High trust, low trust, and meetings gone bad

I loved the unpleasant familiarity of Gretchen Rubin’s Seven things to say in a meeting to make yourself look good and someone else look bad. Sometimes we really shoot ourselves in the foot, don’t we?

What I’ve been mulling over ever since reading her post is one of the comments (the fourth one), which repositions each of the statements with a high trust interpretation.

For example, given the statement “I don’t need all the details. Let’s just get to the bottom line,” Gretchen offers the interpretation: “You imply that others are quibblers and small-minded technicians, while deflecting the possible need to master complicated details yourself.”

The commenter offers the alternative high trust interpretation: “I trust you did your job perfectly. I need to hear only your conclusion.”

Ever since reading that, I’ve been noticing what my default interpretation of someone’s statement is, and then asking myself what the high trust interpretation would be. It’s been educational – uncomfortably so – to realize how foreign the high trust interpretation is for me in some contexts. I’m making a conscious effort to have that high trust interpretation come as my first (or, at least, my dominant) reaction.

Want Different Results? Do Something Different

From an article by the Newfield Network on observing and action:

We maintain that whenever individuals and organizations are dissatisfied with the results of their actions, they tend to reflect on the actions and on improving their performance by speeding up the process. We observe that dissatisfaction remains because basically the same kind of action is being performed. We believe that in these cases reflection should focus on the observer that they are, namely, that they should discover the basic assumptions that have been limiting their scope of action. From this perspective an unknown world of possibilities for actions and meaning opens up, a world that was inconceivable under the old paradigm.

What I took away from this paragraph is that revisiting our actions and endlessly refining them won’t necessarily fix problems. When something is less than satisfying, we need not to refine what we’re already doing, but to question the assumptions that led us to those actions in the first place. Reminds me of the saying that the definition of insanity or stupidity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.

I posted on my coaching blog about how coaching coaxes us through this process, moving away from doing the same things over and over and moving towards examining our assumptions and considering other options. Coaching expands our skills as observers and alerts us to new possibilities of action.

This Meeting Is Not For Discussing Anything That Matters

From the Center for Creative Leadership‘s white paper on Senior Leadership Team Coaching, quoting Kerry Bunker, a Senior Fellow at the Center:

For every senior team, the issues that must be addressed “are more comfortably left under the table or voiced only as the team members are walking away from the room,” says Bunker.

Sad but true. How often have you attended a meeting where the crux of the matter surfaced in a post-meeting discussion, in the break room, in the bathroom, in a post-meeting email conversation – anywhere except during the actual meeting agenda points.

The white paper suggests that the safe and trusting environment built by a senior leadership team coach will prevent this left-under-the-table phenomenon from happening.

What are your techniques for making sure that the “real” issues are raised, and not voiced as afterwords or asides?

“Tell Me How I’m Doing” – Interaction as Feedback

After mulling over Tell Me How I’m Doing (excerpt here) for a few days, here’s what I think is worth taking away:

1. The leadership fable genre is overdone. I hope to never use it.

2. Interaction as feedback; feedback as interaction. Author Richard Williams basically classifies any form of human interaction – conversation, body language, small talk – as feedback, and points out that without it we shrivel up and become shadows of our former self. What I’ll take away is that attention is sometimes the type of feedback that’s needed, and that all too often the better a job an employee (or manager) does, the less attention is paid to him/her. Less attention equals less interaction equals less feedback equals shrivelling up and wondering if anything you’re doing matters at all. I think Williams is trying to promote a mindset shift from feedback as a specific, planned, timed act to a mode of relating to each other. We relate to each other all the time, interact with each other all the time, and therefore are always giving each other feedback.

The Power of Questions: What Versus Why

Someone once told me that questions that start with “Why?” activate explanations and justifications. We are very good at explaining why we do things. We are talented when it comes to justifying why we don’t do things. We have lots of practice rationalizing to ourselves – and others – why we feel the way we do. We already have a myriad of mental scripts in our heads, just waiting to be played back. When someone asks you a “Why?” question, it activates what you already know and believe.

My education taught me to ask “Why?” questions. It taught me to seek out explanations, to be analytical, and to question justifications. Since I started working as a coach and facilitator, though, I’ve abandoned the “Why?” question. My clients don’t need to justify themselves to me. And if I ask questions that activate what they already know and believe, we aren’t discovering anything new. We’re just reinforcing existing mental scripts.

I’ve realized: when I ask a “What?” question instead, it opens up possibilities.

Listen to the difference:

Suppose a workplace facilitator asks a team: “Why are we focusing on this topic?”

