Coaching is boosting performance and employee engagement at National Grid.
Craig Rollason reports

My first awareness of coaching was some 20 years ago, when my employer at that time introduced “coaching for excellence”, a two-day course based on the GROW model run by internally trained coaches. I really liked the concept – introducing a different type of conversation to normal struck a chord with me. At that time, coaching didn’t gain traction and despite the investment,
it didn’t hold.

On reflection, neither the organisation nor I was ready for it. As part of the course, I received a handy small laminated card containing the GROW questions. Occasionally, I would find it in my office, reflect on the questions and store it away again. I knew some day coaching would return.

Fast forward 20 years to my current role, running a matrix IT practice team of 100 permanent and contract employees allocated as resources to IT projects at National Grid. Coaching has become a central part of my role to support and develop individuals and the team to perform at their best in the environments where they work.

The context for coaching at National Grid is based on the company’s framework for performance management, as illustrated in Figure 1. At one level it is simple – looking at what the role is and what objectives people have, how well they are performing in their role, and what needs to be done to develop the individual. Development actions focus broadly on 70% in situ development, 20% mentoring or coaching and 10% formal training.

However, while simple on paper, the foundations have to be built to make this process fully effective.

 

Upskilling for coaching discussions

A shift was needed in thinking about my role as a line manager. This echoed my experience 20 years ago when coaching was first introduced. The shift from manager as experienced, authoritarian figure, to that of an enabling and facilitative leader is quite a change to make. It’s not something that happened overnight, requiring practice to build skills and change the nature of the relationship between employee and line manager.

A couple of key enablers helped me make this transition.

First, National Grid created a role for me, allowing time to recruit and build a new team, and build a supportive environment with time for coaching and people development. Fundamental to this was support from the senior IT leadership team. As part of this role I had training in facilitative leadership. This built confidence in my own skills to reflect, handle large groups of people building events and activities that helped people engage effectively in problem solving and also helping others lead.

Second, National Grid itself sponsored TeachFirst, an organisation that matches business coaches with newly qualified teachers in tough schools to help them through their challenges (the statistics for teacher dropouts from schools in early years are very high).

As part of this, National Grid volunteers are taught basic coaching which builds skills and confidence in pure coaching, which then translates back to confidence in coaching at work. In this context there is no “organisational interference/agendas” in the coaching. It’s a great win/win.

Third, spurred on by initial success, I dived into the world of coaching myself, bought books on a variety of coaching techniques, secured mentoring support, subscribed to Coaching at Work and attended the Coaching at Work conference. I also found myself exploring cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and while not a qualified practitioner I found that a basic understanding of the concepts helped in coaching discussions.

I called on professional help in Occupational Health when needed. There is a line to be drawn in how far the line manager goes into this territory. I believe management theory should explore this more to help people achieve their potential.

Now I have reached a position where coaching is the norm. The variety of conversation topics is huge, especially in a team with diversity in age, time in the company, gender, LGBT and ethnic origin.

The most common areas explored in coaching and mentoring at National Grid are:

  • Making sense of feedback
  • Providing direct help for a problem
  • Helping navigate the organisation, connecting individuals with ‘someone who knows’
  • Supporting employees’ ambition/getting to the next level
  • Leading change or improvement initiatives together or supporting others
  • Exploring and making sense of limiting beliefs underlying performance
  • Opening doors and seeking mentoring support from others
  • Whole group coaching – opening doors and insights from the rest of the company that build alignment with company strategy.

 

Creating time for ‘Slow Thinking’ discussions

The environment of modern-day working has a strong focus on objectives and outcomes. This is no bad thing in itself, however balance is needed to find time to discuss more deeply how the individual contributes to the objectives and how to develop themselves. This is best illustrated in Daniel Kahneman’s work, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Fast thinking (system 1) is characterised by task-related discussed, simple cause and effect assessment and single-loop learning. I can’t secure resources so escalate or prioritise to get resources.

Slow thinking (system 2) is more reflective, requires a deeper understanding of situations and feedback, finding systemic issues, double- or treble-loop learning, eg, the causes of not securing resources is the medium- or long-term planning process with no incentives in place to improve.

System 2 thinking is also essential to explore questions about career ambition. For example, the question, “where do you see yourself in five years?” is a deep one that cannot be answered easily, but is important to guide career development, requiring exploration and reflection of strengths, past achievements and life goals.

All line managers are encouraged to undertake at least quarterly reviews of performance. I found discussions about performance really needed system 2 thinking to be effective.

Figure 2 illustrates how I see fast and slow thinking in operation.

Creating slow thinking time means ensuring managers and individuals create time to prepare and work together, but most importantly that the manager ‘sets the tone’ for the types of conversation that the two parties are likely to have. This, in my experience, can only be achieved by reinforcing through repetition.

 

Quality feedback

I found after a while that the quality of the inputs into the performance coaching discussions were a little hit and miss. To deeply understand individual performance we needed good quality rounded information.
So we implemented an online feedback capture process that has vastly improved the quality of performance coaching in a number of ways.

First, I could easily monitor the completion of feedback by looking at who has provided it, their rating of the individual and a feed-forward rating about areas of focus going forward.

Second, individuals could access feedback directly and were encouraged to review and provide feedback self-assessment (slow thinking).

Third, I was able to spot common themes across all feedback for all team members to mobilise some group collective learning (slow thinking).

Fourth and last, from the performance discussion we recorded key points from all the learning (usually up to three) that could be easily accessed for follow-on discussions.

So far, there are on average six pieces of feedback from a variety of stakeholders, and up to 14 for some people (equating to a regular 360 review of performance). To encourage continual feedback, I have provided summary level feedback to all stakeholders and a big thank-you note.

I also introduced a one-page template that individuals could use to prepare themselves mentally for one-to-one discussions outside performance coaching in order to focus on what was important to them. The template had a simple number of useful perspectives, such as individuals plotting themselves on a challenge/support 2×2 grid.

As a matrix team manager I don’t see the individuals day to day so I needed a fast way of getting a picture of the individual’s current situation to maximise the time we had together. The template is used less now, but it has set the expectation of preparation. One-to-one time is precious and we want to maximise it.

 

Results

Coaching is now a central part of an ‘eco system’ of employee engagement activities at National Grid, which gives everyone the opportunity to succeed.

  • Our overall practice performance feedback scores from peers and customers are very positive, and we have support to further expand the team
  • Employee engagement and enablement (measured through a annual company survey) is at a four- year high, scoring at around 90%
  • Team movement has only been for retirement or promotion
  • We had a record number of people presenting at industry conferences this year
  • We are finalists in IT awards and our reputation is building
  • We have been granted approval to expand the practice further.

I still feel I’m at the beginning of my coaching journey. I know I need to focus on listening – acknowledging unconscious bias is at play here and also being ready to listen, ensuring environmental interference is minimised and to build skills to ‘quieten down the mind’. Just when you think you’ve got to the top of the mountain you realise you are in the foothills of another.

There’s no time to rest on our laurels. I’m now expanding performance feedback outside individual performance to a broader range of metrics, which I expect to drive discussions about wider organisational impact. I continually encourage my team in TeachFirst as well to build their coaching skills. We have a firm foundation to build on for the future and for individuals who know the value of coaching.

 

 

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