Tag: leadership

The Starting Points of Coaching

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Competencies in Coaching

Tim Schneider, Coach, Speaker, Author and Trainer from Aegis Learning

By Tim Schneider

Coaching is defined in many ways, terms and contexts. For our purpose, coaching is a stream of communication from the leader to team members for the purpose of maintaining and improving performance.

Often times, coaching is viewed as an athletic function and visions of Bobby Knight, Dean Smith, Tom Osborne or Lou Holtz are summoned. The model provided by the athletic version of coaching is not far off from the business model but there are some distinct differences.

One of the comments that has often been expressed about coaching is the lack of time to devote to this activity. This is a classic symptom of a leader being too involved in doing and not involved in leading. When debunked this comment is really more about a lack of comfort in coaching skills than it is about available time.

Team members who do not receive regular coaching often feel disengaged from the organization and leader. Morale will suffer and in the absence of good coaching, team members will take an active role in defining what is good and bad in the organization. Strong personalities, sometimes for very bad reasons, will rise to an unofficial position of importance and drive team effectiveness. Team members with no coaching will also become fearful, tentative and resentful of the lack of knowing where they stand.

When effective coaching is present, the opposite will occur. Team members are engaged, upbeat, clear in their direction and clear in their understanding of where there performance is at. Team members will develop a much clearer understanding of the organization’s needs and how they fit in the big picture with good coaching. They also will see hope in their own growth.

The core coaching competency is good communication skills. To coach you must be able to communicate. In groups, with individuals, following-up in writing; a leader must be able to express their comments, suggestions, praise and encouragement effectively.

The other core competency in coaching is the need to be a people person. Although this phrase is pretty grossly overused, you must enjoy interacting with team members to be an effective coach. The boss that hides in her office and buries her nose in projects and paper work is often expressing a discomfort with dealing with people and thus avoiding coaching activities.

The journey into effective and excellent coaching will begin with breaking coaching into three separate pieces. The first piece is feedback. Feedback is providing either positive or corrective information to team members about their performance or behavior. This is the most common form of coaching and should represent a big part of a leader’s coaching interactions.

The second tenet of coaching is teaching and mentoring. This is different from feedback in that it takes a more long-term and nurturing approach. Teaching and mentoring is about providing skills to be successful and growing people for maximum results.

The final piece of the coaching puzzle is a catch-all wing that includes decisions to release team members, game planning and protecting team members. For the purpose of simplicity, we will call this operational coaching.

No single part of coaching is more important than another and none are effective without the other. For team success, feedback is needed, mentoring and teaching are needed and the operational elements of coaching are certainly engaged. Equally important and equally distributed from a leadership perspective.

Tim Schneider

Tim Schneider is the founder, CEO and lead facilitator for Aegis Learning.  

Maintaining and Reparing Relationships

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Swallow Your Pride

Tim Schneider, Coach, Speaker, Author and Trainer from Aegis Learning

By Tim Schneider

As simple as beginning to build a relationship seems, maintaining a relationship in the working environment becomes tricky and difficult. The first order of business is to insure that the relationship is reciprocal and not one sided. People must not feel, perceive or detect that you are using them or manipulating them in the relationship.

This means that you must provide assistance and openness when required and without strings attached. You must be willing to help, mentor and coach when there is no immediate gain for your or your part of the organization. You must also spend time with the people you have built relationships with and continue to communication and build rapport. Effective relationships also require a healthy dose of forgiveness. The forgiveness of faux pas, the forgives of neglect, the forgiveness of lack of understanding, the forgiveness of neglect and the forgiveness of the lack of reciprocation.

Forgiveness is a funny equation. We all admit we need it for our own mistakes and misspeaks but we tend to be a little stingy in providing it. As openly as we seek forgiveness of others, we must provide it to others.

Repairing
The final element of fully engaging relationship power is the need to repair relationships in the working environment. Repairing relationships that have been strained over time or not tended to because of the demands of our jobs.

Repairing will require a big amount of swallowing your pride and ego to do the right thing. Relationships are about building a long lasting power base and sometimes you have to subordinate your own ego to get this done.

Like in building relationships, this is not about you waiting for others to approach you. This is about you taking the initiative and responsibility for the relationship and reaching out to those in which the relationship has become strained. This will also require you to apologize for something that, in many cases, you have not done wrong. You are apologizing for the strain or apologizing for the miscommunication or apologizing for the neglect. It is the first step in repair and may not always be reciprocated but it is a starting point.

