How to Develop Emerging Leaders through Coaching (#3 of 10): Priorities and Action Plan

Having “onboarded” the emerging leader(s) into their coaching program, and having guided them through a series of “assessments”, the next step – and incidentally, the 3^rd of my series of 10 “leadership coaching best practices” blog/pulse posts – consists of summarizing all of the information and insight gathered so far, and establishing the goal – and the associated timeline and outcomes – for the program. That’s what we typically refer to as “Development Priorities and Action Plan”.

What are “Development Priorities and Action Plan” anyway?

In essence, it’s quite simple. It consists in establishing the “what” and the “how” of your client’s program. Whereas the “what” refers to the leadership competencies that your participant has prioritized and decided to improve (with your help and support), the “how” delves into the specific activities, timeline and outcomes related to this improvement plan.

Why do “Priorities and Plan” matter? 

The fact that “Priorities and Plan” matter isn’t puzzling… What is uber-troubling is the fact that they “matter soooo much”, yet most leaders - and most leadership development programs - go about their business without establishing such “priorities and plan”. Efficient team meetings have agenda, minutes and action items… Performing organizations have annual priorities, quarterly plans and monthly dashboards… Successful projects have charters, Gantt charts and task lists… Productive employees have annual goals, quarterly checkpoints, monthly reviews and weekly/daily ToDo’s… (and I could go on with the analogies, trust me!). So?

Well, if a Leadership Coaching Program has any chance of succeeding, it should begin with a set of priorities – the focus of the program; and it should have some sort of a plan – a set of preferred approaches, a list of activities, a certain timeline with key milestones, and some concrete outcomes that can be used to assess whether or not the program was successful… Otherwise, without any Priorities and Plan, the participant may end up “wandering aimlessly through the program”, one coaching session at a time, with punctual “feel good” reactions, but most likely with a general sense of “—blah—”. A 4-8 month Leadership Coaching Program is an important investment – of time, effort and money – for all involved stakeholders (the participant, his/her coach, the manager, HR, the organization). Embarking on this journey without a clear plan and set of priorities is simply… not cool!

What works well, what doesn't? 

When helping your participant establish his/her Development Priorities and further declining them into an Action Plan, a number of important aspects need to be considered. Based on our experience coaching several emerging leaders, we found the following seven (7) practices – Do’s and Don’t’s so to speak – to be practical when selecting priorities and crafting a plan:

1.     Summarize the onboarding and the assessments. At this point, although the program might feel like it hasn’t begun “the real coaching” per se, a lot of work has been done – and a lot of information has been gathered. So it’s a good idea to view this phase as an opportunity for the Emerging Leader to take a step back, review what’s in front of him/her in terms information, feedback and self-awareness, and synthetize the essence on this newly-gained insight into his/her development plan.  What we’ve found useful is to turn this document into a real roadmap that we use for the rest of the program. This way, we no longer have to consult the onboarding questionnaire, the psychometric assessment results or the 360 feedback because the “jist” of it all is summarized into the participant’s action plan.

2.     For competencies, consider both proficiency and importance. Since the underlying theme of the program is to improve the skillset of the emerging leader, it’s only natural that the “selection of leadership competencies” to be worked on plays a central part in the “Priorities and Action Planning” step. However, we found that most participants, as they review their 360 feedback data, have a tendency to zoom in and prioritize their “weaker skills” in hope of turning them into strengths. This is intuitive… but wrong. A better approach is to ask the participant to identify which of the dozen or so critical leadership skills are considered “very important” in their current role (or upcoming role – in case of a looming promotion). One way we often do this is simply by asking them the following: “Imagine you’re leaving your role and are asked by your boss to interview your replacement… during the interview, which competencies are you going to make sure that the candidate possesses in order to be successful in this role?”. By removing (so to speak) the participants from this introspective question, it becomes easier for them to truly identify the skills that matter for their role. Once this is done, then it becomes much easier to line up these “required skills” with the current proficiency profile of the participant. And what happens often is that, some of the “weaker” competencies that the participant wanted to improve suddenly get set aside because they don’t matter so much for the current role. In other words, it is important to identify the leadership competencies that are BOTH critical for the role and that require strengthening.

