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© Andrew Atter, leadership coach and Associate of Marshall Goldsmith Partners
After years of coaching high performing leaders one-to-one, I’ve come
to the conclusion that really effective leaders need to leave behind
their management persona, built around impartiality, neutrality and the
avoidance of emotion, and develop courageous new behaviours built on
the expression of emotion, the development of personal trust and the
delivery of powerful messages. If good managers are primarily task
focused, great leaders are primarily people focused. Making this
transition from one to the other is difficult for most people.
This courageous behaviour is never more clearly demonstrated than in a
leader’s ability to avoid team conflict and focus their people on
outcomes. Certainly avoiding conflict and delivering results requires
more than just traditional “soft” management skills, where often the
expression of real beliefs and feelings are usually discouraged.
To explain further, a while back I coached Megan, the MD of an
international software company. She was a tough, hard driving boss with
a high industry reputation. Yet, her performance and company cohesion
were being undermined by mistakes the whole team made in front of the
client. Blame and retribution resulted.
She had been asking questions such as… ‘When will this be ready?’ and
‘Are you going to be able to do this on time?’ But she was not getting
the full story in time. Things were not… ‘OK, really’.
I coached her on making some important changes. She began to name her
emotions in a controlled way. She began to ask more discovery questions
earlier in the process. And she delivered more powerful messages.
Team performance improved. There were fewer blame meetings and research
revealed higher team motivation. Let’s look at what she did
differently.
Naming her emotions
In the words of the Harvard Negotiation Project team report, a
“conversation without emotion is like Opera without music”. A leader
who learns to express emotion and hear the emotion from others will
build trust. By saying “I’m feeling worried about this”. “I’m feeling
disappointed” or “I believe this is the right direction” Megan got
attention from her team. She learnt to talk more slowly. By expressing
how she felt in a controlled way, they trusted her more and surfaced
their doubts and concerns more readily than before.
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Discovery questions
Megan found that “What and How” questions gave her the
intelligence she needed. Rather than asking “Will this be finished on
time!?” (er...yes!), she began asking questions like “What do you have
to do to deliver this on time?” or “What alternatives have you
considered?” Discovery Questions require a thoughtful answer…and in the
heat of battle Megan noticed which of her team were still thinking.
Rather than delivering criticism, these questions allowed her to direct
her coaching effectively. She developed a better understanding of the
diversity in capabilities within her team, enabling her to calibrate
her expectations more accurately.
Powerful messages
Previously, Megan’s language was a model of business mindedness. ‘The
business requirements are…’ or ‘the client is expecting’ were common
statements used. Megan realised this was management language, not
leadership language. She learnt that staying too long in the ‘neutral
zone’ lessened the emotional charge that stimulates the team’s energy.
She shifted her language to a personal expression of needs. ‘This is
what I want… I need the complete picture…This is my expectation…’. In
the heat of the moment, the team began responding to her more as a
person and minds became focused. And Megan noticed that while ‘I
want’/’I need’ statements are demanding, they were respectful. She
avoided the previous mistakes of lapsing into ‘You need / you must’
statements which have a coercive, diminishing and even accusative tone.
Avoiding conflict, therefore, requires leaders to grasp the very
emotion that we try to avoid, to probe deeper into developing
situations that others would leave alone, and deliver messages that
take the breath away. Leaders… Be bold! ˘
Andrew was a speaker at a BPCC seminar in the BPCC
Academy series on 13 March 2005. He provides one-to-one executive
coaching to business leaders.
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