Centre for Housing and Support – training and conferences

Chris will be delivering training for the Centre for Housing and Support in March, and holding workshops at two of their conferences.

You can find out about the winter conferences in their Conference brochure.

CHS Winter Conference 2012 – North edition (Leeds) Conferences – 1st Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

CHS Winter Conference 2012 – South edition (Cheltenham) Conferences – 22nd Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

The training is part of CHS series of national seminars:

Coaching Skills for Support Staff Seminar (Worcester) Seminars – 5th Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

Using coaching skills as a manager seminar (Worcester) Seminars – 6th Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

Coaching Skills for Support Staff Seminar (London) Seminars – 8th Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

Using coaching skills as a manager seminar (London) Seminars – 9th Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

Coaching Skills for Support Staff Seminar (Manchester) Seminars – 13th Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

Using coaching skills as a manager seminar (Manchester) Seminars – 14th Mar 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm

Christmas Coaching Offer

Wishing you a Merry Christmas from Creative Difference!

To make the season more merry, our Christmas Offer is 25% off all coaching booked to begin before the end of January 2012.

Have a look at our page on executive coaching and give us a call for a free telephone taster session on 07515 759 587.

 

For face to face coaching, offer extends only to London area.

Distract yourself or develop yourself?

Painful things are hard to think about.  I notice myself pushing them to one side in my mind, and focussing on something more pleasurable instead.   Quite a natural way to prevent anxiety, but at what stage does this become ‘problem, what problem?  Let’s party!’  i.e.  the stage at which pleasure is used to avoid engagement with stressful circumstances.  Virginia Satir identified this type of reaction to stress as the ‘distractor’ response.

I have found successful projects much easier to engage with than less successful ones.  My way of dealing with this has been to notice it and ensure that I give the things I enjoy less, but which nevertheless deserve attention, the time they need.  Tackling them first in the day when I am fresh works well.

When do we give ourselves permission to engage with pleasures that distract us?  This is easier to answer when our days are well structured and there are clear times for ‘work’ and ‘play’.  Working for myself,  I have to self-motivate and organise my own time.  I find that I have to set myself rules, targets and manage myself so that I tackle the things that are necessary but less fun.

This makes me think about personal development.  Many people say that it is our failures we learn from, but thinking about them in order to learn is painful, so we will often slip into defensive ways of thinking – projecting blame onto others, distracting ourselves with pleasures, ascribing a failure to the context.  The other thing we do is distract ourselves, which also means we fail to learn.

For me a great way of spotting where I should be learning/changing is when I give myself permission for a ‘treat’ – am I trying to distract myself from something I need to engage with?  I’m not talking about some hair shirt approach to life, but about noticing when I think ‘let’s have an hour off now and go for a walk in the sun’ at a time I would normally be working.  Is this because everything is under control and I can enjoy this, or is it to avoid tackling something unpleasant?

Procrastination is another good indicator of what we are avoiding.  Last week I found myself grateful for a day of DIY as a way of avoiding dealing with other tasks.  In themselves those tasks were not unpleasant, but they had a negative emotional charge for me.

Noticing what is going on can help us make conscious choices, learn from errors and engage with areas of our work and lives which need to change.

Coaching; professional vs personal

One theme that I have noticed while coaching senior managers is the thin boundary between professional and personal at work.  I don’t mean that these managers are blurring the boundary, but that the coaching relationship has uncovered the impact of the personal on performance at work.

What surprised me was the depth of this connection and how useful it was to be able to compare patterns of behaviour in work, with patterns outside of work.  Influences included parents, siblings, partners, religion and loss.  The way these patterns and the emotions they engendered influenced work should not have been a surprise to me – a fundamental of my coaching is that it deals with the whole person, because it is the whole person who goes to work.  It was the strength with which these influenced affected daily behaviour that was surprising, and the need to recognise those influences and take action to move beyond them.

I can only liken this to seeing an osteopath (something I did recently).  Working with the underlying structure, the osteopath clicks something back into place, freeing the whole body to move and feel better.  In the same way, freeing up the personal helps the professional perform smoothly.

