Building a Coaching Culture in 2020
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The relationship is the engine; emotion is the fuel
Every engine needs fuel, and in the coaching relationship there is no stronger fuel than emotion. Much of the time in business we’re taught to keep emotions in check – especially negative emotions like anger, frustration and disappointment. Since it’s rare to see these kinds of emotions expressed, it can be triggering when our people show their dissatisfaction. It can feel like an attack, and the default response can be to mirror the emotion – meet anger with anger – or become defensive.Every engine needs fuel, and in the coaching relationship there is no stronger fuel than emotion.Falling into this trap, however, robs you of the opportunity to direct the energy in that emotion in a productive direction. When a team member expresses negative emotion, it means they care. When leaders make an effort to notice and acknowledge the emotion, they can deepen the relationship and build trust. And by exploring the emotion, they can help their people see what’s possible and use their feelings as motivation to take a step in the right direction. In these situations, the relationship is what allows the coach to lean into the emotion and explore it. In our 3×4 Coaching program, we give participants challenges to apply key learnings back on the job. In one of these challenges, a participant committed to asking their people simple questions like, “What’s new from the weekend?” much more frequently than they had before. Asking more, personal questions helped this leader build rapport with their people. And it provided the leader with new insight into their people’s emotions. In the course of these conversations, this leader noticed that the emotion in the person’s response provided a deeper view to valuable information. By leaning into those emotions and exploring them further, the leader was able to learn more about how they were interpreting their experiences. Noticing what made them frustrated, anxious, fearful, or even happy and excited, improved the leader’s ability to identify and address their team’s issues and challenges. With stronger relationships in place, and positive results beginning to emerge, it wasn’t long before the leader began asking more direct questions to gain a deeper understanding of their people’s feelings. Equipped with better information, the leader was able to give more and more targeted support and feedback to enable their team’s success. As a leader and a coach, the relationship you have with your people is what allows you to help them be at their best. When leaders give their relationships the care they need and lean into emotions, they can drive higher levels of performance, and ultimately results.
Make the most of your investment
Investing time in building relationships pays dividends. And yet, all the other pressures don’t go away just because you’ve decided to put your time into this endeavour. To optimize the benefits of relationship building given the reality of time constraints, smart coaches create a strategy for how they’re going to build and maintain their relationships every day. What this comes down to is showing people that you care. That means making time for them, offering them support when they’re struggling, and doing both with unwavering consistency. But every person is different, and what works for one person might not work for another. When you’re working to build relationships with the people you lead, make a point of understanding:- What are their strengths?
- What motivates them, specifically?
- What is the best way to communicate with them?
Putting it all together
Productivity is the direct result of an effective team. When everyone is engaged and making a strong personal contribution, efficiency follows. And the greatest influence on performance and engagement is the team’s leader; their coach. But which leader garners the higher level of engagement and commitment: the leader who focuses first on task execution? Or the leader who works to build relationships and earn permission to coach their people to a higher level of performance? In your next round of one-on-one meetings, take the time to consider your relationship with the person you’re leading. You might just find that when you move your focus from the to-do list to the person, productivity follows. 🧹 People who think highly of themselves might brush off the piece of corrective feedback, giving more weight to the positive news surrounding it.
😟 But those who are self-critical might dwell on the bad news and miss out on the good.
🐍 And the lack of direct communication makes people feel like they’re victims of a sneak attack.
Instead, Peggy offers simple advice for leaders who need to give feedback: Describe the behaviour you want to reinforce or correct, explain the impact of the behaviour, and outline what you want them to do. Click here to read the article on hbr.org. The plans for the Tokyo Games have been in the news a lot lately. In this video, our founder, Peter Jensen, shares his perspective on the preparations taking place within Team Canada. Rather read than watch? Here is the full text of Peter’s update: Greetings! Well, it’s certainly been a while. And a few things have happened this past year, to put it mildly. I thought I’d give you an update from my perspective on the Tokyo Olympics. I believe unless something else dramatic changes, and that’s certainly a possibility, that the Olympics will proceed, but they certainly will not resemble, for the participants at least, a normal Olympics. As a spectator watching on television, you’ll see a lot of what you would normally see with the exception of loud crowds and loud noises. In the latest installment, they’re hoping to have people in the stands but get this, they’re not allowed to cheer. And that’s obviously for COVID reasons. Quite frankly, the COC is doing its best to encourage parents, family, and friends not to attend the Olympics in person because they won’t have access to the athletes and their children. Likely, it will be like the World Junior Hockey Championships, where gatherings will be held afterward online – so you might as well stay at home. What do we know from the athlete’s perspective? We know that they’re only allowed in the village five days before their event and they must leave when the event is over. Obviously each country will have their own bubble. It will not be a normal Games in terms of the athlete’s experience.