People at Work & Play

Michael Melcher, personal coach writes about the value of a year end review of your goals.

 In a simple manner, Melcher recommends capturing key events that have happened to you in the year gone by. Step one is data collection. On a blank piece of paper, write down the significant happenings of the past year. You might jot down the names of people, places, events, projects, books — whatever comes to mind.

The second step is to identify the items that stand out for you. You can circle them, underline, or highlight in various colors. You might notice that you give more attention to some items than others.

The next step is to look at things on your page that are compelling to you. See if you can rank-order these happenings in significance, without analyzing why they are significant. What are the top 10? What are the top 3?

Now switch to left-brained thinking, and do some analysis. Ask yourself some questions about what your list means in terms of the kind of year you’ve had, and the kind of year you’d like to have going forward:

– What’s surprising about your list?
– What’s predictable about your list?
– Based on this list, what’s important to you?
– Based on this list, what’s not really that important to you?
– In the past year, what are some ways that you’ve grown personally? Professionally?
– In the coming year, what are some ways you’d like to grow personally? Professionally?

Once you’ve turned over your mental soil, you’re ready to draft some specific goals. You know what’s important to you; now focus on how you want to move forward in these specific areas.

This seems to be an interesting way of taking stock of the past to plan for the future.

I am not sure how many readers go through all the comments following a post.

Behaviour based feedback should be the first step in the development process and precede coaching says Mike Chitty, owner of Realise Development.

I thought Mike’s comment on my post on “A Coaching Model” should be reproduced in full:

“Great post Prem.

I hope I can add something from my experience in training managers to coach.

I think that often there are much more effective and efficient ways to help people learn than coaching and these should always be tried before coaching is used.

I try to get all the managers I work with to coach all team members on goal based coaching contracts all the time! This builds the ability of the team to be way more productive and more efficient. But coaching is only used when other simple techniques like feedback have failed to produce the desired results.

Helping managers to be specific about the behaviours they are trying to develop is always the starting point for me. I ask what kind of things they wish they could develop people on. Typical responses are things like to…’Show more initiative’ or ‘Be more of a team player’ or ‘Be more confident/assertive’ etc.

I then encourage them to think through what specific behaviours they have seen that lead them to think that this is an area that an individual needs to develop? Many managers struggle with this step. They have to spend some time watching people to figure out what it is that they are doing, or not doing, that leads to the diagnosis.

Once they are clear on the behaviours that are to be the focus of development I ask managers whether they have ever given feedback about them to the individual concerned. Usually the answer is no! This is a real missed opportunity because the simple use of consistent adjusting feedback (by a manager who is good at using both adjusting and affirming feedback) will often get results much more quickly and cost effectively than coaching.

If feedback does not work we then move onto goal based coaching.”

Thanks, Mike, for this perspective.

Margaret Heffernan writes about 10 Signs of Incompetent Managers in Fast Company.

1. Bias against action:There are always plenty of reasons not to take a decision, reasons to wait for more information, more options, more opinions. But real leaders display a consistent bias for action. People who don’t make mistakes generally don’t make anything.
2. Secrecy: “We can’t tell the staff,” is something I hear managers say repeatedly. They defend this position with the argument that staff will be distracted, confused or simply unable to comprehend what is happening in the business. If you treat employees like children, they will behave that way — which means trouble. If you treat them like adults, they may just respond likewise. Secrets make companies political, anxious and full of distrust.
3. Over-sensitivity: An inability to be direct and honest with staff is a critical warning sign. Can your manager see a problem, address it headlong and move on? If not, problems won’t get resolved, they’ll grow. When managers say staff is too sensitive, they are usually describing themselves. Interestingly, secrecy and over-sensitivity almost always travel together. They are a bias against honesty.
4. Love of procedure: Managers who cleave to the rule book, to points of order and who refer to colleagues by their titles have forgotten that rules and processes exist to expedite business, not ritualize it. Love of procedure often masks a fatal inability to prioritize — a tendency to polish the silver while the house is burning.
5. Preference for weak candidates: Always hire people smarter than yourself.
6. Focus on small tasks: Another senior salesperson I hired always produced the most perfect charts, forecasts and spreadsheets. She was always on time, her data completely up-to-date. She would always volunteer for projects in which she had no core expertise — marketing plans, financial forecasts, meetings with bank managers, the office move. It was all displacement activity to hide the fact that she could not do her real job.
7. Allergy to deadlines: A deadline is a commitment. The manager who cannot set, and stick to deadlines, cannot honor commitments. A failure to set and meet deadlines also means that no one can ever feel a true sense of achievement. You can’t celebrate milestones if there aren’t any.
8. Inability to hire former employees: I hired a head of sales once with (apparently) a luminous reputation. But, as we staffed up, he never attracted any candidates from his old company. He’d worked in sales for twenty years — hadn’t he mentored anyone who’d want to work with him again? Every good manager has alumni, eager to join the team again; if they don’t, smell a rat.
9. Addiction to consultants: A common — but expensive — way to put off making decisions is to hire consultants who can recommend several alternatives. While they’re figuring these out, managers don’t have to do anything. And when the consultant’s choices are presented, the ensuing debates can often absorb hours, days, months. Meanwhile, your organization is poorer but it isn’t any smarter. When the consultant leaves, he takes your money and his increased expertise out the door with him.
10. Long hours: Bad managers work very long hours. They think this is a brand of heroism but it is probably the single biggest hallmark of incompetence. To work effectively, you must prioritize and you must pace yourself. The manager who boasts of late nights, early mornings and no time off cannot manage himself so you’d better not let him manage anyone else.

