Writing

Coaching Creates Time to Reflect

Posted on by simongterry in Leadership, Learning, Life & Career

office-336368_1920We don’t need to be told that work is busy. Pressures are everywhere. Finish one task or one meeting and there is a good chance that the next few challenges are piled up ready to go. We rarely get the time to reflect as we power through our work, unless we allocate time or are forced into reflection by the questions of others.

Without reflection, we all struggle to focus and question our priorities, our relationships and our performance. The value of coaching is that it can create this space in our work week and help make our work far more effective. The power of questions from others is that they force us to reflect, to consider a wider perspective on our work and can break the patterns that form in our busy thinking.

Great leaders coach. They know how to ask simple questions of their teams that foster reflection on goals, priorities, alignment of work and the effectiveness of work. Creating a supportive coaching environment in a team enables people to reflect on how to improve more often and more effectively. Great leaders encourage peer coaching too.

Peer coaching is a powerful technique and one that can happen in the flow of work. Taking the time to ask each other “How did we do? What can we do better or different next time?” is all that it takes to create more reflection in our work. We don’t work alone the insights and observations of others can help us become more effective. Working out loud, purposefully sharing our work with our peers, invites our peers into our work and facilitates this reflection.

In the coaching work that I do, I find asking the simple questions clarifying goals, the situation and opportunities to do things differently creates a space for a new and powerful conversation. The time invested can have dramatic returns by clearing blockages, building new collaborative networks and focusing the effort of work. Often the improvement opportunities are obvious when someone has time to reflect on how they can do things differently.

An added benefit of the time to reflect through coaching conversations is an increase in accountability in organisations. Regular coaching conversations with a leader, a coach or peers, create personal accountability to translate improvement opportunities into action. Knowing that someone will ask “what have you done differently?” helps us reflect continuously on how well we are delivering on our plans.

Reflecting with the support of others is the heart of learning and performance improvement. How are you fostering a coaching culture to benefit your performance and the performance of the teams around you?

Simon Terry is a coach and consultant who helps individuals and organisations to make work more effective. Reach out to discuss how more coaching can foster reflection for you and your organisation. 

Who leads Digital Transformation? Everyone

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work

The CEO should lead digital transformation. CIOs or CMOs should lead digital transformation. You should have a Chief Digital Officer. The posts keep coming offering candidates for the heroic change leaders to make your organisation effective in the digital era. 

By now it is clear that the potential of and ramifications of digital technologies impact every part of your organisation. This is not a future concern. The change is comin fast now. Why should any manager or employee in your organisation wait for a heroic leader to map that change for them?  If the impact is everywhere and here now, why don’t we ask everyone to lead change. 

The organisations best leveraging digital technology aren’t relying on one hero or heroine. We are more than one decade beyond the time that digital change was remarkable or out of the ordinary. Digital technology and approaches are embedded everywhere so the best performing digital organisations. have connected their whole organisation to the digital transformation challenge and are using digital tools and techniques to coordinate the change through the actions of all employees. These organisations are using change agents to leverage both big and small digital changes in all their work. 

Don’t wait for heroic change leadership to work. Don’t rely on change from outside. Engage every  employee in thinking through how they can make their work more effective with digital tools and approaches. Give them all employees power to experiment and lead change to be more effective. That’s the true digital transformation. 

The One You

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work

There is only one you. Share with others the best version of yourself. The one that covers the richness of your skills, capabilities and experience. Show the authentic one you.

One of the common mistakes in modern marketing is the suggestion that a brand is somehow independent of the product. We hear people talk about creating and promoting brands with little connection to the experience that the actual product delivers. In fact people can go as far to talk about building a brand without even selling a product as if marketing itself is the point.  All successful marketers know that as the heart of a successful brand is a moment of truth about the experience of the product or service. If your brand isn’t honest you either have a short-lived relationship or need to continuously invest in marketing and efforts to maintain an illusion.

Sadly this flawed marketing approach can also creep into pressures we experience to be the best version of ourselves in work and our lives. One of the reasons people react so badly to “personal branding” is that they see it as maintaining this inauthentic facade.  Too many people feel the pressure to be one person at work and a different person in the rest of their life. There are real costs to this effort.

Firstly, pretending is exhausting. I know because I tried for years to fit into the expectations of managers, peers and organisations as to the kind of employee and manager I should be. When you have a different life experience, different backgrounds and different thoughts this can be really challenging. I found it exhausting & ineffective to pretend. Mark Twain once said “if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything”. It is also true that if you be yourself, you don’t have to remember the act anymore.

Authenticity is the alignment of what you say and do with who you are.  Authenticity builds trust and is a key to effective human relationships.  Pretending to be a another more ‘perfect’ version of yourself will undercut your authenticity and ultimately your effectiveness as an employee, a peer and a leader. At some point, the pretence will break down or crack just enough to cause others to doubt you. People build trusted relationships with whole people, not perfect airbrushed cardboard cutouts.

Pretending also diminishes why you were chosen for the job. Usually when people are pretending they leave out the uniqueness of their personal experience and capabilities in pursuit of some universal average expectation. Averages lie. Nobody really is like that. Average is rarely effective. Worse still, you were chosen for your role because of your breadth of capabilities and experience. Denying your whole talents is undermining that choice.

