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 tenth 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.

The topic of psychological safety has come up several times in conversation over the last week or so, and has been bubbling under as a topic for days now. Wikipedia defines “psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.[1] It can be defined as "being able to show and employ one's self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career" (Kahn 1990, p. 708).[2] In psychologically safe teams, team members feel accepted and respected.”

In the absence of psychological safety, innovation, “radical candor” (see Kim Scott), team learning, engagement and continuous improvement is inhibited. It is important to the manager coach for creating an interpersonal dynamic that is free from guardedness. It creates an environment in which team members do not fear judgement, ridicule or the potential of saying something that is career limiting.

Uncertainty about how to “be” with one’s manager is a significant inhibitor to the quality of thinking that manager coaches seek.

A couple of years ago I was working with an executive who had got off on the wrong foot with his team. He was radically different in every way from his predecessor. While the team may not have liked his predecessor, they did know how to work with him. Because they did not know how to work with my client, they did not trust him and he had real problems getting going with them.

I had recently come across an article by Leah Fessler (https://qz.com/1046131/writing-a-user-manual-at-work-makes-teams-less-anxious-and-more-productive/) in which she describes writing a user manual for yourself that makes your team members more certain of how to deal with you. I have subsequently read other articles advocating something similar. Your Personal User Manual will have a number of headings which you can use for guidance. Here is one example:

1. My Style
2. What I value
3. What I don’t have patience for
4. How best to communicate with me
5. My flaws

• What I am working on in myself
• What to do when my flaws show up

1. How you can help me
2. What people misunderstand about me

You could do a little research and make up your own set of headings. Completing the content under the headings is a valuable reflection exercise. It causes you to think carefully about yourself, your flaws and hot buttons, and what your team should understand about you in order to not feel the need to guess or tiptoe around you. It also gives them guidance about how they can help you to grow and develop.

In order to complete your personal user manual, you could use a number of sources:

• Any personality profiles you have completed (such as Strengthsfinder, Enneagram, Myers Briggs, DISC, etc.)
• Your most recent performance appraisals
• Colleagues and team members: send them the same questions and have them share their experience of you

Once you have sufficient input, finalise your Personal User Manual. Then share it with your team and have a rich discussion with them, encouraging their comments and questions.  Then encourage them to each compile their own user manuals to be shared and discussed at later team meetings.

This is approach has a number of benefits:

1. It gives you the opportunity to model vulnerability – meaning you show yourself honestly and unguardedly (including your flaws), knowing that judgement is possible.
2. The fact that you are willing to be vulnerable in front of your team demonstrates more loudly than your words that you will create the same psychological safety for team members who reveal themselves.
3. It teaches that we are not all the same and that we make a mistake when we deal with everyone in the same way. We are able to use this information in order to deal with different people in ways that suit them and bring out the best in them.
4. It is a valuable tool in the journey to self-awareness.
5. It could be subject-matter for future coaching conversations with your team members – if they wish to do so.

While it is really useful for a manager who is new to the team to do this exercise, there is also no harm doing it later in your relationship with your team. As my client discovered, it was in making himself more knowable that he was able to build healthy relationships with his team and break through their resistance.

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 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.
 
I think the most common coaching topic that comes up in my coaching practice is time management. It is a fairly broad topic, and comes up in a variety of ways that may not, on the face of it, seem as if they relate to time management. Consider the following examples:

• The team member who regularly works late because much of her work day is spent helping other people and taking care of their priorities – so her own deliverables are taken care of after hours. This person has a boundaries issue, but it becomes visible because of its impact on her working hours;
• The colleague who bounces around from unfinished task to unfinished task and has 10 windows open on his screen because he is distractible and has not developed the habit of task completion;
• The person who drops a high impact deliverable that she is working on to attend to a request from her boss’s boss – a request that makes absolutely no impact on her own KPIs, and which causes her to miss a critical deadline. This person lacks the assertiveness to clarify and manage the expectations of people in positions of power;
• The team member who spends all his time in meetings – some of which do not require his personal attendance – and then works late regularly and often misses important family and parental occasions resulting in immense guilt and a sense of loss around these key occasions. He has not clarified his key priorities, probably accepts meetings mindlessly and is also not using the resources available to him.