In coaching situations, I have used these questions attributed to the legendary Peter Drucker:-

1. What do I do as your manager and what does your Company do that helps you the most in your job?
2. What do I do as your manager and what does your Company do that hinders you the most in your job?
3. What can you do that will help me as your manager to do the best job for the Company?

These questions provoke thought and are useful to identify issues. As Drucker said these are obvious questions but rarely asked.

• “Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.”
  Chinese Proverb
• “You can’t stop the waves but you can learn to surf.”
  Joseph Goldstein
• “Coaching is a conversation, a dialogue, whereby the coach and the individual interact in a dynamic exchange to achieve goals, enhance performance and move the individual forward to greater success.” Zeus and Skiffington

See these and many more quotes on coaching with some wonderful accompanying pictures in Seapaddler, a site about sea kayaking.

A study by IBM’s consulting arm indicates that many organizations see a crisis looming with reference to leadership in the future, reports the Economic Times.

Three-quarters of the people who responded said this was a significant workplace issue.” The study found 88 % of companies in the Asia Pacific region are most concerned with their ability to develop future leaders, followed by Latin America (74 %); Europe, Middle East and Africa, (74 %); Japan (73 %) and North America (69 %).

The survey by IBM’s consulting arm interviewed 400 human resources executives from 40 countries and suggests companies are putting growth strategies at risk if they cannot identify and develop the next generation of leaders.

To my mind, an integral requirement for leadership in the future will be, if it is not already so, a truly global outlook. Cross-geography assignments in varying cultures become essential to develop the very different perspectives needed for global leaders.

I see significant need for organisations to have select executives coached in ways of working in different parts of their business world.

Came across an interesting and thought provoking post in coachsusie’s weblog.

She quotes the famous American writer Samuel Langhorn Clemens known more popularly as Mark Twain.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed
By the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.
So throw off the bowlines.Sail away from the safe harbor.Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore. Dream. Discover.

Look back to see what you have achieved but look ahead to see what more you can do. There is so much to be done.

Onboarding is a crucial people process. The success of the onboarding program gets the new employee off to a good start.

Here are 7 reasons why onboarding programs fail:-

1. Each thinks it is the other’s responsibility. Lack of co-ordination between functions and people concerned make the new hire wander around unattended or pushed from pillar to post.
2. Existing employees do not support the program simply because nothing similar was done for them. They leave it to the new hire to “sink or swim”.
3. The new employee, especially the lateral hire, thinks he/she knows everything and does not give the program the attention it deserves. They miss out on issues of culture to their detriment later.
4. Managers are too “busy” and do not give the program the priority it deserves. They are quick to delegate the task to some one else.
5. Key elements of onboarding are delegated to those who are not competent enough to do it effectively
6. Too much information is loaded on to the new hire making them groan under the weight of huge amounts of detail, much of which are not needed for their own work.
7. The program is largely impersonal and the employee feels processed like a widget in an assembly line.

Apart from this, no program can give you insight into the “politcal” issues which simply must be learned through experience.

What factors have you come across which make a process so powerful in concept a failure in practice?

Felt nice to be invited by Priscilla Palmer to join her Personal Development List.

“People at Work & Play” is a medium for me to share my thoughts and ideas with those who wish to lead a better life- both professional and personal.

At a recent workshop, we were discussing ” Personal Life Goals”. When asked what mine was, I replied that at this stage of my career- and life- it is simply to: “Help People Grow”.

I derive considerable satisfaction from thinking that after every interaction someone some where can pick up an idea to improve their lives.

Some one called it a gold mine. Priscilla Palmer has put together an impressive list of people interested in/blogs on different aspects of Personal Development.

Personal development is a large topic that includes but is not limited to law of attraction, goals, time management, physical fitness, education, motivation, inspiration, and social skills.

Visited some of these sites. Very informative.

Recommended for those who wish to get maximum value from surfing time !