Tim Schneider

Tim Schneider is the founder, CEO and lead facilitator for Aegis Learning.  

Non Verbal Communication and Tone

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Message Recieved

Tim Schneider, Coach, Speaker, Author and Trainer from Aegis Learning

By Tim Schneider

A great deal has been written about the importance of non-verbal elements in the totality of the communication picture. Ranging between sixty and eighty percent of either message content or message richness, all experts agree that body language, facial expressions and tones account for a big part of the message received.

In addressing tone, a good communicator must understand their environment and situation. During corrective coaching, a leader cannot be overly upbeat or friendly in tone. When having relationship based dialog or during tone setting, you cannot come across in a flat, monotone or disinterested tone. Tone, in communication is an interesting dynamic that is driven by attitude. When the attitude is strong and healthy, a person is more likely to correctly adapt to different tone situations. When attitude is poor, tone adaptations are less likely to occur or, at the least, occur in a well done manner.

The great mirror of tone, and attitude for that matter, is the human face. Very few leaders are truly in tune with how their face looks during communication. Many are unaware of the wrinkled brow, scowl or stares of indifference that they cast on a regular basis. Under stress and with a poor or sinking attitude, managing facial expressions becomes a remote after-thought.

Effective leaders and great communicators make a special point of being aware of and managing their facial expressions. They understand what others see on their face and they actively work to create facial expressions that add to, and not distract from the message. This facial management is an important part of the non-verbal communication package and very important in controlling the tone of any dialog.

A couple of other non-verbal messages to be aware of include crossed arms, hands in pockets and single finger pointing. The crossed arm position, especially prevalent in sitting positions and during colder temperatures, shows a closed and uninterested position. For men more than women, the hands in pants pocket message is very common. When those hands slide in the front pockets it demonstrates a nervousness or disinterested position. Many people show this when standing for introductions or in other uncomfortable situations.

First recognized by the airline industry, the single finger point is a very aggressive piece of body language. Many people report that they feel assaulted or at the least, uncomfortable when others point. And as we all remember from our parents, it is rude. An interesting side note on single finger pointing is that many studies conclude that the aggressive nature of this piece of body language is not limited to pointing at a person but rather is equally aggressive when pointing towards other objects.

We can’t put them in our pockets, cross them, put them around our mouth or point them, so what do we do with our hands and arms. Effective leaders have found great value to engaging their hands and arms as message accentuation tools. Quite simply this means to use your hand and arms to assist in adding emphasis and enthusiasm to the message package. A little hand and arm movement shows you are engaged and believe your message as well.

Tim Schneider

Tim Schneider is the founder, CEO and lead facilitator for Aegis Learning.  

Object Oriented Innovation

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Desired Outcome

Tim Schneider, Coach, Speaker, Author and Trainer from Aegis Learning

By Tim Schneider

An excellent resource in innovation and improvement is the use of Object Oriented Innovation. OOI is a very simple approach that yields the highest success in innovation and creativity.

The starting point of OOI is to define the end point. What is the desired outcome? What is the product or process that you need to achieve? What is the end game? Equally important as defining the ending point in which you want to achieve is insuring that the end point has value and is valued by the organization. You must connect the end product or process to the core values and mission of the organization. If it fits, you keep going. If it does not fit, you have to look to see if it should be eliminated, discontinued or repackaged in such a way that it will fit.

Without deference to how it is done now or who is involved now, the next phase of OOI is to determine how the end point is achieved. Identify the needed steps to deliver the product, service or project. Again, the challenging point in this step is to ignore how it is currently being done or how it was done before and concentrate on how it needs to be done. The step must include identifying resources needed, labor and time, regulations, laws and other requirements.

Since no leader works in a vacuum, the next step in OOI is to identify the areas of impact. What other departments will have to change the way they do things? Is there an impact on customers and end users? Are there organizational considerations and the egos of other leaders that may be in play? What is the human resource impacts such as changed hours or more or less people? What are the financial considerations? The effective innovation leader must now reconcile these realities without overly compromising the desired outcome and make some good judgments and decisions about the next course of action.

The final OOI step involves converting the identified process steps to action and delivering the desired outcome.

Tim Schneider

Tim Schneider is the founder, CEO and lead facilitator for Aegis Learning.  