Effective organisations

I was stimulated to think about how organisations become more or less effective after a coaching session I delivered to a client who was part of a senior management team.  I ended up with the following model:

The model is all about alignment between the organisation’s Purpose, People, Processes and the environment the organisation works within.  Where these factors are aligned, the organisation is effective.  Where they are not, it is ineffective.  The arrows between the polarities of alignment and dysfunction are to show that each area is a linear scale; most organisations will have some areas which are in strong alignment, and others where there is weak alignment or dissonance.

Different elements of Purpose, Processes and People may or may not be aligned.  For example, the Purpose of the organisation may align with the environment and with the organisation’s Processes, but if the People aspect of the organisation is out of alignment then areas B, C, and D will show dysfunction.  Translating this into practical terms, an organisation may exist in a highly structured environment and will have adjusted its Purpose and Processes accordingly, but the People within in it may be used to discretion and freedom of action, leading to indifference, disablement and ultimately ineffectiveness.

The challenge for leaders is to keep alignment between Purpose, Processes and People and the environment.

Coming Unstuck

After two years working as a consultant, I reached a restless period.  Work wound down for the summer, nothing much was happening, a sense of dissatisfaction grew.

Somehow Wile.E.Coyote  had spread glue on my road.  Fortunately I had registered for a Diploma course with the Academy of Executive Coaching, and this involved being coached myself.

On the first session of the course I was disconnected and my mind was spinning.  I splurged everything I was feeling to my coach for the day and a weight lifted.  I began to travel forwards again.  Drive returned and I got back to marketing and getting coaching work, to clearing out the shed at the bottom or our garden and making other changes.  I just took 20 minutes clearing the debris to begin this process.

I’ve noticed similar things for friends and colleagues – it often takes an event to begin to unstick things.  This might be a coaching session, it might be taking practical steps to clear out a room, or it might be just getting some distance on a weekend break trip.  Physical clearing, emotional clearing or distance.

I attended a conference yesterday that had a model that made some sense of this for “serial achievers” – a person’s drive to learn and move forwards falls off into a period of stability until  there is restlessness.  A period of incubation follows, during which they may be searching or reflecting, which ends with an epiphany as the person realises where they want to go next.  Drive returns and the person sets off in a new direction.  This happens in cycles and different cycles may be going on in different spheres of the person’s life.

Being restless or stuck is ok, if uncomfortable.  That’s the time to look for a catalyst that might release that stuckness.

Do it with conviction

A placebo is a sham medical intervention, widely used in medical research, as someone’s belief that they are receiving a helpful intervention will actually help them get better.  It points to the important role of the brain in physical health.

The book “Bad Science“, by Ben Goldacre, gives some good examples of the placebo effect.  It started me thinking about what the equivalent in management might be, what the role of the brain’s beliefs might be in helping organisations succeed.

Expectation may be the answer  – expectations influence how we act and perform – see this link for examples.  Other studies have shown that when you expect people to perform well at work, they do.  This makes me think that, in a similar way, expecting a strategy or plan to work enhances its chances of delivering what you want, provided staff understand it and are convinced it will work.

For leaders, the placebo “effect” is a direction, strategy or objective that is given to the organisation “with conviction”.  This is not suggesting that remedies prescribed for organisations by leaders are not effective, but that part of their impact comes from belief generated that the leaders know what they are doing and therefore the staff of the organisation expect success.

This may lead to a positive feedback cycle, where belief leads to confidence, which leads to better performance, and back to increased belief.  Its an important element of transformational leadership to engender that belief in followers, so that they perform at their best.  The unspoken expectations will be communicated between staff and with those outside the organisation (see the link above for examples).  The difficult part for the leader is the need for conviction (and not just to pretend it) that staff are going to perform well and that the strategy will work.  In situations where an organisation has not been performing well, this may be difficult.

On the other hand, those who do not get behind the direction of the organisation, who believe it will fail, or who believe that staff will perform poorly, may help this become a self fulfilling prophesy.

The other difficulty is that the wrong direction, no matter how much it is done with conviction and expectation, is still going to be wrong.  All I suggest is that unified action, a belief in the ability of staff to deliver and belief in a strategy, enhance chances of success.

So why the “happiness” image at the top of this post?  I’m thinking of another way that expectation can spread, through modelling (covered in a previous post).  People will often copy and learn from the behaviour of others.  So if a leader believes in and expects the best from people and a strategy, others will too.  That means belief in self as well, happiness with self.  It suggests that self confidence and valuing self enhance the chance of success and that to transform others you may also need to transform self.

