Associates for Professional Development's Coaching Blog

How High Performing Teams Resolve Conflicts

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One of the most important characteristics of high performing teams is Constructive Conflict Resolution.  After being appointed to a committee recently, I realized that I was the "newbie".  Everyone else on the team had worked together pretty consistently for years.  As we worked through the task at hand, I was amazed at this team's ability to deal with dissenting opinions, and it became clear that there were 3 key elements to our positive process.

1. We genuinely respected one another and wanted to understand each member's point, so we listened carefully to each other. (Including the "newbie"). 

2. Our individual egos weren't invested in the outcome--we wanted the best decision for the organization.

3. We stayed focused on the job we came to do. 
   

Remembering these three points will help any team resolve its disagreements or differing opinions.  In fact, if you think about it, these three elements may be the most essential elements of working on a team.  Even though it was hard work, we completed our task and we enjoyed ourselves as we did it.  In the process we experienced the very best of working together as a high performance team.

Try it.  Let me know if it works for you, too. 

Team Coaching Drives Innovation

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In the business world, team coaching is designed to help each 'player' on the team perform at a top level and to bring these individuals together as a cohesive, finely-tuned unit.  In sports, the goal is to win the game, have a winning season.  In business, the goal is to increase productivity and profitability.

In today's competitive climate, innovation is key to the success.  While creativity includes the generation of new, valuable ideas, innovation is what turns those ideas into profitable activities.  Every product or service ever brought to market began with an idea in someone's mind of how something could be changed for the better. 

Many potentially profitable ideas, however, have died on the vine through a lack of innovation, or a process for bringing substance to that idea.  Effective team coaching fosters a culture of empowerment and helps team members perform in unison to translate the vision of the organization into reality.  Team coaching can help produce a heightened sense ofawareness of  key issues and can speed up the problem-solving process.

Innovation often stalls or breaks down as a result of certain dysfunctions common to work teams.  These may include:

• Lack of trust between members
• Lack of commitment toward the mission of the organization
• Fear or avoidance of conflict
• Avoidance of accountability
• Inattention to the results of daily activities

Effective team coaching addresses these dysfunctions by motivating members to honestly confront them and to transform them into team strengths.  When done well, team coaching can also improve morale and help increase productivity and profitability and leadership.

Senior LeadershipTeam Coaching Will Transform Your Business

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Carefully study the executive management of any successful business and you will find a cohesive and comprehensive senior leadership team. The strength of this team is structured around the individual strengths of the team members, and how well those strengths blend and complement each other. It is not necessary that each member be well rounded, but it is an essential characteristic for developing a successful senior leadership team.

Results from a recent survey based on the work of Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D., the creator of the Clifton StrengthsFinder® assessment, identified four general categories of leadership strengths.  Following are the categories and some of their characteristic traits.    

• Strategic Thinking:
• Analytical
• Contextual
• Futuristic
• Creative
• Learner
• Executing:
• Achiever
• Arranger
• Consistency
• Focus
• Responsibility
• Relationship Building:
• Adaptability
• Developer
• Connectedness
• Harmony
• Individualization
• Influencing:
• Activator
• Communication
• Competition
• Self-Assurance
• Significance

A highly effective senior leadership team must have members who represent each of these four categories. A more successful team will not have one dominant person who tries to do everything alone, or a group of individuals with similar strengths. Instead, there will be a broad representation of these four general classifications.

The next obstacle in creating the best senior leadership team possible is to evaluate the strengths of the team members. It is important to realize each member will very likely have strengths that fall into different categories. Then it is necessary to determine how to best utilize these strengths and how to blend them all together into a cohesive team.

How will you develop these strengths to the best advantage of the team and the company? How will the team work together to strengthen each other? Is there an important component missing from your team?

Team coaching can take the individual strengths of your team members and multiply them, creating one single powerful and extremely effective leadership team.

With team coaching you will learn to recognize the true potential of your team members and your team as a whole. That potential will then strengthen your entire business.