All of these issues can be dealt with using Stephen Covey’s Four Quadrants approach to time management (see The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and First Things First). I am going to take you through my own version of this approach, the basis of which is the following:

1.  Consider what you have on your plate in terms of the following dimensions:
a.  Importance - there is only one thing that makes a task important: there is direct line of sight between the task and your goals. Not your boss’s goals, not your CEO’s goals, not your global head office’s goals. Your goals! And this includes your personal goals, like taking care of your health, being a good parent and a supportive spouse. This implies that you have tasks that are important (to you) and tasks that are not important (to you). Now before you get all anxious and stop reading, I am not about to suggest that you will not do those tasks. I am simply going to encourage you to think about them differently.
b.  Urgency – the more pressing the deadline for the task, the greater the urgency.

2.  Once you have decided where each task goes, you can decide how to tackle them.

The diagram below explains how to identify and deal with what is on your plate, and to allocate it to the correct quadrant.

1. Quadrant of Necessity – Important and Urgent

These are tasks which must happen today. There is direct line of sight between these tasks and your own goals. Some of these will be surprises in the form of crises or emergencies, but many of these will have been coming up, so you should be ready to take the necessary action. If you feel as if you are lurching from crisis to crisis, then you are probably not spending enough time in Quadrant 2.

2. Quadrant of Quality – Important but not Urgent
​
These are tasks that contribute to the quality of your work and life. Every single Quadrant 2 activity is focused on the future.  At work these activities include:

• the time spent developing new stuff and improving old stuff – innovation and continuous improvement should keep you out of crisis management, and if you are constantly in crisis management it is a strong indicator that you are not spending enough time on quadrant 2 work;
• the time spent preparing and preventing – this is about being organised, focused on quality and on top of things;
• time spent on strategy – this is the thinking and designing work that keeps you ahead of the game and ensures that you are not relentlessly bogged down in day-to-day operational busyness;
• time spent building relationships and developing people – you do these things in the present so that you can call on them in the future;
• time spent planning – daily for tomorrow; weekly for the coming week; monthly to make sure preparation time is blocked out in your calendar.

​Outside of work, quadrant 2 tasks relate to key personal goals, events and concerns – some of which have to be attended to during working hours. Attending the gala in which your daughter is swimming qualifies; as does going to the gynae with your spouse for a pregnancy scan. Taking care of your health through regular exercise and physical exams also qualifies.

Because there is no pressing deadline on your Quadrant 2 activities, they often get bumped aside in favour of tasks with greater urgency – Quadrant 3 is the biggest culprit (see below). For this reason, it is important that you book out chunks of time in your calendar to take care of your Quadrant 2 activities. Consider these “appointments” as a matter of integrity. You wouldn’t dump an appointment with a client for weak reasons, would you? You wouldn’t do the same to a person of influence in your working world, would you? So why would you do it to your team members, your family and yourself? A commitment is a commitment. If you have blocked off time and you absolutely have to do something else during that time, then reschedule – and honour that appointment.

The first part of the day should be spent in Quadrants 1 and 2 – this is when your energy is at its best and should be used on work that serves your objectives. Having good boundaries is critical to ensuring that your most valuable part of the day isn’t gobbled up by other people’s priorities. This includes good personal boundaries – like developing the habit of task completion. You do your best work when you get into a state of flow (google it). It takes about 20 minutes to get into a state of flow – and every time you shift your focus to another task you add another 20 minutes to the task, and take away from the quality of the work.

​3. Quadrant of Deception

These are tasks that make no contribution to your goals, but they shout so loudly that you are deceived into treating them as important. It is your Quadrant 3 activities that erode the time that should be spent in Quadrant Two. It is important to defend yourself from them. These activities include:

• Many of your emails;
• Interruptions to address someone else’s concerns;
• Requests from people who outrank you (your boss’s boss or the global head office) – especially last minute requests or demands;
• Many of the meetings to which you are invited;
• Many of the reports that you compile.

There are 3 main tactics for dealing with activities in Quadrant 3:

• Delegate: are there meetings that you do not have to attend yourself? Can you ask a team member to deputise as part of their own development or because they are as capable as you of representing the team? “I won’t be attending that meeting myself. I am sending Douglas. He has the authority to engage on this subject and contribute to the decisions you will make.”

