If you are a manager committed to leading in a coaching way; a manager who has done some “Manager as Coach” training or who has read and experimented prolifically with coaching as a style; a manager who sincerely works at using a coaching approach to leading your teams; a manager who is human, has bad days, experiences stress and pressure, and who inevitably messes up despite your best intentions; this series of articles is for you. This is the fifth in series of 12 monthly articles, first published in SA Coaching News in which I share tools, techniques and practices that you can use over time to create new default behaviours that will enable you to live into your intentions of being a coach and creating a coaching culture in your team.

Whether you are a manager of managers or you find yourself coaching a peer who manages managers, there are some interesting complexities. When the source of difficulty or frustration is a manager who is not taking appropriate action on the performance of their team member, what is the coaching topic?

Let’s use a fictitious example. I lead a team of managers. One of them – let’s call her Lindi - is struggling to deliver on her KPIs because she has a team member (Pete) who is not performing. I also am not aware of any specific action being taken to address Pete’s non-performance. We have discussed non-performance against the KPIs before, and Lindi had agreed to take up the issue with Pete, but I am not seeing any improvement in what is being delivered from that team. Therefore, the topic of my coaching discussion will be Lindi’s failure to manage. In essence, Lindi is underperforming in that she is not taking action (or effective action) on Pete’s non-performance– and her inability to achieve her KPIs is a symptom.

Any performance coaching discussion is better handled when one uses a fairly standard set of stages. In my coaching, I work with clients to come up with their own stages, but these are the ones I use:

1. Describe what you have observed and why it concerns you.
   I notice that your team is still not delivering on its KPIs. We talked last month when you missed target, and I notice that your team has missed its targets again this month. This concerns me for a couple of reasons. One is that with each passing month we are increasingly unlikely to meet our annual target – and that is not good for anyone. The greater concern is that it suggests that you have not managed to get Pete up to speed yet. I am concerned that you might be struggling to manage his performance, and I would like to be able help you to sort this out so that you and your team starts to experience more success.
2. Ask if they would be willing to work with you on this.
   Are you willing to work with me on this?
   [The use of a closed question here is intentional – I want to know if you are open to a discussion: yes or no.]
   
   

{You will not follow steps 1 and 2 if a colleague has approached you for some peer coaching.}

1. Ask for a description of their experience. Ask follow-up questions that uncover what has been done; what has happened; what meaning is being made of what is going on (assumptions at play); the extent to which they are able to take the perspective of the underperforming team member. This is all about understanding the situation and identifying the key issue(s).
   What has been going on for you?
   What have you tried?
   How did Pete respond? How was he in the discussion?
   What has happened since then?
   What do you think might be going on for Pete? [This is a key question because it is probably what Lindi and I will work with – it may well be the key issue here.]
   How do you feel about this? What impact does it have on you and the rest of the team?
2. Ask questions that explore what will happen if nothing changes, arriving at the conclusion that change is not negotiable.
   What will happen if nothing changes?
   How will that impact on your team?
   How will that impact on the wider team?
   Are you saying that there really is no choice – we have to solve the problem? [Again you see the power of a purposeful closed question.]
   What specific change would you like to see?
3. Refer back to the key issue identified above: ask questions that explore options for supporting Pete in addressing the key issue(s).
   How might you make ..… easier for Pete?
   How often might you do that? And for what period of time?
   What else could you do? How might you involve Pete in the solution? How would you coach him?
   How might you track his progress? How could he track himself?
4. Ask questions that summarise the commitments and arrive at agreement on a review.
   Could you summarise for me what you will do?
   How do you intend going about it?
   What will you do if it does not have the results you hope for?
   How will I know if you are struggling?
   When shall we meet again to see how this is working?
5. End with a short reflection that identifies the key learnings.
   What stands out for you as most useful from this discussion? How might this influence you in future? How will you use this with other team members? What have you learned about yourself?

​While this article has specifically discussed coaching a manager who has an underperforming team member, taking the time to structure any discussion that may be tricky is good practice. It keeps you focused, it acts as a kind of rehearsal and it also ensures that the outcomes covers most, if not all angles.
​
For your convenience, here are the steps without the blurb:

1. Describe what you have observed and why it concerns you.
2. Ask if they would be willing to work with you on this.

Steps 1 and 2 are not applicable if a peer has requested some coaching.

1. Ask for a description of their experience until you both deeply understand the situation and the key issue(s).
2. Ask questions that explore what will happen if nothing changes, arriving at the conclusion that change is not negotiable.
3. Ask questions that explore options for addressing the key issue(s).
4. Ask questions that summarise the commitments and arrive at agreement on a review.
5. End with a short reflection that identifies the key learnings.

