Coaching Conversations: Teaching People to Think Better
One cannot teach a man anything. One can only enable him to learn from within himself. ~ Galileo Galilei 1564-1642
Given how many people in today's companies are being paid to think, improving thinking is one of the fastest ways to improve performance.
But most leaders don't know how to do this. Leaders need to learn to improve the way their knowledge workers process information, instead of telling them what to do or solving problems for them.
Leadership practices are not keeping up with the realities of organisational life. There is an increasing gap between the way employees are being managed at work and the way they want to be managed. Countless surveys and headlines repeat this message:
6 out of 10 workers are miserable
74 percent of staff not engaged at work
It's easy to see how this came about. 100 years ago most people were paid for their physical labour. The dominant management model was the master-apprentice in which the master showed or told an employee how to work.
The industrial age brought systems and the dominant paradigm became the management of processes: scientifically analysing linear systems for greater efficiencies. Employees needed to follow plans laid out by the boss.
Hired to Think
To learn is to change how you think. ~ Michael Merzenich, Professor of Neurosciences
In the last two decades as more routine work has either been computerised or outsourced, employees are increasingly hired to think. In 2005, 40 percent of employees were considered to be knowledge workers, and for mid-level management and above, that number is closer to 100 percent.
There is an increasing need to shift management styles to what's more effective for educated staff. We haven't been teaching leaders and managers how to improve thinking and decision making skills for their knowledge workers.
In the book Quiet Leadership by David Rock, the author makes the point that the increasing wealth and education of knowledge workers is an important issue: "Yet we have not significantly reinvented our management models since the time Henry Ford hired a pair of hands and wished they'd left their brains behind."
Generations X and Y are making major contributions to organisations and with different expectations from organisations. They want to develop personally and they value freedom and independence. They need leaders who will help them fulfil their potential at work: leaders who can help them improve their thinking.
As people develop in their careers, they go from managing themselves to managing others. To become a leader, each phase needs a change in the way one thinks, yet organisations have few internal resources allocated to helping people go through this shift. It's time leaders learned how to develop their staff for higher level decision making.
The Iceberg Model
What we think, we become. ~ Gautama Buddha
There is a visual model of human performance in the form of an iceberg: some of our behaviours are visible while most other behaviours, thoughts and feelings are below the water. There's a lot more driving performance than meets the eye. What we achieve at work is driven by how we think.
Yet when a leader wants to address someone's performance, he or she tends to stay at the surface and focus on what's visible. They rarely discuss what's driving the habits or discuss feelings, and less often have a conversation about a person's thinking.
Many employees are highly capable individuals who want to work smarter, and want to be smarter. They are crying out for help. Leaders can learn how to ask the right questions and have coaching conversations that engage people's thinking.
Have a Coaching Conversation
The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution. ~ Bertrand Russell
If we want people to think better, let them do all the thinking, then help them think. How do you go about this? Author Rock suggests the following five step process to set up a coaching conversation and enable self-directed learning:
Let the person think through their own issue. Avoid telling them what to do or giving advice. Ask questions about their thought processes.
Keep them focused on solutions not problems.
Challenge people, open up their thinking, so that they might stretch themselves rather than stay in their own comfort zones.
Keep a focus on what they are doing well and right so that you grow people's strengths.
Make sure there are clear processes behind every conversation. To be truly helpful, a coaching conversation requires permission to ask questions and explore possibilities
Asking thinking questions means you are now focused on one thing: people's mental processes. When you ask about people's thoughts, it allows them to find connections in their minds, makes them more self-aware, and they take more responsibility for the issues.
As they process their thinking, they start to search for solutions, and search their own mental maps for connections in an effort to achieve insight. It is through their own mental efforts they will learn and come up with solutions.
Thinking Questions
Here are examples of thinking questions:
How long have you been thinking about this?
How often do you think about it?
On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is this?
How clear are you about the issue?
What priority is this right now?
How committed to resolving this are you?
Can you see any gaps in your thinking?
What impact is thinking about this issue having on you?
How do you react when you think of that?
How do you feel about the resources you have put into this so far?
Do you have a plan for shifting this issue?
How could you deepen your insight on this?
How clear are you on what to do next?
How can I best help you further?
None of these questions focus on details of the problem, nor do they suggest what people should think or do. They get people to notice their own thinking. Something starts to happen then: people start to think on a deeper level and start to see more clearly. Often it leads to making new connections in their brains that lead to new insights.
We need to give up the need to find behaviours to fix and problems to solve and become intrigued with identifying and growing people's strengths and abilities to think things through.
Asking Permission
To be effective, a coaching conversation needs an environment where people feel safe to explore their thoughts and reach new insights. In order to set the stage for this to happen, certain elements should be in place:
Permission – Is this a good time to talk about this and explore your thinking?
Placement – Let's see if you can come up with some ideas in the next few minutes.
Questioning – Is it alright if I ask you to share your thinking with me?
Clarifying – Tell me more about that, what do you mean?
There's almost nothing more personal than trying to change people's thinking. Given that our perceptions are reality, asking people to think differently means we're invading personal territory. It's therefore crucial to establish permission any time you want to have a coaching conversation.
Furthermore, as you approach more personal questions, you need to again ask for permission. People can quickly become defensive and stop listening to you. Asking permission frequently will help people to feel safe, acknowledged and respected.
I get a sense you have more to say about that, could I probe a little further?
I'd like to have a more open conversation than we've had before, would it be okay if I asked you some more specific questions right now?
Can we spend a few minutes brainstorming ideas around this?
I'd like to understand more about your thinking in that area, would you be okay talking more about that?
I'd like to discuss some more personal matters…would that be okay with you?
Advice Doesn't Work
Ideas are like children; we love our own the most. ~ Chinese proverb
Advice is rarely helpful as people are far more likely to act on ideas they've come up with themselves. Adult learning studies prove that this is the way we acquire new habits. We find a connection for other people's ideas in our own mental maps, and decide to act. It becomes our own idea, our own decision.
Giving Up Control
People don't need to be managed, they need to be unleashed. ~ Richard Florida, professor of urban theory
In 1974 William Oncken wrote one of the two best selling articles in Harvard Business Review: "Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey”. The article describes an employee's dilemma as a monkey, and when the manager takes on the job of solving the problem, he's got the monkey.
While the article's focus was to improve time management by better delegating, by giving the monkey back, it didn't address the problem of how to get people to come up with their own insights.
Command and control management practices were common back then. In a commentary about the article in 1999, Steven Covey said this:
"…much has changed since Oncken’s radical recommendation. Command and control as a management philosophy is all but dead, and “empowerment” is the word of the day in most organizations trying to thrive in global, intensely competitive markets. But command and control stubbornly remains a common practice."
Empowering your team members is hard and complicated work. You have to be willing to give up control and let people work through their own thinking. Empowerment often means you have to develop people. And for that to happen, there has to be dialogue and trust.
The best way to develop people is through coaching conversations, by letting people do their own thinking. It's also the best use of a leader's time and talents. A good leader acts as a guide rather than the all-knowing expert.
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