3.     Select a few but repeat often. Here, the goal is to avoid the temptation of “overloading” the development plan with too many leadership priorities. Emerging Leaders may not appreciate this just yet, but these critical skills have an important “behavioral component” (as opposed to more cognitive technical skills that younger workers tend to favor). And developing, i.e.: acquiring, strengthening and/or changing a behavior takes time… not hours or days, but weeks or months. Typically, a good Action Plan should only prioritize 1 to 3 (two is my favorite) leadership competencies, and leave enough time to implement several repeating Development Activities (e.g.: reflections, discussions, observations, experimentations, etc.). Only then can the participants truly internalize the targeted behaviors.

4.     Contextualize and project forward. The essence here is to help the participant answer the following questions: “What does this really mean for you in your current role” and “Can you think of other way(s) to reach this development goal”. What we’re trying to accomplish here is to not tackle a particular leadership skill in absolute terms (say: Influencing others, or Motivating your employees…) but rather to “contextualize” it in the current reality of the participant. For example, there are several ways one can “influence others” or “motivate employees”. But the goal here is to work mainly on the “influencing or motivating ways” that are relevant for your participant’s context (i.e.: given who he/she is, and the context and people he/she has to influence or motivate). We also found it important to go back and leverage the participant’s “signature strengths” and “preferred learning style” when crafting development activities. For example, take two emerging leaders who both need to improve their “influencing and mobilizing skills”. If one of them is more “creative, funny, extroverted and a natural experimenter” and the other more “analytic, introverted, reflective and prudent”, then the “learning ways” in which they will both try to improve the same skills should be quite different.

5.     Focus on observable behaviors. This step is very much in line with the previous best practice (to contextualize). The goal is to take a leadership competency and, before jumping ahead to plan development activities, to further analyze the selected skills into a few “observable behaviors” that are critical for the context in which the leader operates. These “observable behaviors” will also act as “success measures” – program outcomes so to speak – that you will refer back to at the end of the program. If the participant is successful, we (him/her and his/her manager and peers) should be able to observe the behaviors per se. Another important – and often overlooked – aspect that concerns behaviors is this: Sometimes the focus is on acquiring a new behavior that allows the participant to improve a particular leadership skill… But sometimes, we also deal with behaviors that inhibit change or are plainly destructive, and that the participant needs to let go of… And some other times, there are behaviors that the emerging leaders already possess, but simply need to be re-emphasized or be done more frequently… So, the key when breaking a skill down into a few observable behaviors is to identify those that need to be acquired, strengthened, AND/OR let go…

6.     Seek feedback - before, during and after. This advice sounds obvious, but it is often overlooked, sadly. The feedback sought by the Emerging Leader while crafting his/her development plan is capital – and serves many purposes. For starter, it helps validate the information received during the assessment phase, thus raising the self-awareness of the coachee. It also tells the participant’s peers about the seriousness of his/her development endeavor – this way, they might be more forthcoming with constructive observations of the leader’s behaviors in the workplace. Finally, it commits the participant to truly change – because now, people expect it (and will likely support and welcome the change!). This is also a great time to involve the participant’s manager. Our approach has been to “strongly” recommend a frank discussion between the emerging leader and his/her boss during which the participant shares his/her development plan (which includes a summary of the onboarding and assessment insight) and seeks his/her buy-in and support. We always volunteer to participate to this call, but don’t impose it. But we do stress the importance of alignment between the participant’s priorities and what the manager expects. This just makes sense, doesn’t it?

7.     Be pragmatic, but serious. At last, a plan of actions should be down-to-earth and flexible, but achievable and serious. What we mean here is to ensure that the sought-after outcomes, the proposed actions, and the high-level timeline are realistic and make sense. To do so, we let the participant draft the plan first, but we review it with them and challenge some of the assumptions that went into it. This way, when the “final plan” is completed, we stand a better chance of succeeding because of the strengthened commitment of the participant and the realism of the proposed plan. And the coach’s role becomes one of “support and motivation” to ensure that the participant stays the course and doesn’t deviate too much from the proposed plan. Of course, if hiccups happen (and they always do), we readjust accordingly. This is a dynamic process, so changes are to be expected. But flexibility should not be synonym with excuses and un-reasonable delays.

In conclusion, this crucial step is a reminder of the following quote from Greg Reid: “A dream written down with a date becomes a goal. A goal broken down into steps becomes a plan. A plan backed by actions makes your dreams come true.”

What do you think? 

