What?!? Where? Who? Why? When? How!?!
Leadership Coaching - Ingredients for a successful transformation.
When starting a coaching journey together with a leadership team there are a few things that you need to know/agree on up-front and a few things that you must acknowledge and admit that you simply cannot know up-front.
Where - Why - What - Who - How - When, these are six key elements in the evolution of an organization whether it is conscious or not. By soliciting the services of a leadership coach, you are expressing your willingness and desire to make the evolution and growth of the organization a conscious endeavor.
The leadership team has the ultimate accountability for the performance and results of the organization. Whatever the current performance, it is the best that can be achieved given the current constraints and if you want "better" performance you have to make changes. Changes that require embarking on a transformational journey.
What - For a coaching journey to begin you must agree on the "What". What do we want to achieve? What outcome are we seeking? This is crucial to get a sense of direction for the coaching. If you do not have the direction, you have no foundation upon which you can base your observations/questions/discussions. In a conversation I recall I emphasized that when you are out running it is crucial that you know where you want to run so you can set off in the right direction. The comment I got from the responsible manager was that they just wanted to become better at running. To which I answered, but if you are running in the wrong direction you are only making things worse. After a moment of silent reflection, we could at least agree on that.
Who - Specifically for leadership coaching, there must be an acceptance that the main group that will be coached is the leadership group themselves and its members. The coaching-contract (written or verbal) must be established between the parties that will be the focus of the coaching journey. It is therefore crucial that the leadership team understand that there is commitment needed from their end and it will require investment of time and effort. We are after all talking about a conscious improvement and evolution of the organization that will result in increased organizational performance. That doesn't come by accident nor for free. If it did, every company in the world would be the best there is at what they do, by simply existing.
These two elements, what and who, are pre-requisites for leadership coaching to start and is the focus of the getting-to-know period. We must have explored what we potentially want to aim for and a sincere commitment must exist to invest the proper time and effort.
The following elements should, to some degree, be touched upon during the get-to-know process, but will very likely change drastically as the coaching journey begins and progress.
Why - In my experience this is easily confused with What and can take many different forms. Core to the question is - why do we think the specific outcome we are pursuing will influence or directly improve our performance? The answer to a why-question is usually followed by a because-answer. For this element it is more-so the pursuit of the answer that is important and will act as a connector for What-How-Who-When, i.e., a because-answer will need to be anchored in all of those elements.
Where - This element is crucial for any sense-making of the current state and potential strategies moving forward. We need to understand certain aspects of the larger environment we are trying to do business in. Which industry are we involved in? What markets/countries are of concern? Do we build our products/services somewhere other than where we are trying to sell? What is our competitive advantage (product/feature/people/timing/…)? Who are our competition?
Who - Again, we need to address who will be accountable for the work, who will be responsible, who will be affected, who will be resisting, who will be promoting, … The list goes on. When we are talking about the role of leadership in organizational evolution, we are in the end discussing organizational behaviour - how people act within the constraints of the organization. What are productive behaviours and which behaviours do we need more of and which behaviours do we need to get rid of? The understand all nuances of who, we need to understand the people and the culture within the organization.
How - How are we going about trying to solve the underlying problems we identify in our pursuit of the desired outcome? This is mostly about processes and structures, but also about avoiding micromanagement and giving the right people the right tools and opportunities to come up with good solutions. Organizational capabilities are important to address to create a good understanding of how we as an organization come up with solutions. In organizations that deal with complex problems it is crucial to have capabilities that cover the areas of Engineering, Product and Transformation (more on the latter three another time).
When - Are there any crucial timings involved? Certain market windows that must be hit? IPO ambitions? Financial or investor related aspects that we need to be aware of? Expectations from within the organization on when we can begin to see some return on the time invested in consciously evolving the organization to improve performance? All of these timing aspects will be crucial in creating the strategy to move forward as well as to set reasonable expectations on when we will begin to see which kind of results.
Coaching is all about figuring out the right question to ask at the right time, in the right context, to the right audience. Coaching is not about providing answers, rather about providing perspectives and facilitating the collective problem-solving process.
