Coach high performers to create a competitive advantage

This is the third post in a series on coaching high performers. In the last post, we explored how coaching high performers leads to widespread innovation.

Organizations are notoriously inept at seeing and acting on problems of great significance (see: Kodak, Blockbuster, Lehman Brothers, Target in Canada, etc). And while there are many explanations for this myopia, I believe this inability to respond can be explained, in part, by company cultures that suppress the whistle-blowers, that hide the canaries in the coal mine, that obscure the proverbial pause buttons.

In today's workplace, we're encouraged to develop a "solutions-oriented mindest," and a high level of "change resiliency." Neither of these is problematic in and of itself.

But when an organization becomes too focused on solutions, it actually narrows its focus on internal and external challenges (see Adam Grant, The Creative Power of Misfits). When an organization focuses too much on change "resilience," it sacrifices some of its ability to ask critical questions, surface unforeseen challenges, and act upon the subtle yet significant problems that accompany any change.

And that's where coaching high performers comes in.

While it's true that high performers can be problem-solvers, they may be equally valuable for their capacity to flag the otherwise ignored weaknesses and threats confronting an organization. It might be said that a true high performer is best deployed not just a problem-solver but as a problem-flagger!

Part of coaching a high performer involves developing a "problems-oriented mindset," and perhaps even a bit of "change skepticism." We ought to hold coaching conversations with high performers in which we analyze and identify the competitive challenges that the rest of the organization chooses not to see. In these discussions, we should seek to put teams and organizations on a path towards sustainability - by surfacing factors undermining longevity.

We should seek to have these conversations with high performers - but we should be judicious and discerning about what constitutes high performance. It's likely that anyone in an organization can articulate a few conspicuous grievances about their peers or their day to day work. But we're not looking for senseless griping about obvious annoyances. Presumably, someone has already thought about these. We're looking for the hidden challenges, we're seeking to understand the imminent problems that are not readily seen by all. That's why these conversations are a perfect fit for your high performing team members: those who know the business, who know how it runs, and who know how to contribute to its success.

In these conversations, workplace leaders can use three familiar tools in slightly novel applications:

The first is the SWOT Analysis, a look into a team or organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Long applied in strategic planning meetings or executive retreats, SWOT Analyses have been the tool of senior leaders and those in the upper echelon of the org chart. But they shouldn't remain there exclusively. High performers should regularly be encouraged to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats confronting their team, with a keen emphasis on weaknesses and threats.

The key to using this tool for competitive advantage lies in using it consistently with high performers, in encouraging them to focus on the "W" and "T," and in naming weaknesses and threats that are not readily apparent to all others within the organization. The key coaching question in these conversations becomes: "What weaknesses and threats are you aware of, that others are not giving enough thought to?"

The second tool is "Five Whys," a technique often deployed to uncover a problem's root cause. With the Five Whys, a coach asks their coachee "why" a problem exists. Upon their answer, they ask "why" again, prompting a deeper level of reflection than we typically apply to workplace challenges.

Five Whys can help high performers evaluate proposed changes to a team or an organization, so as to identify what downstream effects such a change might create.

The third tool is "Value Stream Mapping," a process-mapping activity that identifies all of the steps involved in delivering a product from a business to a customer. Value Stream Mapping identifies redundancies and unnecessary steps that create waste.

Value Stream Mapping can help high performers to identify possible sources of clutter, or sources of clarification. With Value Stream Mapping, a coach encourages high performers to think about what an organization should add to or remove its critical paths in order to protect against competitive threats.

High performers have an aptitude for sensing consequential problems before the rest of the organization. Often, they are sensing these vulnerabilities at the same time our competitors are thinking about them. When we help high performers to identify meaningful problems - and not just to offer solutions - we buffer our organizations against future disruption.

So give your high performers permission to dwell on problems, and to be skeptical about changes. It may just be the competitive advantage you require in order to avoid stay relevant.

Coach high performers to create a culture of innovation

This is the second post in a series on coaching high performers.

High performers bring many positives to the workplace. They drive results, promote collaboration, elevate morale, and set performance standards. But workplace leaders tend to see high performers as primarily as productive individuals who get things done - which is part of the reason that they receive so little coaching compared with the low-performers on their team. When the high performers do receive coaching, it is often aimed at increasing individual efficiency or ratcheting up productivity: "We like what you're doing, now do more of it."

