Coaching for Performance

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book focuses on Coaching, the act of helping a person fulfill their potential by themselves.

🎨 Impressions

It was an okay book. Try to not focus to much on the SMART, CLEAR and other methods and rather reflect on the way we can help other with coaching.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• Coaching focuses on future possibilities, not past mistakes

• Internal obstacles are often more daunting than external ones.

• However, mentoring is very different to coaching, because coaching is not dependent on a more experienced person passing down their knowledge – in fact, this undermines the building of self-belief which creates sustained performance, as we shall discover.

• Our experience shows that the development of employees is the lowest priority of four criteria that cause us to adapt our leadership behavior in the moment. At the head of the list comes time pressure, then fear, and next comes the quality of the job or the product, leaving employee development a poor fourth.

• Our experience shows that the development of employees is the lowest priority of four criteria that cause us to adapt our leadership behavior in the moment. At the head of the list comes time pressure, then fear, and next comes the quality of the job or the product, leaving employee development a poor fourth.

• “It is an interesting feature of human psychology that, once we have found someone to blame, the quest for explanation seems to come to an end.”

• “As we look at the terrain ahead, we see that we are entering a whole new dimension. Whether you are the president of a company or the janitor, the moment you step from independence into interdependence in any capacity, you step into a leadership role.”

• A leader’s task is simple: to get the job done and to develop employees. Time and cost pressures limit the latter. Coaching is one process with both effects.

• The single universal internal block is unfailingly unanimous: fear, variously described as fear of failure, lack of confidence, self-doubt, and lack of self-belief

• Responsibility is the other key concept or goal of coaching. It is also crucial for high performance. When you truly accept, choose, or take responsibility for your thoughts and your actions, your commitment to them rises and so does your performance.

• If I give you advice, especially if it is unsolicited, and you take the action but it fails, what will you do? Blame me, of course, which is a clear indication of where you see the responsibility lying.

• Here is another example of the difference between the normal or imposed level of responsibility and high or chosen responsibility. Imagine a group of construction workers being briefed: “Peter, go and get a ladder. There’s one in the shed.”

• The GROW Model: Goals, Reality, Options, and Will

• Goal setting for the session as well as the short and long term. Reality checking to explore the current situation. Options and alternative strategies or courses of action. What is to be done, When, by Whom, and the Will to do it.

• In addition to supporting an end goal, which is not in your control, with performance and process goals, which are, goals need to be SMART: Specific Measurable Agreed Realistic Timeframed and also PURE: Positively stated Understood Relevant Ethical and CLEAR: Challenging Legal Environmentally sound Appropriate Recorded

• When employees begin to see each other as a support rather than a threat, they will be much happier to raise their problems. When this happens, honest diagnosis and dialogue are possible, leading to early resolution. The blame culture that prevails in the majority of businesses works against this, as it causes “false reality syndrome,” or “I will tell you what I think you want to hear, or what will keep me out of trouble.” Any corrections put in place thereafter will be based on a false reality. The wise coach starts with a more general investigation and follows the conversation of the coachee.

• The purpose of the options stage in GROW is not to find the “right” answer, but to create and list as many alternative courses of action as possible. The quantity of options is more important at this stage than the quality and feasibility of each one.

• The point is not to become a leader. The point is to become yourself, and to use yourself completely – all your gifts and skills and energies – to make your vision manifest. You must withhold nothing. Warren Bennis

• Carl Jung said: “What you resist persists.” If you don’t want the same challenges to rise again and again in work, life, and love, I encourage you to turn to face the challenges that come into your life.

• Real teams (1) have clear boundaries; (2) are interdependent for some common purpose; and (3) have at least some stability of membership, which gives members time and opportunity to learn how to work together well.

• It could be said that it is even more difficult today to get the best out of a team, for the following reasons: Global mobility brings diversity to teams which requires greater flexibility of mindset. People no longer work in settled groupings but are continually forming and reforming teams. Teams can be project based, functional, matrix based, operational, virtual, self-organized. Some teams are spread across geographical boundaries, making contact more infrequent and more problematic, or entirely virtual in nature. The timescales within which teams are expected to join, form, and perform to meet a business challenge are shorter than ever before. The business challenges themselves have increased in complexity.

• Leadership is about learning together and constructing meaning and knowledge collectively and collaboratively … It means generating ideas together; seeking to reflect upon and make sense of work in the light of shared beliefs and new information; and creating actions that grow out of these new understandings.

• Management became about the operational, getting the job done, about the process and the present. Leadership, on the other hand, had its focus on development, vision, and the future. However, in today’s fast and complex world, the lines between management and leadership are blurred, especially when it comes to day-to-day business.

• Kaizen, or “good enough never is,” is a well-known principle within Lean cultures. The belief that no process is ever perfect opens up the possibilities of continuous innovation and evolution to move toward the challenge through incremental improvement and occasional breakthroughs.

• There’s a famous story about a presidential visit to NASA in the early 1960s when America was preparing to send people into space. President John F. Kennedy was walking down a corridor where a janitor happened to be working. The President stopped to have a chat with him and asked, “What are you doing here?” “Well, Mr. President,” he replied, “I’m helping to put a man on the moon.” That is a great example of somebody who understands that, however small their contribution might be, without that contribution it would be more difficult to achieve the overall aim. Having sight of the impact of what each person does on other people is a real key factor in teams that work interdependently.

• There are several things that distinguish a team that is working interdependently from teams that are working at the other stages of The Performance Curve: An interdependent team recognizes the value and potential of working collaboratively, its members are much more likely to set ambitious goals. They see that more is possible. The activity that is taking place is much more likely to be focused. There is more fun, because working together with people is usually more fun than working independently or in an isolated fashion. Lots of feedback occurs, not just in one direction but in all directions, inside the immediate team and also outside it, because that creates learning. There is a high level of trust and openness. Team members are happy to have challenging conversations if that surfaces issues to enable greater performance. There is mutual accountability, so people are more likely to be catching colleagues doing things right and giving them feedback, as well as catching them doing things wrong and feeding back on that as well. There’s a greater awareness of how the team is doing and knowing how other team members are. So they’re much more likely to recognize when a challenge or some support is required. There’s a continuous emphasis on review and learning to enable improved performance on an ongoing basis.

• Non-judgment – the behaviors observed may fall below the standards required, but this can be explored in partnership to create a learning culture. • Looking for learning – there is always learning to bring out, whether the actions observed are above, at, or below expectations. • A coaching mindset – see the person as capable, resourceful, and full of potential. • Curiosity – get curious about the challenges the person is experiencing, and what is needed to overcome these. • Look for potential as well as interferences – it’s more effective to build on strengths, and where a person is already most engaged, than to focus on weaknesses.

• Measuring the financial impacts justifies future investment. Once you can demonstrate the tangible impacts, it’s a different ball-game. Alan Barton, Director, Arup

• *It postulates four stages of learning:

  • Unconscious incompetence = low performance, no differentiation or understanding.
  • Conscious incompetence = low performance, recognition of flaws, and weak areas.
  • Conscious competence = improved performance, conscious, somewhat contrived effort.
  • Unconscious competence = natural, integrated, automatic higher performance.

• “Our enjoyment of the process gave us unlimited patience, and we wrote as if the precise choice of every word were a matter of great moment.”

• Too much workplace coaching is transactional, limited to cognitive psychology, or else constrained within the principles of humanistic psychology, which maintain that awareness itself is largely curative. The Inner Game, however, reflects a transpersonal psychology which emphasizes the principle of will, intention, or responsibility. It is on this philosophy of awareness and responsibility that coaching is built. Many