In the many years since then, I have been very clear that a new paradigm offers choice. We can interpret the world or an event or a person differently. And if we do, more becomes possible. Joel Barker’s work on paradigms3 made this very clear. He taught that what is impossible to solve with one paradigm can be easy to resolve with a change in paradigms. A new way of seeing brings with it the potential to liberate us from the prison of our assumptions.
However we see the world, whatever experiences have formed our mental models, every single one of them is woefully inadequate to perceive what’s going on. We all walk around with dense blinders that filter out critical information and, as we now work faster with consuming levels of distraction, we have become truly blind. Those who take the time to think are increasingly rare, and very powerful. As an ancient proverb noted: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
How many of us understand that we have choice? Consumed by tasks, addicted to distractions, avoiding thinking, we have become the most endangered of all species. And this has happened because we fail to use the essential freedom that all living systems possess: choice. Everything alive is free to choose to notice what’s happening in its environment, and then free to choose how it will respond. Even though we humans still possess the highest capacities for thought and awareness, where do we see these in our actions? Failing to notice what’s going on and learning from experience – failure to exercise choice – we win the award for the dumbest species as well as the most endangered. (Actually, dumb and endangered are causally linked.)
This is why I had to put choice in my book title, and why it has become paramount in my work with leaders. If we take time even for a brief moment’s reflection, we can’t help but notice what’s happening to the people we support, the causes we care about, the families we love, and the planet we live on. Whatever skills and resources we have as leaders and citizens, how do we choose to use them? Here is a prose poem I wrote to answer this question.
What This World Needs
This world does not need more entrepreneurs.
This world does not need more technology breakthroughs.
This world needs leaders.
We need leaders who put service over self, who can be steadfast through crises and failures, who want to stay present and make a difference to the people, situations, and causes they care about.
We need leaders who are committed to serving people, who recognize what is being lost in the haste to dominate, ignore, and abuse the human spirit.
We need leaders because leadership has been debased by those who take things to scale or are first to market or dominate the competition or develop killer apps, or those who hold onto power by constantly tightening their stranglehold of fear until people are left lifeless and cowering.
We need leaders now because we have failed to implement what was known to work, what would have prevented or mitigated the rise of hatred, violence, poverty, and ecological destruction. We have not failed from a lack of ideas and technologies – we have failed from a lack of will. The solutions we needed were already here.
Now it is too late. We cannot solve these global issues globally. We can see them clearly. We can understand their root causes. We have evidence of solutions that would have solved them. But we refused to compromise, to collaborate, to persevere in resolving them as an intelligent, creative species living on one precious planet.
Now it’s up to us, not as global leaders but as local leaders. We can lead people to create positive changes locally that make life easier and more sustainable, that create possibility in the midst of global decline.
Let us use whatever power and influence we have, working with whatever resources are already available, mobilizing the people who are with us to work for what they care about.
As former president Teddy Roosevelt enjoined us: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
Reflection Questions
These questions are about thinking, and they require time to think. They also ask for a then-and-now perspective to gain clarity about what has changed in the past few years.
Personally, how much time do you spend thinking and reflecting today as contrasted to a few years ago?
Organizationally, how much time do you spend thinking with colleagues in contrast to a few years ago?
How much learning from experience occurs?
Talk to a few staff people and get their answers to these questions. Then note whether people feel sad or wistful when they talk about time to reflect together.
Notes
1. Margaret Wheatley, Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2017).
2. Stuart Kauffman’s work is thoroughly described in Meg Wheatley’s book A Simpler Way (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1999). The phrase order for free is easily found on Google.
3. Joel Barker’s initial work, in books and videos, was titled “The Business of Paradigms,” published in the late 1980s.
PART IV
Be Ye an Opener of Doors
In the 1800s, great American lecturer, essayist, and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said, “Be ye an opener of doors.” In this section, our contributors explore the meaning of this inspiring phrase of Emerson’s. What does it mean to open doors – for ourselves and for others – through which we can walk together toward a shared and positive vision of the future?