Collaborative Decision Making

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Two Great Leadership Fears

Tim Schneider, Coach, Speaker, Author and Trainer from Aegis Learning

By Tim Schneider

Two great leadership fears are associated with collaborative decision making. Like most fears, they are baseless and concocted by the enemy that resides on your shoulders.

Some people in leadership positions fear using a collaborative approach in decision making because it would make them look weak and indecisive. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, the leader always retains the right and responsibility to make the final decision and veto the input from others. This is not always prudent but no one removes a leader’s ability to make the final choice after seeking input and collaboration.

The other fear that leaders often connect to collaborative decision making is that through seeking input the decision will become a popularity contest and the pig with the best lipstick will win. Again this is a baseless fear and collaboration is not about incorporating democracy and voting to an issue, it is simply about seeking input.

To obtain collaboration, the leader must create an environment in which team members and peer leaders feel safe and that their opinion is valued. There can be no besmirching, belittling or dismissing of input. All input, even those contrary to your opinion must be appreciated and valued. This is not about changing your mind but about selecting the best course of action and decision for the organization.

Many traditional methods of collaboration don’t work. Brain storming and the unwarned introduction of a topic yield very little results. To get someone’s thoughts on a subject, process or decision point, effective leaders have found that a private, direct and previewed approach work best. The leader will announce that one of the subjects during one-on-one meetings will be a particular decision or direction element and that gives team members or peers a chance to think about it and process their own conclusions. The privacy element also reduces any team member’s trepidation about public comment or fear of embarrassment.

Collaboration also implies that the leader will be open to suggestions and different perspectives. If that is not the case, future attempts at collaboration and seeking input will be hampered.

A collaborative approach to decision making is more time consuming and requires more effort but it yields significantly better decisions when done well. Ownership of the decision is enhanced through feedback and input. Unintended consequences are uncovered. Different perspectives are considered. New ideas are found.

Tim Schneider

Tim Schneider is the founder, CEO and lead facilitator for Aegis Learning.  

Thanksgiving for Leaders

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Appreciation Post

Tim Schneider, Coach, Speaker, Author and Trainer from Aegis Learning

By Tim Schneider

Thanksgiving offers a unique time of the year to offer thanks and appreciation for those around us and the good fortune in which we have been bestowed.  The usual thankfulness involves family, friends, health, security and the availability of four days of football games.

In addition to the standard items, people in leadership positions need to be thankful for more. 

Team Members

The jobs of supervisors, managers and executives are uniquely dependent upon the ability and effort of those that they lead.  No matter what kind of relationship you may have with your boss, it is your team members that keep you in your job day in and day out.  When they perform well, you are successful.  When you fail to keep their support, you will fail.

Take a few moments this week and sincerely thank and appreciate the efforts of your team members.

Customers

Both internal and external customers drive the business need for your existence.  Without them, there is no need for your department or your organization.  Yes, they can sometimes be demanding, problematic and downright difficult but you need them desperately.  Your customers are the life’s blood of the company. 

Far too often we assume that customers have no choice in their decisions or are locked in with us.  Even internal customers can choose to outsource the service that your group provides.

Find a way to communicate your appreciation to your customers this week.

Challenges and Opportunities

Leadership is challenging.  Problems roll up to your level.  Tough decisions need to be made and guidance needs to be provided.  You have to craft direction, coach team members and build strategic relationships with difficult people.

Thank goodness for all of those things.  It is these types of challenges that define your value to the organization and hone your skills.  If leadership were easy, anyone could do it.

Support Systems

All of us have support systems in which we rely upon nearly every day.  Spouses, friends, mentors and even our pets. 

When times are tough, they hear us out.  They encourage us and sometimes challenge us to continue to meet the rigors of our jobs.  They keep us going.

In the most sincere manner available, thank them.

Tim Schneider

Tim Schneider is the founder, CEO and lead facilitator for Aegis Learning.  

Consistent and Fair in Tone Setting

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Eyes On the Prize

Tim Schneider, Coach, Speaker, Author and Trainer from Aegis Learning

By Tim Schneider

One of the challenges associated with tone setting is the need to be consistent and apply tone setting fairly and equitably. It is painfully easy to be upbeat, build relationships and greet those team members that have always been nice to us. For the team members that have been supportive, complimentary in 360 degree reviews and volunteer for more work, tone setting is a walk in the park. Just like talking with treasured friends and family.

Where many leaders find challenge is to provide the same amount of tone setting behaviors and skills to those team members that may be or may have been a little problematic. Those team members that question, challenge or irritate are a tough crowd and it is easy to justify why you would not tone set with them. After all, they are a bitter and nasty bunch.

