Coaching Excellence Unleashed

Gregg Thompson: Well, I tell you, coaching simply works. When we look at all the other human resource development approaches these days: training, on-the-job experiences; many of these are effective, but what we find is that, when people get to operate in a one-on-one coaching environment, their performance simply improves. It is a – one of the most effective ways of helping people to improve their performance, advance their career; become even better managers and leaders within organizations.

Rachel Salaman: And what exactly are we talking about here? How does coaching work?

Gregg Thompson: Well coaching is really quite misunderstood in many ways because we often fall back to sports metaphors like the sports coach, and about cheering and really being some type of an expert in the field and imparting that expertise to others. In fact, coaching in organizations is much more about focusing on the strengths and opportunities ahead for people and being both the catalyst and the challenger to help people achieve that. So coaching is really about having a one-on-one relationship with somebody and working with them on their career, their performance, their challenges, to help them succeed at whatever they're up against in the organization.

Rachel Salaman: It sounds very time consuming. How much time do managers have to put aside for this kind of thing?

Gregg Thompson: That's a great question. I hear that from my clients all the time, I mean, because, you know, all of us managers these days are under time, incredible time pressures, and, quite frankly, there's not an easy answer to that. It is time consuming. Any time you have to deal one-on- one with people, it is very, very time consuming. I think the pay-off is well worth it; the investment of one-on-one time with individuals is worth it, but managers also would be well advised to simply be more 'coach-like' in everything they do. I mean, it's not that they are coaching one minute and then they're not a coach in the other minute. Managers can be very, very effective in their leadership by being more coach-like in all of their leadership and managerial activities.

Rachel Salaman: Can you define coach-like?

Gregg Thompson: Well, to be coach-like is to really see yourself as a – as in service of the other people within the organization and the people you work with, and to help them become what we call 'the very best version of themselves' as opposed to being a leader, manager or supervisor who is directing others. So it's really about seeing yourself and deploying all of your talents, whatever they might be, in service of others. So it's really looking at your interaction with others as somebody who is there to lift other people up, as opposed to get other people to do what you want them to do. So the great internal manager coaches are ones that would really be seen as what we often call as a 'servant leader,' somebody who really sees their role as serving others and helping others become the very best that they can be.

Rachel Salaman: Now this type of coaching, am I right in thinking it's different from mentoring?

Gregg Thompson: Yes. Yeah, there's lots of commonalities as well. We would tend to see mentoring as helping people advance their careers and helping understand the nature of career development and professional development, providing guidance. Coaches tend to know less than mentors; mentors tend to give more advice and more guidance. Coaches tend to challenge and affirm. So, if you look at a mentor as somebody who could be very helpful in helping you gain perspective in a corporation, perspective in your career, some advice as to what you might do to build your career, and some support in building your career that would be more my definition of a mentor. A coach would be somebody who really helps you lift your game, somebody who really challenges you, somebody who sees some greatness in you, somebody who will actually hold you accountable to step up to a higher level of performance.

Rachel Salaman: What proportion of companies in North America and elsewhere, if you know this, are now actively encouraging coaching from their internal leaders?

Gregg Thompson: We work in – throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. We have clients in all of those areas, and every one of those regions is very active in coaching. We work for some of the larger corporations around the world and we don't have one client that is not very active in promoting internal coaching right now. Most organizations we work with, and literally all of them, are seeing coaching as one of the core competencies for their managers and are holding their managers accountable to demonstrate that kind of coaching in the organization.

Rachel Salaman: So they've seen some tangible benefits then?

Gregg Thompson: Well, it is. The – it really comes down to the war for talent. Organizations are simply seeing that competitive advantage these days is going to be gained largely by having great talent within the organization and one way, and it really is quite a futile way, is to continue to try to recruit it on the outside; when all of our surveys, all of our engagement surveys, if you study any of the Gallop surveys, they tell us that over 50% of the people who work for us in our – particularly in our large corporations rate themselves as 'not fully engaged,' which means they're leaving much of their great talent at the doorstep before they come into work every morning. And I believe organizations are recognizing this and I believe organizations are recognizing that the war for talent in fact goes on within the walls of the organizations; that we can help people bring forth a lot more talent when our managers are much more coach-like.

Rachel Salaman: And what type of employees benefit from coaching? Is it everybody in the organization?