The group responds with what we already know: business reasons, evidence, anecdotes. All of the reasons that put the topic on the agenda in the first place. The answers summarize everything we already believe.

What if the facilitator asks a “What?” question instead: “What will become possible for us if we focus on this topic?”

Suddenly, the answers change! The team is no longer sitting comfortably in the space of what we already know and our tidy logical explanations. Suddenly, we’re moved to a sense of possibility and openness. A sense that what we are doing matters to the future we are creating together.

What would it look like to ask yourself a “What?” question? Here are a few to get you started:

What would it look like if I . . .?

What would become possible if I . . .?

What is important to me about . . .?

The Killer Phrase: words that grind teams to a halt

“We’ve tried that before.”

“Put it in writing.”

“Get a committee to look at it.”

Australia’s The Change Agency (“listen deeply, reflect critically, strategise effectively, make change happen”) turned me on to the idea of the killer phrase. Killer phrases reduce possibility and inhibit creativity. They put an end to something, before the something has even started.

The Change Agency offers advice for groups that suffer from the killer phrase. I especially like these recommendations:

Institutionalize the term. Get some friendly groans going in the room as everyone brainstorms the killer phrases that their group loves to hide behind. Once the term is institutionalized and the phrases identified, have the team come up with a way of discouraging the use of any killer phrase. (The Change Agency suggests throwing wads of paper at the perpetrator).

Find the underlying cause of the killer phrase. Is the killer phrase camouflaging a valuable question? Searching out the question, rather than accepting the killer phrase, can lead to more possibility. (The Change Agency’s example: turning “We don’t have the resources,” into “How can we mobilise the resources to do this?”)

I’ve worked in groups with their own idiosyncratic killer phrases, and I’m sure I contributed a few of my own. In fact, in co-active coaching we have a similar concept for that internal voice that’s full of killer phrases: we call it the saboteur. Like the killer phrases, if the saboteur is taken at face value, it will kill possibility. And, like with killer phrases, there is often an underlying, important, valid concern underneath the saboteur’s voice.

I started wondering what my own internal “killer phrases” are. What does my inner saboteur say to me that kills my sense of possibility? I quickly recognized a few of my own killer phrases: “You don’t have the energy to do that.” “You don’t have the skills to do that.” “You aren’t outgoing or enthusiastic enough to run your own business.”

It was refreshing to write those down and get them out, actually! Now I can strategize on how to vanquish my killer phrases.

What are your killer phrases? How do you overcome them?

(Thanks to Jasmine at Stepwise Heritage and Tourism for passing along The Change Agency link!)

Personality and Business

I’m enjoying a new blog that looks at uses for the Myers Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) in business. Sandy McMullen, the blog’s author, has a fantastic book of her own paintings expressing the MBTI. Inner Landscapes is a “visual guide to the MBTI”. The paintings and text express the personality tool in a whole new light, quite literally.

Approaching With Appreciation

As a coach and facilitator, one methodology I use is Appreciative Inquiry. As Wikipedia explains:

Appreciative Inquiry utilizes a 4-stage process focusing on:

1. Discover: The identification of organizational processes that work well.

2. Dream: The envisioning of processes that would work well in the future.

3. Design: Planning and prioritizing processes that would work well.

4. Destiny (or Deliver): The implementation (execution) of the proposed design.

The basic idea is to build organizations around what works, rather than trying to fix what doesn’t. It is the opposite of problem solving. Instead of focusing on fixing what’s wrong, AI focuses on how to create more of what’s already working.

This week, I read about a psychology study that reminded me of why Appreciative Inquiry works. Researchers assigned subjects to solve a maze, with a cartoon mouse pictured in the centre who was trying to get out of the maze. Half the subjects saw that when the mouse got out of the maze, it would get to a yummy piece of cheese. The other half of the subjects saw that when the mouse got out of the maze, an owl was ready to swoop down and eat the yummy mouse.

Although all the subjects successfully solved the maze in a similar amount of time, the two groups showed distinct aftereffects from the activity:

When the participants later took a test of creativity, those who had helped their mouse avoid the owl turned in scores that were fifty percent lower than the scores of students who had helped their mouse find the cheese. The state of mind elicited by attending to the owl had resulted in a lingering sense of caution, avoidance, and vigilance for things going wrong. This mind-state in turn weakened creativity, closed down options, and reduced the students’ flexibility in responding to the next task.

. . . The same action . . . has different consequences depending on whether it’s done to move toward something we welcome (activating the brain’s approach system) or to avoid something negative (activating the brain’s avoidance system). In the maze experiment, aversion was triggered by something as minor as the sight of a cartoon owl. It led to reductions in exploratory, creative behaviors. This is dramatic evidence that the avoidance system can narrow the focus of our lives, even when triggered by a purely symbolic threat.