If you have ideas to share or feedback to provide, please comment this post, contact me through our Blog or our website (www.crinq.com), or email directly me at: patrick@crinq.com.

Merci, in advance…

Patrick

How to Develop Emerging Leaders through Coaching (#2/10): Using Assessments

Having “onboarded” the emerging leader(s) into their coaching program, the next step – and incidentally, the 2^nd of my series of 10 “leadership coaching best practices” blog/pulse posts – consists of using assessment(s).  Don’t frown just yet… This post won’t be a lengthy and convoluted treatise on the scientific bases of assessments, nor will it cover the importance of their statistical validity and reliability (you can use Wikipedia for this ;) Instead, were considering assessments as pragmatic tools helping us shed light on the classic leadership coaching questions: Where are we starting from? Where are we headed? What should we work on? What should we leverage? And how should we go about all of this?

What are “Assessments” anyway?

By “assessments”, we basically mean the various evaluation “tools and methods” that can be used by the coach and his/her coachee to better understand – with some degree of quantitative measure – the various dimensions that have been deemed important for the leadership coaching program. Whereas some of these tools are “more quantitative” in nature (they yield normalized “scores” and may benchmark these against larger population statistics), others have a more “blended” approach (they combine both quantitative metrics and qualitative data; they may include “free-form respondent feedback”, they might relate assessed dimensions with one another without attributing them with absolute score, etc.). Another important aspects regards the person “responding” to the assessments. Some are self-evaluation (typically done by the participant him/herself) whereas others will combine feedback from multiple respondents (these are often call “multi-rater” or “360” feedback tools).

Why do Assessments matter?

Quite simply, we found that using these tools within Leadership Development Programs was beneficial for the following reasons:

• They help us (the coaches) to get to know our clients better (or better faster);
• They help the clients (the Emerging Leaders) to get to know themselves better;
• Assessments can also help uncover “blindspots” – strengths or weaknesses that the participant has unknowingly;
• They’re practical in establish a common “vocabulary and framework” used by the coach and the participant to discuss development matters. This is particularly useful to clarify, to differentiate, to analyze and to communicate leadership dimensions and development priorities; and
• Assessments help put everything in perspective (for the client, the coach, and the other stakeholders – HR, the manager).

In a nutshell, when the client – either on his/her own or through the guidance of his/her manager – signs-up to a coaching program with the crucial “I need to get better” question, then the use of assessments help both the coachee and his/her coach clarify the question with the “what exactly, why and how”.

 

What works well, what doesn't?

When using assessments within a Leadership Development Program, a number of important aspects need to be cnsidered. Based on our experience coaching several emerging leaders, we found the following six (6) practices – Do’s and Don’t’s so to speak – to be practical when using assessments:

1.     Select the right assessment(s): Given the fact that there are soooo many different assessment tools out there, it’s crucial to spend more time upstream of the program in order to select the right assessment for the task at hand (i.e.: the development of emerging leaders). Start by identifying your program goals (develop leadership skills, enhance conflict resolution, understand thyself better, boost individual/team creativity, plan your career, improve work-life balance, etc…). Then, shop around! Spend a fair amount of time reviewing existing assessments (and there’s a lot!) in the context of your program goals. In doing so, pay attention to the following: assessment – and provider reputation; scientific background; statistical validity and reliability; completeness of assessment results and report; administration tool; costs (to get certified with the assessment tool, to buy individual assessments, as well as the effort to administer these assessments); ease of use (to log-on, to complete the evaluation, to interpret the report). And as final “litmus test” take the assessment yourself, and self-debrief. Your own feedback should prove quite decisive in selecting the final set of assessment(s).

2.     Select the right number of assessment(s): When it comes to assessments, “one size fits all” doesn't exist (beware if someone is trying to sell you just that!). Once you’ve identified your program focus, and have a good idea of the kind of goals your participants will be shooting for, it is time to identify the important “dimensions” that need to be uncovered, understood and leveraged during the program. If you’re lucky, a single assessment may be sufficient to help you – and your coachee – evaluate these important characteristics. But it’s not uncommon to require more than one tool to broaden the assessment spectrum and identify all of the key metrics that you need. For example, in our Leadership Coaching Programs for Emerging Leaders, we typically use three assessment tools to cover all the bases: two psychometric self-assessments to highlight our clients’ “Character Strengths” (personality characteristics to be leveraged) and their “Preferred Learning Style” (to help us craft meaningful development experiences), along with a Multi-Rater (aka 360) Leadership Feedback Tool (to evaluate their proficiency with the targeted “Leadership Competencies”).

