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Management and coaching are generally treated as entirely separate disciplines with vastly different facets. I find the most significant difference is in how each discipline works with others; where managers tell, coaches guide. I think a lot of problems could be solved if people did a little less telling and a little more guiding, and that is where management can lean on coaching techniques.
Brené Brown is known for highlighting the impact of what she calls, “the stories we tell ourselves”. In her Netflix special, The Call to Courage, she recounts how while swimming with her husband he did not respond as expected to a statement from her. She started mulling over what culd be happening, thinking up a variety of scenarios - most of which she questioned herself in. After the swim she realised that he had in ear plugs and could not hear her and that is why he didn’t respond, and not the myriad of other reasons she had imagined. Hence she knows how the stories we tell ourselves can harm us. But where do these stories come from?
I have been a coach for some time now, and I’ve been doing Performance Cafe for over two years, but I recently realised that I have never actually stopped to properly explain what coaching is, and a lot of people seem to have the wrong idea. As with all discussions of what something is, let’s start with what it isn’t.
A workplace accountability study by Partners in Leadership revealed that 82% of correspondents said that they have limited to no ability to hold others accountable; in this same study, 91% of correspondents ranked accountability highly among the company’s developmental needs.
As a concept, accountability sucks. As recently discussed, the word doesn’t really have positive connotations; but the process is also scary – to hold someone accountable is to make them your responsibility, and to be held accountable by someone else often means having someone with authority over you scrutinising your every move.
When holding people accountable, or when trying to, there is often a fear that something will go wrong, that the person in question won't respond constructively and that stress will escalate because of it.
Accountability often sounds negative. To many being held accountable means they’ve made a mistake, and to hold someone else accountable can often lead to stress or even conflict.
Kindness is complicated, especially in the workplace. We often try to avoid confrontations and clashes. This gentler approach is often seen as a kindness, both to oneself and to others, but it is harmful in its own way. Shrugging off concerns because dealing with them causes stress. Avoiding holding people accountable for the work they are meant to be doing because it can cause tension in the workspace. Complimenting people on their work when they are struggling to keep up or are underperforming.
Recently, in my discussions on accountability, I discussed the necessity for self-awareness in management and teamwork. Understanding our own motivations, behaviours, boundaries, and expectations allows us to better understand our triggers, habits, and responses to the situations we find ourselves in. This all boils down to self-management, but it is time we stop looking inward and start looking at how we manage other people. Accountability is a two-way street, it only works when all parties involved are self-managing, but this is only one half of the equation, the other half being relationship management.
It is one thing to hold someone accountable; a task or project can be handed to someone, they can be briefed, given a due date, and that’s that; but before we can hold others accountable, and before they can even hold themselves accountable, they must first take ownership.
Accountability is a two-way street, when you hold someone accountable, they need to hold themselves accountable too. Recently, we discussed what it is to take ownership of a given task or project, more just about ticking boxes, taking ownership of a task is about responsible autonomy. Taking on autonomy is often more difficult than it may first seem, we don’t know what we don’t know – a given task might have steps we are unaware of or don’t know how to complete, or it may require a working knowledge of tools and workflows that we don’t have, or, far more commonly, we don’t know what the common pitfalls and issues are and where we will encounter them, kneecapping our ability to solve or avoid them.
On the road to accountability, entitlement is often encountered, but rarely is it properly acknowledged and discussed. Entitlement is, in its simplest form, a sense of being inherently deserving of something – privileges, benefits, special treatment, higher status, etc – without necessarily having earned or worked for it.
I have said a lot about accountability in recent months – how to hold yourself and others accountable, the benefits of accountability, etc – but something I haven’t really discussed is the impact of personality on accountability. As mentioned in the past, accountability requires clear expectations, but people have different standards when it comes to a concept such as clarity. A ‘thinker’ will need measurable targets, specific instructions and a set workflow, but a more creative person will perform best when given wiggle room, space and time to understand a given task on a deeper level and the flexibility to approach it from different angles.
In our discussions of accountability, I recently touched on entitlement and its impact on the workplace, but when managing someone else’s entitlement by holding them accountable, we need to be wary not to act entitled ourselves. An example of this is the response “Because I said so”, under no circumstance does that phrase ever improve a conversation. The reason for that is that entitlement destroys any sense of psychological safety.
Last week I wrote about making the best of the challenges that 2020 has brought across our paths and reiterated the well-known saying “There is no growth in your comfort zone”. People responded that as there is so much pain and suffering right now that it is difficult to know where to start looking for the positives. Predictably this is to be expected as most people feel worn down by the rigours of Lockdown and the unfortunate run of negative news that accompanies it. This week I prepared a social media post for Facebook. In this post I was speaking of individual versus team strengths. The challenge was for everyone to try and understand each other’s strengths as a way to understand their perspective. I used the metaphor of a rope and showed that each person’s rope is different. A rope can either provide security or it can be constricting. So, in effect the same tool can have two very different uses.
So this seems to be my new “thing”. I am totally obsessed with finding the sweet spot between “ensuring performance and results” and “being human” in business. The COVID pandemic has highlighted one of the biggest dilemmas in our modern world of work, how do we find the balance between showing empathy at work while not dropping the ball on productivity and performance.
In the past year I have often made reference to the fact that we cannot underestimate the impact of COVID on our emotional lives. I never highlighted the importance of the indirect impact of COVID. As I write this I am at the beside of my father who fell and is now being admitted to hospital with broken ribs and a broken wrist. My father is in his eighties and is frail both mentally and physically and I am responsible for his day-to-day care. Typically when I say I have this I covered, I mean really covered, from meds, to finances to small rituals and routines. This is not the first hospital visit and normally I would be able to take this in my stride, I’ve so got this. Except I don’t…..
Last week I was presenting a mentoring session focused on human-centered change management. While the focus of the session was on change within the business context the question was asked how we change people’s minds to accept vaccination. Given the recent emphasis of vaccination against COVID-19 and its strains, and the strong response from anti-vaxxers, the question drew more questions around how to address racism, patronage and so on. I jokingly replied that I would solve world peace shortly. Earnestly though my advice was to have the tough conversations. It takes education to change minds – education that actually focusses on taking abroad range of perspectives into account. And that I think is the downfall of how we communicate.
