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Participants will learn:
- The role of confronting in fostering a healthy coaching culture
- How coaches can build trust and rapport even while confronting
- Skills for self-management during the internal conversation that preceeds the external one
- Three critical questions a leader must ask themselves before engaging in a challenging conversation
- Strategies for crafting an effective opening statement
You should attend if:
- You are responsible for enabling and fostering a culture of coaching in your organization
- You are leading a change that will require a large number of people to modify their behaviour
- You want new ideas for increasing the effectiveness of your leadership team
- You want to build your own capability for producing behaviour change in others
What can you expect at this event? Take a look at this recap from our last executive breakfast.
About the presenter:
Olympian Karyn Garossino, BA, M. Ed., brings a combination of insight and grit from 40+ years of being coached and coaching others. Her experience at the highest levels of elite sport, Master’s Degree in psychology and adult education, and experience working with thousands of leaders in business and government bring huge depth to her understanding what it takes to thrive under pressure—and to lead others to do the same.
About the venue:
Just minutes from Union Station on Toronto’s waterfront, OCAD U CO is a state-of-the-art 14,000 square foot studio designed specifically for collaborative innovation work. The space features is home to 20 resident design-led startups, a suite of formal and informal meeting spaces, and is the setting for our program, How To Lead Innovation, which we run in partnership with OCAD U CO and the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University.
Reserve your spot:
EVENT POSTPONED
This event has been postponed. Be the first to know when it’s rescheduled by entering your information below.
Sunrise Keynote | The Meta-Skilled Organization: Building the Capacity to Evolve
Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 – 7:15AM – Room 718A – Session #202
This is a sunrise keynote, and the topic of the day is going to be evolution. In a world where job requirements are changing, new skills are emerging, old skills need to be discarded, there has never been a time where evolution and adaptability is more important. It’s not that helpful to just tell people, “hey, you need to get better at evolving.” We need to help them understand how. I’ll unpack it the capability of evolution and have, what I hope, is a really interesting discussion on the role of self-awareness, flexibility, creativity, resilience, and a couple other key ingredients that go into personal evolution. See more about this keynote at the HRPA Conference website.Breakout Session | Future-Proofing Your Organization
Friday, January 24th, 2020 – 9:45AM – Room 711 – Session #306
In this breakout session, I’ll have an opportunity to unpack resilience, which is a key part of the journey of evolution. Resilience is one of my favorite topics, and for my money, there has never been a time where resilience has been more important. We are dealing with change. We are dealing with setbacks. We need individuals, teams, and organizations that can cultivate the ability to navigate change with resilience and adaptability. And there are a lot of questions around resilience: Is it something that you’re born with? Is it something that we can build? How does resilience differ across individuals and teams? I’ll unpack what we’ve learned from our work in sport and business, and hopefully answer a couple of those questions, while starting a bit of a dialog on this really important topic. See more about this keynote at the HRPA Conference website. In 2002, the Canadian Women’s National Hockey Team entered the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City in an unfamiliar position: as underdogs. They had not hit their stride as a team, their confidence had taken a hit, and emotions were at risk of boiling over. In eight head-to-head games against the Americans leading up to the Olympics, Canada had lost all eight. For many players, it was hard to avoid memories from four years earlier when the team had lost to the Americans in the gold medal game. Jayna Hefford, who was playing in the first Games of her Hall of Fame career, recalls the point when the stress and emotion came to a head: “There was an intense conversation in the dressing room with the team. A lot of people had a lot to say about things we needed to do and how we were going to get better, and we realized that a lot of what was happening was the blame game.”“We realized that a lot of what was happening was the blame game.”Through a frank, players-only discussion the team was able to come together, but the conversation could have gone a number of different ways. It stayed on track because the team was prepared – mentally and emotionally – to have performance conversations under pressure and surface a number of issues the team needed to resolve. And that preparation turned out to be an important stepping stone to winning gold in Salt Lake City.
Training the bomb squad
Handled poorly, team communication under pressure can lead to combustion. And just like you wouldn’t get success as a bomb disposal technician going in without their toolkit, you won’t find success in communicating through tense situations if your team isn’t prepared. The advantage the women’s team had that allowed them to emerge from that conversation united was a deep awareness of their communication tendencies and systems to counteract the counterproductive ones. They had laid the foundation for performance conversations in good times so that they could happen and be productive when the difficulty hit. In other words: they had a tool kit and they knew how to use it.“The biggest opportunity for meaningful growth is often to increase self-awareness and strengthen their ability to communicate productively when under pressure.”We’ve worked with hundreds of teams in elite sport and business, including the last four medal-winning Canadian women’s hockey teams. One of the things we’ve learned is that when teams are already operating at a high level, the biggest opportunity for meaningful growth is often to increase their self-awareness and strengthen their ability to communicate productively when under pressure. To support this, we’ve developed a process to help teams become more aware of their tendencies, develop systems and practice performance conversations anytime. At the heart of this process is a tool called the TAIS – The Attentional and Interpersonal Styles inventory. The TAIS was developed for use by Navy SEALs and Olympic athletes, and we’ve found it to be an incredibly valuable tool for diagnosing communication challenges on all kinds of teams. When the pressure is on, when teams are in the midst of setbacks and failure, individuals will fall back on their default communication styles.
Five communication choices
The author of the TAIS, Dr. Robert Nidefer, showed that people make five choices over and over in the course of a conversation. These choices are informed by their tendencies on five dimensions.
