By Annie Kavanagh, RGS HR Advisor
Often supervisors are reluctant to document and give valuable feedback to employees because they are afraid of being perceived as judgmental, and they are concerned with the employees’ potential negative reactions. In fact, performance coaching is a gift. Performance coaching is the practice of communicating empowering feedback that helps people to become their best future selves. Empowering feedback is based on a commitment to principles, not on a personal agenda. It speaks to the individual’s need to achieve and explore, to do the next unaccustomed thing. The communication offered is not only for the good of an individual’s growth and mastery, but also serves a higher organizational purpose, such as the well-being of a work team or improved service delivery.
Performance coaching is a long-term approach to performance management which takes into account the fact that mastery takes time and deliberate practice and occurs in incremental steps of expanding knowledge and skill. As performance coaches, we can guide employees to move their practice up notch by notch rather than continuing to use past practices and outdated habits that no longer serve them or the organization.
HOW WE DO IT
Learning new behavior takes time and sustained intention. As human beings, we have blind spots for our own negative habits of thinking and behaving. Fortunately, as research in neuroscience is showing, over time our neural pathways are capable of changing with practice in a positive environment. Performance coaching is intended to support sustained practice and provide a positive environment. It takes determination, patience, courage, and generosity. It takes willingness to persist in pointing the way to a deliberate practice of new thinking and unfamiliar behavior.
According to researchers, a critical key to successfully changing is focused practice. Geoff Colvin, author of Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, wrote… “both the hard work and natural talent camps are wrong. What really makes the difference is a highly specific kind of effort– ‘deliberate practice.” The role of the performance coach is to focus effort and encourage practice of the right skills.
Another key aspect of creating change is a positive environment—obtaining support from an ally who can reflect our strengths and areas for growth back to us without being judgmental or having a personal agenda. A performance coach creates this environment.
One of my early business coaches, Amba Gale, told me, “Don’t coach where there is no request for coaching.” When I forget that wise counsel, I invariably bump into resistance. For the purpose of this article, my discussion of performance coaching assumes ‘coaching the willing’–a mutually agreed-upon coaching relationship within the context of the work environment, with a commitment to work together to further the mission of the organization and to empower employees in their assigned roles.
“Traditionally, giving others feedback often carries a tone of superiority, judgment, and/or criticism. Expressing our own opinions is typically an effort to convince others to agree …. ” writes Sharon Strand Ellison in Taking the War Out of Our Words. In training supervisors to approach performance feedback with some enthusiasm, I introduce a model of empowering feedback that often helps overcome this traditional mindset. Here’s how I start:
I ask them to take a moment to make a list of people they most admire – athletes, community leaders, artists, and spiritual leaders – people from any walk of life who have achieved some level of mastery. I suggest a list of 5 – 6 people admired for their courage, integrity, creativity, and service.
I have had responses that varied from celebrities like Barry Bonds, Mother Teresa, Steve Jobs, and famous actors, to remarkable people who have played a role in the person’s life. Although these admired people don’t seem to have much in common, without doubt, each of them had at least one coach or mentor who contributed to their success by offering on-going support, including empowering feedback.
Just think – what would have happened if no one had stepped forward to mentor these people? What if no one had taught Balanchine to refine his ballet movements or had told Einstein he was smart? How much brilliance and passion would have been lost in mediocrity if someone didn’t have the courage to speak up and say the right thing at the right moment?
For many people, criticism is the only kind of performance review they have ever received from a superior, so they may be on hair-trigger alert to avoid participating in any way in such a negative experience. The coach must be willing to let go of his or her personal reactions and preferences to hold the employee accountable based on a balanced commitment to both the organization’s purpose and the individual’s own intentions.
To keep this alignment, a sports analogy is helpful. Each organization has a purpose – the specific “game”. Each player has a role in that game. Sometimes employees genuinely don’t understand “the rules of the game” and are metaphorically running down the court carrying the ball in the wrong direction. A supervisor/coach might say, “I may not have been clear…. the basket you are supposed to be shooting at is over there.” When this occurs, the light dawns, and the relationship is strengthened by such clear communication.
If the unproductive behavior persists, the coach and the player may discover that this is not the right role for that particular employee. Coaching employees to make a change to a role that is a better fit can be a service to them as well as to the organization.
Empowering feedback communications ask, “What’s missing?” rather than “What’s wrong?” Although the overall goals of coaching must be clear, asking, “What’s missing?” keeps possibilities open. It helps to re-focus focus on the purpose of performance, and opens the conversation to a range of mutually respectful course corrections.
Empowering feedback communications also imagine and present possible consequences to an employee. Sharon Strand Ellison describes this kind of powerful non-defensive communication as “making predictions”: “Traditionally, when we ‘set limits,’ we are coaxing or threatening others to get them to do what we want, or what we think they should do — perhaps for “their own good.” People will often make decisions that are contrary to their own best interest as a way to avoid being coerced. In a non-defensive model, we simply let the other person know how we will respond … in the context of an [if/then] statement. For example, ‘If you do X, then I will do Y. If you don’t do X, then I’ll do Z.’ We do not try to influence the person’s decision when we make a prediction. The prediction must be very neutral [to]free people up to think things through without the need to resist being controlled.”
The other night I watched Stephen Curry of the Warriors shoot impossible baskets, one after another. He was giddy, almost flying as he floated around the court – and he leapt with joy. His coach, Steve Kerr, said with pride, “ Steph has a ridiculous shooting range.” Undoubtedly there have been many times that Coach Kerr has had to point out Curry’s weaknesses and guide his deliberate practice within the context of helping him hone his skills and achieve another incremental degree of mastery. This is a model coaching relationship built on respect and possibility.
When someone has a good coach, they have an ally. They know that their coach is giving them trustworthy information and is taking the time to support their growth.
Performance coaching is one work-related way that supervisors can make a positive difference in employee’s lives, communicating about their behavior with kind attention and intention in a way that empowers their growth and enduring vocational satisfaction.
Recommended Reading List
Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell
“Complexity and the Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule”, The New Yorker, August 21, 2013, Malcolm Gladwell
Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Geoff Colvin
Taking the War Out of Our Words, Sharon Strand Ellison, 1st Edition
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