Often it is not easy to bring together the many parts of your life and share them with others. We aren’t a neatly packaged brand. We come with complexities, contradictions and   surprises. Often we are more concerned about these things than others are. You will find life richer, easier and far more effective if you focus on bringing the whole one you to your work.  In the heart of those complexities, contradictions and surprises you will find what defines you, what others can appreciate and what will make you effective in your work.  You are the one you. Share that person with others.

The Power of Peers – Peer Academy

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work, Learning, Working out loud

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I recently agreed to become an Ambassador for Peer Academy, because I see enormous potential in a new platform for organisations to bring together all their employees in the experience of sharing expertise, growing strategic capabilities and realising potential in new ways. Peer Academy is an exciting Melbourne startup founded by Kylie Long and Onur Ekinci that already has great traction in creating a public marketplace for skill-sharing and delivering tailored peer academies for organisations.

Designing Peer Learning Academies for the Future of Work

Yesterday I participated in a design studio session on the Peer Academy product roadmap with the team and a number of clients and prospects. What became evident quickly was how much potential there is untapped in organisations and how new solutions can make it easier for people to share their expertise and collaborate to achieve personal and work goals.  We cannot leverage what our people already know when their skills are hidden, when collaboration is not recognised and when building capabilities takes unvalued time and effort.

In past learning projects with organisations, I have seen the power of peer mentoring.  Focusing on the exchange of learning and experience by peers expands the learning culture in an organisation from a culture of giving to the more junior and less experienced to a two-way dynamic exchange of skills and experience through networks. That benefits all in the organisation, reinforces collaboration and flattens the power dynamic in the organisation. The more people you engage in peer mentoring the value of that learning accelerates and scales exponentially.  This is one of the key reasons why I believe so strongly in the power of working out loud to help others to learn by watching work in progress.

Ultimately, peer learning is powerful too because the feedback of your peers is a way to understand and validate the skills and capabilities that you have developed.  Every time a peer shares their learning it is a two-way gift, both teacher and student benefit from the experience. Tacit knowledge is made explicit. Knowledge is validated and the teacher learns something from feedback. The organisation benefits too as understanding of the capabilities of the organisation develops through the platform and learning can be far more responsive to business needs than a centralised learning team developing courses to plan.

As we move into the fast paced agile future of work, organisations need to move more to leverage the collective potential of people. Social learning mediated through peers in networks are a key part of this opportunity.  This kind of learning is more than just peers delivering courses to each other. Ultimately peer learning becomes part of a Big Learning culture in the organisation, a systematic approach to ensuring every interaction in the company is a learning experience for individuals and the organisation.  This personal collaborative approach to learning is at the heart of organisational effectiveness in the digital era.

The Wirearchy Makes Your Hierarchy Work

Posted on by simongterry in Future of Work

Your hierarchy doesn’t work. It is. No value has ever been created down your hierarchy. Nothing of value occurs because of the flow of resources, information or power up and down a hierarchy. All the money invested in perfecting hierarchies through restructures are a massive exercise in waste. Much of the money in perfecting the flow of information up the hierarchy suffers the same fate. The focus on the hierarchy is a focus on status relationships, not the relationships of work.

The real engine of value in your organisation is the interactions and collaborations in and through the hierarchy. These collaborative relationships are where the work gets done and where the formal hierarchical decisions are shaped, influenced or frustrated.

The value that is created in any organisation comes from the wirearchy. Jon Husband’s working definition of wirearchy is

a dynamic two-way flow of  power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology

Speak to any sane chief executive and they are frustrated with the limits of their information, their power and their influence. The constraints that they experience are the outcome of the two-way dynamic of the wirearchy that wraps in and through their hierarchy:

  • The ability to order an outcome is not the ability to achieve an outcome. Humans intervene to assess a careful two-way dynamic of trust, credibility and purpose before they yield to raw exercises of power.  In many situations the cost of an order to information, trust and credibility may overcome the value of achieving any result.
  • The vertical relationships in organisations are often far more tangential and remote than the everyday demands of other horizontal or external relationships. Money, rewards and status can matter less than personal relationships or fit within a group.
  • Information is not a standardised input into decision making. Our view of information is shaped by context, by relationships, credibility and trust that come from relationships. Decisions are not made on the papers but through a complex web of relationships and influences.
  • Because central planning and control is inherently unreliable, it is the cooperation and collaboration in the hierarchy that reorders work, resources and information to enable critical outcomes to be achieved. The tighter the hierarchy seeks to control these the more poorly the system performs.
  • In the absence of trust, the wirearchy fills the vacuum with rumour, gossip and investigative research. Human networks find a way to bring partial transparency to secrets, by routing around the barriers.
  • Most dangerous of all hierarchical power with its one-way flows is slow and unresponsive. Remote from the ever-changing interface with customers and the market, the hierarchy is a barrier to innovation, experimentation and adaptation.  The change agents who navigate the wirearchies in and around hierarchies are those who remedy this danger.

Our organisations invest heavily in perfecting the hierarchy often at the expense of investment in the elements of this two-way dynamic. Learning, knowledge, trust and collaboration are after thoughts in many organisations plans for the digital world. What would be possible if instead of the perfect hierarchy we invested to develop knowledge, trust, credibility and results in our interconnected world?