Some advantages of team coaching for your senior leadership team: 

• The individual strengths of your team members will be identified and developed. People will discover they have strengths they were unaware they possessed.
• Self-esteem among your team will increase, and this will be carried from the meeting rooms to the rest of the business.
• An outside team coach has no pro-conceived ideas of where any individual team member fits into a category or area of responsibility. This opens the possibility to discover a multitude of unknown talents and skills.
• Your team will experience increased personal belief in their individual achievements and that of the company.
• Communication and feedback will be expanded, leading to new and innovative ideas.
• With the team working together and balancing each other’s strengths, productivity will increase.

The senior leadership team within any business should be the most important group in that organization. The decisions they make have serious implications for everyone within the business, and for the continued future of the business.

Albert Einstein said, “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created then.”

Senior leadership teams within major businesses are a relatively new concept. The idea of team coaching is even newer. Nonetheless, both ideas have proven to be very valuable. The complexities inherent in today’s global business world have made it impossible for one, or even two, senior executives to effectively operate a successful business.

Diversity in the marketplace calls for diversity in the management team. Team coaching can help you harness that diversity.

Finding The Middle: the Executive Coach and Extreme Personalities

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One of the more challenging experiences an executive coach has is working with powerful personalities.  I found myself face-to-face with one of these experiences recently and learned a great deal about the importance of coaching experience and technique.  The gentleman I was asked to coach was not just extremely confident, he was convinced that he knew the answers to practically everything. He spoke loudly and rapidly, as if he couldn’t get the words out fast enough. It was exhausting.

During the first 20 minutes of my initial coaching session, I realized what his co-workers experienced every day. They did not know how to slow him down or how to get him to listen to their suggestions or solutions. He already had them, so why should he listen to anyone else.

Listen first. I learned years ago from one of my mentors that the real work with extreme personalities is twofold:

1. Listen long enough to let them know that you value what they have to say.

2. Once you have heard them, have the courage to point out the short-term effectiveness of this behavior, but how ineffective it is in the long term. What they gain in short term solutions actually inhibits the growth of their team.

Benevolent Intent. At AFPD we believe in the concept of benevolent intent– most people in most situations are trying to do the best they can. Extreme personalities want to get problems solved and they want to demonstrate their worth to their teams, to their bosses, to their companies.

When extreme personalities see that their method of communication is self-defeating, it becomes much easier to help them move to a middle ground that works better for everyone.

Personal Coaching Can Help Create Behavioral Change

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Breaking old behavior patterns and implementing new ones is a task that can be greatly enhanced with a personal coach.  A personal coach is at your side as you struggle with new behaviors and will encourage and support you as you develop a new approach to success. 

Why Is Change So Hard?

We’ve all seen it. A particular behavior causes us problems, so we make a concerted effort to change it. And the change works, for a while. Then we gradually slide right back into the old behavior and end up with the same problems.

Why does this happen? And why is it so hard for human beings to effectively change a behavior pattern for good?

The answer isn’t because we are weak or unwilling to change. It lies in brain patterns. These are the brain pathways that develop when we repeat a behavior over and over again. Each time we perform an action we strength the neuronic pathways in the brain, making them more efficient and easier to use.

   The Interstate Highway in our Brain

A familiar behavior pattern is like speeding down the interstate on cruise control. Even though we may slow down or change lanes once in a while, we are still on the highway.

Changing an ingrained behavior means getting off the interstate and getting onto a back road full of ruts and bumps. Who wants to do that? It is so much less efficient. In order to create a new behavior, we have to slow down, try something new, and be aware of how much slower it is going to be, at least for a while.

Creating New Patterns

The key to real behavioral change is creating new behavior patterns. The only way to do that is to be intentionally different, even if (or especially if) it less effective. Your personal coach encourages you and helps you as you work on these new behaviors, making it easier to create the new pathways in your brain. And the more you repeat them, the more they become second nature—your new interstate.

Coaching a Reluctant Leader

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Executive Coaching can be an unsettling process to someone who has not had the opportunity to participate before. Sometimes the whole idea of talking with someone who will be messing around in their business can lead strong individuals to hesitate in their participation.