Gregg Thompson: You know, if you look the whole – the continuum of kind of low performers thru to high performers, coaching tends to benefit all levels and all levels and all performance levels within organizations. The remedial coaching has, I must say, has checkered results. It's when a person is performing poorly within the organization, there's often things going on that coaching will not address. Coaching is not a panacea, coaching does not fix all issues. Coaching can be very effective for Executives. I'm an Executive Leadership coach and so I work at the – mainly at the senior level within organizations. It's also very, very effective for more junior staff, new employees, new graduates into the organization, so I would say at all levels, but it has not found a particular success in areas where there is great discrepancies in performance; when there's a major performance problem, normally something else has to happen.

Rachel Salaman: If someone needs disciplining, they should be disciplined; they shouldn't be coached.

Gregg Thompson: Well, I think the managers would be well advised to be very coach-like in that approach but, if there is a serious performance problem, managers are still accountable for stewarding the performance in the organization and, yes, sometimes managers do need to take other approaches other than coaching to manage performance discrepancies.

Rachel Salaman: Isn't that very difficult for a lot of managers, a lot of what you might call leader coaches, to be able to determine when coaching can help and when really there are other issues?

Gregg Thompson: It is. However what we tend to do, and I'm a manager within my organization as well, but I believe what we tend to do is we tend to go to put our manager hat on, our supervisory hat on very, very quickly, as opposed to looking first to see whether or not we can be more coach-like, and if that would be helpful in the circumstance. And we call it 'taking responsibility for the agenda' so, as soon as I come in and start judging the performance and taking responsibility for another person's performance and trying to fix it, then I'm more of a supervisor manager, and sometimes I have to do that, especially if my sense is that the performance is poor. I believe managers would be well advised to start first as a coach, to start first to push the responsibility for the performance towards the staff member and to see how you might be helpful in helping the staff member improve their performance. It's really a different way of looking at performance and the individual; it's looking at it from who has the responsibility. If I believe the other person has a responsibility for their own performance, then I'm being coach-like; once I take responsibility for that and I'm going to fix that, then I'm being much more the supervisor manager.

Rachel Salaman: Well going into a coaching process, let's say a coaching process with someone who has a good performance generally at work, what can the participants realistically expect to achieve? First, what can the leader coach expect to achieve from that process?

Gregg Thompson: Well, for most leader coaches, most people who embark into the role of coach find it very, very rewarding. You know, when you look at it in all the things we do within organizations, really making a difference in people's lives and people's work lives, and seeing it happen, seeing people perform at higher levels, seeing their careers advance and see them become much more engaged in their work, is probably one of the most rewarding things a manager or a leader can achieve. It is really the holy grail of management in many ways, is to look and to see people, you know, aligned and engaged and enthused about their work, and these are all the products of great coaching. Now, on the other hand, the person being coached, and we call that person the 'talent,' so the person, the talent who's being coached can expect sometimes a pretty bumpy ride. They will be challenged and encouraged to examine all their talents and gifts and see how they might use them better in the organization; they're going to be challenged and encouraged to look at their own potential; they're going to be challenged and encouraged to look at their own performance and job satisfaction. The resulting experience tends to be very, very positive. When engaged in coaching the talent tends to come away more with higher levels of job satisfaction; they tend to come away performing at a higher level and feeling a lot better about themselves as well.

Rachel Salaman: Is there an optimum frame of mind on either side which will deliver the best results from a coaching process?

Gregg Thompson: What we encourage our leader coaches to do is what we call 'come at coaching with noble intentions.' And noble intention really means that you approach the coaching relationship with the intention to satisfy and meet the needs of the talent as opposed to your own. And, for many of us, this is very, very difficult because our needs to be helpful, our needs to be successful, our needs to be right, our needs to be seen as having great answers, sometimes need to be subordinated so that we're able to help the talent find their own answers. Now, from the talents' perspective, when they come at the coaching relationship, they need to come at the coaching relationship with great courage. It's not an easy process to go through. Myself, I approach coaching when I'm being coached with great trepidation. It is a time in one's career, one's life, when we have to look at our performance, look at ourselves, look at our values, through fresh eyes, and this can be very, very difficult. So we honor and recognize how difficult the coaching process can be for the talent as well, so we encourage them to look at it and to look at it as a serious time in their lives and their working careers, when they need to have the commitment to make a real change in their lives.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned that you'd been coached, who was your own greatest coach, and why?

Gregg Thompson: Well, my own greatest coach, I've been just blessed with several of them. My own greatest coach happened to be my mother; somebody that early on in my life challenged me to become the very best person I could be, and she saw things in me that I never saw in myself and continued to remind me of those things, confronted me with them and, in fact, held me accountable to be that person as well. I've asked the same question you asked me of many Executives, and sometimes it's a first boss, sometimes it's a parent, sometimes it's a colleague, staff member, University Professor. It's really interesting, is that that best coach is often one that has not been assigned to you, you know, it's somebody that has really, we say 'earned the right' to be that coach, but, in my case, it happened to be my mother.

