Change Archives - Nick Robinson

12 questions to answer when one important member of your team is not adapting to change or isn’t wholeheartedly on board

Have you told them directly about what seems to be going on?
Are they perhaps acting as the “unconscious voice of the system” – either as a safety valve that shows there is pressure in your organisation, or a warning signal that you’ve missed something significant?
Is it really just them or, if you pay careful attention, are others also doing this?
Is this a behavioural pattern for them that also occurs in other places and situations?
Do you really need them to be any different?
If the answer to 5 is “Yes”, have you actually asked them to change?
If they were to change, what’s in it for them?
What strengths and positive personal qualities do they have that they might apply in this situation (but aren’t currently applying)?
What might they be afraid of (consciously or unconsciously), that is keeping them out of sync with your team?
Can you adjust the circumstances in some way to better accommodate their preferred ways of doing things?
Have you discussed this, in a ‘safe’ way, with the whole team present?
What other support have you offered them to help adapt and/or get fully onboard?

Angry, Anxious, or Chaotic?
Three simple techniques for when you really need to kick-start some personal change

Sometimes before you can do any significant behaviour change and development, you first need to shift your state to be a little more positive or flexible. Or perhaps you just need to get yourself out of a temporary ‘stuckness’. Here are my favourite quick and easy actions to create some space, order and momentum. You’ll still need to do the developmental work and growth that leads to longer-term, sustainable change, but these simple actions often seem to help get that started.

Click here to download as a pdf

Positive Behavioural Change

How to use Positive Intention and Metaphor to give someone a real boost to their interpersonal and relationship skills

I’m occasionally asked to help when a man in a senior leadership position is seen as being particularly challenging or negative in his relationships. Or similarly, when his interpersonal behaviour is having a damaging effect on other people or is just not getting the results that the business needs.

My experience has been that it’s almost impossible to help this man change his behaviour by starting out being critical of him. By the time things have got to the point where the business seeks my help, plenty of other people (and, sometimes, even the man himself) will already have been highly critical of him. Even if my being critical would have worked as a behavioural change catalyst (and sometimes it can), that option is often no longer available to me.

Instead, I often apply a change strategy based on two key aspects:

the power of Positive Intention; and
the use of Metaphor.

1. Positive Intention

Positive Intention works by seeking to understand, from the other person’s perspective, what was the ‘good’ outcome they were hoping to achieve by applying the behaviour that they used. Even if the actual outcome they got was highly negative, there will be something from their point of view that they were trying to achieve that, to them, would have been a positive outcome.

If I can understand what their Positive Intention is, as they see it, that’s halfway to creating the rapport and partnership we need for me to help them explore other behavioural strategies.

I’ve listed some of the examples I’ve come across of Positive Intention in the table below.

2. Metaphor

I’ve noticed that there’s something about metaphors in a coaching context that lets them fly right under a client’s radar, bypassing any resistance to change.

When we’ve found a metaphor that works well to either describe what the client’s positive intention was, or to picture how a ‘good’ interpersonal relationship might work, I can often see that it’s like weight has been lifted from their shoulders. See the table below for some examples.