CONFERENCE ROUNDUP
NHS London Leadership Academy (LLA) Coaching & Mentoring Summit, London, 4 February 2015
By Liz Hall
Coaching the potential differences between women and men can help women navigate the “glass labyrinth”, said Lis Merrick.
In her controversial keynote at the NHS LLA Coaching & Mentoring Summit in February, Merrick encouraged delegates to explore whether they coached men and women differently.
Delegates included NHS internal and external coaches. Their responses included: (from a female) “Our opinion doesn’t matter; it’s all about the client in front of us”; (from a male) “The impact of having a family and career is a concern for a lot of the women I coach, but as a man with children, I’ve never had this concern”; (another female) “Although we need to be wary of generalisations and judgements, we do need to bear these in mind as they affect women as they move up the ladder” and (another male) “Employment legislation in the
UK reinforces the idea that it is women who look after the children.”
Yet, said Merrick, quoting research from The King’s Fund, “having women at the top of organisations has been shown to improve organisational performance and change cultures”.
Female leaders’ strengths, she said, lie in the value they place on relationships, teamwork and consensus building. They are often more intuitive, show anger less overtly and are more appreciative than men. They are also quicker to see the benefits of coaching.
Men’s brains may have 6.5 times more grey (thinking) matter than women’s brains, but women’s have 9.5 times more white matter (connecting parts of the brain). However, the frontal and temporal areas of the cortex are more precisely organised in women, and are bigger in volume (producing dominant language skills).
Men tend to use analytical systems thinking, are eager to compete, thrive on conflict, are keener than women to take risks and are more direct in communication.
In terms of coaching, though, unlike women, men need more convincing about its benefits.
Considerations to take into account when coaching men and women, said Merrick, include: desire to lead, understand the culture/games, search for meaning, managing energy, positive framing, making connections, take risks and engage and a calibrating influence.
Trained ‘thoroughbred’ bosses may join the herd, but won’t improve it
Teams do not improve markedly when their individual members receive coaching, finds research.
While individual coaching can help executives become better leaders in their own right, the team does not necessarily improve, according to research by The Performance Coach (TPC) shared at the conference.
TPC’s Judith Firman said that coaching senior teams can be very challenging: “Independent-minded thoroughbreds are often convinced of the rightness of their ways and are not responsive to correction, even by the lead horse.
“Team coaching is not everyone’s cup of tea. It requires a bit of masochism to put yourself in the hands of people who might not want to be there.”
Firman said for her it was less important to find out if she was working with a team or a group than it was to find out what it was they could do together that they couldn’t do apart.
TPC defines team coaching as: “a series of developmental interventions delivered over an agreed period of time, aimed at enhancing a team’s performance, improving their processes, communication, and internal and external relationships.”
She outlined a number of benefits of team coaching including that it’s: in real time; is culturally and behaviourally transformative; is systemic, and it allows peers to challenge and learn from each other.
She said that to be a team coach, people need to increase their skills in containing groups, engaging with people in lots of ways. “You do need to have an understanding of the kind of journey a team can go on and the key issues they might encounter.”
Team coaching might involve any of the following: diagnostic instruments; observations and feedback through effective listening; process interventions; facilitative interventions to help the team explore the way it is operating and engaging with its objectives; incisive questions; supporting awareness through challenges about performance, attitude, approach or behaviour; educational or conceptual inputs that support learning and dialogue, and role modelling behaviours, reviewing and evaluating mechanisms.