Positive Feedback and targets

Positive feedback in economics explains why some products take off and become the standard, while others don’t.  One example often cited is VHS, which edged it over Betamax (a product with a technical edge) by virtue of having a slight lead in the market.  Because more people had VHS, more VHS cassettes were produced with more choice, making that the choice for those purchasing a system, so more VHS was bought, and so forth.

Another example is a new service being provided by a national charity.  Many local authority commissioners have quickly bought into this service, although it is not yet out of the pilot stage.  I wonder if this is the case of  “everyone else has one, so it must be good”?

Apply this to behaviour at work as well.  If someone gets positive feedback, they believe something worked and will do more of it.  On the other hand, negative feedback, fault finding etc. only tells them what not to do and can lead to risk aversion.

Trouble starts here, as positive feedback can lead to poor decisions – technically we should have ended up with a Betamax standard.  And who remembers when bell-bottomed trousers were the rage (and everyone had them)?

To encourage positive behaviour at work, people set targets.  This would be fine if we knew what would be effective, but the specialised nature of modern work means that the impact of our actions on the whole enterprise is unclear.  Targets are best guesses, which then lock people into behaviour patterns that may be damaging, or parochial and narrow in outlook.  Missed targets can turn potential positive feedback to negative or blaming.

Positive feedback appears to drive a lot of behaviour.  Targets drive a lot of behaviour at work.  How can we know it is effective behaviour until long after the fact, if ever?

Emergent learning, targets and support

I developed the model above about a year ago, but last week found a practical application for it.  You may notice I adapted it from Mintzberg and Waters model for a planned vs. an emergent strategy, with Nonaka and Takeuchi’s idea of combination thrown in.

I was discussing ways of engaging with homeless and vulnerable clients, in a workshop for managers of a not for profit organisation.  The model helped us think about how planned targets (expressed in the “Supporting People” world as “outcomes”) were very difficult to plan for.

The process is expected to run like this:

Client meets professional and an assessment is carried out.  The client expresses aspirations and they set goals together.  Over a period of time those goals are achieved through a series of small steps, and the outcomes desired are achieved.

What often happens is this:

Client meets professional and an assessment is carried out.  The client expresses aspirations and they set goals together.   At the next meeting the client has done nothing towards these and instead expresses other aspirations.  This happens a few times, the professional expresses frustration and begins to nag the client to do stuff.  The client begins to feel bad and votes with their feet.  Personal change is even further off for the client.

This happens for two reasons.  First, the insistence on setting targets and having a plan early on, before the client has explored their current situation enough.  Secondly, the professionals involved are normally generalists, not trained therapists or coaches, and they have targets to meet, so their urgency is to get action and results at the expense of exploration.

Back to the model.  If you realise that a lot of value comes from what emerges unforseen, you may be less likely to grab the first plan that comes along and try to stick to it.  Where achieving targets and outcomes are concerned, this suggests that the right target can only be identified late on in the process and that trying to nail it early may be counter productive.

Transformational Leadership – 3

I would like to Continue my earlier thoughts about transformational leadership and particularly my wariness towards the “charismatic” element that Bernard M Bass identified as necessary (“Transactional to Transformational Leadership”, in Organizational Dynamics).

One way in which a leader can transform others is by example.  This is popularly called being a “role model”.  It works because one way we learn is by copying others.   Understanding of the behaviour copied is not required, simply copy someone who is good at what they do (in line with Bandura‘s theory of modelling).  The idea is that understanding will develop later as you experience how the behaviour copied works, and get further help from the expert (sometimes called cognitive apprenticeship).  Learning physical activities where description of the activity in words is impossible requires this sort of learning, but it applies to other tacit knowledge.  The way a child learns from its parents is the most common example.

For a leader this puts a premium on what you actually do, rather than what you espouse.  You will modify the behaviour of those around you by acting differently yourself, not by changing what the mission statement says.  It also means that if you have senior team members whose behaviour is unhelpful, they have to either make a personal change or go, as their behaviour reflects upon you and how serious you are about enacting a set of values.

One up side to this is that if you want a happy and effective organisation, make yourself happy and effective first – permission to enjoy!