I've been working with a team of real Lean leaders helping to change culture by developing our company into a learning organization of problem solvers. To do this, we have had to rethink how we manage and lead in our company. We have decided that Coaching is the leadership method that would help drive this culture change. Recently, we have trained a group of leaders in this Coaching style of leadership and have gone through practice sessions with them. Each day we reflected as a team to help in our learning, and the statement "Coaching is difficult...but worth it" was made. I want to share some of that experience from the week and how powerful having the Coaching mindset can be to change culture.
The photo shown here shows the support it takes to hold up businesses and people on a busy pier. Thinking about my past week, I think of all of these pillars as the leaders (not all in the higher levels of course) in an organization. If one pillar is not strong, those it holds up become slightly unstable. The more pillars that weaken, the more instability is added to the organization. With strong pillars, we find a strong support, one that is especially stable. What's even greater is that if we see these pillars as Coaches, they strengthen those around them, and I imagine (though this would be quite a magical feat) more pillars start extending below as more of those that are supported gain the skills to support themselves and others as well.
During this past week, we have trained some great people to be Coaches. The Coaching style of Leadership requires a couple base principles. We teach the principles of Respect Every Individual and Lead with Humility. Respect Every Individual is a personal belief that every person deserves respect, that each person inherently has value. In order to help solidify this principle, I wrote two statements on the board:
1. Everyone comes to work to do a good job.
2. No one comes to work to get hurt.
If you followed my previous post on Lean Safety then you will be aware that these two statements were used by Bob Hafey to help change the mindset of how we see our people in the light of respect and trust. In our training, we said "As an individual we must truly believe these two statements. Our belief in these two statements enable us to Respect Every Individual." We cannot make anyone believe in those statements, or make them give respect to everyone, so we make that clear with each person. It is truly up to them to believe. If you think everyone comes to work to do a good job and that no one comes to work to get hurt, we can truly become a Coach and develop others, and change more individuals' mindsets - eventually creating a new culture for the organization.
The second principle we discussed was to Lead with Humility. In its most basic form, we mean that we must be truly curious about what others think. We do not have all the answers, and many times we are wrong. As a Coach, we ask a lot of questions, and we do so in order to understand what others are thinking so that we can help them develop.
After defining these two principles as the basis of being a Coach, we talked about the skill of Coaching. Coaching is unlike what many of us are actually comfortable doing. We teach how to be present in the moment, to be inquisitive and get to understand the situation, to clarify if we haven't quite understood the situation, to encourage others to think about what options exist for improvement, to commit to some action, and to follow up with the person about how the action went. Starting with the Coaching skills first in our interactions with people allow us to understand what they are experiencing, finding out how they are thinking about their situations and improving their situations, and gives us the opportunity to become a mentor or teacher when they need help.
We taught the skills and did mini-practice sessions in order to build up each of those Coaching skills. At the end of the session we practiced using role-play through four separate real-world scenarios. We started off easy, with a scenario where the people we had to coach were engaged and willing to be coached. The most difficult part for people in this part was asking open-ended, non-leading questions. We watched as people lost the presence in the moment as they struggled to find a question that wasn't leading someone to an answer, or just a simple yes or no question.
In the second scenario we introduced a micro-manager. With this scenario we challenged our leaders to coach a micro-manager who had gone through the same Coaching training as they had, but still had the micro-manager tendencies. We started to see patience get tested with some as they went through this scenario. Trying to get someone who has all the answers, ask a question is pretty difficult, but many got through this by giving a little demonstration for them. They asked "do you mind if I show you how we can coach in this situation?" and typically the person will agree. They demonstrated the coaching method, and then turned back to the micro-manager type to try. This gave the micro-manager something to emulate and helped to nudge them away from their comfort zone.
Third, we led people through a situation where you are trying to coach disengaged people. As a Coach you may find that you have to do more encouraging and breaking through the reasons for the disengagement before anything else. We had the role-players try hard not to engage with the Coach, to have a defeated attitude. The Coaches had difficulties as in the previous scenario the role-players energetically answered questions. They struggled to get the person engaged, and spent more time cheer-leading previous successes, and helping to show the person that they must be the spark for others.
Finally we got to the most challenging scenario. What happens when you deal with an extremely difficult person? What happens when this person is loud, belligerent and has an obvious bias against millennials? Well this is the scenario we placed our newly trained Coaches in. It became much more difficult to even get into the methods of coaching, the scenario required them to understand and handle conflict. Each person seemed to have a different strategy, but the only one we saw work was one person who very respectfully walked the belligerent person from the current situation and had a very blunt discussion about Respect Every Individual. She was a natural at diffusing these difficult situations, and we were pretty awe-struck that she actually got it to work - and we were not being easy on her either.
"Coaching is difficult...but worth it."
These scenarios challenged our Coaches and allowed them to gain much needed feedback from their peers in a safe environment. We allowed them to experiment with different strategies, different questions, and this helped develop the skill. So how did that translate to the real world environment? We took them often to the workplace, to Gemba, to perform Gemba Walks. During these walks we challenged each of them to practice their Coaching skills, at least with each other as a team. Following these walks with each other, and having each person practice the skills for themselves, we reflected together. A common theme on the reflection as the week came to an end was that "Coaching is difficult...but worth it." They all saw how starting with the Coaching method allowed them to engage easier with people, gain perspective of the situation, and help develop others to solve problems by coaching them through the problem solving process. It is worth it because this builds trust, it shows respect and humility, and it enables the culture to shift to one where we truly become a learning organization of problem solvers.
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