3.     Selectively use the assessments’ information: Having decided the number and kind of assessments is essential… but your work isn’t complete just yet. Most commercial tools will provide you with comprehensive assessment reports that can typically be 20 to 30 pages long. If you’ve selected to use three tools (as we have), you’ll end up with close to 100 pages of assessment-related data! Although this information is usually well presented and quite interesting, it’s simply overkill. Your task is now to “identify and extract” the important subset of data that is needed by your program, and to leave the rest aside. For example, in the “Learning Style Inventory” assessment that we use, there’s information that relates your preferred learning style with different work/life situations such as working in teams, resolving conflict, communicating or even choosing a career. This “extra knowledge” is indeed fascinating… but of little use for the task at hand. And if we try to digest too much data, we may run the risk of “drowning the fish” so to speak. We recommend that you keep the assessment report(s) intact, but that you clearly indicate to your participants which information “subset” will be used during the program, and clarify that everything else in the report should be deemed as “interesting information to consult on their own time, but not essential for the coaching program”. The curious overachievers will read it, and the pragmatic minimalists will ignore it.

4.     Dedramatize and contextualize: This is perhaps the most crucial step in using assessments with emerging leaders. Since most of them will be confronted with this kind of personal data and 360 feedback for the first time, you need to thread carefully and prepare your participants before you share this information. What works well is to “dedramatize and contextualize” the process: let them know that, although “scientifically-based”, these assessments provide an “approximation of reality” and not an absolute and unchangeable truth. Often, perception will bias the feedback received by others. Sometimes, the participant will self-evaluate too negatively… or too positively. Tell them that the data they’re about to receive needs to be considered within the context in which it was gathered. For example, if you’ve just finished a challenging project, your teammates may have a different opinion of you than they would otherwise when you’re at your best… Emphasize that these reports provide “trends and guidelines” that will help us – the coach and the coachee –better understand and plan.

5.     Debrief the Results in 2-steps: This part is a little more controversial in that, contrary to most practitioners who show the assessment results to their coachee as they debrief them, we advocate sharing the results to the coachee “prior” to the debriefing session per se. The reason behind this “2-step” approach is to minimize the time required for the assessment debrief, thus helping maximize the value of the program by keeping more coaching time for the “development” phase. How we go about this is as follow: we send the assessment results electronically (by posting a PDF version of the report onto the Private Online Collaboration platform). However, as we share the report with the participants, we also provide them with specific instructions and guidelines as to how to read and interpret the results. For example, we suggest that they first read through the assessment without taking any notes. This “first quick read” allows them to get a general feel for the results. Then, we recommend that they read it again, but this time while highlighting the sections of the report that they either find surprising, that they feel are important, or that they don’t quite understand. Finally, we schedule a coaching session quickly thereafter (typically 1-2 days after having shared the results) and debrief the report with our coachee by paying special attention to their questions and to the highlighted sections.

6.     When possible, use online tools: At last, we think that assessments conducted online are simpler to administer and allow for greater flexibility from a survey respondents point of view. These online tools also lend themselves well to “pre-scripted guidelines” that can easily be communicated electronically to the program participants. Again, the principle of “minimizing costs while adding value” dictates that assessment should be conducted with minimal involvement from the coach (and/or the program administrator), thus keeping the effort low while maintaining the focus on developmental coaching rather than on administrative tasks.

Finally, we found that using assessments – as imperfect as they are – is in line with the following development philosophy: “You can’t manage and improve what you don’t measure and plan…”

What do you think?

If you have ideas to share or feedback to provide, please comment this post, contact me through our Blog or website (www.crinq.com), or email directly me at: patrick@crinq.com.

Merci, in advance…

Patrick

How to Develop Emerging Leaders via Coaching (#1/10): Participant Onboarding

The first step in every structured coaching program – and incidentally, the 1^st of my series of 10 “leadership coaching best practices” blog posts – is what we often refer to as “Participant* Onboarding” (*: throughout these posts, I will use the words “client”, “coachee”, “participant” and “emerging leader” interchangeably). 

What is “Participant Onboarding”?