-The Mindful Way Through Depression, p. 124-125

The coach within me invites you to ask yourself: Where in your life or organization are you narrowing your focus by acting to avoid something? What possibilities might open up if you shifted your actions to highlight what you are approaching, rather than what you are avoiding?

Tips for Gathering Performance Feedback – Part Three

The third installment of what I’ve learned conducting 360 reviews.

3. Build trust throughout the process. If you’ve been asked to conduct a performance review for someone, he/she is putting his/her trust in you. You will hear what the client’s managers, employees, and coworkers see as strengths, and you will likely hear some naked, unadorned criticism. Your client is making himself/herself vulnerable, and you need to provide a safe space for that vulnerability.

a) Keep the client informed. One of the best ways to build trust is to make it clear what you are doing, why you are doing it, and when it will be done. Review the plan for the performance review with your client. What questions will you be asking? Who will you be speaking to? What will you guarantee in terms of confidentiality? How will you frame the discussion with the respondents? How will you follow up with them? Which steps will the client be a part of? What is the timeline for each step?

b) Introduce yourself and your qualifications. Make sure the respondents know who you are and why you are conducting the review. It helps to have the client contact the respondents to introduce you. One mistake I made was to start one review process assuming that most of the respondents knew me or had been told I would be contacting them. I found out I was wrong when I got an email that said, “Who are you and why are you doing this?”

c) Be flexible to the respondents’ preferences. Respondents are doing a favour for you and your client by sharing their time and thoughts. Work to accommodate them! If they prefer a phone call over an online survey, pick up the phone. If they prefer to talk face to face, set up a meeting. If you arrange an interview and they prefer open-ended questions, go open-ended. If they prefer that you structure the interview, come prepared. Of course, the degree to which you can be flexible depends on the purposes of the review (e.g. if you need hard quantitative data, you need to be consistent in how you gather it), but for the most part, you and your client will learn the most when you conduct the interview in a way that works best for respondents.

c) Discuss what comes next. After the questions have been answered, the data have been sorted, and themes are bubbling to the surface, your client might feel a bit lost. “I knew I wanted feedback,” he/she says, “but what do I do with it?” Prepare for this question before you meet with your client to discuss the results of the review. Make sure you can discuss, with examples, some of the things your client is known and valued for. Make sure you can describe diplomatically, but accurately, the behaviours or patterns that are holding the client back in his/her performance and work relationships. Provide ample opportunity for the client to pause, consider, and contribute their reactions as you discuss the results.

d) Above all, be ready to summarize feedback themes and suggest appropriate goals. Suggest goals that include behaviour/traits for the client to maintain, and ones to develop. Furthermore, provide your client with options for support as he/she acts on all this feedback: if you do performance coaching, explain how you would support him/her in this process. Or refer your client to someone who can provide coaching, or help the client prepare a plan for asking a manager or colleague to work with him/her over the next few months as the client tries to bring the feedback to life in his/her performance.

Tips for Gathering Performance Feedback – Part Two

The second installment of what I’ve learned conducting 360 reviews.

2. Determine the best format for the desired outcomes.

If you’re seeking feedback, you can gather it through an online survey (Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo are easy to use and either free or cheap), by interviewing people yourself, or by asking a third party to conduct interviews.

The questions you ask, and the way you ask them, determine the answers you will get. Do a test run of your survey or interview questions to understand how respondents interpret and answer them. Here are some different purposes for reviews I’ve conducted, and how we designed it accordingly:

a) Baseline comparison. One person wanted a baseline gauge of her abilities in ten different areas. She planned to compare these baseline results with the results a year later. In this case, the design was fairly straightforward: survey questions were designed to evaluate the ten areas in both qualititative and quantitative ways. The exact same survey can be used a year from now to show if there has been any improvement in her performance in these areas. The entire survey was conducted online.

b) Recognition and direction. Another individual wanted to know if he was meeting goals he had set for himself, and wanted input into what goals to work on next. We used rating scale questions to see how well he was achieving goals, and open-ended questions to explore areas of strength and weakness. Respondents answered online, and we had follow-up telephone discussions with a subset of respondents to explore their answers further.

c) Exploratory and relationship-focused. A third individual wanted to understand what his team knew about him that he didn’t know. Rather than an online survey, this performance review consisted of open-ended questions in telephone conversations, and was more participant-directed than client-directed. The outcome was a series of themes and learning opportunities that we might not have discovered if we had set out with our own pre-formed questions to explore.

Next post: part three – trust and relationship-building while conducting reviews.