COACHING AT WORK. Powering your Team with Awareness, Responsibility and Trust. Matt Somers

Transcription

1 COACHING AT WORK

2 COACHING AT WORK Powering your Team with Awareness, Responsibility and Trust Matt Somers

3 Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 8SQ, England Telephone (+44) Under the Jossey-Bass imprint, Jossey-Bass, 989 Market Street, San Francisco CA , USA (for orders and customer service enquiries): Visit our Home Page on All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP, UK, without the permission in writing of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 8SQ, England, or ed to permreq@wiley.co.uk, or faxed to (+44) Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The Publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the Publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Other Wiley Editorial Offi ces Wiley have other editiorial offi ces in the USA, Germany, Australia, Singapore and Canada. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Somers, Matt. Coaching at work: powering your team with awareness, responsibility, and trust/ Matt Somers. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-10: (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Employees Coaching of 2. Teams in the workplace Management. 3. Employee empowerment. I. Title. HF C53S dc British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN (HB) ISBN (HB) Typeset in 11.5/15pt Bembo and Univers by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall, UK This book is printed on acid-free paper responsibly manufactured from sustainable forestry in which at least two trees are planted for each one used for paper production.

4 CONTENTS FOREWORD PREFACE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii ix xiii INTRODUCTION 1 PART 1 HOW TO COACH 1 Peak Coaching Model Pt 1 Potential & Interference 9 2 Peak Coaching Model Pt 2 Performance, Learning & Enjoyment 33 3 Peak Coaching Model Pt 3 Coaching & Communication 57 4 Peak Coaching Model Pt 4 The Coaching ARROW 85 5 The Model In Practice 115

5 vi CONTENTS PART 2 HOW TO APPLY COACHING Introduction Sales Presentations Personal Organisation Performance Review Career Development 219 PART 3 HOW TO IMPLEMENT COACHING Introduction Towards a Coaching Culture Implementing a Coaching Programme Evaluating the Programme Making the Business Case for Coaching 297 EPILOGUE 315 REFERENCES 317 INDEX 319

6 FOREWORD At the basic level coaching is a technique, with practice it becomes a skill and with dedication it can become an art form, always different, always an opportunity for learning. I fi rst met Matt many years ago when he attended a Coaching for Managers course at a big bank for which he worked. Every so often someone unexpectedly fi nds the course more important than the corporation. So it was with Matt. He really took to coaching. To prove it, this is now his second excellent book on the subject. Imagine my surprise then to fi nd I was becoming more and more frustrated as I continued to read. Suddenly I realise why. I was looking for faults, for its weakness so I could give Matt wise council before it was set in print. I became irked because I could not fi nd anything to correct or complain about. I laughed at my folly and thoroughly enjoyed the rest of my read. Often authors try to be clever to demonstrate they are superior to the reader. Matt does not fall into that ego trap. Coaching At Work is a very sound, logical, practical guide to the many applications of coaching in business, written with the passion that Matt has for the subject. Of course you can read it cover to cover as I did, but the alternative that Matt suggests is to read it in segments.

7 viii FOREWORD This is my opinion and would be best for the user. Matt thoroughly covers many business applications with their subtle differences. I recommend that if your focus is in sales for example, that you read part one on how to coach then read the section on sales in part two. Other such sections reside in part two on the most common applications of coaching at work, presentations, personal organisation, performance review, and personal development. Part three deals with implementation, and building a coaching culture in an organisation. This something that is in my opinion so much more worthwhile and productive than providing executive or specialist outside coaching to organisations. It can really make a difference and its impact can be evaluated as Matt also shows in this section. As a long standing professional coach I am very selective about my coaches. As a result I have been coached by a few excellent coaches. I have never been coached by Matt but in his case I would not hesitate to accept. John Whitmore Author of Coaching for Performance

8 PREFACE I am obsessed with work. I realise in making this claim that I risk alienating those readers who have worked long and hard to bring a little balance into their own working lives and those of their colleagues, so let me qualify the statement. I am not obsessed with working. I believe that for the most part people spend too many of their waking hours in factories, shops and offi ces and that many of these hours are not really productive. There is a difference between business and busyness. Throughout Europe and perhaps the UK in particular, this is further exacerbated by appending the start and end of each working day with as much as two hours travel in either direction. The promise of home working has also yet to materialise in my experience. No, my obsession is with work itself. The way that places of work are organised and structured, the way that business is run and won, the increasing importance of work in people s lives and most crucially the business of deploying and developing staff. This preoccupation started early for me. I left school at aged 16 with the four O Levels I needed to secure my job with a high