The “onboarding” of participants into a coaching program is the initial phase where you welcome your coachee(s), explain the process, and kickoff the coaching engagement. Depending on how you’ve structured your coaching program, this phase may vary in length and in number and types of activities. However, there are common “onboarding” themes that typically resurface within most coaching programs. Some of these are: Participant welcome; Intake questionnaire; Definition of coaching; Explanation of the coaching approach, process, tools and methodology; Communication and confidentiality; Program timeline and milestones; Administrative aspects (scheduling, cancellation, options, duration...); etc. 

Why Does it matter?

Essentially, the efficiency of a coaching program (i.e.: how quickly/smoothly can it reach its goals) will be greatly influenced by the following:

• The ability for the coach to clarify the program approach and structure, and the ability for the program participant to understand and accept such approach and structure;
• The ability for the coach to “get to know” his/her client rapidly. Amongst other things, this means grasping the personal, professional and organizational context of the participant;
• The ability for the participant to rapidly initiate a deep reflection and adopt a change-focused attitude; and
• The ability for the participant to have a clear picture of what he/she signed up for, i.e.: when does the program start; how does it work; how long does it last; what do I have to do; why/when/how do I have to do it; what will I gain out of this.

As we can imagine, a well-executed “participant onboarding” phase will play a central role in establishing these criteria so crucial for the efficiency of the coaching program. 

What works well, what doesn't?

When onboarding a new participant into a multi-month coaching program, a number critical elements need to be covered, explained and/or established. Based on our experience coaching several emerging leaders, we found the following nine (9) practices – Do’s and Don’t’s so to speak – to be useful with client onboarding:

1.     Welcome the Participant: Schedule a half-hour conversation – either as a phone call or a face-to-face encounter –  to cover the basics: High-level explanation of coaching (what it is/isn’t, the coaching approach and philosophy, the process and tools); The program logistics and rules (scheduling and cancellation, duration and cadence); The program phases, activities, milestones and deliverables; The coach-participant confidentiality; The communication preferences (how to share/archive information); and, last but not least: answer any question that your client may have.

2.     Explain what Coaching is/isn’t: Emerging leaders that have the luxury of participating in a structured professional coaching program do so generally for the first time. Therefore, they either have very little or even no idea of what coaching is all about… Or worst, they have the wrong pre-conceived view of what they’ve volunteered (or were “voluntold”) for. We found that spending a few minutes during the “welcome call” to explain “what coaching is” was a good start. But we also found it useful to write our own “brief overview” of coaching (in a 2 page PDF document) coupled with an equally brief description of how coaching is used within our development programs (a 3p PDF document). This way, our clients can peruse this reference material at anytime during the program.

3.     Balance Costs vs. Value: Because the overall development allowance that emerging leaders have access to is generally limited, it’s important for the onboarding phase (and activities) to optimally balance the real-time involvement of the coach with the amount of work done by the participant on his/her own time. For example, a shorter half-hour “welcome call” may be sufficient to cover the onboarding basics if it is combined with two brief informational documents (e.g.: “What is coaching”, “What’s our Leadership Coaching Approach”) along with an interactive questionnaire (5-7page form to be completed by the client and covering basic “personal”, “professional”, and “organizational” questions). This way, the coaching program meets several success criteria (clarify approach, initiate attitude shift, get to know the client, etc…) while “consuming” very little coaching-time with the participant… thus minimizing costs without sacrificing value*. (*: this “minimize costs and maximize value” principle will resurface often during our “Best Practices” series of blog posts).

4.     Make use of Brief Articles and Interactive Forms: As stated earlier, we found that using brief articles (that we wrote specifically for our programs) and interactive questionnaires (forms that the participant can fill-out, save and return to his/her coach) to be useful in a number of ways: 1. It helps us minimize the coaching costs while maintaining the program value; 2. It allows us to convey important information that the coachee can refer back to as often he/she wants/needs (this last point applies to the coach as well in that he/she can refer back to the client questionnaire at any time during the program); 3. It also helps us “engage” the participant right from the beginning of the program by asking him/her to complete a brief “homework” before the next program activity (i.e.: read two brief documents, complete the onboarding questionnaire and return it to your coach with any questions that you may have); 4. Finally, by crafting specific “coaching-like questions” in our onboarding form, we help the client initiate a reflective and development-focused mindset that will be helpful for the rest of the program.

