Every team has what I like to call “vital signs” which the Manager of the team needs to keep an eye on every day. If we use our medical analogy, the nurse checks the vital signs of the patient in order to ascertain if there are any problems that might need attention. If the patient’s blood pressure, temperature or pulse rate are either too high or too low, these are indications that the doctor may need to obtain more information (perhaps in the form of tests) in order to diagnose and treat the problem.

So too does a team have vital signs. These are indicators that the team is doing what it should be doing in order to ensure that it delivers the results by which its performance is measured. The principle is as follows:
If the team does enough of the right things at the right time and in the right way, then it will achieve the results it seeks.

In the book “Great by Choice” (Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen) – which I highly recommend – the authors talk about the 20 Mile March. We live in an economic environment that is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA), and one of the 3 habits that sets the outstanding performers apart from the businesses who fail or only just survive is that of “Obsessive Discipline”. This means that there is absolute clarity on what must be done in good times and in bad times. Achieving the daily 20 Mile March requires “hitting specific performance markers with great consistency over a long period of time.” These performance markers drive the results that the team is looking for.

Let me give you a really simple example from the world of truck sales to illustrate the point:
You have to see enough customers every day, in order to write enough quotations
every week, in order to sign up enough offers to purchase every month, in order to
deliver enough vehicles in order to achieve your monthly target.
So the vital signs in truck sales are:

• Customer contacts
• Quotations
• Offers to Purchase
• Deliveries

This means that on at least a weekly basis, a Sales Manager needs to actively monitor what is happening with each Sales Executive in order to know where and how to support them. If your Sales Executives are reaching or exceeding their targets, then they will need little from their Manager other than being available on request and checking in with them in a periodic one-on-one. However, if a Sales Executive is struggling, then looking at their vital signs will give you an indication of what support they need:

• Are they seeing enough prospects? If not, what will assist them to see more prospective buyers?
• Are they seeing enough prospects but not writing enough quotations? If so, how are they conducting their contact conversations and what can they do differently to increase the number of quotations they are asked for?
• Are they seeing enough prospects and submitting enough quotations, but still not getting enough signed Offers to Purchase? In which case, how can they improve their closing skills?
• And finally, are they getting enough signed Offers to Purchase, but still losing some of these sales? What might be happening that is getting in the way of Offers to Purchase resulting in Deliveries?

Tracking these vital signs closely and often with Sales Executives who are not achieving their targets puts their Sales Manager in a position to do some remedial coaching early on, resulting in greater success – which ultimately impacts on the overall success of the team.

I’ve used a commercial vehicle sales example because it provides really tangible drivers of performance – anyone can identify with these even if they are not in the same field.
​
So think about your own area of the business:

1. What are the KPIs in your part of the business? These are the Output Goals.
2. For each KPI, identify the behaviours, actions or targets that comprise the Input Goals – that is, the achievement of the Input Goals is what will deliver the Output goals.
3. How can you track and monitor the Input Goals? Come up with some tentative ideas for a dashboard that focuses on the Input Goals.
4. For each of the Input Goals, identify what could be going wrong in the event that those goals are not tracking.

In the next article, I’ll write about how you could get the team on board so that they are excited about a Scoreboard – rather than resistant. You don’t want them to treat any of this as admin! So process is everything.

​There has been some interest in the notion that fear is a notorious performance inhibitor, and I have had some interesting questions about how one can bring about improvements to the performance of underperforming managers without invoking fear.
Let’s look at some background. If you are noticing that a manager is underperforming, chances are this is because you have noticed that she is not delivering on a performance expectation that is perfectly clear in your mind – in other words, what she is delivering falls short of your expectations.
It has been my experience that managers have the greatest difficulty handling such issues with the managers who report to them. I think there may be some ego issues – it is difficult to acknowledge that you may have put the wrong person into the job. They may have difficulty defining what it is a manager should be doing in order to deliver on expectations. I think they may also have difficulty having these difficult conversations. They are stressful and they make you anxious. But consider this: will yelling and losing your temper change anything? No – in fact, it will probably make things worse. Will leaving well enough alone and hoping for the best work? No – and you will have the further impact of disillusioning the rest of the team with your failure to take action.
The ability to correct underperformance without using threat or fear depends on the following:

1. The performance expectation must be clear in your own mind. You need to be able to describe it in clear, specific, measurable or observable terms.
2. The performance expectation must be as clear in your team member’s mind as it is in yours. You must have articulated your expectations in a series of discussions with your team member, and your team member must be able to describe the following accurately:
   1. What must be done / what must be delivered?
   2. How it must be done?
   3. When, how often and by when it must be done?
   4. What must be done when it goes wrong?
   5. How is performance measured?
   6. What is the impact of falling short of expectations, and what will be expected if this happens?

If you have not heard these expectations from your team member’s own lips you do not know if she has the same picture of the expectations in her mind as you do in yours.