Another challenge to consistency are the team members that rebuff tone setting. The ones that do not open up when trying to build a relationship or the ones that may even tell you “it is none of your business.” In reality, it is these two populations that need your tone setting more than any other. These people are screaming to be engaged by the leader. Here, your resilience will play a big part in continuing to reach out and try to build rapport.

Think about the impact of your eyes for a moment. Too frequently our eyes point out what is different about others and not what we may have in common. Look at the common little pockets of team members in a parking lot or break room and you will see that groups often form around age, gender or ethnicity. The effective leader has to ignore the messages of the eyes and reach out to all populations, regardless of difficulties, and build an excellent tone base with each of them.

Tim Schneider

Tim Schneider is the founder, CEO and lead facilitator for Aegis Learning.  

Critical Objectives

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Long/Short Term Goals

Tim Schneider, Coach, Speaker, Author and Trainer from Aegis Learning

By Tim Schneider

Goals. Targets. Objectives. Milestones. All the same thing with a little different nomenclature.

Critical objectives are those measurable, meaningful, comparable and important benchmarks that track progress towards the vision of an organization or unit within a company. These objectives are usually expressed in annual terms but can be created for less than a year in start-ups and environments requiring significant turnaround.

This is another part of strategic planning in which minimizing is better. Five to seven objectives per year is the top end. More will convolute your ability to achieve real ownership and buy-in into these objectives. Our teams must be able to remember them and lock onto them as the year progresses.

Each objective must incorporate a significant business segment. Most commonly, strategic planning will incorporate objectives related to revenue or sales volume, customer service quality, productivity, quality of work or product, team member satisfaction and expense control. These major headings represent not only important areas of organizational success but also those areas in which each individual team member can contribute and participate. They are also the categories that can be easily measured and reported.

The best format of a strategic objective includes a comparable element to a prior year or prior period. By example this would look like “Improve Customer Satisfaction by 4% Over 2010.” This example also includes the measurability required in good strategic planning. By contrast, the example of “Improve Customer Service” meets neither of these requirements. Measurability and comparability are important to demonstrate progress and to connect to important business elements.

The incorporation of comparability also assists the effective leader in promoting improvement and growth. From year to year or period to period, the leader is able to raise the bar in some or all strategic areas of performance. The one required element in this area is that the growth factor cannot be some arbitrary number. The best tool for this is a standard progression analysis that looks at change and improvement from year to year and uses that as the improvement factor for the coming period. Another tool for that purpose is to diagnose capacity for maximum performance and factor that over a three to five year period.

Two final notes on critical objectives include the ability to connect each objective back to a line or element in the company vision and mission. This connectivity will insure that proper progress in being made towards the ultimate target described in the vision. The other final element is the reminder to make sure that all of the critical objectives can be impacted by team members. For example, team members can contribute to revenue but have very little impact on net income.

Tim Schneider

Tim Schneider is the founder, CEO and lead facilitator for Aegis Learning.  

Decision Making Ownership

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Legacy Making Decisions

Tim Schneider, Coach, Speaker, Author and Trainer from Aegis Learning

By Tim Schneider

At the end of the day, the decision was yours. Even with collaboration and using systems thinking, you made the call. The decision is part of your leadership record and legacy.

Effective leaders cannot run from their decisions. They cannot blame others. They cannot blame the economy. They cannot hedge or try to escape accountability. It was your decision.

When right on target a decision is a glorious thing. Your hard work paid off and you chose the correct course of action. Everything fell into place nicely and the return was better than anticipated. It is pretty easy to own that type of decision.

The harder decisions to own are the clunkers. The ones that don’t work out so well or the choice that just did not pan out. Those are hard to swallow and to have your name attached.

Effective leaders own decisions that are both good and bad. With good decisions, the leader will share credit with the team, those that provided valuable input and any stakeholder that gave clues about outcomes or consequences.

When the decision is a poor choice you are on your own buddy. Can’t blame the data or any person. It is all you.

With bad decisions, there are a couple of additional decision points that come into play. The poorest choice is to defend and continue to cheerlead for a bad decision. This is simply digging a bigger hole and drawing more attention and potentially, criticism to a bad decision.

The effective leader must admit the mistake and work diligently to fix it. Simply say that you made a mistake, you are sorry and you will get it fixed. Use plenty of personal pronouns to make sure the ownership of the decision is clear. You may not get beaten up for a bad decision but you will certainly loose credibility if you try to run from it.

