Good to Talk

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The Zen of a great space for thinking out loud about ideas, concerns and ambitions

One of the best aspects of my work is how much people value the chance to just talk about stuff.

There are several things you have to do before, during and afterwards to make it work well, but, the most important message I’d like leaders and managers to take from this post is really simple:

having a good-quality opportunity to talk and think out loud about the things that excite, concern and drive us is a fundamental requirement for operating well and feeling good about things at work

If you’ve set this up well, people will arrive ready and raring to go, with lists, narrative notes or a thought-cloud of things they want to share.

As a coach, it’s sometimes surprising how little I actually have to do on the outside – the important part for clients is for me to ‘witness’ whatever it is they are sharing. And I’m often consciously working at not doing anything else other than witness during these times. I’m also working at not letting my opinions and my own concerns and ambitions crowd-out my attention.

Things that seem to make it a good quality opportunity for people include:

1. Environment
The actual physical space you’re in, which needs to feel fairly protected or perhaps isolated I think. Although you can do a lot towards that just by the way you interact and negotiate together about what’s to be said and how they want you to be during the saying of it

2. The Coach or Leader’s Attitude
Holding an attitude in mind where (as the coach) you can connect really well with whatever it is that you find genuinely interesting, magnificent or even puzzling about this person. This I think is the key to good, deep listening and should be what drives your body language and verbal ‘tics’ (the uh-hu’s and hmm’s etc)

3. Offering People the Chance to Just Talk
On a conscious level, people don’t always seem to know that they want the chance to just talk. So it needs to be part of the negotiations about what they want from you as their coach and I think you may sometimes need to offer it explicitly: “You know, people sometimes just want me to listen to what’s been going around in their head and in their experiences. Would that be useful for you either now or sometime?”

4. Confidentiality and Managing the Agenda
There are also the real basics, like your commitments to confidentiality and how it works if you’re this person’s boss and therefore also have to juggle your own and the organisation’s agenda as well as listening to them. Make sure you talk about these right upfront, preferably before offering an ear to someone. But do it not in an idealistic way, but in a way that includes and is explicit about the reality – what are the limits to the confidentiality you can offer this person? What are the potential conflicts with your own agenda for what you want them to achieve and what the organisation wants?

For me, being able to give someone the chance to talk about (and hear for themselves) their ideas, concerns and ambitions is an incredibly privileged and humbling experience. Instinctively (and I have more learning to do about this), my sense is that the experience of talking about these things should be really ‘zen-like’ – unadorned and aspiring to true insight.

Team Alignment

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Six surprisingly simple things to check if your team isn’t all pulling together

Hitting a Rough Patch

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The six reasons why men lose the plot at work, and what to do about it

I’m sometimes asked to step in when a key person has somehow (and often unexpectedly) hit a rough patch at work and their company has sensibly decided to help them through it. You’ll know when this is the case, because either their output/quality has dropped off the chart or, more commonly, people around them are feeling the brunt of them losing the plot.

My experience has been that this is one of the situations where taking some time to find out why they’ve lost the plot can really help. Here’s my list of causes and tips about what to do, in order of the ones I’ve come across the most:

1. They’ve lost sight of the wood because of all the trees
Even when you’re a really senior leader, there are times when you’ve got to get down and dirty amongst all the details so you can understand things enough to lead people through it. The coach’s job then is to help them remember why they’re there and where they need to be going and to pull them back up into the helicopter view again.

2. They’re not being a ‘complete’ version of themselves
People often seem to slide into the habit of hiding parts of themselves at work. They hide parts which they judge to be “too frivolous”, “too weak”, “too demanding”, “too friendly” – you name it, we’ve no shortage of possible judgements. Over time, the parts they are hiding are like they’re relegated half their team to the sub’s bench and are playing without a full squad. The coach’s job then is help them be a great team manager, to find out the strengths of their own hidden parts and bring them back into play in the right position.

3. They’re feeling powerless to do what needs to be done
Spot the warning signs for this one by looking out for extremes: people who are either (a) over-reacting – overtly displaying anger etc or manically piling-on more and more to-do lists; or (b) have withdrawn or even disappeared from the scene.
Working with feelings of powerlessness is demanding, because you’ve first got to go through the fear and vulnerability and then start looking at the beliefs and habits that give away power. After that, you can, if necessary, consider competence. My experience has been that simply training for more competence (skills and capabilities) is less effective without those first two steps.

4. They’re carrying shame about who they are or what they’ve done or not done
Someone once told me that shame is our fear that the rest of the world will see us as we really see ourselves. It’s the gap between how we think we need to be or behave externally and what we know about our limitations and weaknesses on the inside. And it leads us to put on more and more layers of armour to stay safe.
We often have an inherited picture of the ideal male leader: powerful, independent, having the answers, invulnerable, always acting with integrity. This can be a very constricting view! So the first part of working with shame is about coming to terms with who we really are. And then we can start letting some of the heavy, suffocating armour go clanking to the ground.

5. One or more of their boundaries is being or is at risk of being crossed
“Here’s a line. In your interactions with me, you can go all the way up to this line. Do what you want on that side of it, that’s fine. Do not cross it.”
It seems simple to talk about boundaries; everybody gets it. Yet, in the busy-ness of work, with lots of demands for our attention, our virtual border guard can get forgotten. And who wants to be the unreasonable, snapping Rottweiler, constantly patrolling on the end of his chain? Coaching around boundaries can be a really straightforward discussion – what are the no-go areas for you? Where are the lines in the sand? What is unacceptable? How do you let others know where the border is? What are the warning signs that an incursion is happening? What do you want to do, if a boundary gets crossed?

6. One or more of their key values are not being upheld
Although this is the last one on my list of six, I think it’s down here not because it happens less, but because it less often leads to overtly negative behaviour. My guess is that we could all do with fairly frequent reminders about our values. Values are the things that are intrinsically important to us (recognition, creativity, just to randomly name a couple). And when we are actively living and working in line with them it is incredibly empowering. The coaching job here is around discovery – eliciting and experiencing values. The leadership job is to help individuals align what’s important to themselves with what’s important to the business.