1. The performance expectation must be monitored regularly and the team member must be given regular feedback on her performance in comparison with the expectation.
   1. She needs to know where she is meeting expectations and where she is falling short.
   2. She needs to have the opportunity to think through and discuss the possible reasons why she is falling short.
   3. She needs to have the opportunity to think through and discuss what she needs/needs to do in order to bring performance back up to expectations.
   4. She needs to know what may happen if she continues to fall short of expectations.
   5. She needs to be encouraged to keep trying and be reminded that she has your support.
2. You need to be sure that you have done all that can reasonably be expected in order to enable her to reach the required levels of performance:
   1. Have you ensured that she has the necessary skill? Have you provided training/coaching in the event that there is a skills problem?
   2. Have you made sure that performance to the standard is recognised and acknowledged (or is it ignored or even punished in some way)?
   3. Have you ensured that there are no obstacles to performance – everything that is required to do the job is in place and works (equipment and technology works and is suitable for the job, the information required is available timeously, the necessary people and other resources are available to do the work, etc.)?
   4. Have you given regular feedback on progress – including noticing when progress is made and saying something when there is insufficient progress?

If you have done all of the above and are still not happy with the performance of your team member it is appropriate to have a conversation that clarifies that meeting the performance expectation is not negotiable.
There are some steps to follow:

1. Get your mind right – do not have this conversation if you are angry and uptight. Do your preparation.
2. Articulate the performance that is expected and describe how it continues to fall short.
3. Remind the team member of the things you have done in order to give her the best chance to succeed.
4. Ask if she thinks there is anything else you should be doing in order to enable her to succeed. Discuss this and agree if this is reasonable or not. If it is a reasonable request, agree to the action. If it is not a reasonable request, say so and give a reason.
5. Clearly state that meeting the required standard of performance is non-negotiable, and the deadline by which such performance must have been achieved. Also describe what you will have to do in the event that the team member continues to fall short of expectations. This may include taking disciplinary action. Indicate your reluctance to go this route and that you hope it will not be necessary.
6. Make yourself available in the event that the team member requires any further support from you.

In your dealings with the team member, make sure that you remain calm and that you never threaten. Advising someone of the consequences of continued underperformance is not a threat – and there should be no threat in your tone. It is a statement of fact – that no manager can be expected to tolerate prolonged underperformance from any team member. Be sure that you are prepared to follow through.
In all of this, it is so important to remember that we are dealing with people, and compassion is key. We are living in tough times, and people are struggling with all sorts of things that we know nothing about. Discussions relating to the possibility that someone may lose their job are not to be taken lightly. While it is never a good idea to allow underperformance to run too long, it is important that you can look yourself in the mirror and know that you have done everything you can, and more, to help this person perform as required.
A word to the wise – it is preferable to have the first of these conversations as early as possible. The longer underperformance is allowed to persist, the greater the difficulty in correcting it – after all, your silence and inaction implies that the performance is okay.