If you are a manager committed to leading in a coaching way; a manager who has done some “Manager as Coach” training or who has read and experimented prolifically with coaching as a style; a manager who sincerely works at using a coaching approach to leading your teams; a manager who is human, has bad days, experiences stress and pressure, and who inevitably messes up despite your best intentions; this series of articles is for you. This is the eighth in series of 12 monthly articles, first published in SA Coaching News in which I share tools, techniques and practices that you can use over time to create new default behaviours that will enable you to live into your intentions of being a coach and creating a coaching culture in your team.
 
In my coaching work with executives and managers, I frequently hear stories that suggest that my client is struggling with some “childish’ behaviour in their team. My tendency is to name it as exactly that because it opens up the opportunity to explore how my client may be managing in a parental way – behaviour that enables this childishness. Is my client excessively critical, figuratively wagging her finger at “naughty team members” for not behaving or performing as expected – in which it is no surprise that there is a culture of blame and unaccountability? Is my client overly nurturing, rescuing team members by fixing or completing their work for them, letting them off the hook – resulting in a pattern of “delegating upwards” or delivering incomplete work?

The Parent – Adult – Child model has its roots in Transactional Analysis. It is not the purpose of this article to present this entire approach, but to demonstrate how the model can be used to raise the maturity (emotional intelligence) of a team by moving the manager’s behaviour away from being either an overly critical or overly nurturing Parent to something more Adult – thus enabling and expecting more Adult behaviour from team members. The principle here is that we are all adults making an adult contribution to an adult pursuit (the work of the organisation) – and we need to approach that in an adult manner.

As an aside, I have observed Parent – Child patterns of behaviour at every level in my client organisations – including at Board and Executive levels.
​
Let me start by sharing a beautiful Parent – Adult – Child diagram created and developed by Karen Pratt, an exceptional Cape Town-based Coach and Coach Supervisor, adapted from the work of S. Temple (1999):

If you are a manager committed to leading in a coaching way; a manager who has done some “Manager as Coach” training or who has read and experimented prolifically with coaching as a style; a manager who sincerely works at using a coaching approach to leading your teams; a manager who is human, has bad days, experiences stress and pressure, and who inevitably messes up despite your best intentions; this series of articles is for you. This is the seventh in series of 12 monthly articles, first published in SA Coaching News in which I share tools, techniques and practices that you can use over time to create new default behaviours that will enable you to live into your intentions of being a coach and creating a coaching culture in your team.

One of the areas of manager coaching that always seems complicated is that where your team member has an issue with another person and wants to talk about it. Indulging this can feel like gossip – and it is gossip where you, as the manager, get caught up in the content and your curiosity is about what happened, and who said what, and what next, etc. etc. I have had many times in my coaching career where I have been coaching several (and sometimes all) members of a team, including the leader of that team.

​In my contracting under such circumstances I always say something like this: “I am going to hear from all of you about all the rest of you. In every conversation where one of you talks about an issue or concern you have with any other member of the team, I will only be interested in thinking about what you are going to do about it – whether that involves dealing with that team member or dealing with yourself. I will not have any conversation with any of you that you should be having with each other. You may say anything you like about any other member of the team. But know that before the end of the coaching conversation I will always ask you what you are going to do about it.”

This is not gossip. This is coaching – your intention is to assist the team member to understand what is going on for them and then decide what they are going to do. You should contract something like this with your own team members when you take on coaching as your leadership style.

In some instances, your role might be to challenge their assumptions about the intentions of the other person. Team members often react strongly to the actions, comments or other behaviour of a colleague because they assume that the behaviour has something to do with them: “she seems to get pleasure out of making me look like an idiot”; “he’s just trying to make it look like the error happened in my team, when the problem is really in his team”; “no matter how well I prepare for my meetings with him, he always manages to throw me a curved ball – it’s like he always wants to show me up as not having covered something”.

In other instances, team members will talk about something that really suggests that a courageous conversation is required. In my book, a courageous conversation is one in which something important needs to be communicated to a colleague because it relates to their effectiveness and success – and not communicating it increases the likelihood that this colleague will get themselves into difficulties that could be prevented – and there is the likelihood that the colleague may not respond well to the conversation. In other words, something must be said AND they may react badly. Nevertheless, a conversation must be had.