5.     Assess and Catalyze Motivation and Mindset: Obviously, the participant motivation and attitude are extremely important for the success of the coaching program. As such, the coach needs to assess these parameters early on in the program, and should keep an eye on them throughout the engagement. It is not uncommon to encounter challenges regarding our coachee’s motivation and/or attitude. These difficulties may be due to the fact that the emerging leader was “voluntold” by his/her manager to participate in a coaching program (instead of having volunteered willfully) … Or perhaps the participant’s perception towards coaching and leadership development is negatively biased because of a lack of self-awareness and/or of understanding of the program’s approach and benefits… But no matter what the reasons are, once a participant is “onboarded”, his/her motivation and attitude should become one of the coach’s main concern. Our experience has shown that, although difficult to alter substantially, the best way to assess and maintain positive engagement and attitude is through an honest (and sometimes frequent) dialogue on that matter. It is best to be frank with your coachee: Why are you participating in this coaching program? What benefits do you anticipate? Do you believe you need coaching, and why? Are you completely committed to make the necessary effort to reach your goal? Etc. We’ve also found that a bit of “soft selling” was always helpful in clarifying misconceptions, dispelling fear and boosting confidence. Reminding the client that participating in a multi-month coaching program is a unique opportunity – especially for an emerging leader – and that it should not be seen as a “development punishment” but rather as a “career opportunity”. Finally, it might be helpful to engage the participant’s manager at various points in the process: You may periodically ask the participant whether he/she is comfortable with you reporting on the program progress to the manager (without divulging confidential information, of course); Sometimes, you may have to remind the manager that, although the time commitment towards a coaching program is small (1-3 hours per week, including the coaching sessions), the success of the program depends on the ability of the participant to complete his/her “development homework” and to attend the periodic coaching sessions (simply reminding the manager is often enough to raise his/her awareness of the time commitment and to trigger his/her support).

6.     When possible, adopt an Online Collaboration Platform right from the Start: Business users receive and send, on average, over 90 and 40 emails per day, respectively. And the amount of electronic documents that employees have access to – in their inbox, on their PC, in the cloud, or at home – is simply overwhelming. Since it’s not uncommon for a 6-month long coaching program to generate or make use of over 30 distinct documents (forms, articles, reports, coaching summaries, etc.), emailing back and forth and saving these documents on various PC or media is simply ineffective. The use of an online collaboration platform where the coach and his/her participants can safely and efficiently exchange and store relevant program documents is a much better alternative, and should be adopted right at the beginning of the program (during the onboarding).

7.     Schedule Activities and Coaching Sessions ahead of Time: Cadence – the regular rhythm at which program activities happen - is an important factor affecting participant motivation. We’ll discuss this aspect a little later within the context of “development coaching” (post #4/10). But during the “Onboarding” phase (as well as during the “Assessment and Planning” phase), a number of activities are often assigned to the participant as “offline work”. This is usually done in an attempt to balance “cost vs. value” (it is more efficient for a coachee to complete a questionnaire on his/her own rather spending one to two coaching sessions answering similar questions from his/her coach). Although logical, this offline self-paced work makes it a bit more challenging to keep a steady pace. In fact, we’ve observed that, when a client is left to him/herself, there’s a greater risk of delays in completing the assigned activities (like reading a brief article on coaching, or completing an onboarding questionnaire). To palliate to this “natural human tendency” of delaying work and postponing deliverables, we found that pre-scheduling a few activities in “cluster” (say 2 to 3 at a time) and gently reminding the client with periodic emails/messages that certain tasks are “due” helps staying on course. For example, during the early stages of a program, a coachee could be asked to: #1. Read the article “what is coaching”, #2. Read and sign the coaching agreement, #3. Fill-out and return the onboarding questionnaire, #4. Go online and complete a psychometric self-assessment, and #5. Call his/her coach for his/her next coaching session. In this situation, instead of waiting for each activity to be completed before scheduling the next one, it would be preferable to “pre-schedule” all five activities (#1, to #5) and to periodically remind the client that activities #1, #2, #3 and #4 need to be done for the coaching session (#5) can take place. This “pre-scheduling + periodic email reminders” helps establish and maintain rythm, which in turn motivates the coachee.

