I'm taking a break from my series on resilience, grit and mental toughness to share a podcast.

I was invited by my lifelong friend, Penny Milner Smyth of Ethicalways to participate in a radio show on which she is a regular. The show is all about business ethics and corruption, which is her area of expertise.
The main idea is that following an instruction to do something unethical or illegal does not let you off the hook - you can be prosecuted in your personal capacity.

So how do you respond when you are instructed to do something unethical or illegal? 

1. Notice your physical response - you will most likely have a tightness in your neck or a feeling in the pit of your stomach that tells you that there is danger. This is not a good time to try and have a cogent conversation as these feelings are a strong indicator that your pre-frontal cortex has been disrupted and you won't be able to think clearly.

2. Buy time - or be non-commital. Ask if you can discuss this later or if you can have some time to think about it. If you don't have the presence of mind to do this, no matter. Proceed to step 3.

3. Gather your thoughts. Get some guidance and advice and formulate a response. Prepare yourself for a difficult conversation. Write the most important points down.

4. Pick a good time - make sure it is a time when you can be uninterrupted. Share that you have had difficulty sleeping since the last conversation; that this is a really difficult conversation to have; and ask that you be heard to the end. Share your concern about the instruction and especially your concern for your manager (let's assume it was your boss who gave the instruction - although it could have come from anyone who outranks you) - that this course of action will have an impact on them that they might not have thought of. Make it clear that you value working for them and that you would hate for the working relationship to be disrupted. If this doesn't work, proceed to step 5.

5. Ask them to get this done without involving you - please can you ask someone else to do it; please don't involve me. You need to find ways to increase your resistance. If this fails, proceed to step 6.
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6. Ask to have the instruction in writing, respond with your concerns in writing and then do what you must do.

This is a very difficujlt position to be in and it always carries risks. You can insulate yourself from such requests if you show yourself over the long term to be a "principled rebel". In order to establish yourself as a principled rebel, it is important that you do the following:

• Build good relationships across your organisation, especially with people who have influence in the business - such as senior people in HR or Finance. Build relationships with your manager and your team mates and make sure that you have plenty of "relational capital". It is just not good enough to fly under the radar and mind your own business.
• Be a consistent good contributor. Being a top performer gives you license to push back. Top performers always have more "wriggle room" than those who do no more than what is required. Their views also tend to be respected more than those of average performers.
• Be an original thinker. Be known as someone who resists anything "dodgy". Contribute good ideas for doing things better and differently.

People who do these 3 things are far less likely to be asked to do anything untoward because they have established themselves as less corruptible than others.

Have a listen to the podcast below - it's only 20 minutes. You'll find it useful and interesting.

Call to Action
Remember that values conflicts are great topics to take into coaching, so if you find yourself in this situation, send me an email and we can talk about some coaching for you: [email protected]

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.