But it can be short-sighted to view a high-performer just in terms of productivity, and counter-productive to focus coaching on low-performers. Workplace leaders should instead view high-performers as force multipliers, keys to unlocking greater performance and productivity from all of those around them.

And that's what we're seeking when we coach them. Coaching a high performer is not an exercise in facilitating productivity, at least it shouldn't be. Coaching a high performer is an exercise in building a culture of innovation.

High performers perform effectively not because they work longer hours or are more committed to the daily grind. They perform effectively because they find new solutions to old problems.

When we coach them, we're not looking to multiply their outputs - we're looking to explore their inputs. When done well, these coaching sessions empower high performers to take the lead in scaling what's working well to the broader organization - to multiply all of the outputs in the system. As coaches, our goal is to enable high performers to be positive and self-sufficient change agents who raise the game of the greater team.

When done correctly, all high performers in an organization will receive consistent coaching. These coaching sessions will lead to the wide-scale adoption of new ideas, approaches, and processes. Because that's what we're looking for when we coach high performers: not more productivity, not even greater sustainability: rather, we're seeking new ways of working. We're resolving to build a culture of innovation, starting with one high-performer at a time.

So how exactly do we do this?

Coaching to create a culture of innovation is a process of identifying the motivations and behaviors that high-performers use to solve old problems - and exporting them to the broader team.

Step one: Explore the mindset. An effective coaching conversation with a high-performer somewhat resembles psychoanalysis. As a coach, we likely know the behavior that led to high performance - we can see the pitch deck that closed the big sale, we can read the patient survey that described the great healthcare interaction, we can observe the actions that the mechanic took to fix the broken engine. But what's not always obvious is the underlying motivation that enabled high performance. The key question becomes - when you were at your best, what was going through your mind? With this question, we're seeking to understand the motivations, intentions, and broader mindsets that catalyze great performance, to connect and make known the thought processes and the actions of our top talent so that others might benefit.

Step two: Refine and generalize. Once motivations, intentions, and mindsets are established, the next step is to explore the possibility of sharing and scaling. The key question here is what would it take to transfer both behavior and motivation to the organization. As a coach, it's our job to help the high performer differentiate motivations and behaviors that are uniquely situational, from those that are universally transferrable. The key question here becomes - what is the likelihood that others will find themselves in this situation? And if that likelihood is significant, how can we help others to exhibit similar motivations and practice similar behaviors?

Step three: Provide a change vector. Coaches must seek to transfer motivations and high-performance behaviors by creating action plans. These plans might be as simple as a quick training session, in which the high performer shares what's working well. They might be as complex as reconfiguring the physical office environment to spark the types of motivations that drove the high performance - or changing the incentive structure within the team to drive different behaviors. The key question for this third step becomes - what changes can you personally make to this team that will inspire similar motivations and behaviors? And this is the crux of high-performance coaching: taking what's driving great outcomes for some, and using them to drive great outcomes for many.

When coaches start to have these conversations on a recurring basis, a culture of change and innovation emerges. Many team members are given the opportunity to export what's working well for them and what could work well for all. All team members begin to buy-in to an organizational habit of continuous experimentation and improvement.

And the high-performer we started coaching begins to see themselves not just as an engine for producing solid individual outcomes, but as an innovative force transforming the world around them.

TD Magazine: Swap Frameworks for Skills-Based Leadership Development

The following article appeared in the February 2020 edition of TD Magazine (link for ATD members)

The right environment gives people managers the tools and confidence to be successful.

Perhaps when you think of leadership development, you first think about frameworks or models—a clever acronym that describes four steps toward leadership success or a personality inventory that describes a person's greatest strengths based on a set of multiple-choice questions.

As a designer of leadership development programs, I've seen a rising trend of framework fatigue from leaders wary of having the complexities of their vocation reduced to advice from the latest airport bestseller. There's a different way to do leadership development, one that grounds learning in role-specific responsibility and contextual reality.