Reluctance to coaching can take several forms:

• Failure to set up appointments
• Missed appointments
• Not doing the work
• Avoiding difficult topics

All of these behaviors can be traced back to set of common themes. Internal, personal resistance to change. A fear of someone getting too close. Not wanting/willing to look weak. A perceived loss of control.

Powerful But Not Fatal. All of these themes are powerful, but they do not have to be fatal. Coaching is the process of facilitating change.

Openly addressing any of the above behaviors gives both the coach and the coachee the opportunity to discover things they did not know about themselves, including the ability to deal straightforwardly with very difficult issues.

Identify and Label. The most important step in dealing with reluctance is to identify it and label it in an honest, straightforward way. Calling it what it is frees both parties up to have the hard discussion around what is creating the reluctance and what they want to do to remove it.

This recognition and removal opens up opportunities to talk about where reluctance may be showing up in other areas of the individual’s professional life. This is where the real growth begins.

Keeping a Leader On Track: Interventional Coaching

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Turnover at the executive level is expensive and disruptive. The average cost to replace an executive is three times his/her salary and the organizational turmoil that is caused is almost inestimable.

Interventional coaching is a viable option for preventing a potential high performer from derailing and causing loss and disturbance to the organization.

Interventional Coaching

Interventional coaching engages the coachee’s leader in the process in a much more active role than in developmental coaching. The process is more focused on goals that are agreed upon by the leader, the coachee, and the coach. The meetings alternate between private meetings with the coach and the coachee, and meetings that include the leader.

Typically the process includes:

• Initial meeting with the coachee’s leader to confirm needs.
• Coach meeting with coachee privately to begin to establish relationship.
• Coach, coachee, and leader meeting together to establish goals and objectives of coaching program.
• Administration and interpretation of assessment materials.
• Coach and coachee begin in-depth coaching on a regular weekly or biweekly basis, analyze data, identify style and personality issues and determine how those issues promote or detract from the individual’s effectiveness, and create a plan to address goals and objectives that are surfaced.
• Periodic meetings with the coachee, the leader, and the coach to ensure that progress is being made in the areas of concern for the organization.

Interventional coaching is a proven method to produce behavioral change in individuals. When the person who is struggling is a valuable leader in your organization, you will typically see a high return on investment.

Executive Coaching: How Coaching Can Develop Leadership Skills

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Executive coaching can prove to be an enormously helpful way of developing leadership skills.  Personal and professional development begins early in life and never really needs to stop.

When I was 26, I volunteered to be the “Assistant to the Director” of a two week summer day camp program. I was to function as her “go-fer” and runner. Four days before the camp started, she broke her ankle. Suddenly I was on point. It was before the days of cell phones and instant messaging, so I was able to confer with her only once or twice a day, tethered to a phone on the wall. She was there (at home) to guide me, but the job was really on my shoulders.  But she was with me as a coach. 

Looking back on it, I bet she was more stressed and frustrated than I was.  She had not volunteered to be a leadership coach, or a life coach or even a project manager.  I bet she did not want to be coaching me at all; she probably wanted to be doing the job herself. But we did it. We worked together and successfully directed a program for 300 kids with a crippled director and a green assistant.

It was risky. It was scary. It was a stretch. It was stressful. I have never learned more in two weeks time. Not even in an MBA course.

So what is the point? We all know that sometimes it feels like it is easier to do it yourself than to teach someone else, then follow-up, and correct and review.

Maybe that is a big stretch for you, to let go, to trust and support instead of being the doer. And besides, you feel bad because the extra work stresses your staff. They have enough to do. So you just keep doing it yourself. No one stretches, no one is stressed, and no one grows.

Can you remember a time that someone gave you a stretch assignment? It was hard, but you did it. How did you feel when you were successful?

Are you willing to be a teacher and coach to someone else? Let them stretch their wings? Can you let go long enough to do that for a staff member? They might complain in the moment, but they will always be grateful.