On coaching people

In the last posts (here and here), we saw how to identify and measure the performance of employees. In this post, we will look at how to develop your employees. This is important for two reasons:

• Good talent management and development directly contributes to better company performance (Jeff Pfeffer's research here? on banks; showed 30% better performance)
• Developing others makes you more successful. Being able to seek feedback, learn from mistakes, and helping others to do so makes leaders successful. See research by Gretchen Spreitzer here, and Project Oxygen from Google here. 

The ACS (Assessment, Challenge, Support) model is helpful to develop and coach employees. 

• Assessment
• What performance dimensions should we assess? Why those dimensions? 
• Know your rationale for assessing stuff. Example:
• A common dimension assessed is personality. 
• Big five are conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, extraversion, neuroticism. 
• Research here shows, for example, the importance of big five wrt performance. 
• You are interested in performance; hence you are assessing personality traits that have a positive correlation on performance. 
• Do not use single datapoints to arrive at conclusions (stereotyping). For example, do not think INTJs are only bookworms. Use experience and assessments together to identify discrepancies, and to arrive at a person's strengths and weaknesses. 
• Use evidence to validate assessments on the market. Of course!
• Should we focus on a person's strengths or weaknesses? Both?
• Two viewpoints:
• Gap analysis: identify weaknesses, and build them until they become strengths. Makes you well-rounded, but maybe not great at a given thing. 
• This is the traditional/typical approach.
• Strengths-based approach: develop strengths until you are the very best. You will become great at something, maybe not well-rounded. 
• Example: Tiger Woods was good at some aspects of golf, and was able to leverage them to find success. 
• When strengths are leveraged, there is less turnover, better performance, and customer satisfaction (gallup results here). 
• Improve weaknesses until you meet viable thresholds. Then, focus on strengths to attain excellence (when exceptional work is done). 
• Challenge
• Stretching employees beyond their comfort zone is critical to growth and development. 
• When does an experience become developmental?
• Novelty (varies for different individuals)
• Outcome is high stakes
• Requires significant change 
• Requires working across organizational boundaries (teaches influence, rather than authority)
• Exposure to diversity in thinking 
• Identify a great developmental experience, and the discrepancies on the above dimensions (novelty etc.) with the current job. Work on incorporating those dimensions into your/employees' current work. 
• Active learning makes a challenging experience developmental. 
• Two people can learn different things, and in different amounts from the same experience. 
• Depends on the mindset a person brings to the job, the experiences during the job itself, and the reflections on the job. 
• Hence, mindful engagement (and accompanied learning) is important. 
• Feedback (especially 360 degree) while on the job is critically important to success on a challenging job. Not just at the end, but during the job, and in real-time. 
• Performance/fixed mindset vs growth mindset
• Fixed mindset causes you to confuse performance with avoiding mistakes, and to prove to others how good you are => do what you already know. Prevents you from going beyond the comfort zone. 
• Growth mindset causes us to learn from mistakes, makes us more confident, and better performant (research here).
• Note to leaders: 
• Encourage growth mindsets
• Set goals for learning/development, not just performance 
• Use mistakes to teach (of course, accountability for repetitive mistakes)
• Culture of experimentation
• Execution is good for routine. Experimentation is good for learning, innovation, and better performance in the long run. 
• Encourage experimentation, help design experiments for team. 
• Some good strategies/tactics to maximize learning from experiences:
• By oneself
• Expect and tolerate ambiguity
• Revisit learning priorities periodically 
• Keep a learning journal (helps retain learnings longer). The rationale for these blog posts is exactly this!
• Manage energy by focusing on a few learning goals
• Find a balance between learning and execution priorities
• Leveraging others 
• Get advice from someone who had similar experiences
• Seeking feedback makes others like us; we are giving them an opportunity to help!
• Encourage others to hold us accountable
• Meet periodically to discuss stressors that undermine learning
• 70-20-10 system of learning 
• 70% on the job, 20% from others, 10% formal training 
• Typically, no focus on providing the right experiences during 70% on job
• Example: identify next two experiences employee wants 
• Tailor this experience, with support from the 20% and 10% above
• Make time for growth assignments on the job
• Identify growth opportunities (within your role)
• Talk to others how they keep learning
• Look for one or two opportunities with the best ROI 
• Provides focus, and makes it easy to sell your boss on
• Create an action plan to get to the goal
• Set minimum progress goals (say, for each week)
• Prevents you from putting things off, and compounding pays off
• Support
• Create network of advisors (personal board of directors) for the team (and yourself)
• Strive to be on your team's network of advisors; help them learn and get better
• High impact of network on career success
• Quality of network 
• Contacts from diverse functions (marketing, sales, finance etc.)
• Contacts at higher level 
• Benefits
• Access to information
• Access to resources
• Career sponsorship and advocates
• Career success 
• Salary
• Promotion
• Career satisfaction
• Quality of network => greater Benefits => greater Career success
• Organizing your network of advisors
• Sponsors: Who will advocate for you?
• Mentors: Who will you go to for feedback?
• Stretch: Who will challenge you to "think different"?
• Support: Who will provide social and emotional support?
• Structured reflection for the team
• Provide opportunities to the team for reflection at key points in projects 
• Based on after-action review in the military
• Structured reflection process increased peer-rated performance, as also job offers and salary (research here)
• What does structured reflection involve?
• Reflect close to the event 
• Have a structured set of questions for reflection
• Use "what if" scenarios
• Goal is to uncover assumptions, and level-set the team 
• Helps us run through different scenarios of external factors
• Develop "if then" implications 
• Goal is to learn through different alternative scenarios
• Helps us run through the space of our own choices to find optimal point
• Establish accountability for change 
• Use 1:1 to follow up on progress of committed changes 
• Publish learnings goals to team, and engage them for feedback, and keeping you accountable 
• Coaching the team 
• Leader as a teacher
• Disseminate understanding of company's goals 
• Tie the employee's work to the company's work
• Make sure employees are engaged, and enthusiastic
• Holding the employees accountable
• Help unlock potential of individuals, as well as team as a whole
• A framework for coaching people
• Build a relationship first: listen, ask questions, avoid advice too early
• Assess the need of the employee: what are challenges and opportunities? 
• Establish goals and an action plan, based on the needs
• Co-create strategies to achieve goals: ask questions, help develop/articulate strategies and tactics employee will use. Makes employee more committed. 
• Take action: make sure there is focus, and small wins along the way. 
• Evaluate and adapt: after-action reviews, and reinforce accountability. 
• The steps in this framework are continuous (need to keep up the relationship), and cyclical (needs and goals change).
• Good questions to coach people
• What are the activities you should focus on? How do they create value?
• What result do we want? What changes to make to attain that result? 
• Focus more on results, not on actions
• What does your team need from you to be successful? How can it be done better? 
• What is your legacy? How can you change behavior to ensure this legacy?
• What prevents you from working on things you believe in? How can we minimize non-productive work?
• What are your greatest strengths? How can you leverage them? 
• How can I help? 
• A framework for creating personal change
• Focus on one or two goals; focus is key 
• Create an action plan with this table
• Time on x-axis, and Start | Stop | Continue | Who can help? on y-axis