Rachel Salaman: Well, I know that she taught you one of your central philosophies of coaching: the Great Expectations model which comes up a lot in your book Unleashed! Could you just explain that for our listeners?

Gregg Thompson: Certainly. Thank you very much for the question and it brings back fond memories. What my mother did is that, at a very early age, even before I embarked on my school career, would take me aside and would tell me what she called were her 'secrets' and, you know, one of her first secrets was, she said, you know, "Gregg, you are a very, very smart little boy and you're going to grow up to be a very, very smart man, but you have to be very cautious that you don't laud this over any friends of yours as you move into the school system, but you need to know that you are exceptionally smart." And she told me the same about athletics and about my relationships as well and, quite frankly, I entered my school career really thinking that I had these very, very special gifts. And actually, as I say in the book Unleashed! it wasn't until college that I figured out that I really was pretty ordinary, but my mother had set these great expectations in my mind and was so positive and affirming that I spent most of my school career very confident and embarking upon all kinds of pursuits, that I'm convinced I never would have been successful in had she not laid that great expectations groundwork.

Rachel Salaman: Now how does that approach translate into the workplace?

Gregg Thompson: I think that much of what we do in management is really trying to find out what is wrong with systems and people and what things we need to fix, and it would be very interesting if we took a completely different approach in the workplace; if in the workplace we simply had great expectations of each other and held each other accountable for that. When you look at a manager who goes out of his or her way to find the greatness in others, to identify, to talk about it, and then to hold them accountable to be that that's a completely different way of approaching leadership, and I believe much more coach-like.

Rachel Salaman: But does everybody deserve great expectations? Surely there are some people who are limited in their talents.

Gregg Thompson: There may be, and we are all gifted with different talents, and I do recognize that. But I love the quote from John Gardiner when he says that, "Most human talent goes undiscovered." And he also goes on to say, is that, "Talent is one thing, its triumphant expression is another." And it may be that some of us have more talent than others and I know personally there's lots of people in my life that are much more talented than me. I think though that we can generally just put that aside and I think if we can just assume that, as John Gardiner says, that most human talent goes undiscovered then it also goes undeveloped. So, rather than trying to calibrate how much talent a person has, I would encourage managers to try to explore and discover and utilize what is there. I believe there's a huge reservoir of talent in all of us and our focus should be on finding it, discovering it, helping the person exploit it, as opposed to trying to measure it.

Rachel Salaman: I suppose you have to be very careful though, don't you, because, with people who are perhaps slightly under confident, you might be setting them up for failure, they'll just feel like they're not able to meet the expectations that you put up for them.

Gregg Thompson: That is true. I will tell you though, in my coaching, that people are a lot less fragile than we often think. When people are challenged to live up to their own, what we call their own 'best version' of themselves, to fully employ their talents, I continue to be amazed at how people just step right up to that. I mean, it is, you know, it's quite rare, I think, for people to shy away from a discussion about what they're really good at and shy away from a discussion about what they might do with some of the really cool talents.

Rachel Salaman: Well, we've talked a bit about Unleashed! How is Unleashed! and the Great Expectations model different from any of the other coaching books out there at the moment?

Gregg Thompson: Well there's some wonderful coaching books that have been written. What would be distinct about Unleashed! probably is a couple of things. One is that Unleashed! focuses more on the kind of person you are and how you interact with others, as opposed to giving you the five sequential steps to coaching or, you know, the three absolute principles of coaching. The – Unleashed! really helps the manager look at how they can be as a coach, as opposed to how they can do coaching. I guess, secondly, Unleashed! takes a distinctive appreciative approach to coaching. It takes the approach that as opposed to doing some kind of a critical analysis of individuals that, if we take an appreciative approach, it is a much more powerful approach to coaching.

Rachel Salaman: So it's collaborative between the leader coach and the talent rather than the leader coach imposing something on the talent?

Gregg Thompson: Yeah, it is quite collaborative in nature and, in fact, it is – even puts more of the responsibility for the coaching process onto the talent's plate as opposed to the coach's plate. The great coaching occurs when it is a partnership, but the responsibility for the product of the coaching rests solely with the talent. So the outcome of coaching really needs to be – the responsibility for that needs to be felt by the talent.

Rachel Salaman: And, in your experience, it works better that way?

Gregg Thompson: Oh, by far. Once the coach starts taking responsibility for the outcome of the coaching process, the effectiveness of the coaching diminishes greatly. The great coaching occurs when the leader coach acts as the catalyst and the talent themselves takes full responsibility for whatever the outcome of that coaching is.

