very well-known 2x2 models (which I haven't used much up to now) so that it makes this visual impact. The model I'm talking about is the classic "Situational Leadership" model. To refresh your memory, it has axes for "Directive behaviour" (low to high) and "Supportive behaviour" (low to high) and shows the leadership style moving over time along a path from right to left through quadrants for Directing, Coaching, Supporting, and Delegating along a sort of humpbacked hill. Not much visual meaning for me in that!

So, for a client where I thought this was a very relevant model, I re-drew it with the emphasis on the person you are leading. I replaced "Directive behaviour" with "Competence" (the reason you do or don't need directive behaviour) and "Supportive behaviour" with "Confidence" (the reason you do or don't need supportive behaviour). The result is below.

You get the same quadrants and the same path, but re-positioned. This time it is a U-shaped curve, left to right, with an obvious visual link to the change curve. It's easy to see the obvious potential for backsliding if you simply re-explain rather than coach when things go wrong. And, best of all, if you draw a wavy water line, you illustrate perfectly the results of a sink or swim approach to delegation!

Which comes first - a relationship or coaching?

I'm prompted to write this by a discussion with a client who is responsible for leading the relationship with a key global account for one of the big consultancies. We had been talking about how he might develop new relationships at the most senior level, and my client had framed the strategic conversations he would like to have as being a bit like coaching conversations.

His goal, using a coaching mindset, is to help the client see things from a different perspective and so reach new insights of their own, rather than simply to tell them what he thought. I really liked this framing - it seems to me a great way for him to have a strategic conversation without the usual baggage of anxiety about demonstrating the quality of his own strategic ideas or about provoking a defensive reaction through implied criticism of the other's current strategy.

My client talked about another client where this works really well with the CEO... "but, of course, I know them quite well now. I can't do that with X until I have had some more meetings to build relationship and establish credibility." Which set me thinking: which comes first, the relationship or the coaching? And I concluded that ideally they develop in parallel. Pure relationship building may not, in itself, provide enough value to the other to make further investment in development of the relationship seem worthwhile. Conversely, the value from a good coaching conversation is a great way to build the relationship. The key is to respect, and pay attention to, the natural balance.

You might question whether a new contact would see it as appropriate for you to position yourself like this. But perhaps whether they will see it as appropriate depends on whether you do. You can easily check it out. And it is hard to think of a better alternative!