The Coaching Roundabout
Dick Richards
Originally published in Fast Cycle Organization Development: A Fieldbook for Organization Transformation. Merrill C. Anderson (editor), South Western Publications.
Coaching an executive or manager who is leading organizational change is very much like navigating the traffic circles, called roundabouts, that are so ubiquitous along British highways. In Britain, a driver who knows where he is headed enters an unfamiliar roundabout, then drives around the circle looking for a sign pointing to a target, usually a village or region, lying between the roundabout and the ultimate destination. The driver thus proceeds from roundabout to roundabout, from target to target, until reaching the ultimate destination. Getting to that ultimate destination requires some idea of what intermediate targets to head for.
Coaching for executives and managers has become a considerably popular and potent tool. It has many advantages. It responds to the demands of the current business universe. It occurs in work time, rather than days of training away from the business. It focuses on the very real and very live issues of the business moment, rather than on training simulations or exercises like a raft trip on the Colorado River. It is highly personalized and customized, and so can be right on the mark for the individual.
The ultimate destination of such coaching is to enable the executive or manager to guide change in a way that makes best use of who he or she is, is most personally fulfilling, and is best for the organization. Getting there, like getting from London to Land’s End by car, requires knowing the intermediate targets.
In my own work of coaching executives and managers who are challenged by the need to facilitate rapid change, I have discovered four crucial roundabouts, four targets to head for along the route to the ultimate destination. They are:
Speaking from the heart,
Framing an authentic role,
Making good use of your life,
Aligning behavior with intention.
SPEAKING FROM THE HEART
A restaurant in Atlanta. I am having dinner with the regional head of sales for a giant financial services company. I am his coach; we are preparing for a meeting tomorrow. He is expected to deliver an urgent message to about two hundred and fifty people. The message was honed in the company’s headquarters, and will be delivered by people like him throughout the company. The message goes something like this: “We are not doing well. The competition is passing us. We have lost sight of our customers. We have lost their trust, and must reclaim it. We have to stop obsessing over our internal skirmishes, pull together, and make things work for the people we serve. We have little time: we must act now.”
Those are the things he is expected to say, and he seems ready to say them, seems even to believe them. After we review those sobering messages, and once we are confident that he has the script down pat, over dinner, he relaxes.
“You know,” he tells me, “I cannot fathom how we lost sight of the fact that what we do is help our customers fulfill their dreams.” He pauses, shakes his head sadly and says, “That is what we are supposed to do, you know. We are supposed to help people fulfill their dreams. Their financial dreams, at least. That is what our customers expect of us. It is why they pay us.”
The way he speaks this second message, the message that emanates from him rather than from headquarters is qualitatively different. It is not that the message from headquarters is wrong, but that this latter message comes from his heart rather than from the pages of script he has received by e-mail. His tone of voice is different; it is at once more thoughtful and more passionate. It resonates more from who he is as a person, rather than from his role as a Manager of Sales.
“I hope you will say that tomorrow,” I tell him. He looks surprised, places his knife and fork on the plate in front of him, rests his hands on the table, and looks directly at me.
“You think I should?” he asks.
“Absolutely,” I tell him. “The logic of what your people must do is irrefutable: pay attention to what customers want. Who today can argue with that message? But the passion, the caring about it, has to come from your people, and that can start with you. This business of helping people fulfill their dreams - this is what matters to you. I could hear it in your voice just a moment ago. This is the arena in which you can take leadership. It is what you care about. I urge you to take responsibility for what you care about. Tell people about it. Tell the people tomorrow.”
He seemed doubtful at dinner, unsure that his own words, expressing his own thoughts and feelings, were fit to broadcast. But the next day, in the midst of delivering the message from headquarters, he pauses to tell the assemblage how he feels about the dreams of their customers. There is not a sound in the room except for his voice. When he finishes, the room hesitates in silence, not quite believing what they have just heard, not quite believing that an executive of the firm cares in such a heartfelt way about the dreams of their customers, and is willing to say so. After the moment of stunned silence, a moment when he looks around the room nervously for some sign that he has succeeded or failed, the room erupts in applause.
Speaking from the heart means finding declarations that are resonant for one’s self and that also forward the action in the organization’s change process. Coaches can listen for those messages. They are often expressed in unguarded moments, over dinner or at a break during a meeting. They are only expressed after some measure of trust has been established between the coach and the person being coached.
FRAMING AN AUTHENTIC ROLE
He is CEO of a foreign division for a large computer company. He is one of those executives who are sent in to clean up wretched situations, and he has been, throughout his career, very successful at doing this.
His way of improving these situations is, in his own words, to “kick butt.” One member of his management team describes him as “abusive.” Many members of his management team seem afraid of him.
He is not the kind of executive who ordinarily asks for help from a consultant such as myself, and he has not asked for personal coaching, but for help with his management team. Still, it seems an odd request from someone as gruff as he.
We talk for some time about the other members of his team, and he tells me what he would like me to do for each of them. So-and-so needs to be more of a team player. So-and-so needs to pay more attention to our top priorities, etc.
I ask him, “What about you? What do you need?”
He tells me that he was passed over for a larger assignment. The corporate CEO, his boss, told him that, although they would have loved to have his skills and knowledge in the new assignment, his style had abraded too many people. The new assignment would have brought him home from his foreign outpost to corporate headquarters, something he very much wants because his children and grandchildren live nearby. The implication is that some people at headquarters prefer he be kept at a distance. The CEO told him that his style, although useful to the company, had become career limiting. He wants to find a new way.