In his article, Michael Bungay Stanier dissects the “elegant simplicity” of the theory and practice of coaching as an opener to the door of great leadership. Gary Ridge offers lessons he learned about the true nature and purpose of business from his boyhood in suburban Sydney, Australia, drawing on these to advise how to develop truly “transformative” leadership and create “tribal unity” in modern organizational cultures. Brigadier General Tom Kolditz makes a powerful case for offering professional-caliber leadership development to students at the college and university level rather than waiting till they are more established in their careers. He also identifies tangible payoffs in terms of creating a cadre of young leaders well-suited to face the challenges of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Pawel Motyl recounts how an encounter with Marshall Goldsmith – “an expert ophthalmologist” – led him to challenge his vision of himself and reevaluate his performance as CEO of a major business magazine publisher in his native Poland. He describes how he then used the insights of Peter Drucker to realign his career path with his true personal vision. Alex Osterwalder et al. use the metaphor of a garden to describe corporate culture and how it must be cultivated and tended. A Culture Map technique is introduced as a method for helping leaders and their teams assess their current culture or design a new one. Liz Wiseman expands her previous research on leadership types to describe the Accidental Diminisher – those who unintentionally and unwittingly diminish the people they lead. She outlines several precise strategies for identifying and overcoming such tendencies in your own leadership practice, along with techniques for developing into a “great” vs. merely “good” leader!
22
The Elegance and Simplicity of Coaching
Michael Bungay Stanier
Michael Bungay Stanier is the founder of Box of Crayons, a company that teaches 10-minute coaching to busy managers. He is the author of the Wall Street Journal’s bestseller The Coaching Habit, the number one coaching book since its release. He is a Rhodes Scholar, and a member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches. An Australian, he now lives in Toronto, Canada.
■ ■ ■
I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Great tools and models have an elegant simplicity to them. They provoke a paradoxical response at the same time: both, I’ve never seen it like that before and Of course, it has to be like that. The periodic table and Darwin’s theory of natural selection are grea
t examples of this. Marshall Goldsmith’s Feed forward process1 and Peter Drucker’s Five Questions2 are examples in the world of leadership.
My goal is for coaching to be a practical tool for all managers, so I’m seeking the simplicity that lives on the other side of complexity in this discipline.
And there’s a lot of complexity. Many hold the perception that coaching is a confusing, complex, arcane, and slightly touchy feely process that only HR types and people from California can master. It’s frustrating. There’s an increasing amount of evidence from both neuroscience and large-scale leadership studies that points to coaching as one of the essential leadership skills. Yet, progress is slow in having managers and leaders actually get better at coaching.
But it doesn’t have to be so. I’ve seen glimpses of coaching’s fundamental elegance and simplicity. One commitment and a few good questions are often all you need to be an effective coach, not just to people you manage and lead, but to everyone with whom you work.
Start at the Beginning
Let’s start with the definition of coaching. There’s no one clear definition of what we mean by coaching, and that means many different options have sprouted and proliferated over the years. Every expert has theirs. Every niche has theirs. Every coach has theirs. They’re all similar, they’re all a little different, and it all gets confusing.
Let me cut the Gordian knot. The coaching cycle is simple. A good question creates a new insight. That insight sparks action and behavior change. That behavior change leads to increased impact. Learning from that impact takes us back to a new insight. The virtuous cycle repeats.
That’s how coaching works. The behavior that makes coaching coaching is even more straightforward to explain: Stay curious a little longer; rush to action and advice-giving a little more slowly.
It’s as simple and as difficult as that.
To put that theory into action, here are four simple strategies that can help all managers and leaders lift their leadership game and improve the way they work with others.
1. Coach-like, not Coaching
Peter Block, the celebrated author of The Answer to How Is Yes3 and Flawless Consulting,4 once said, “Coaching is not a profession but a way of being with each other.” The power in that statement is that it makes coaching something that we all can do. It’s not for a few. It’s for everyone.
But the term coaching comes with baggage. Some think about the proliferation of Life Coaching, with the occasional tendency to overdo feelings and pastels. Some go to Executive Coaching and think it’s all about high-powered conversations in the corner office. Others may go to sports coaching, or ADHD coaching, or teen coaching, or mid-life coaching or – the list goes on. Whatever the reason, too many people assume this being a coach lark is not for me.
Reframing can make all the difference. Let’s talk about our goal not as being a coach, but simply as being more coach-like. Now the pressure’s off. This doesn’t require an identity shift, but a behavior change. It’s simply a way of changing what you currently do, not adding on additional burdens and expectations. And what does being more coach-like even mean? As before, simply staying curious a little longer, and rushing to action and advice-giving a little more slowly.
2. Real Questions, not Fake Questions
Most of us know that questions are the currency of coaching. Clayton Christensen5 said, “Without a good question, a good answer has nowhere to go.” The best coaching allows those good answers to show up, often, wonderfully enough, to the surprise of the person speaking the answer.