Challenging Assumptions

You will know that the issue relates to your team member’s assumptions if they say things like “I don’t know why she always wants to make me look like an idiot”, or “He’s trying to pin this on my team when the problem is really somewhere else”, or “I don’t know why he’s always so angry with me”. There are many variations on this theme. Often the behaviour that is described is defensive – anger, aggression, stonewalling, blame. Any defensive behaviour suggests that the protagonist feels the need to defend – in other words, they feel at risk or under attack. It is by creating the opportunity to think about what might be going on for the other person that you challenge the assumptions of your team member. In some cases, the person you are coaching will understand that they are the reason why their colleague feels the need to defend themselves – in which case, your coaching may be about how they might behave differently in order to arrive at a more productive outcome. In other instances, your team member may realise that the defensive behaviour of their colleague is not about them at all – that there is something going on in the environment that is making their colleague feel at risk or under attack or under relentless pressure. In this case, your coaching might result in a bit of compassion for the other person. “What might be going on for so-and-so that might make her feel that she needs to defend or protect herself?” This compassion will either cause them to decide to let the “bad behaviour” pass with no response at all – knowing that “it is not about me” - or to have a courageous conversation with their colleague about the impact their behaviour is having.
 
Courageous Conversations

As I said earlier, I believe a conversation is courageous when the content may be hard to hear, must be heard, and the reaction might be strongly negative or emotional. Most often, people avoid such conversations either because they don’t want to hurt their colleague, because they want to avoid unpleasantness or because they simply don’t care enough about their colleague to say what must be said. All of these reasons are problematic.

When you do not want to hurt or upset a colleague, your empathy is going to harm your colleague because avoidance of the conversation means that they will not hear something that will help them. When you want to avoid unpleasantness for yourself, you are protecting yourself by being insincere. And if you simply don’t care for your colleague enough to have the conversation, this is actually passive-aggressive behaviour – hanging a team member out to dry, when something could have been done.

I’m a big fan of Kin Scott’s book, Radical Candor. She teaches that truly courageous conversations require two things: firstly, that you genuinely care about the best interests and well-being of the other; and secondly, that you challenge them directly in terms that are clear and unequivocal.

Let’s start with the first part. In coaching the team member with the issue, you need to confront the issue of care: “Do you care enough about the best interests and well-being of your colleague (and the team) to have a conversation that makes you feel uncomfortable?” This is a whole coaching topic on its own. If your team members do not care enough about each other to do this, then you have some work to do with them team in creating psychological safety, mutual care and concern and a climate of candour. If the issue is only with the team member being coached, your conversation might be about the impact on the team of their not caring – there is no point in coaching on how to challenge directly until a point of caring has been achieved. Failure to do so may result in this team member sharing feedback in an obnoxiously aggressive manner – or not sharing it at all. (And don’t fall for the line that “You are the manager. You must handle it.” It is only if the attempts at a courageous conversation by your team member fail that you might step in. It is important that team members have the courage to handle issues directly with one another.)

Once you are satisfied that your team member cares enough about their colleague and the team to have a courageous conversation, your coaching can turn to how to have the conversation. You might find the following questions useful:

• “What do you want your colleague to know and understand?”
• “How will you say it?”
• “What could you say to your colleague before you start that might make them receptive to hearing what you need to say?” (It is often useful to set a courageous conversation up with something like “I need to talk to you about something that you may find difficult to hear. I want you to know that I am sharing it with you because I care about you and your success. Could I ask you to hear me out to the end before you respond?”)
• “How can you be part of the solution? How can you be supportive?”
• “What strong reactions do you expect from your colleague? How will you deal with these if they happen?”
• “Tell me about your own possible reactions and feelings. What will you do to keep these in check?”
• “When will you have this conversation?”
• “Would you like to check in with me after you have had the conversation?” (This is probably a useful thing because you will then have a sense of how the issue was handled and the outcome.)

Of course, the questions above are also great self-coaching questions when you need to have a courageous conversation yourself!

If you are a manager committed to leading in a coaching way; a manager who has done some “Manager as Coach” training or who has read and experimented prolifically with coaching as a style; a manager who sincerely works at using a coaching approach to leading your teams; a manager who is human, has bad days, experiences stress and pressure, and who inevitably messes up despite your best intentions; this series of articles is for you. This is the sixth in series of 12 monthly articles, first published in SA Coaching News in which I share tools, techniques and practices that you can use over time to create new default behaviours that will enable you to live into your intentions of being a coach and creating a coaching culture in your team..
 
Any manager who is committed to being a Coach needs to be mindful of the myriad occasions throughout every day when you can model the way. This is no more true than in the area of relationships. Everything we do in the working environment is with or through people – so via our relationships. And relationships are built one conversation at a time – not one email at a time! The same is true of leadership – it is exercised one conversation at a time.