The division under his stewardship is doing well. He has turned it around. His management team seems competent and dedicated. He tells me he has achieved this with his usual brand of “butt-kicking” which he also calls “tough love.”
I ask him if that is how he raised his children, practicing tough-love. He tells me it was. I ask him how he is with his grandchildren. He says, “Oh, that is a totally different story. I am much more relaxed with them. I spend my time with them enjoying them and helping them learn.”
I tell him, “Maybe you could be more that way with the people around you. Less a “tough love” kind of manager, more like a grandparent. Maybe you could be more relaxed with them, enjoy them more, and focus on helping them learn.
He agrees to try that, I agree to help him, and two years later he is awarded the assignment he wanted in headquarters.
Framing an authentic role - tough love father, grandfather, earth mother, etc - allows us to bring an entire set of behaviors to a situation that are congruent with both ourselves and the requirements of the situation. It means uncovering some existing part of the self, not learning new behavior. Too often we bring misconceptions or unproductive habits to our various life and work roles. We behave in stereotypical ways, or ways that do not serve us or those around us. Executives and managers are particularly prone to these mistakes because we have so many preconceived notions about how they are supposed to be.
MAKING GOOD USE OF YOUR LIFE
He is a product line manager in a Latin American affiliate of a large American computer products company. His primary reporting relationship is to a corporate product line manager in the states. He is also a member of his country’s management team.
There appears to be much to be gained by cooperation with other product line managers on the management team. There may be opportunities to bundle his products with others to approach customers. Customers are complaining about being approached by too many sales people from his company; sales people from different product lines. Because of the organizational structure, however, he has little financial incentive to cooperate with other product line managers.
His regional manager, the senior person on the management team, encourages such cooperation, with not much effect. The rewards come from the product line, not the region.
During a coaching session I ask him, “Why is being in this job a good use of your life?”
He tells me that the most exciting part of his work is that he has the opportunity to use the resources of a huge multinational corporation to improve the standard of living in his own country. As we talk about this it becomes apparent to him that he could better achieve that end by cooperating with other product line managers even if the rewards to him are not immediately apparent.
Making good use of your life means understanding your own broader vision, the reasons you are doing what you are doing that extend beyond your own self interest. This understanding can then become a powerful beacon to guide decisions, and a source of declarations for speaking from the heart.
ALIGNING BEHAVIOR WITH INTENTION
She knows that her organization must encourage dialogue among its people. There have been too many years of creating non-permeable boundaries between this department and that department, between the third floor and the fourth floor, between levels of the organizational hierarchy. She knows that many of these barriers are getting in the way of serving customers, and are creating an organizational climate of mistrust, antipathy, and gloom.
She also knows she does not have all the answers nor solutions to the many problems that plague the organization. She believes, however, that answers and solutions do exist and can be found, if people would bring them to one another rather than to her. She wants people to take more responsibility for raising and solving the organization’s problems.
She calls a series of meetings aimed at getting people together from across the boundaries. She wants them to share both their achievements and concerns with one another, to discover how they might act as resources to one another, and to cooperate in improving customer service.
The meetings go well, but one thing about them bothers her. She knows there are problems and concerns that are not being raised. Fear has long pervaded the organization, and it is difficult for people to be honest with one another.
She has an idea about how to encourage people to raise difficult issues. She says, “How about if we give people blank index cards to write their concerns and issues on. Then we could collect them and answer the questions.”
I cringe at this idea. “I don’t think that is consistent with your intention to increase dialogue,” I tell her. “It seems to me that anonymously submitting index cards will encourage people to evade responsibility rather than take it. It might also reinforce the notion that you have the answers.”
She seems surprised, but on a moment’s reflection she agrees. The technique she proposed, though raising and responding to difficult questions, will undermine her intent. Aligning behavior with intention is no easy matter when intentions change. We decide to strike off in a new direction, but hold onto old comfortable behaviors. Someone, such as a coach, who can spot us doing that, or about to do it, can provide an invaluable service. When our behavior does not align with our intentions, and we have gone public with our intentions, we sow confusion at best, and mistrust at worst.
FROM ROUNDABOUT TO ROUNDABOUT
A good road map of Britain will help us navigate the excursion from London to Land’s End by showing which target we should seek while driving around each roundabout: London to Plymouth to St. Austell to Helston to Penzance to Land’s End.
Coaches working with executives and managers during a change process have as their destination a successful coaching experience. Earlier, I defined that experience as one that enables the executive or manager to guide change in a way that makes best use of who he or she is, is most personally fulfilling, and is best for the organization. Driving toward this destination is not nearly as linear a path as driving from London to Land’s End. Although we might know some of the targets along the way, there is no clear roadmap showing a succession of targets. The best we can do is to know all the possible targets and steer towards them, keeping the ultimate destination in mind.
Each of these four coaching roundabouts - speaking from the heart, framing an authentic role, making good use of your life, and aligning behavior with intention - is both a target to be attained and a source of signs pointing to the next target. When we reach the region of Speaking From the Heart, for example, we find not only a target along the way, but also another roundabout showing us where we might go next.
As more and more organizations embrace the imperative of adapting quickly to change, they will of necessity require that their executives and managers change as well. This requirement will impel those executives and managers to seek the real time, work focused process that a coach can provide. Coaches, in turn, will have to discover more and more of the important roundabouts to head for in order to serve both the person being coached and the organization.
