Manager as Coach

Whatsort of workplace training would see participants lying on the ground desperately clinging to the leg of a table to prevent themselves from toppling over at nine o’clock in the morning? How to cope with being outrageously drunk at work having come straight from the pub? No. This was a stark lesson in how someone else telling us what to do when we knew how to do it ourselves was not only futile, but frustrating.

Nick Greenhalgh from Career Innovations began his in-house road test, with our usual line up of guinea pigs, by simply asking us to pair off and have one member of each pair tell the other how to go from lying flat on your back to standing up.

The catch – there’s always a catch – was that those of us lying on the ground were only able to do exactly what we were instructed to do and the instructions had to be gradual. In other words we couldn’t be simply told to get up.

Very quickly the point was made that all too often we tell people what to do on a step-by-step basis without giving them an overview of what the desired outcome is, nor do we search for their input even though they may well be better qualified to achieve the outcome than we are. As in my example, being told what to do can be counterproductive and if it wasn’t so funny, enormously demoralising. Even in humour mode, I found that I quickly abandoned any idea of achieving the goal of getting to my feet and instead simply enjoyed the incompetence of my instructor. How often is this scenario played out in the workplace with far more serious repercussions for everybody, and on everything from morale through to productivity?

Our road test was a one-day example of the work that Career Innovations has been delivering in Australia since its inception in 2002, for clients including Foster’s Group, Boots Healthcare International and Thomson.

Career Innovations bases its approach on the work of Dr Anthony Grant and the Coaching Psychology Unit at the University of Sydney. During our programme, we looked at when might be the appropriate time for a manager to tell an employee what to do and when to ask them what they think is the most appropriate course of action.

The day promised to leave us with a bag of tools to assist us in our coaching roles as managers. We were not disappointed. As we learnt through the course of the day, all change starts with self-awareness. For some of us, this proved at times both confronting and challenging. Gaining an insight into just how much of the time I spend telling rather than asking was certainly startling for me. So too was my tendency to use a barrage of questions like a sledgehammer to get my own way.

Having been somewhat humbled in our own opinion of what good coaches we were, we were then armed with a few simple models such as Sir John Whitmore’s GROW. In essence, GROW asks what is the Goal? What is the current Reality? What are your Options/Obstacles? What is your Will to perform these actions?

Along with the theory, we were all given practical takeaways such as a list of questions appropriate for each section of the GROW model. Then it was down to practice and more practice.

Another of the highlights for the day was some pretty detailed work around managing poor performance and delivering difficult messages. This component was designed to give us a real framework to ensure that we could stop having to ‘dance around’ difficult issues and do what employees actually want – cut to the chase.

The day was extremely well received by the group, with the course receiving very high reviews from all in attendance. At the end, we all had to write a letter to ourselves outlining our action plans. The next week these letters arrived, courtesy of Career Innovations, asking us how we were going with our plans. A month later, a second letter asked the same, a nice touch to help bed down the learning.

Contact Career Innovations (02) 9965 3791; email [email protected]; web www.careerinnovations.com.au.