         Do you have to perform Quadrant 3 tasks yourself, or can you ask a colleague to take care of them – in which              case, say “I will be passing this on to Nqobile to do. You can follow up with her. Let me know if you have any                  problems.”

• Relegate: this means that you move these tasks to a later part of the day or you give them a lower standard of attention. For example, it is appropriate to look through your emails at the beginning of the day – not to clear them, but to establish if there is anything that must go into Quadrant 1. All the other emails can be relegated to later parts of the day. Perhaps you can attend to some emails every couple of hours – in between your more important work. And please switch off your email alerts! You don’t need them. There is no danger that you will not get to your emails – but if you have an alert popping up on your screen, and a vibration on your wrist and a ping from your cell phone, all you are doing is raising your blood pressure and exacerbating your ADD! Also please remember that the vast majority of your emails can be dealt with via a quick one-liner – most often it really is not necessary to write an email as a formal business letter!
• Negotiate: this is about managing other people’s expectations. When you receive a request (or demand) from a person who outranks you, it is completely appropriate to say “Sure I can do that for you. Can I get it to you by Friday?” You do not have to explain why. And when you get that 4.00pm email for the piece of work that is required back by 9.00am the next day, it is fine to say “Got your email. I can get that work to you, but it won’t be by 9.00am. It will be with you by the end of the day.” Again, no reason is required.

It is not mannerly or collegial to assume that someone has nothing better to do with their evening than sort out someone else’s bad planning. And if the person making the request really needs the work urgently, they can come back to you and politely ask you to pull a rabbit out of the hat. You will also have made the point that it should not be taken for granted that you can attend to last minute requests.

The same is true of interruptions. If you are busy with an Important task, it is fine to say to your colleague “I need to finish this (you don’t have to say what it is). Can we talk at 2.00?” And then be sure to be available when you said you would be.
​
Remember that the standard required for activities that make no contribution to your goals is good enough. Do not over-engineer these tasks. They do not deserve or require a higher standard. Accurate is important, but perfect is not.

4. Quadrant of Waste

These are typical time wasters. Some have to be done, like filing (does anyone still keep files of papers?). Many of them make no contribution of any kind. If you really need a break, go for a walk – with a colleague, even. That is real restoration (combined with relationship-building) – playing Candy Crush is not. Eliminate these tasks if you can. Don’t allow them to pile up if you can’t.
 
Using the Four Quadrants in Coaching

1. Explain the model. While doing so, ask your team member for examples of tasks and activities that fit into each quadrant – this will make it real for them. Also ask them which of the traps they typically fall into. Use a whiteboard or draw on a piece of paper – make the explanation as interactive as you can.
2. Once you have explained the model, ask what small changes will make the biggest difference to their ability to use the time available more effectively.
3. Now get a commitment to specific actions – you can follow up on these in the next session. And don’t fall for the “I didn’t have time” excuse!

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 fourth in a series of 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. 

Taking a coaching approach to managing and developing your team is a journey. As with any journey, we need to figure out where we intend going and how we think we might get there. You will notice that I have used the language of “intentions” rather than the language of “goals”. The reason for this is that the beginning of the coaching journey is about exploring possibility and not about creating certainty. Furthermore, developmental activities such as succession planning and career planning are also about opening up possibilities – for the organisation and for the individual – rather than about creating certainty and single-minded commitments.

It may be useful to think about the beginning of the coaching journey as a series of conversations. The first will be a conversation intended to get to know and understand your team members’ values and motivators.  The second conversation will be around understanding their hopes and dreams for their best life. The third conversation aims at coming up with a development plan with each team member. Let’s look at each conversation individually.

Conversation 1: Values and Motivators

I begin all my professional coaching programmes with an intake interview that has clients telling me their life story. I begin the process by asking them to tell me about their life from the earliest time they can remember (usually around 4 or 5 years old). I am listening for the following kinds of information:

• Key events, achievements, disappointments and people from whom they have learned important lessons. I will often stop them to ask “what did you learn from that” or “what did you learn from her”? This may tell you something about their fears (things they have learned to avoid or mistrust) and hopes (things they have learned to move towards because they are rewarding);
• Key decisions they have taken and their reasons for taking these decisions. Here I may say “Please tell me more about that decision. What made you make that choice?” This will often reveal values – and you can note these quite tentatively as something you might check later.