Rachel Salaman: Now is that something that happens through what you call 'dangerous conversations'?

Gregg Thompson: It is. It is something. The great coaches have always been skilled at being able to have these important conversations and ask the penetrating question and provide that challenge or that insight or that affirmation that really strikes to the core of whatever the issue is that the talent is dealing with at – in the moment.

Rachel Salaman: Can you give us an example of a dangerous conversation?

Gregg Thompson: Certainly. A dangerous conversation might be one where a – the talent is struggling in a role and the coach is having the conversation with them, and it is very clear to – becomes very clear to the talent that their values or their passions are simply not being fulfilled in that role. And, rather than trying to help that talent become better at a role that they really have little enthusiasm for, the dangerous conversation goes right to the point about, "Okay, what are your values?" "What's important to you?" "What is your passion?" Another dangerous conversation might start off with, rather than looking around at performance achievements, simply asking the talent, "Are you doing your best work right now?" And a dangerous conversation is around that kind of self-analysis as to whether or not the person is really functioning at their best.

Rachel Salaman: Now your book is a practical guide, as much as an introduction to the benefits of coaching within organizations, and one particularly useful chapter outlines your four coaching 'power tools.' Can you share those with us?

Gregg Thompson: Certainly. The first one is the one we called 'Acknowledgement' and it simply is stopping to recognize and to see the other person as a separate fully functioning human being with their independent set of aspirations, values, motives, and the like. And we emphasize that because many of us go through organizations every day and rarely get acknowledged for who we are. And so we encourage our leader coaches to stop and, as the Tibetan greeting would say, "Tashi Deley," I see the greatness in you and this simple tool of starting every coaching session with that kind of acknowledgement is, "I see you as a separate human being with lots of opportunity," that changes everything; that sets the tone for the coaching relationship. The second one is questions – and I gave a couple of examples of those earlier, but it's powerful questions, and in the book we actually list what we call the '60 big questions' and these are the questions that help facilitate the dangerous conversation. They're questions like, "What would really happen if you took your foot off the brake? How are you getting in your own way? What would happen if you had unlimited resources in your job today? Where is your passion? To whom are you going to be accountable to?" These are the kind of questions that we call the 'big coaching' questions. The third power tool is called 'intuitional perspectives' and this is the idea that often a leader coach has some perspective that he or she can and probably should share with the talent because, if they don't hear it from the leader coach, they may never hear it again, and this perspective doesn't have to be correct; it just has to be true for the leader coach in the moment. And this would be something like, "I think you're better than this. I think you've got a bigger game in you. I think you're not performing at your best. I think this is an old story and you need a new story. I like you. I think you're onto a good thing here. It's about – it's not giving advice; it's really sharing a viewpoint, a perspective that needs to be delivered, again with what we call 'noble intention.' The last one is silence. Susan Scott, in her wonderful book called Serious Conversations says, "Let silence do the heavy lifting." And so sometimes in the coaching conversation, we find that we don't have to be filling the air with words. Sometimes we need to simply sit in silence with the talent and let the silence punctuate whatever was said last, so it is using silence to – as a time to reflect on what is said in the coaching relationship. Many times we just want to fill the air with words to make ourselves feel good that something is going on. You'll notice we do that in elevators very frequently; we can't stand the silence so we have to talk about the weather. The same is true in the coaching conversation, and we encourage our leader coaches just to resist that and to use silence to really emphasize the important things that are said.

Rachel Salaman: Now we talked a bit earlier about how time consuming coaching is and, because of that, not everybody will have access to coaching within their organizations. Do you have any advice for people who would like to be coached by their managers, but don't have that opportunity at the moment?

Gregg Thompson: Well, it's a great question. I think that one can coach their manager as well, and one can coach their manager to coach; one can challenge their managers to step up to the coaching role and, in doing so, might motivate their managers, own managers, to be more coach-like within the organization, simply by describing the kind of support that they would appreciate within the organization. There's also lots of opportunity to receive coaching on the outside and there's professional coaches available. When one is looking for a professional coach, I encourage people to look for a coach that is certified by the International Coaching Federation, the ICF. There are also many other sources of coaching. There are colleagues and there are staff members, there are people in other organizations; there are customers, there are family members and friends that can fulfill that role as a coach.

Rachel Salaman: Gregg Thompson, thank you very much for joining us today. Gregg's book Unleashed! is published by Select Books and it's a thoroughly useful guide to the benefits of coaching within organizations and how to do it well. And you can find out more about Gregg's work on his company's website www.bluepointleadership.com. I'll be back next month with another Expert Interview, so do join me then. Goodbye.