The need to win lucrative contracts has led to unhealthy levels of competition in a successful engineering business. Could a year of coaching restore balance?
The issue
Gary heads a group of 60 highly skilled engineers, working in three sections. With rising pressure on resources and on landing big industrial contracts, everyone’s focus is on winning big bids, meeting tight deadlines and working long hours. This has created many unhealthy work habits.
Competition within and between the sections is particularly unhealthy and Gary wants to explore how coaching over a 12-month period could help. The last staff survey showed that work stress is at dangerous levels, morale is low and conflict is rising. While high performers are desperate for more balance, they blame weaker team members for not pulling their weight, strugglers face the shame of being labelled as ‘dead weight’, and average performers are caught in the middle distracted.
Gary wants to see relief for those pushing too hard, performance being boosted within the average performer group and empowerment restored to those who need help. He also wants to strengthen inter- and cross-sectional teamwork. Being highly technical and left-brain focused, Gary is worried that coaching will be dismissed as ‘fluffy’ and staff won’t engage. At the same time, the team has a high turnover and struggles to attract new talent. It has developed a reputation for being a tough place to survive, yet everyone in the team describes themselves as a ‘nice person’. How could coaching put Gary and his staff on the road to better?
The interventions
Magdalena Bak-Maier
Leadership coach and productivity without burnout expert
Most people and their nervous systems will not respond creatively or resourcefully to problems under these conditions. A vicious cycle of ineffective individual and collective behaviours is not easy to interrupt, let alone change.
Gary is wise to seek help. I would focus the initial coaching intervention on the senior team: the three heads of sections and Gary. In my experience, senior leaders who openly engage in coaching help embed it as a valid and useful intervention, especially in highly technical environments. A team coaching approach makes sense as it is the senior team that ultimately needs to set the tone, focus, direction and expectation of behaviour for others and the workplace culture.
An approach I quite like is a mix of monthly team coaching sessions with the coach and peer-coaching meetings where the team learns to work together in practice without the coach. As far as practical, situational and context-sensitive leadership coaching goes, I have found this set-up highly effective, results-focused and team strengthening by design.
To create a framework for this, the first meeting would be held in person and facilitated by the coach. This ensures the coaching process can be experienced, clarified, a team coaching contract co-designed, and key needs and indicators of progress noted. In parallel, I would recommend short experiential staff workshops that focus exclusively on the felt sense of how we work and act under stress and the impact of this on the individual, their team and the system as a whole.
These types of training are highly effective at helping staff interrupt existing unhelpful behaviours and seek better alternatives. They are naturally empowering. If budget allowed a further offer of additional one-to-one coaching clinics for those in need would be ideal.
- Dr Bak-Maier is delivering a Coaching at Work masterclass on ‘Resilience Coaching with the GridTM’.
- Go here to find out more: http://bit.ly/2LjWcbg
Dr Catherine Sandler
Managing director, Sandler Consulting
ary must balance the pressure to win and deliver contracts with the strategic need to establish a culture that will maximise performance, build morale and retain talent.
Willing to invest in coaching, he is understandably anxious about how to engage his overloaded engineers. Stressed and struggling with feelings of blame, shame and resentment, they are losing empathy and are focusing on survival.
Any credible coaching intervention, then, must deliver practical value from the outset and be closely aligned with the commercial interests of the business. Gary should emphasise the importance of staff wellbeing but also the risks and costs of burnout, lack of collaboration and high turnover. Individual coaching for Gary and his section leaders would help ensure they communicate these messages, model new behaviours, showcase ‘quick wins’ and maintain the momentum for change over the year.
Junior managers reporting to the section heads are key players, so a combination of regular group coaching with quarterly individual sessions would be a cost-effective investment. Coaching would help them to prioritise and delegate more effectively and develop their coaching and feedback skills. This would enable them to focus on managing and supporting their direct reports; they could also encourage collaborative working, eg, by asking a high-performer to mentor a ‘struggler’.
Finally, coaching intact teams and cross-sectional groups using Action Learning would be a powerful way to engage the whole workforce. This methodology combines a highly effective approach to problem-solving while simultaneously elevating individual and team skills.
Simple ground rules, implemented by the coach, ensure that participants cooperate, leverage diversity of thought and reflect on their own contributions and behaviours. Team members present real and urgent business issues worked on by the entire group which would appeal to the task-focused engineers.
Cultural transformation is notoriously hard to achieve but this multi-faceted intervention would give Gary the help he needs to deliver lasting benefits to both company and workforce.
- Dr Sandler is delivering a Coaching at Work masterclass, ‘Executive Coaching: A Psychodynamic Approach’, on 25 February.
For more information go here: http://bit.ly/383PSyk