It is important to remember that some team members may initially be uncomfortable with revealing too much. That’s ok. The purpose of these conversations is to build trust and this happens over time. There is no need to press a team member who wants to move away from talking about childhood events. Move onto topics that they are more comfortable with. Even these will tell you something important about people’s hopes, fears, values and motivations.

If it makes you more comfortable to have a set of questions than to have the conversation meander, you can create a short agenda for yourself. This is a good habit to have early in your coaching, because it calms your own anxiety about “doing it right” or remembering everything. If you do this, hold your agenda lightly and be prepared to take little detours.

You might end this first conversation with a summary along the lines of:

• This is what I’ve heard …;
• It seems to me that the following is important to you …;
• It sounds as if you enjoy … and dislike …;
• What resonates with you? Where am I off the mark?
• Is there anything else you’d like me to know?

Expressing appreciation for your team member’s willingness to share is a good way to end this conversation.

Conversation 2: Hopes and Dreams

The purpose of this second conversation is to get a sense of what they hope to experience at the peak of their career, and what living their best life might look like. This is a far more useful conversation than the usual “tell me about your 5 year plan”, which generally elicits the answers that they think you want to hear.

There is an important caveat here. As managers and leaders, we are working with people who are free agents. We do not own them and we should not expect that they want to be with us forever. They are whole people who are on their own journey, part of which they are sharing with us. We should expect that one day they will move on and make choices that advance their own hopes and dreams. We need to be ok with this. While they are journeying with us, we want to create an environment where they can learn, grow and make a valuable contribution.

Ask questions like:

• What do you hope the peak of your career will look like?
• Tell me about 3 to 5 dreams you have for your life.

It is also useful to see how these hopes and dreams align to your team members’ values. Imagine that one of their dreams is to retire early, yet a clear personal value is contribution. It would be interesting to find out what is behind the dream.

You will then want to discuss the critical skills that your team members need to develop in order to get closer to their dreams. What skills do multiple dreams have in common? Team members can go away and do this privately and bring it with them to the third conversation.

Conversation 3: The Development Plan
The purpose of this third discussion is to reach agreement on the following:

• What are the skills that the team member needs to develop in order to move closer to the realisation of one or more of their dreams?
• What work opportunities or projects would help them to develop these skills? How could this person’s role or responsibilities be adapted in order to support them in learning these new skills?
• How else could they learn these skills? A mentor? A course? Some reading? A personal project outside of work?
• How will you coach and support them in the acquisition of these new skills? How often? When?

Future articles will give you additional tools to use with your team members as you continue your coaching journey with them.

To quote Scott from her website:

Obnoxious Aggression™ is what happens when you challenge but don’t care. It’s praise that doesn’t feel sincere or criticism that isn’t delivered kindly.
Ruinous Empathy™ is what happens when you care but don’t challenge. It’s praise that isn’t specific enough to help the person understand what was good or criticism that is sugarcoated and unclear.
Manipulative Insincerity™ is what happens when you neither care nor challenge. It’s praise that is non-specific and insincere or criticism that is neither clear nor kind.
 
Radical Candour is the quality of feedback that happens when you skilfully challenge directly within the context of a relationship in which your personal care is clearly apparent. It is not enough for you to know that you care. It is important for your team member or colleague to also know that you care.

Radical candour is the quadrant within with the Coaching Manager belongs. Coaching Managers I have worked with have had some or all of the following good intentions in adopting coaching as their style:

• To be a good manager
• To take a good team and make it really great
• To enable team members to achieve their potential
• To help average and weak performers to improve
• To get people to think for themselves
• To foster innovation in the team
• To build relationships
• To develop people in support of their career aspirations

We really can’t engage well on any of these topics if there isn’t a relationship characterised by care and complete honesty between you and your team members.

One of the most important leadership lessons that I have learned in my years of working with managers is that if you want your team members to be able to take honest feedback and guidance, you yourself need to be able to take it. A second aspect of this is that you also need to be able to take it publicly. Good managers hold themselves to the injunction to praise publicly and criticise privately – well you don’t have that luxury.