8.     Trust the Participant… but Dig deeper before launching the Coaching: As a coach, it is imperative to attentively listen to our clients… but we shouldn’t take everything that’s being said at face value. Often, we found that the original intent that participant has may change quite a bit between the program kickoff and the end of the “assessment and planning” phase (more on this during posts #2 and #3). The value of the information gathered during the onboarding phase is great… but it doesn’t mean that it won’t change throughout the program. For example, a client may think that his/her greatest strength is “resilience”, and that his/her development goal is to improve his “team building skill”s… which is absolutely fine from a leadership coaching point of view. However, the feedback obtained from the 360-assessment may uncover some blind spots – both in terms of strengths and areas to be developed. And a discussion between the participant and his/her manager may reveal different mid-to-long term career plans, which might also impact the development decisions. When you put together results from the 360-assessment, summary from the employee-manager discussion, and insights from the coaching sessions, a different picture often emerges (unbeknownst to the coachee). So, even if your coachee is eager to “roll up his/her sleeves” and get going with the coaching, launching too fast without a full picture and a complete plan may be akin to sprinting in the wrong direction.

9.     Beware of Recurring Scheduling Delays: Finally, as a general rule of thumb (that applies to all phases of the program), we advocate being flexible, but without letting the coachee delay the process unduly. There will always be a seemingly good excuse – an urgent work meeting, an important client call, or a last-minute business trip – for not having read an article, completed a questionnaire, or for postponing a coaching session. When this happens, we found it useful for the coach to re-emphasize the importance of this program – this helps (re)build commitment and motivation (ref.: post #7), and facilitates establishing a good coaching cadence, especially during the later development stages of the program (ref.: post #4).

In a nutshell, a successful onboarding could be characterized as follow: comprehensive but clear, flexible but steady, and serious but engaging.

What do you think?

If you have ideas to share or feedback to provide, please comment this post, contact me through our Blog or website (www.crinq.com), or simply email me at: patrick@crinq.com.

Merci, in advance…

Patrick
 

How to Develop Emerging Leaders through Coaching: Introduction

A little more than two years ago, in an attempt to understand the issues faced by organizations with regards to developing emerging leaders, a colleague (Valerie Tremblay) and I ran a research initiative to gather insight on the context, trends and best practices in Leadership Development, Employee Learning and Professional Coaching. Thanks to the 110+ Canadian executives and professionals who answered our 13-question survey, and to the dozen of respondents who agreed to provide us with their qualitative feedback and professional viewpoints during individual follow-up interviews, the insight derived from our research was fascinating. So much so that our project – and accompanying whitepaper – was presented at two national conferences (CSTD 2014, HRPA 2015).  

One of the conclusions obtained from our survey and follow-up interviews highlighted the potential that coaching held as a practical approach for developing emerging leaders. In June 2016, we will once again have the opportunity to present our findings during the Institute for Performance and Learning annual symposium. For this conference, we want to expand our original presentation with the coaching best practices that we acquired during the last three years. Concretely, our goal is to share with the symposium participants the practical insights – our very own collection of “do’s and dont’s” – that we derived while coaching over 40+ emerging leaders working in 10+ organizations of different sizes and market focus.

During the next 6 weeks, I’ll be using our Blog (along with LinkedIn Pulse – which I’ve yet to figure out) to post some of these “best practices” related to leadership coaching. The important themes that we intend to cover are:

• Post #1: Onboarding the program participants (i.e.: emerging leaders)
• Post #2: Using assessments
• Post #3: Deriving the leadership development priorities
• Post #4: Establishing an optimal coaching approach and cadence
• Post #5: Maintaining an ongoing communication with the participants
• Post #6: Using learning tools and activities
• Post #7: Managing the participant motivation
• Post #8: Meeting the needs of HR/Management
• Post #9: Minimizing the program costs (and maximizing its value)
• Post #10: Summarizing and looking ahead (a conceptual Framework)

Aside from the self-imposed discipline of thinking and writing regularly, our goal with these ten posts is to collect enough feedback – either as comments through the blog itself or as direct email/phone conversations with our audience – such as to be able to produce a decent whitepaper in time for the June 2016 Symposium. Hopefully, this process of sharing our field-tested “do’s and don’t’s” and enhancing them with your feedback, will prove beneficial to us – coaches, L&D practitioners, and managers – who care deeply about developing better leaders.

If you have ideas to share or feedback to provide, please comment this post, contact me through our Blog, our website (www.crinq.com) or email me at: patrick@crinq.com.

