An interview with Dr. Marilyn Atkinson, PhD, President, Erickson Coaching International.
(There is a video of this interview at the end of the text.)
- What does Coaching Style Management mean in the 21st century?
A coaching style management is very critical part of leadership in large scale organizations today. What it means is, first of all, that people interact with their direct report in such a way that meaningful ongoing, unfolding execution takes place. That’s pretty important because execution makes all the difference in whether or not a corporation succeeds. Whether the employees are implementing well depends on their relationship with the person who they directly report to. And if that person is able to, first, support them in getting inspired.
Secondly, assistance as they build the stages of a difficult plan, and that may mean conversations from time to time, but it means that the manager is aware of where it’s difficult, where it’s working, and where the manager has the ability to assist that person to build plans, discover what needs to be done to take the step in difficult situations and also to self-evaluate, to really build a self-understanding whether the plan is really working or not.
Now, that style of management is critical in organizations today because with it employees stay inspired, they stay with the company, they love to come to work, they experience that what they’re doing makes the difference, they continue to build their leadership potential, and the company moves ahead. Without it, with a level of competition in a world today people will easily be bought off by head-hunters; they’ll easily go for a different salary because they won’t have a level of meaningful interaction that has them stay connected to a job.
- How easy it is to train managers in that type of leadership?
When the manager understands how to assist to team to have a meaningful dialogue, to put together plans, they let go of their need to control every step of the way. They begin to make a difference between those people who need training, those people who are committed, those people they can coach, and those who can actually build the joint plan and deploy it well.
That takes a huge burden off the manager. The manager then becomes someone who is working through the employees, working with the employees, working in such a way that the employees get the real support they need.
- How coaching style management overcomes silos and creates integration and cohesion?
It simply means that people protect themselves from giving out too much information in case that it’s used against them. And they run their little fortress their own way. Now, that means that awful lot of information gets missed through the whole organization. The only way organization works well if there’s a lot of information flow between all the people who are building results together.
Fundamentally, we want to have the kind of company where people don’t even need their offices; they can move from a meeting to meeting, they can bring their offices with them on their computers, they can settle in and work with one group of people or another group of people, they can sometimes manage and sometimes be on a team. In other words, the need to have rigid walls around them becomes a thing of the past.
- How Solution Focused Coaching at workplace is transforming the way people think about their work and how they value it?
I have worked with about 3 companies that discussed the ROAD warriors that mean Retired On Active Duties. And these are people who simply become, if you want to call it, stones in the path of the stream. They’re doing their job but just barely. And they are not really contributing in the critical areas where the company needs to move up level of team relationships, discover next level of integration of styles and skills – all of things that allow a company to compete in a world.
So, yes, this is one of the only ways we can work with people who have become passive in the job. Usually they become disappointed at some earlier stages of their work; they’ve decided, well, I’ll do just for the money. “I’m not really part of things around here, I’ll just coming in; my 95 is what I give.” And that’s very disappointing. Think about it! We spend 60% of our life at work. If that time is just used to do some basic pen-pushing and filling in correct forms or thinking through the basic plans, it wastes people’s lives! They have no fun at their job.
We’ve got to have fun at our work – 60% of our life is a lot of our life. So, yes, solution focused coaching, workplace coaching is transforming the way people think about their work and the way they value their work and rightfully so, it’s a long time coming that makes a big difference in the organizations which are bringing solution focused coaching in today and watching these changes happen. And I want to tell you – THEY ARE WONDERFUL!
- How can Coaching Leadership go beyond fear and survival mode in the current period of economic instability?
It’s simply about people not knowing that they can swing out and express themselves creatively. And so, they focus more on protecting themselves and their job than they do about doing the job. To do a job well requires that we need to really, really know what we are aiming for.
Fear comes from lack of leadership. A great manager versed in solution focused coaching methods assists his team to relax, assists his team to move out of a survival mode and feel safe. A good coach knows a lot of ways to make people feel safe. They know their job is on a line, they know their life is fine, that they’re OK, they’re being supported. And they feel freedom move ahead in to the kind of thinking that really gets results for the company.
- How to properly install a coaching culture in an organization – what level of management should be involved first?
I have been involved in about five major corporate coaching deployment episodes where a large company has moved to install a coaching style management. In one company we started at HR level and that was very effective. The HR department built a plan; they started, after The Art and Science of Coaching, the 60-dy program. The whole team started coaching, upper level leaders and some of the managers at different levels, to work with their own teams. And gradually, bringing in a variety of other programs from Erickson, especially the team programs, a coaching style of management is moved through a company.
And there was another corporation, a big one (80 000 people). We started right below the vice-presidents of the company. That also worked, but it worked in a different way. It allowed the top leadership to, domino style, start training managerial coaching with the people below them using a lot of the coaching tools and coaching the leaders who reported to them. Both worked and each was an effective method. In one case we started lower than that, in a couple of speciality areas of a company that did not work. It made the difference in that company’s area but wasn’t moved throughout the corporation.
- What qualities are required for highly effective leadership at this stage of the 21st century?
I perhaps can briefly mention some of them. Leadership and coaching go hand in hand. So, we train strong coaches and we’re also developing leaders. And that’s the reason the coaching is so valuable in companies because leaders need to support the integrity of the company. That means they need to support the vision of the company and connect it with the values and be able to talk that at every level. They need to speak for the heart of the company and the mind of the company in the aims and goals of the company to the people around them, and to keep people inspire about the work they do. So, that’s number one.
Number two. A leader needs to have a strategic focus. He constantly needs to know where the bottom line is and keep the company’s integrity with that bottom line organized around the future goals. He or she needs to have great strategies for bringing in new initiatives, for supporting new initiatives, and noticing when it’s time to find the next blue ocean strategy if you like to move things forward.
In other words, a great leader needs to be a great possibility thinker. Truly! They can’t just follow the same old, same old, because even if it was a great strategy that worked ones, times are changing far too fast for that. So, we need to be able to think possibilities and we need to be able to think opportunities.
Thirdly, a great leader needs to know how to prioritize. They need to be able to prioritize for themselves, also for those people around them who are attempting to organize around those priorities. And that’s no small thing because the goals we have are getting thicker and faster all the time. There’s so much information coming at us from so many directions. And to find the difference that makes the difference and focus on that and to keep the company focused requires that leader’s attention.
Fourthly, a leader needs to think people. He needs to know the ways in which people form habits, the ways in which those habits are talents, the ways in which each person is different and can do a different kinds of work and to support those talents effectively, and to celebrate people in their diversity. To really seek diversity is something of a great value.
A great leader in this world today in the 21st century needs to think cultures because we always work internationally except in some very small companies. We need to be able to talk to people from different countries, understand the difference in how to inspire our team’s products and services with different people, and to enjoy different people from different cultures so that our products and services can spread. I know, in China, they need the leaders as huge and they really need that ability to go from vision all the way down the ladder through the planning stages and deployment stages to on-the-ground thinking, to link all of these together into effective strategic building of corporate intelligence.
- How does Solution Focused Coaching unlock leadership potential?
I assess leaders to have an alignment at all times with their vision and values. So, as they’re on-the-ground assisting a group to execute a plan or as they’re talking to a group of people about how to build the next step in something that’s difficult and they’re still trying to unfold it they’re constantly accessing a visionary aim and the values that support that.
An interview with Dr Marilyn Atkinson from Erickson College on Vimeo.