Cut the right wire
Every team will have members with different tendencies. Ultimately, it’s not the tendencies that matter; it’s the level of awareness team members have of their tendencies, and the systems they put in place to leverage their strengths and weaknesses in the heat of the moment. The highest performing teams we work with take three critical steps in preparing for productive communication under any circumstances.Acknowledge the “I” in team
Great coaches know that the phrase “there is no I in team” is a myth. Every individual makes their own contribution – and without self-awareness, people can’t adjust. That’s why the first step in your team’s communication action plan is to encourage every individual to build self-awareness across these five choices. By knowing and understanding their default tendencies, team members can begin to recognize their behaviour and course-correct when necessary for the good of the team.Connect to the “we” of the team
It’s advantageous to know your individual tendencies, and the value is multiplied when that information is shared with everyone on the team. When you raise the waterline of team awareness, everyone can work on the same communication system. Team members can see the intent behind the behaviors their teammates exhibit. The process can be incredibly difficult; Team Canada Captain Hayley Wickenheiser called sharing her profile with her team-mates, “the most stressful part of the 4-year [Olympic] quadrennial.”Come together as a team
Armed with knowledge of self and others, teams can come together and translate self-awareness into action. When pressure hits, if everybody on the team has the tendency to get louder, express their thoughts and try to take control of the conversation, the team can make decisions in advance to decide who’s going to take control when issues arise. By having these conversations earlier, teams can build systems to fall back on when the pressure is turned up.Preventing detonation
The next time you’re headed into a potentially high stakes conversations, use the five choices below to carry out a short 3-step preparation exercise:
1. Plot your default tendency on each of the five scales – given your past history, where are you most likely to fall?
2. Where would you ideally like to be as you head into this specific interaction?
3. What are the gaps between your ideal and default style? What actions will you take to ensure you are at your ideal?
Repurpose the fuel for growth
We’ve said before that negative emotion is volatile fuel. Improperly handled, it can lead to combustion. Used properly, it can lead to high performance. Team communication must go beyond just staying cool during difficult times. Teams must use communication to understand and lean in to their negative emotions, uncover what the emotions are telling them, and frame it as an opportunity for growth. This is what happened with the women’s team in 2002. They prepared to have productive communication at all times, and used the tools they learned to find the opportunity for growth at a moment when it could have blown up. Jayna Hefford explains: By understanding your individual communication style, sharing your tendencies with the team and proactively planning to address potential faults, your team can find its way through difficult times and not just safely diffuse difficult situations but find new strength and opportunity for higher performance in the process. In the summer of 2019, we changed our name from Performance Coaching to Third Factor. We’ve heard so much positive feedback on the name change, but there’s a big question I’ve been asked many times over: what does third factor mean? I have the privilege of teaching in the Executive Leadership program at Queen’s University, and I took some time to explain the concept in a recent class. If you’re curious to learn more about the concept of Third Factor, this video will shine some light. On November 19th, 2019, 75 leaders from Toronto’s business and HR communities gathered at OCAD U CO for a discussion on team resilience. Here’s what they learned: Leading the discussion, Third Factor CEO Dane Jensen brought together the voices of elite athletes and coaches to talk about what separates those teams that are able to rebound from failure to reach even higher levels of performance from teams that tend to crumble or falter in the face of failure. Drawing on insights from our work with high-performing sports teams, including the last four medal winning women’s Olympic hockey teams and the men’s and women’s national soccer teams, Dane identified what it takes for teams to not just perform but also to recover and be resilient. These are the four traits we’ve observed that characterize resilient teams, or differentiate resilient teams from those that are less resilient: 1. Negative emotion. Resilient teams process negative emotion in a way that leads to harder work and higher standards as opposed to detachment or combustion. They frame it so rather than being scared of negative emotion, they choose to lean into it, work with it, and see it with a sense of challenge, control and commitment. 2. Communication. The teams that recover quickly from setbacks communicate differently because they have worked consciously on awareness. They’ve surfaced their communication styles and worked on having performance conversations in the good times. 3. Relationships. Teams are more resilient when they work diligently on building relationships, even if that’s just 30 seconds for each person every day. 4. Shared purpose. Teams work best in the face of failure when they have a clear a line of sight to shared purpose. They don’t do hard work for it’s own sake, but because they choose to connect it to something that actually matters to them.JOIN US FOR OUR NEXT LEARNING BREAKFAST
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Third Factor CEO Dane Jensen and Rick Hansen
This year, the focus will be primarily on discussing what it means to be a collaborative community of organizations. How do we think about combining our efforts to make sure that we are punching above our weight and not just acting as a number of independent organizations? We are stronger as a whole and through better corporate collaboration, we can accelerate the pace of progress for people with disabilties.
This year also marks the launch of the Accessibility Professional Network, a membership network created to bring together accessibility professionals, consultants, students and anyone passionate about creating a Canada that’s accessible for all. The network will host its first Annual Accessibility Professional Network Conference on Oct. 31-Nov. 1 in Toronto, which will provide a platform to learn about national and international initiatives in accessibility and contribute to enhancing the field of accessibility in Canada.
Canada is a better place to live because of the important work that Rick and the Foundation have done to raise awareness and remove barriers, and we’re pleased that we’re able to contribute to a movement that’s making a real difference in the lives of people with disabilities in this country.
If you’re interested in doing more to improve accessibility within your organization or community, learn more at the Rick Hansen Foundation.
Upon hearing the ‘c-word’ from his doctor, Peter Jensen embraced teachings from the Inside Edge in order to equip him for the challenge ahead.
Imagine if you got a phone call that would dramatically change your life for the next decade or more. How would you react? The mental fitness skills that are used to stimulate high performance on the field or in the boardroom have a distinct purpose in a more central area of our lives–our personal health.
Click here to read the whitepaper.