Merci, in advance…

- Patrick

A brave new Workplace, part 2: Cross-Cultural Communication

Nowadays, with immigration rising, trade barriers falling, and the good old Internet stirring it all up, we are really becoming to live – and work - in a global village. Our “brave new multicultural workplace” has become a mosaic of people from different ethnic and linguistic background. Culture provides us with ways of thinking—ways of seeing, hearing, and interpreting the world. For instance, when we converse with a colleague from a different culture, words or gestures may mean different things… Or, perhaps the person we’re communicating with is from a different class from us, or has a very different lifestyle… All of these subtleties can hinder our ability to get our message across effectively.

Let’s look at “a few” of the (many) aspects of cross-cultural communication that relate to the Message, to the Tone and Non-Verbal Cues, and to other Diverse or Intangible elements, and let’s see how these may influence the way people of different cultures perceive what’s being communicated.

The Message…

Before looking at the conversation “message” itself, it is useful to first understand the concept of Low- and High-Context culture. Low-context cultures – like Anglos, Germanics and Scandinavians – rely more on content rather than on context, which make them value the written word over spoken statements. Conversely, high-context cultures – like Japanese, Arabs and the French – infer information from the context of a message rather than from its content, thus making them rely heavily on nonverbal signs while preferring indirectness, politeness and ambiguity.

For example, Japanese may find Westerners to be offensively blunt while Westerners find Japanese to be secretive and unforthcoming with information. Similarly, French can feel that Germans insult their intelligence by explaining the obvious, while Germans can feel that French provide no clear sense of direction when discussion contentious topics.

The Non-Verbal…

In terms of non-verbal communication, its importance is not only huge for interpersonal interaction, but it’s multiplied across cultures, especially when different languages are involved in the conversation. Because behavior is a strong manifestation of our cultural background, non-verbal elements of a conversation will be interpreted very differently by people from diverse cultures. Some of these non-verbal dimensions that we should pay attention to include:

1. General appearance and dress code,
2. Posture, gesture and touch,
3. Facial expression, eye contact, and
4. Tone.

For example: bowing shows rank in Japan, slouching is impolite in most Northern European countries, having his hands in pocket is disrespectful in Turkey, and sitting with our legs crossed is insulting in Ghana and Turkey. A brief and firm handshake is the “acceptable, self-confident way of doing it” for North-Americans whereas the correct manner for most Africans countries is a “limp and much longer-lasting” handshake. As per facial expressions and eye contact, we note that whereas most Mediterranean Latinos and Arabs exaggerate sadness or grief, most Asians will, on the other hand, suppress facial expression as much as possible and avoid eye contact as a sign of respect.

Other intangible factors…

There are several other less tangible factors that may also affect how people from different culture perceive and interpret what’s being communicated to them. These may include:

1. The perception of time and personal space,
2. The authority and power distance,
3. The relative importance of individualism versus collectivism, and
4. The disclosure and uncertainty avoidance, etc. 

For example, in some countries like China and Japan, being on time is important and being late is considered an insult, whereas punctuality isn’t as significant or imperative for South-Americans, for Indians and for people from the Middle-East. In “high power distance” countries such as India, bypassing a superior is considered insubordination, whereas, in “lower power distance” countries like in North America and Northern Europe, differences in people’s status is less important and bypassing a superior is usually not such a big deal. And in individualist cultures, self-determination is valued and demonstrating initiative or being a “self-made man” is admirable, whereas collectivist cultures expect people to identify with and to work well in groups, to be loyal and compliant. While Anglo cultures tend to be individualist, many of the Asian cultures are collectivist.

So What?

Finally, one of the biggest and most obvious barriers to written and spoken communication is language itself. The people communicating may speak different languages; The language being used is not the first language for one or more people involved in the communication; Or the people communicating speak the same language, but are from different regions and therefore have different dialects and/or unique subtleties.

We should keep in mind that this “brave new global workplace” brings a wide spectrum of cultural and linguistic nuances, all of which affect the way we communicate. In case of doubt, we should thread carefully… perhaps ask about the differences that we notice, and encourage questions about the culture of our counterpart. It’s also useful to make sure that our questions are curious, not judgmental, resentful or otherwise negative. And let’s always keep an open-minded and be patient, repeating what we understand and confirming meanings, providing suggestions and acknowledging a mutual understanding.

What do you think?

- Patrick