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How to fight fire-fighting without fighting fires

21/6/2020

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The number one complaint we hear from leaders in organisations is that they are always ‘fire-fighting’.
Now they are not actually members of the fire-brigade, so we know that fire-fighting is not supposed to be their main activity.

Most of them mean two things:
  • I don’t have enough time to get my tasks done
  • And - because of that - I don’t have enough time to think strategically (which is where I have the opportunity to add the most value)
When everyone around you is saying the same, welcome to your organisation’s Fire-fighting Culture.

This was a familiar problem before Covid 19, but shifting into the virtual world has made it even more challenging! You are at a greater distance from your people, so communicating with them becomes trickier than before. 

And, as the world comes out of lock-down, we all have to think again about how to organise our collaborations.

The key question for leaders in organisations is this: How do we create a new fire-resistant working culture, in which people take responsibility towards shared goals?

When we find successful answers to this question, we’ll have a big competitive advantage over other organisations and also over the old ways of working.

Here’s a prediction, based on evidence from our work in the past: A coaching culture will  outperform a fire-fighting culture. 

When we were invited to work with Walkers (the potato crisp people), they were losing staff fast, and their organisational survey revealed that the main reason people were leaving was because of poor communications from their immediate manager. This was consistent with findings in many organisations: 11% of employees cited ‘Manager Behaviour’ and 22% cited ‘lack of growth and development opportunities’ as reasons for leaving their jobs, in a decade-long study produced by the Employee Benefits organisation.

We trained the Walkers’ managers in Solutions Focus coaching, so that every conversation between manager and a direct report would create more clarity about who should do what, and leave the direct report feeling both empowered and supported. 

A main principle for these conversations is to follow the process indicated by our coaching model. We taught them to ask two questions and make one suggestion.


  • What's going well for you?
  • What do you want to do next?
  • Here's what I feel also needs to get done. 

Starting with what the employee is thinking - about what’s going well for them and what they want to do next - is a good way to build engagement. And then including what the manager needs to see keeps the conversation grounded in the reality of the organisation’s needs. And so by the end of the talk, staff are far clearer about their role and immediate next steps. 

What’s more, the top team signalled their commitment to this new coaching culture by being the first to attend the training, then clearing space in their diaries to coach their direct reports.

In short, it worked. Over a period of just a few months, retention rates went up and staff said that the quality of communications had noticeably improved. 

Perhaps you’d say that this would not be possible in your organisation: if we stop fighting fires, everything is going to burn down.

The clue here is to escape the metaphor. Not everything will turn to cinders. In fact, everyone remains keen to get things done, so although there’s a brief period of adjustment, it’s a small price to pay for long-term, sustainable improvements.

Sure, to begin with, some things may not get done, or may be done more slowly. And that might feel awkward in the short term. But very quickly - if, let’s say, you put in place an improved system - within a few days, it will have already relieved the pressure. Which in turn creates space for your next considered improvement.

That’s coaching on a large scale. Each conversation between manager and report, or between colleague and peers, is set up to address a significant issue. After every conversation, you make small changes immediately.

The result is a renewed sense of control, and an atmosphere in which calmness replaces descents into panic at the slightest signal. 

When managers adopt a coaching style, they quickly get a sense of how it builds capacity in their colleagues, encouraging everyone in the organisation to work out their own solutions. And that takes a load off of the leaders’ backs. 

Staff - the very same people who seemed so frustrating before - are rediscovered as resourceful. 

We’re planning soon to re-open our popular online course, SF Coaching in the Workplace, to teach precisely these skills - a programme that means you will save time by conducting conversations that are purposeful, without being uncomfortable or confrontational. You can increase performance in a way that makes you and your direct reports feel good.

We’ve opened our waiting list so that you can sign up to learn how to coach in your organisation to get better results - mostly by ensuring fires don't break out so often in the first place!  

 
Click here to join the waiting list and receive a free series of useful coaching resources.
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Should I stay or should I go - how to make deciding easier

17/6/2020

 
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I was recently coaching a senior executive who was having difficulty making a decision. After a promotion, he was struggling to manage a large team and was trying to decide whether he should get help to do his job better or leave the company to find a more specialist role elsewhere.

It struck me that we tend to think about decisions as if they are binary: stay or go - keep or discard. This works with relatively simple decisions. Shall I eat an apple or orange? Wear the blue or black top today? But with more complex and weighty decisions, it adds a rigidity that easily mutates to indecision and stuckness.
There is no need to limit ourselves to a forced choice when there are often far more possibilities available.My client was putting immense pressure on himself to make a quick decision, ‘so that I can move forward’. This was producing the opposite effect, creating so much pressure that he’d come to a complete standstill. He’d made his 'pros and cons' list, he’d talked himself round in circles and he’d berated himself for lacking clarity about what to do next. Now the impasse was overwhelming and detracting from his work even more.
​
It was clear that he needed a fresh approach – via an appetising metaphor. Like a good pot of tea, decisions often need time to brew. Sometimes it’s not the decision itself that’s especially tricky. It’s the knots with which you entangle yourself – as a response to the pressure you perceive in the situation. It’s the story you tell yourself about ‘lacking confidence to do the right thing’. So rather than focus on the content of the decision, let’s pay attention to the process.

I asked my client to consider on a scale of 0-10 how confident he was that he’d make the right decision. He said 8. 'How come it’s an 8 - and not a 0?', I asked. He explained that he’d made good decisions about his career before, and that whatever he decided, he knew he would make the best of the outcome.