So often I find myself astounded at the mindless way in which my clients work. They talk about the frustrations that they have with their team members’ lack of progress or disappointing execution despite the fact that they have emailed them numerous times! I am always concerned when I hear about complex work being delegated by email, so my standard question is “Where are these team members located?” Of course, I’m a bit of a smartarse, so I know the answer to this question – “Oh, in the open plan outside my office.” That is when silence is my best friend.

Let’s be clear. We are all vulnerable to working on autopilot. We receive an email about some important initiative, and we delegate this on by email. In fact, how much of our day do we spend reading and responding to emails? There is just too much that is done by email that really should be done via the medium of conversation.

The Manager Coach has the opportunity to model the way in terms of how they exercise leadership and build relationships themselves. Here are some examples of how it might be done:

i.  You have a new project and everyone needs to be on board

This is a great opportunity to get your team around a table and use one of your coaching tools to enable the team (and yourself) to get your heads around the thing and decide where to start. Good old GROW is a great tool to use for getting your team talking and thinking about the initiative, deciding on how to tackle it, who to involve and where to start. It also enables you and your team to clarify responsibilities and deliverables, and agree initial deadlines.

But what if it is a project team made up of colleagues who are not in a natural team together? Then it is appropriate to have a conversation about how you will work together early in your time together. This is a Rules of Engagement discussion which results in agreements about behaviours that will support the success of the project, in terms of how team members will deal with one another, solve problems and make decisions, handle accountability, and resolve conflict. It also ensures that the leader’s role is clearly articulated. Many project leaders omit to have this discussion and then experience problems at various stages in the project relating to exactly these topics. Taking the time and the trouble to start well relationally saves much frustration later on.​

ii.  You are observing a pattern of behaviour that troubles you

Here is another example of something that is too often handled by email.

                Dear So-and-So
                You have arrived late for work 3 times in the last 2 weeks. May I remind you etc. etc.

You know where this is going. Whether it is timekeeping, a pattern of defensive reactions that are not helpful, withholding crucial information from colleagues or any other unhelpful patterns of behaviour, the Manager Coach should address this in a conversation. Once again, it is a conversation with a structure – since you want to arrive at a mutually satisfactory outcome. Here is one of my preferred structures, which I often share with clients:

Step 1: Describe what you have observed and why it concerns you.
Step 2: Ask your colleague to help you understand what is happening.
Step 3: Articulate how important it is for this thing to change and ask the colleague if they are prepared to work with you on this.
Step 4: Ask the colleague for ideas that might address the issue. Offer your own.
Step 5: Agree on what each of you will do and by when. (Each of you should articulate what you personally will do – avoid making the mistake as the Coach of summarising the actions of both parties).
Step 6: Agree on a follow-up date

iii.  You keep delegating something to someone who just gets it wrong

The mistake we often make in this instance is to explain what we require again, and even more slowly and clearly.  But this misses the point. Until we understand what the colleague has understood, we are never going to understand where it is going wrong. You need to meet them where they are in order to bring them to where you need them to be. In this instance, it can be useful to approach it as follows (with the answers to each question potentially giving you insight into where things are going wrong):

Step 1: Explain to me what we are trying to achieve here. What is the purpose of this?
Step 2: How do you go about it? Where do you obtain the information? Who do you involve? What is your work method? What is still unclear to you?
Step 3: What obstacles are you experiencing? What are you doing about them?
Each of these provides opportunity for you to create clarity once you have identified where the obstacles are.
Step 4: Now that we’ve clarified all this, please tell me:

• What are you going to do?
• How are you going to do it?
• Who will you involve?
• What obstacles might you experience? What will you do about them?
• How will I know how you are doing?
• How will I know when it is done?

The answers to these questions are the commitments being made by the team member, so in the event that they don’t deliver, you can hold them to their commitments – which is more powerful than holding them to your requests.

iv. A team member is having one of the problems described above

All of the above are tools you can share with team members who are having difficulties with colleagues. Just as you default to conversation to resolve work difficulties that reside within your relationships, so you can coach team members to do the same. By sharing tools for resolving work difficulties, you empower team members to exercise leadership with their colleagues by having structured conversations that have productive outcomes. It is completely appropriate to allow a team member to discuss with you difficulties they are having with another team member – provided the purpose of the discussion is to help them figure out how to tackle the issue constructively for themselves. And your coaching is so much more powerful because they have seen you do these things yourself.