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I have two news items to share before jumping into the newsletter for this week: Registration is still open for my free workshop on Using a Coaching Approach to Leadership on June 25. And registration is officially now open for the next cohort of Developing a Coaching Approach to Leadership this August through December! This is an opportunity to join a small group of library leaders meeting every other week for 5 months to practice building your coaching skills and building lasting habits. We have a structured curriculum to discuss and apply to scenarios you’re actually dealing with at work AND space for you to get constructive feedback on how well you use these skills in practice. And now onto the content for this week! How do you handle really difficult conversations with members of your team? Recently, the book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High came up in a discussion. It’s an older book on its third edition, but it was a new one to me, so I checked it out. Crucial Conversations is about how to have a productive conversation when both emotions and stakes are high. Some of the key strategies include:
If you’ve heard me talk before about using a coaching approach to leadership, many of these strategies should sound familiar! The focus of this book is on regular conversations, not coaching conversations, but it has a lot of valuable insight into ways you can manage your own emotions and reactions, and monitor for psychological safety to keep difficult conversations moving toward a productive goal. So, what’s important about that distinction between regular and coaching conversations? In regular conversations, you’re fully bringing your opinions, desires, and needs into the conversation. We may be negotiating an agreement and need to find a compromise that we’ll both feel good about. Or we may be having a departmental discussion about workloads, with everyone bringing their own opinions about what is manageable and what should be prioritized. Or you may need to give feedback about an area where someone on your team is falling short of meeting expectations, with the agenda of wanting them to improve their performance in that area. Or any number of other regular conversations we have every day. The coaching conversation is distinct from that, because it centers the other person’s goals. Your goal in this conversation is to ask thought provoking questions that will help them consider perspectives they hadn’t considered, so that they can find a strategy or solution that works for them. There are times when it’ll be useful to share information – some institutional knowledge they didn’t already have or clarification of expectations, for example. But this conversation is about helping them achieve their goals, not about what you want. I feel like it’s easy to see how that description of a coaching conversation fits developmental coaching, where you’re helping someone who is already meeting expectations grow. It might be harder to see how that fits discussions around performance issues. So let’s dig a little deeper into that scenario of giving feedback about an area where someone on your team is falling short of meeting expectations… Managers often come to meetings like this with their own agenda – wanting the team member to improve their performance in the area where they’re falling short. You care about this team member as an individual, so you have an emotional attachment to their success. That sometimes leads to doing things that take away some of their autonomy. The distinctive part of using a coaching approach here is that you share the observation of behavior – the performance that fell short of expectations – and then ask a lot of curious, nonjudgmental questions. Instead of proceeding with the story you came up with about their skills not being up to par, so they need additional training (or whatever the case may be), you ask what’s going on for them. And then you ask more questions about what’s going on below the surface of that answer. You speak clearly about expectations and consequences, but remember that the coaching mindset includes acknowledging that the person you’re coaching is responsible for their own choices. You want this person to be successful in this role, but is that what they want? If not, how can you help them achieve the goals they actually want to work toward? (Assuming that involves a path out of their current role if they don’t start meeting expectations.) If their goal is to be successful in this role, then what do they actually need to be able to meet these expectations? What steps are they going to take to improve their performance, and by when? Bringing the discussion back around to Crucial Conversations, notice the importance of actively listening to your team member’s perspective. Notice the importance of recognizing that the story that comes to mind for you first may not match their story. In both settings, the details of what you’re discussing may not be the real issue that needs to be discussed, so you need to pay attention to cues that something deeper may be going on. In both settings, creating psychological safety is crucially important to keep the conversation on track. And, both approaches focus on getting to a clear path forward. So, even though Crucial Conversations doesn’t discuss coaching, I recommend checking it out to help you build some key components of a coaching mindset. |