Fast growth in a subsidiary of a global organisation is proving a stretch for its employees. Complaints from customers, as well as from a few senior leaders, are pointing towards one leader, Ben C. The CEO is worried how this will affect the organisation’s credibility (and profitability) in a key region.
The issue
Ben C is well liked, known to work hard and gives great support to his and other teams. He is always someone to go to if you need help. He is a ‘Yes’ man. However, the CEO has noticed that Ben has some missed deadlines, is disappearing off the job and ‘ghosting’ people, is frequently ‘under the weather’ and there are complaints from his peers that he cannot be trusted to deliver any more.
The CEO is very concerned about what is going on with Ben. He has given him this feedback and wants to support him ‘back to health’. He has suggested Ben finds himself a coach who can help with whatever is getting in the way of being his usual successful self.
Ben has chosen you as his coach. How would you support and help him turn things around?
The intervention
Adam Turner – Human dynamics coach at SC Ventures, Singapore (part of Standard Chartered Bank)
Ben’s change in performance is likely to be hurting and haunting Ben more than anyone else, and yet there seems to be a negative pattern developing and persisting.
Below are two angles of enquiry I might like to explore, each different and yet complimentary.
Because we know Ben is a good performer who has recently ‘gone off the boil’, I am going to first explore his relationship with his previous excellent performance.
Second, I will explore the possible positive intentions for Ben’s new sub-optimal strategies.
An important part of the context is that we know Ben is a people pleaser, a ‘Yes’ guy. So I intend to steer clear of external referencing factors in the process, relying on Ben’s internal processing and personal cognitive journey to help him master his change for success.
For the first line of enquiry, the starting point would be a scaling exercise, following the coaching methods that grew out of the work of Insoo Kim Berg and Steve de Shazer who developed the Solution Focus Therapy models.
In ‘scaling’ we help the client to provide a measure of their performance between a suboptimal norm of 1 and exceptional performance of 10. Once the client has decided on their current score we then have many types of levers to pull to elicit positive and solution orientated strategies.
For instance, if the client says ‘I am at a 4’ we can explore what’s making the client a 4 now, and not a 3. We can then invoke exceptional periods in the last few days, weeks or months, and see how high the rating goes. Again we can elicit the behaviours and strategies that led to those exceptions. All these ‘assets’ can be leveraged to enable Ben more optimal choices for the future.
My focus and intention here is to keep him in a positive and productive mental state throughout the process and, furthermore, help him develop his self-awareness, and his capacity and resilience for self-management and change.
The second line of enquiry will evolve around the NLP presupposition: ‘People are doing the best they can with all the resources they have’ – or, folks don’t intentionally screw up!
I am keen to help Ben build a relationship with the positive intentions of the ‘errant’ behaviours. There are often two distinct outcomes discovered through creating this curiosity for Ben, and their combined impact can create the motivational charge and e-motion to move towards change.
- This approach can help Ben build a far more positive, caring and respectful relationship with his shadow side, helping him to adapt into his future more effectively.
- The cognitive disturbance, created by noticing there is a positive intention for self-destructive behaviours, opens the options for using new and more effective strategies and behaviours to achieve the same outcomes.
(See the work of Dr Paul Brown and Dr Virginia Brown in ‘Neuropsychology for Coaches: Understanding the Basics’, Open University Press, 2012)
Through exploring the positive intents and deeper purpose for poor choices, responses and behaviours, the client, in the midst of the turmoil and turbulence, can often discover a totally new relationship with themselves and their shadow side. They can start to appreciate, even love, the darker and more wayward parts of their being and identity. This building of a positive relationship is a fascinating subject in its own right and perhaps hides one of homo sapiens’ true powers: the sense of self.
Human beings have a number of rare distinctions, perhaps ‘super powers’: a sense of self, behavioural choice and another is reflection. My suggestion is that Ben needs to become fully aware of these extraordinary capabilities and lean into them with conviction, thoughtfulness and choice.