Curious, I asked him about these other good career decisions and how he’d done that. What did he know about making good decisions about his career? Soon he was listing actions to move this forward -  contact a head-hunter, chat with his boss, organise mentoring or training on team management, explore other suitable in-house roles. There was plenty to do while the decision brewed - actions that would provide more information, make progress and generate possibilities.

So next time you’ve got an important decision to make, give yourself more choice and allow things to emerge by asking yourself what you know about making good decisions, what’s worked before and what can you be getting on with whilst it’s brewing. You never know, you might even have time for a nice cup of tea.



If you want to learn more about these conversational life-changing skills, we’re re-opening our popular online course, SF Coaching For The Workplace, later this year.

It's a programme that will equip you with practical tools to turn things around without being uncomfortable or confrontational. 



You can get onto the waiting list now. 

​Sign up here if you’re interested to learn how to coach in your organisation to get better results.



What’s the research on coaching telling us?

18/3/2020

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‘More than half the effect is placebo: As a coach you can just hum along’. Well yes, and the other half is important too - the client’s attitude, the coach’s method, the context, for example.
 
At this year's Wales Coaching conference, Eric de Haan spoke about what we know about what makes an impact in coaching. He was presenting headlines from the quantitative research that finds patterns in data - usually after the coaching sessions. It’s the sort of research that sees the coaching work as a lab experiment, ideally comparing clients with control groups of non-clients.
 
Most of what we can say about coaching research is derived from the more extensive research on therapy. 


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How to do a Success Analysis | Paul

15/1/2020

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​When was the last time you did something well and greeted it with a Success Analysis? 
 
Here’s how to do a Success Analysis when you have a team with accomplishments to its name.
 
Gather everyone around, and share stories of when this success happens. The stories will ideally touch upon:

  • What prompts it?
  • What’s each contributor doing?
  • What conditions are helping to maintain this success?
 
Then task the team to work together to generate a list of 10 (home grown) tips you could give to a new member of the team so that they will also know how to do this.
 
We tend to over-rate how much we can learn from mistakes and failures - mostly, the learning consists of ‘Don’t do that again'.

​But the real gold of knowing what to do (instead of the mistaken behaviour) is only found when we discover what works. Then we can analyse and re-apply it.
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How Don Jackson brought an interactional view to people seen as dysfunctional

27/11/2017

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​At the UKASFP conference, Dr Wendel Ray from the University of Louisiana at Monroe, reminded us about Don Jackson, one of the founding fathers of what’s become the solutions-focused approach to change.
 
Jackson took a view of people not as isolated individuals to be thought about or studied separately, but as part of the small or larger groups to which they belonged. Then any particular individual’s behaviour is seen as them adapting as well as they can to the way the group is operating.

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Hard problems, easy solutions

13/11/2017

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The problem might be hard, but the solution can be easy. That’s a central insight of a solutions-focused approach. If we get too tangled up in thinking about the problem, analysing it and talking about it, we might miss the simplicity of doing something different – which may well be unrelated to the problem in any obvious way, yet improve things quickly. A nice example here, in this Guardian Weekend column by Oliver Burkeman.
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What’s the best question to start with in a workshop or coaching session?

30/10/2017

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Our opening words inevitably contain assumptions, destiny-filled assumptions which can shape the rest of the conversation.
 
What if we start with ’What’s the problem?'. That assumes a problem, which we’ll now have to talk about and then try to solve.

​Bulgarian solution-focused practitioner Plamen Panayotov proposes, ‘What question brought you here today?’ 
The Solutions Focus Book

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‘The client is the expert’.  What?!

17/10/2017

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In our Solutions Focus practice we like to say that our clients and customers are the experts, by which we acknowledge that they know their lives and work better than we ever can, and are therefore best placed to decide how to use their resources to solve their problems.  
 
So, if the client is the expert, how do we let them know that, while still adding value in our job as coach, therapist or workshop leader? How do we empower clients in practice during a workshop or a coaching session? ​
Positively Speaking

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6 ideas about setting goals in your organisation | Paul

11/9/2017

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​Here are 6 thoughts about goals:

  1. It’s unethical to hold people to goals that they have set, because much of what happens after you set a goal is unpredictable.
  2. Watch out for when goals turn counter-productive. Like prescription drugs, they can have unwanted side-effects.
  3. It’s important to give yourself permission not to stick to goals when circumstances change and you need your wits about you to deal with uncertainty.
  4. Perhaps if goals are modest and short-term, they will not be so delusional. 
  5. A deadline by which you have to produce a piece of work can be very productive. I write here as a trained journalist. 
  6. If you work with others, instead of setting goals ask them what they would like to achieve. Then when you meet again, ask them what progress they have made.​
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Answer and question sessions

4/9/2017

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​In many forms of coaching and therapy, the practitioner has a plan. The course of the conversation depends relatively little on what the client wants. That makes it predictable and thus easy for the coach. But is the comfort of the coach or the therapist (rather than the client) the goal of the session?

​In taking a solutions-focused approach, you do have to listen to the client, and the questions you ask depend a great deal on what the client has to say.

 
We have a favourite SF training exercise, in which you practice with a partner and your next question must include a significant word or phrase from the previous answer. So the pattern shifts from ‘Question, answer, question’ to ‘Answer, question, answer’.
Positively Speaking The Solutions Focus
In SF coaching sessions, we start by asking what the client wants. That’s the plan, and that’s as far as the plan goes. The rest depends upon the answer you get and whatever is needed to get a more detailed description of what’s wanted, descriptions of resources and descriptions of progress.
 
And the value of that? These questions will produce change. And they will keep you as the coach in the moment and on your toes.
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