Some of us have already heard of the difference between open and closed questions. Closed questions – those targeted to get an answer of yes or no – are the weapon of every cross-examining lawyer. Open questions, on the other hand, force the person answering to work a little harder and fill in the details. Traditional coaching tends to pooh-pooh the closed question, but the truth is that both can be very useful, although on balance, you want to use open questions more often.
But that’s not what I mean by fake questions.
Fake questions sound like this: “Have you thought of …?” and “Did you consider …?” and “Have you tried …?” or even “What about …?”
These, in fact, are not questions at all. They’re just advice with a question mark attached.
You’ll remember that the goal is to stay curious a little longer and rush to action and advice-giving more slowly. The truth is, most of us are advice-giving machines. We’ve been trained, praised, and rewarded all our lives for having the answer. This is how you add value. Even when you don’t really know what the challenge is, you’ve probably got a solution to suggest anyway.
Some of us have become a little more cunning about the way we offer up our advice, and have learned to package our ideas as seeming questions. But let’s stop kidding ourselves and begin to practice asking real questions. (I’ll tell you the best coaching question in the world in a little bit.)
3. Real Listening, not Fake Listening
Those of us who’ve done some sort of training in coaching have most likely run into the concept of active listening. In fact, for many of us, that’s the only remaining residue left over from the training: Nod your head a lot, make small grunt-y noises of encouragement, and look interested.
The shame is, most of us have moved into FAL: Fake Active Listening. Sure, you’ve got the moves down. Nodding, uh-huh-ing, maintaining eye contact. But are you really listening to your client? Not so much. Running through your head is not their words, but yours: “How long are they going to keep talking?” “What’s the next question I should ask?” “When can I interrupt and tell them what my idea is?” “Did I leave the stove on when I left the house this morning?”
It’s difficult and powerful to stay present and hear what they’re actually saying. To listen without feeling the need to interrupt or make your point or add value by telling them what to do.
4. The Best Coaching Question in the World
We talked about asking real questions, not fake questions. Now you might ask me, “Michael, that’s all very well, but what are good coaching questions?”
Well, there are many, and one of the smartest things you can do is to start collecting your favorites. When you hear someone ask a good question to someone they’re coaching – say, “What’s the real challenge here for you?” – you might note how it slowed down the rush to action and dug a little deeper into figuring out what the heart of the issue was. Jot it down! Or when another coach asks, “What do you want?” and you notice how that slows the conversation down and creates a moment of honesty and vulnerability and insight, you make a note to try this technique out for yourself.
But there is one question that rules them all, the best coaching question in the world.
It’s just three words. And it’s literally awe-some.
The question is: “And what else?”
What’s the magic of this question? It’s twofold. To start, the first answer someone gives you is never their only answer and it’s rarely their best answer. “And what else?” helps them keep going and untap all that’s in their head. They’ve got more to tell you. This gives them the chance to do that.
The other reason is that it’s a self-management tool. To repeat myself and drive home the point, we’re trying to stay curious a little longer and rush to action and advice-giving just a little more slowly. For the most part, however, we’re not that good at this form self-control. Having “And what else?” in your repertoire is a tool to help you bite your tongue. Instead of giving them that burning answer you’re desperately keen to tell them, that nugget of gold, that pearl of wisdom – hold off for just a moment. Ask them, “And what else?” instead.
Coaching is simple and it’s elegant.
If you want to, you can spend months and thousands training to be a coach. And no doubt, you’ll pick up some powerful and useful tools when you do. But you don’t have to. Everything you need to be more coach-like is right here on this
page:
Resist giving advice.
Stay curious and ask real questions.
Ask “And what else?”
Listen to the answer.
Do all of that, and you’ll change the way you lead forever.
Reflection Questions
What is your definition of coaching?
What distinguishes real coaching from activities that are only coach-like?
What are some instances in your own life when you practice fake versus real listening? How might you change how you listen to be more real and present all the time? What would be some benefits of this in your personal/work life?
Notes
1. Marshall Goldsmith, “Try Feedforward Instead of Feedback,” Leader to Leader, June 2002.
2. Peter F. Drucker, The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008).
3. Peter Block, The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2001).
4. Peter Block, Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used (Hoboken, NJ: Pfeiffer, 2011).
5. Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2014).
23
The Gift of Belonging
Work is Love Made Visible Page 17