What it is

Skills-based leadership development is an instructional design philosophy for management training. This development method jettisons frameworks, models, and inventories. Each is replaced by the concrete skills required to perform as a leader in a specific context. It begins with an intensive analysis of the most important skills required to lead in a specific role and the selection of a particular skill on which to focus.

How it works

Skills-based development is effective because it acknowledges that the nuances of people leadership limit the applicability of models and frameworks. Rather, this approach provides a consistent environment in which people leaders can reflect on the specific competencies that matter to their success and listen to how peers are applying the skills in similar contexts.

It doesn't require a training team to teach anything. Instead, it entails the training team creating an environment where leaders synthesize different perspectives into a concrete skill development plan. The training team provides a space in which leaders supply the learning on a peer-to-peer, role-relevant basis.

Guidelines

I create learning experiences for people leaders in Zendesk's customer advocacy organization, a global business comprised of hundreds of customer support professionals. After extensive interviews between the training team and dozens of people leaders, my organization mutually identified coaching as the most critical skill to people leader success. In my department, most customer support advocates are first-career professionals, and most managers are first-time people leaders. We made coaching the focus of our leadership development efforts because it is a powerful source of learning and innovation in an environment of rapid growth and constant change.

With a skill or set of skills identified, the leadership developer sets out to build consistent opportunities to explore, reflect, and self-evaluate on the selected skill. We provide this opportunity through a quarterly coaching skill development meetup, each of which examines a different dimension of workplace coaching. Some explore coaching questions, while others explore coaching in the context of a particular conversation.

Prior to each meetup, the training team enrolls managers in a carefully curated learning path that includes articles with third-party perspectives on coaching skills and podcast-style interviews with managers from our organization.

In these interviews, we ask managers to describe what the skill means to them and how they plan to apply it. We also encourage them to candidly describe the challenges associated with using and developing the skill.

Usually one month after publishing the pathway, we host our quarterly skill meetup, during which we provide managers with three to four case studies related to the skill of workplace coaching. Reflecting on the learning path content and their own experience, managers work as a team to develop a coaching action plan and script coaching conversations for each case study. The meetup concludes with action planning; managers identify how they will put their learning into practice with their team of customer advocates, when they will apply what they have learned, and what may stand in their way.

Between meetups, our learning management system suggests role-relevant resources based on an individual's evaluation of their current skill level. Our LMS curates learning content from a wide spectrum of online resources—from TED Talks and podcasts to blog posts and courses.

What does this look like in practice? One first-time people manager was unfamiliar with workplace coaching before we adopted the skills-based approach. Through the program, the manager discovered the importance of coaching to managing a team of customer support professionals. The manager realized how her peers were applying their coaching skills to career development conversations and envisioned how she might do the same. Via case studies and action planning, she developed a specific and measurable plan for developing her own coaching skill set. Six months into this initiative, she is holding regular coaching conversations with her team and attending recurring meetups to understand how to apply coaching in other contextually relevant scenarios.

Results

While the program is still relatively new, we measure its success based on the number of managers who have made progress against their action plan within 30 days of the meetup. Long term, we plan to encourage managers to rate their coaching skill level on approximately a quarterly basis so that we can track the extent to which participants put the learning into action.

A skills-based approach enables managers to continuously improve the skills that matter most within their context through a synthesis of perspectives and ongoing self-reflection. The next time you're asked to contribute to a leadership development initiative, ask yourself what skill matters most to your learners, how internal and external thought leaders are thinking about that skill, and how you can create an environment that promotes dialogue and reflection. The approach moves leadership development from an abstraction to a concrete driver of business results.

Checklist: Skills-Based Development Process

• Conduct a needs analysis to identify the most critical skills for leaders in your organization.

• Create consistent opportunities to build the skills—self-paced and with their peers.

• Measure the progress leaders make on their action plan and monitor how they self-evaluate their skills over time.

• Pivot toward different skills as the organization's needs change.

Resources

Bika, N. n.d. "How to conduct a skills gap analysis." Workable. https://resources .workable.com/tutorial/skills-gap-analysis.

Buckingham, M. n.d. "Lie 9, Leadership is a thing." Marcus Buckingham Blog. www.marcusbuckingham.com/rwtb/lie-9.

Degreed. 2019. "Skills: Measure What Matters," May 9. https://blog.degreed.com/videos/skills-measure-what-matters.