“The athletes need to be able to prepare for something very different than they’ve imagined their entire life”The opening and closing ceremonies are still up in the air. Mid February, the IOC will publish a playbook outlining their plan. Now from a psychological perspective, the athletes need to be able to prepare for something very different than they’ve imagined their entire life. I’m sure you’ve had the experience, especially early on in the pandemic, of going to do something you normally do and then realizing, “Oh I’m not driving anywhere. I simply have to go on my computer and go online.” Those images of how we used to do things stay very strong for a long period of time. But once we start doing things differently, those things become the inner images. The athletes don’t have the advantage of that because we still don’t know enough detail to paint a clear picture of what it’s going to look like to be in Tokyo. It will get clearer over the coming months. And it will definitely not be a level playing field. Some of the countries will prioritize the athletes in terms of vaccinations, others will not. Some countries have been allowing their athletes to train in groups, others, including Canada, have not. One of the biggest things is that test events that normally are held in the Olympic venues to help athletes prepare for the Olympics, will not be held. It’s been ages since any of our athletes have had the opportunity to compete. And so, as I’ve said, A lot of changes and a lot of variables. There’s no doubt you’ll hear a lot about this in the coming months. But the Olympics are usually about overcoming hardship and hope, and my goodness, we could all use a little of that. In our 3×4 Coaching virtual learning journey, participants are given challenges to apply what they’ve learned on the job. In this video, our Chief Learning Officer, Peggy Baumgartner, showcases how one program participant used a challenge activity to make a lasting difference in his organization. When it comes to coaching, it’s not about what you know; it’s what you do that ultimately matters. That’s why we make challenge activities a part of our online learning journeys. Participants are given a challenge and encouraged to make note of what works for them and what impact it had. One participant, taking the 3×4 Coaching program through Queen’s Executive Education, really took his challenge on recognition to heart. Following the challenge, Dave Cooper shared that he had written a letter to his team to recognize their contributions through the pandemic. As the manager of retail leadership development for Sport Chek, a major retailer with approximately 250 stores, his team had been hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. “Our training team got very disconnected from the stores, which was really difficult for me personally and difficult for our team,” Dave told us. “After going through eight months of this constant stress, I wanted to see if I could write something to recognize what they’d accomplished how long they had endured. And maybe give them a little nudge that they have more in them.” Dave’s letter to his team was particularly effective because it took all the key concepts from the recognition module and used them in a very powerful way:
- Make it relevant. Dave’s first success was in his timing. Rather than waiting until everything had settled down, he took the time to recognize his people in the moment and let them know they were seen.
- Focus on the behavior, not results. In the letter, Dave recognized his people not for the results, but for their efforts. “You and your team have persevered well over 200 days,” the letter reads. “This is an incredible achievement!”
- Make it a habit. Dave told us that he didn’t want it to be a one-time thing. Rather than writing a letter to his team and calling it job done, he set reminders in his calendar for future times he know would be busy to remind himself to recognize his team.
- Extend influence & ownership to others. The impact of Dave’s letter didn’t stop at his direct reports. He challenged them to pay it forward: “thank your management teams, your full-timers, your part-timers and anyone else who has contributed to your store’s success,” he wrote. “Everyone plays a role!”
“Let me give you some feedback on that.”“Then use a verbal yellow highlighter,” I responded. “Whenever I have to give anybody feedback, and I want to to make sure it’s been heard and recognized as feedback, I always use the word feedback and emphasize it… as in ‘let me give you some feedback on that.’” On the next day of the program she walked up to me and said “Oh my gosh that was so simple, and it will make a big difference. In thinking back to my conversations with my employees I realized that very often when I was actually giving them some feedback I rarely used the word feedback, so they didn’t recognize it as such when they were asked.” It will definitely help the employees’ performance and, secondarily the results on her 360 feedback. Negative emotion is an incredibly volatile fuel. Our CEO, Dane Jensen, lays out how to harness its energy for building motivation in his latest article for Harvard Business Review titled Turn Your Team’s Frustration into Motivation. In the article, Dane offers three tools for leaders to motivate people facing a setback:
🏷 Label the negative emotion and engage. Right or wrong, giving it a name helps uncover important information that can be used for moving forward. 👏 Feed the self-coach, not the self-critic. Encourage them to look for the opportunity in the crisis. 🛴 Channel energy to action. Use the moment to build a vision of a better future and build clarity around what it takes to get there.
Strong leaders don’t shy away from negative emotions. They lean into them and help their people use them to recover and grow. Click here to read the article on hbr.org.Building a Coaching Culture in 2020
Click here to watch on demand Building a coaching culture has never been more vital – or more challenging. In the midst of disruption, leaders are expected to be able to help their people re-skill: to coach them up learning curves and get them excited about unlocking new potential and abilities. Meanwhile, coaching is happening remotely with much greater frequency, reporting relationships and organizational structures are more fluid and the notion of a job as something with a static description that a leader can ‘manage’ to is increasingly obsolete. In this 60-minute webinar, Third Factor Director of Training Peggy Baumgartner and Principal Trainer Cyndie Flett will synthesize over 30 years of experience working to embed coaching in organizations large and small with the last 4 months – in which many of our fundamental assumptions around leadership have changed. You’ll leave with highly practical ideas on how to engage in large-scale culture change around coaching – and how to embed the 3 plays and 4 skills of effective coaching throughout your organization.- You are responsible for leadership development and want to build or strengthen a culture of coaching within your organization
- Your organization’s approach to coaching needs to evolve to suit leaders in 2020 and beyond
- You want a clearer view of the roadblocks that can impede coaching culture and how to remove them
- You want new ideas for developing leadership competencies that can scale to every part of your organization
Peggy Baumgartner has dedicated her life to training excellence. Her passion for developing people, proven expertise, vast training experience, and engaging style make her the perfect trainer to deliver Third Factor’s programs to demanding, senior level audiences.
Cyndie Flett is one of Canada’s leading experts on coaching. As the former Vice President of Research and Development for the Coaching Association of Canada, and Director of the National Coaching Certification Program, Cyndie has dramatically impacted the way that literally millions of coaches are educated across the country.