When looking at a poor decision, first check and see if you gave yourself enough time to analyze and diagnose the situation and all of the potential impacts. This is the most common reason for poor decisions. Then, retrace the system thinking and seek a different and wider scope of input that focuses on why the first decision failed and that the issue still exists. Never compound a poor decision with a rash or arbitrary fix that is simply designed to save face.

Tim Schneider

Tim Schneider is the founder, CEO and lead facilitator for Aegis Learning.  

Gaps, SWOTs and Segments

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Using a Segmented Approach

Tim Schneider, Coach, Speaker, Author and Trainer from Aegis Learning

By Tim Schneider

Most managers and leaders are familiar with the common organizational analysis tools of SWOT and Gap but these tools are largely ineffectual when not properly segmented. Using a segmented approach will deliver greater value to these time worn tools.

SWOT is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. When performed normally, this type of analysis yields almost cursory and useless results. Typical responses when looking at an organization as a whole include comments about having good people (a strength), lacking suitable space (a weakness), growth of a business in a strong economic market (an opportunity) or the presence of a competitor (a threat). This provides a brief snapshot of where an organization is and what might be on the horizon in very high overview. This approach contains only the singular dimension of flat area.

Gap analysis is even more of a simplistic approach. It is linear and clearly defines where an organization is and where it wants to be. The gap between the then and now represent a self-writing action plan when a company identifies how to move from the now to the future. Like SWOT, it is flat and, unique to gap, it is a single straight line.

Now imagine these analysis tools in three dimensions with depth and breadth added. That is what adding segmentation to these tools will achieve. Starting with SWOT, instead of looking at the organization as a whole, segmentation forces the same analysis except broken down in the key operating areas of the company. First the organization defines the key operating areas and many of those are common to all organizations. Typical ones include human talent, financial, facilities, technology, core products and services and regulatory or legal issues.

For example, the training department at High Stakes Motors wants to begin the strategic planning process for 2008 and rather than beginning with a SWOT analysis of the department, they segment their approach and begin with the people in the department. They determine that there are some core strengths and individuals who could be called strong. They also determine there are some general deficiencies and weaknesses among their staff. They look at opportunities to improve personnel skill levels and cross-train key team members and they identify the threats of organizations that have higher compensation or benefit packages. From this view, the management team for the training department at High Stakes Motors can craft a 2008 plan that capitalizes on their strengths, addresses the weaknesses, captures some opportunities and strategically positions to minimize the threats.

Wash, rinse and repeat for all the major segments of the High Stakes Motors training department for all aspects of their operation including their facilities, the technology used, strategic partnerships, financial structure and core training offering. The end result is a significantly more detailed, more useable and more reliable way of looking at this operation.

Now imagine a Chia pet. One that has been watered and is beginning to grow a bit. That is what we are going to create instead of a linear gap analysis. With the center point of segmented gap being the “where we want to be” mark, the lines out from that point will represent where we are based on the same segments used in the segmented SWOT analysis. So, for the High Stakes Motors training department we have one line to the center for technology, one for human talent, one for core products and services offered, one for customer service level, one for facilities and so forth. Each line begins at a different spot because, as in most organizations, these segments are in different stages and degrees of closeness to the ideal.

The really helpful part of segmented gap analysis is that it allows for the construction of simultaneous action planning and action plans that can be interdependent upon other action plans. So rather than approaching the organization linearly, the organization is viewed in full three dimensions and strategic planning can be built to attack all segments at once.

Is a segmented approach more difficult and time consuming? Absolutely but the results will dramatically improve the ability of an organization to plan effectively for the coming years.

Gap and SWOT analysis have been around for a long time and are great strategic planning tools. Tools and not the end game. A common misconception in strategic planning is that gap and SWOT analysis are a result and not a tool to help achieve a results.

In it’s most simple form, gap analysis is a view of where we are, where we want to be and mapping a process of how to get there. This can be a powerful process when crafting strategic objectives and actions plans. It is also extremely helpful in the honest assessment of where an organization or department is currently performing.

SWOT analysis is a little more in-depth and detailed. It helps identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (thus the SWOT). This too, is very powerful, especially when identifying action plan items.

Effective leaders embrace and use these tools in a collaborative and participatory manner within the overall strategic planning process.

Tim Schneider

Tim Schneider is the founder, CEO and lead facilitator for Aegis Learning.