9 x PREFACE street bank. Almost from the fi rst day I was more interested in what was happening on the office side of the business than anything the customers might be getting up to. I was particularly puzzled by the way that one group of people apparently called management, would talk to another group of people apparently called staff. These interactions were usually terse, unfriendly affairs consisting of managers more or less ordering staff to do certain tasks which the staff then carried out to whatever minimum standard was necessary to get by. Looking back it all seemed quite adversarial with little sense of mutual success. In my naivety I thought that people were people and that if you expected people to work hard and achieve results then you ought to treat them well; Do unto others... and all that. This being the early 1980s however, high street banking was characterised by complacency, knowing that customers would continue to come and profits continue to fl ow however the business was run, and however its people were treated. The de-regulation of the industry and the consequent increased competition in the 1990s changed all this. Now there was a need for staff to provide superior service lest the customers take their business elsewhere. People working in banks needed to become sales people and actively promote the bank s products and services. Jobs which had been thought of as secure for a lifetime were now the subject of continual uncertainty. The whole backdrop to the business changed irreversibly, but the management style did not. Those who struggled to make the change from bank clerk to sales person were told to shape up and get with the times. They were sent on sales training courses and if that didn t work they were sent on them again. The pressure was on to perform; crude targets and incentives were introduced. Managers were hauled before directors and told to try harder, Staff were hauled before managers and told to try harder, or else. Yours truly watched all this unfold with a sort of morbid fascination.

10 PREFACE xi Of course banking as an industry was not alone in experiencing change of this kind or on this scale. Globalisation, the march of technology, downsizing and so on were all transforming the whole landscape of work and organisational life. By now I was working in Personnel and had been introduced to the world of training and development. I d had some exposure to management and team leader type roles and was seen to have an ability to get people on side and achieving results. As a management trainer I was similarly able to press the right buttons and to help people access their ability. I guess I was coaching them although I had no idea at the time that there even was such a thing, certainly not in the world of work. In 1995 I was given the opportunity to attend a Performance Coaching course run by Sir John Whitmore and his fi rm Performance Consultants. As I learnt about coaching principles and practices I came to realise that coaching was simply a way of describing an approach to people at work that I had always believed in but had never been able to articulate. It offered an explanation as to why certain of my managers had been able to get the best from me and why others had left me exhausted and scanning the job advertisements. Coaching described a management style that I could see was essential for the turbulent times that were coming. From that point forward coaching became the lynchpin of all my training and development work. I left banking and established my own consultancy practice where I found myself extolling the virtues of coaching and high performance even when I d essentially been hired to teach Time Management or Presentation Skills. Eventually I decided to grasp the nettle and focus my practice on teaching managers how to coach. Over the years we have taken coaching and applied it across the widest variety of organisations; public and private, small and large, in virtually every sector. All of this work has informed the ideas that I will present in this book.

11 xii PREFACE This book is intended for anyone who must achieve results through others irrespective of age, gender, job-title, seniority, qualifications or experience. Indeed our training courses often attract people with no line management responsibility at all but whose work as business advisors or career counsellors for example suggests that coaching principles can apply to the external client as well as the internal team member. That being said, I have written the book with the Human Resources (HR) Professional closest in mind as it seems that HR is often given the role of being both coach and implementer of coaching at the same time. This does not seem unreasonable and I think that HR is well-placed to act as champion of coaching. However, I hope that any of the increasing number of students of coaching be they formal or casual, will fi nd a wealth of ideas here to help achieve coaching s ultimate goal: To see people fulfi l their potential. Matt Somers March 2006

12 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I sometimes think my life is just one big role-play exercise with my family, friends, and colleagues having been briefed to make sure I learn some important lessons. So, in no particular order... Thanks to Timothy Gallwey and Sir John Whitmore for making me think, that s interesting.... Carol. Thank you for teaching me about resilience and never giving up. Kenny. Thank you for teaching me that learning is easier than being taught. Ian, thanks for the concept of useful thinking. Never stop looking for the cart wheelers my friend. Thanks to Samantha, Francesca, Jo, Darren and Dan at John Wiley and Sons Ltd for helping me turn this vague aim into a detailed way forward.

13 xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to my Mum, Dad and sister for giving me the values of fairness, hard-work and honesty. Thanks to my extended family for showing me that those values are widely held. Thanks to my wonderful wife Lesley for teaching me about doing instead of thinking and thanks to my beautiful daughter Evie for teaching me that life is for living and that it really doesn t matter if it s raining. You are all wonderful coaches.