​I have really struggled through the last 2 weeks. The first 3 weeks of lockdown were not too bad. I discovered that I really like this way of working – going up to my office, being able to write, seeing my clients online, and all while looking out at my lovely garden and my beautiful view. I was excited at the opportunities that this time of Covid-19 might bring, despite the inevitable hardship. The idea of no longer having to get up at 3.45am in order to catch a 6.00am plane to get to clients in another city was replaced with the anticipation of being able to work with clients anywhere in the world, because they would have had personal experience of how a virtual coaching session can be completely satisfactory. I understood that I would have to adapt to the online world in terms of my marketing, and that I would need to work out how to build relationships with prospective clients despite not being able to actually be in the same room with them.
Then last week I just felt sad. My son is stuck in Vietnam unable to work and unable to come home. I can’t do anything to help him except send money (some things don’t change). My mother lives alone in a retirement facility and has been confined to her flat. Furthermore, she has always resisted technology, so she does not even have the benefit of video calls and family chats – and I can’t do anything to help her except call her every day. Dear friends of mine are losing their businesses. Under any other circumstances, I would be providing them with coaching in order to find ways to survive and thrive – but the current circumstances provide almost no wriggle room.
I was kind to myself last week – I allowed myself to be sad. I recognised that I was dealing with a kind of grief – the loss of all that was familiar; the loss of my familiar ways of connecting with clients and prospects; the loss of the ease that had characterised my working life. I reminded myself that it is ok to have a meltdown; I don’t have to be strong every single day; I don’t always have to put a positive spin on things. Sometimes things just suck and it’s ok to feel sad about that.
Then this week came around and I really struggled to find the energy to do what I know I must do. It felt like I was having to dig really deep every single minute of every day – and I really couldn’t find the energy to do so all the time. I took this to my regular session with my Coach Supervisor, Graham. I asked him to just coach me through what was happening to me. I came out of that session with some really powerful insights that might be useful to you.
Graham immediately connected my malaise with my enneagram. I am an 8 – a dominant driver. I make the world manageable and safe by taking charge and being in control. I have broad shoulders and a pretty thick skin; the capacity for a heavy workload and a high work rate; I am adept at figuring out how to respond effectively in almost every situation; I am most comfortable when I am in charge; being in control and having things under control is my happy place. On the flipside, powerlessness makes me feel extremely vulnerable – and 8’s do not like vulnerability at all. It threatens their sense of being capable and effective people. The most frightening place for me is where I cannot figure out an effective way to respond to a difficult situation. I realised from my discussion with Graham that this really is the first time in my life where I have felt utterly powerless. On every other previous occasion where things have been difficult either in business or in life, I have been able to figure out how to take charge and work things out – but I was feeling the vulnerability of simply not having an answer. And in feeling so utterly powerless, I was allowing myself to catastrophise. I remember using some really dramatic language around “this government having its boot very firmly on the neck of the people”, and “if they wanted a Venezuala, then this is just the perfect storm!” This is not like me at all. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Generally I am an optimist. One of my axioms is “Everything works out in the end, and if it hasn’t worked out yet, you haven’t reached the end.”
Having had the insight that my malaise is about powerlessness, the balance of my coaching session was about reframing my current circumstances, and figuring out how to take back some power.
But something else happened in that conversation - I shifted my attention to my clients, who are generally executives and senior managers in large companies. Many of my clients are also enneagram 8’s and I am sure that many of them are having their own struggles with powerlessness. That sense of powerlessness will manifest in different 8s in different ways. Because I work alone and don’t have a team that I need to manage and inspire to get things done, I went into my malaise (and not a little grumpiness). But leaders of teams will often do the complete opposite. They will move into intense activity and “pushiness” in order to salvage the situation and save the day. I have clients who, through lockdown when sales activities had all but come to a halt, were in virtual meetings from 8.00am until 6.00pm. What were they talking about? And with such intensity? The 8s were hustling to wrestle back some control - whether it was control over a team that is working remotely, or control over the inevitable financial crisis that their business faces. Typical behaviours when 8s feel under threat are to dominate, confront, be forceful, impose their will and vision, be brave and forge ahead, no matter what. (But that doesn’t work very well when you work alone!) What gets lost is the open-heartedness and caring that is true of 8s when they are at their best.
I think there are 2 topics here. Firstly, if being in control is your familiar place, what do you need to do to regain a calm sense of personal effectiveness despite the fact that there is so much going on that is outside of your control? Secondly, how should you lead your team so that you create a sense of calm and give them the sense that there are things they can do to exercise at least some influence or power despite the impact of outside circumstances over which they have no control at all.
The starting point is to recognise the vulnerability that you experience because of powerlessness, as well as the negative impact this has on your thoughts and your behaviour. Consider using these questions to help you:

• What am I feeling that is so intensely uncomfortable right now?
• What are the thoughts that have given rise to these feelings?
• How am I showing up / behaving that is directly related to my feelings and thoughts?
• How is this further impacting on my thoughts and feelings?
• How is this impacting on my team members?

Then you can tackle some of your thoughts and test whether they represent some form of truth or if they are unhelpful assumptions and catastrophising. Graham asked me to reframe or challenge some of my thoughts, and one of them was the “boot on the neck of the populace” thought. Is that really what the government is doing? Is that really what Cyril Ramaphosa and Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma are doing? Then my compassionate capacity kicked in and I was able to wonder if people who had such a negative agenda would look so utterly exhausted all the time. Surely not.
Maybe these questions will help:

• Which of your thoughts are true? Which are untrue? And which do you not know ithe truth of?
• In the case of the thoughts that are untrue, what truth is more likely?
• Where you simply don’t know, what alternative assumption would be more helpful?

Finally, you can identify areas in which you can take back some power. For me it was about the fact that I know there are certain things that I must do every single day in order to build relationships with new prospects in a world where I cannot go and meet them. I must phone at least 2 clients every day, just to connect and see how they are doing. I must post an engaging article, quote or video clip every single day in order to be in front of my prospective market. I must respond in an generous and engaging way to posts by people either in or connected to my market. I think of these as my 20 Mile March.

• What do you need to do every single day in order to “impose order amidst disorder, discipline amidst chaos, and consistency amidst uncertainty” (Jim Collins)?

The second area to think about is your team. How can you help them to also “impose order amidst disorder, discipline amidst chaos, and consistency amidst uncertainty”? When under intense pressure, 8s forget that they are dealing with team members who are also struggling. 8s come into their own when they are able to “use their strength to improve others' lives, becoming heroic, magnanimous, and inspiring”. Consider these questions:

• What does each of your team members need from you right now? Don’t guess! If you don’t know because they haven’t told you or because you don’t know them really well, then ask!
• How can you help your team members to impose their own order, discipline and consistency? This is probably a coaching or mentoring opportunity?
• How can you inspire your team to be courageous during these times?

During the course of May I will add to these thoughts. If you are interested, please connect with and follow me on LinkedIn or follow my Leadership Solutions Facebook page.
If you think anyone else would find this article useful, please share it. 

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.
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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
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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.
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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.

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.​