This is actually something of a blessing in that it presents you with the opportunity to model or demonstrate healthy responses to criticism. When your team sees you take criticism in an open and non-defensive manner, you become better able to expect that they will take criticism or constructive feedback in a non-defensive way. If you genuinely want to elevate the levels of honesty between yourself and your team, you need to put yourself directly in line for feedback.
Also from the wonderful Kim Scott book, Radical Candor, comes this fabulous question that invites feedback on your own impact on your team: What can I do or stop doing that will make it easier to work with me?

What a wonderful question! But how you respond is everything. On no account should you defend, justify, explain or retaliate. If you do that, you will never get useful feedback again. Appropriate responses include:

• Thank you for that. It must have taken courage to go first.
• Tell me more so that I understand you better.
• That’s really useful! I didn’t realise I was doing that!
• I will definitely give that a try. Thank you.
• You’ve given me something to think about. Can I go away and think about this and then we can pick it up again next time? (And make sure that you do!)

Some of the feedback will be easy to take. Some of it will be more difficult. When the feedback is difficult, make sure to press your internal Pause Button. Breathe. Smile. Say thank you.

When the feedback is difficult and you feel defensive, take time to think about it. Chat with a colleague who you trust to be honest with you. Ask for their input on what they have observed in your behaviour. Ask their advice on how you might respond. Prepare your response. Test your response with your trusted colleague. When you are happy that your response will come across as thoughtful and mature, go back to the team. Tell the team what you intend doing with the feedback and how they can support you in your efforts.

Demonstrating your ability to take feedback or criticism well publicly sets the foundation for you to be able to give feedback privately to your team members, and use that feedback to support their growth. You have shown how it is done; you have demonstrated that you and your team are taking a journey together; you have demonstrated humility as well as courage; you have earned a special kind of respect; and you have demonstrated a respectful response.

In the next article, I will talk about having an evaluative discussion with team members that will be the basis for a coaching journey you could take with them.

In the meantime, I highly recommend that you read Radical Candor by Kim Scott (ISBN 978150984538590100) available in print, e-book and audiobook. Share it with your team! Use it as the basis for some really authentic conversations.
 
About the Author:
 
Belinda Davies is a business coach with special interests in strategy and leadership. She has been a coach since 2002, having been in the business of people development since 1986. She is a credentialed COMENSA Master Practitioner.

Contact details:
Email     [email protected]
Mobile  0825519504
Website: www.leadershipsolutions.co.za

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 second in a monthly series of 12 articles first published in SA Coaching News, in which I will 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.
 
Learning is Everything: Learning Never Ends

Your role as a manager coach is to enable ongoing learning amongst your team members (both collectively and individually), and this necessitates ongoing learning on your part. We all learn differently, and we learn best when we seek learning in accordance with our own learning styles. Our team members learn best when we help them firstly to become aware of their preferred learning style, and secondly when we pitch our coaching conversations in accordance with these styles.

David Kolb introduced us to his learning styles in 1984, and he describes 4 distinct learning styles that are described here: https://www.simplypsychology.org/learning-kolb.html. It is not the purpose of this article to explain the 4 learning styles, but to discuss how you can use your understanding of your own and other people’s learning styles in a practical way.

Essentially, Kolb proposes that there are 4 learning styles:

1. Those who learn by feeling and watching (Diverging) – these are people who gather information and form ideas from different points of view; they are interested in people and like to gather ideas and information; they struggle to move into specific action because there are so many possibilities;
2. Those who learn by thinking and watching (Assimilating) – these are people who value ideas and concepts over people; they spend a lot of time understanding something and often put themselves under pressure to know everything before they will do anything;
3. Those who learn by thinking and doing (Converging) – these are problem solvers who use their learning to solve practical problems (often technical ones) and enjoy experimenting with new ideas; they may avoid tackling interpersonal or social issues ;
4. Those who learn by feeling and doing (Accommodating) – these are people who tend to take a practical and experiential approach to solving problems, and tend to be quite comfortable diving into action based on gut instinct and a willingness to experiment in pursuit of solutions; they will follow other people’s views or ideas rather than thinking things through for themselves, including thinking about possible consequences.​