There are moments, often, when we hit milestones that symbolise the end of something (like the end of a year), that we stop and take a moment to look back. This moments are opportunities to reflect, to learn and to prepare to start again.
Yet, in work, these moments are missed as we jump from project to project, urgent task to urgent task. Urgency getting in the way of growth, learning and, most importantly, using this wisdom to focus on the things that will have the biggest impact on our goals.
In this podcast, Ricky talks with Paul about the power of these moments, asking why these are so important, yet often undervalued in the workplace. Of course, they also get into some simple ways that you can make your reflection time more effective and why this does not need to take very much time at all if you do it right.
When asked, ‘what gets in your way?’, most of us have the same answer. Me!
However hard we try, we cannot get out of our own way. We spend our life erecting barriers for us to them climb over, acting like a critic and sometimes even being a bully to ourselves.
This is the first of several podcasts exploring the different ways we get in our own way and looking at some simple things that any of us can do to reduce self-inflicted barriers. Getting in your own way is perfectly normal, but you don’t have to accept it as being inevitable.
In this first podcast, Rob and Rich explore self-esteem. How do we understand that we have self-worth in a hyperconnected world where we are asked to compare to highly edited versions of everyone else, yet we have a warts and all version of ourselves?
We spend most of the time with our brains on ‘autopilot’. We are thinking at a subconscious level, causing us to act without being truly aware of what we are doing. This handy little trick helps us get through the day, making the most of the energy available and freeing up our conscious mind to work on the more important stuff, like ‘what’s for dinner?’.
Rob and Ricky explore in this podcast how you can turn off this automatic process, so you can take conscious control of the things that you really need to think about, not just respond to.
Every time we learn something new we have to connect that to our world, to understand how that new piece of information or skill will work for us. Knowing is not enough, we have to integrate the new into our existing understanding of the world. That takes reflection.
In this podcast, Ricky and Rob explore why reflection is so important and offer up different strategies that will help you reflect, and therefore embed, your learning.
Before we can answer whether coaching is limited in this way, what might be helpful is to define what coaching is – what is the definition by which I challenge the assertion!
Coaching draws its roots from sports. It is typically a one-to-one relationship between a coach (the person ‘helping’) and a coachee (the person being helped). When you look at sports, the problem is that this type of coaching is subjective, and the coaching techniques used are really for helping high potential athletes to become elite.
In elite sports, the coach is developing the coachee (athlete) who is highly motivated. The nature of the development takes time and effort, meaning their relationship is generally a long term one. The coach will observe technical aspects of a particular routine and provide feedback to the coachee. The coach will also work with the coachee’s physical and mental performance. The high-level goal of the coach is to improve the coachee’s performance level and prepare them for competition.
More commonly, when people think of coaching, they link it to something they are familiar with, something like childrens football, for example. The problem with this is this type of ‘coaching’ is, in reality, more akin to teaching.
So, what’s the same, and what’s different, outside of the world of sports?
According to the CIPD, “Coaching aims to produce optimal performance and improvement at work. It focuses on specific skills and goals, although it may also have an impact on an individual’s personal attributes such as social interaction and confidence. The process typically lasts for a defined period of time or forms the basis of an on-going management style.”
The CIPD acknowledge that a universal definition is hard to come by due to a lack of agreement among coaching professionals. That said the CIPD suggest common characteristics for coaching in an organisation. These highlight coaching as being:
A non-directive form of development
Focussed on improving performance and developing an individual
Directed more on performance at work, but may include personal factors
Something that works with both individual and organisational goals.
An opportunity for people to assess their strengths and development areas better.
A skilled activity best delivered by trained people which could be line managers and others trained in coaching skills.
Without question, coaching in organisations can be powerful if done correctly but it can also be limited in its effectiveness. Typically, the line manager will be the coach as there is an existing, hopefully strong, relationship. However, their agenda can dominate the discussion; risking them becoming overly focused on the impact on their own goals and less on the development of the individual.
Let’s also face up to the reality that line managers are hardly blessed with time; they are often spinning many plates at the same time as they attempt to satisfy both the needs of their manager and their people. Yet, they are expected to find quality time to coach their people. Whilst they get the intellectual argument, they may lack the skills to coach effectively, and they will often lack is the time to do it right. Their own time pressures inform where they choose to focus their time.
Additionally, managers may ignore their top performers because they believe (wrongly) that they’re alright and often choose to focus on improving their weaker performers. The contradiction here is that this will almost certainly not give them the best return on their efforts. Because coaches can only work with one person at a time, and coaches who are line managers typically attend to performance issues, this combination feeds a belief that ‘coaching’ is what you get when you are underperforming.
The pressure of time causes further conflict for coaches; do they do the tasks where the output is visible, and often demanded by others, or do they coach? It is much easier to defer the coaching conversation as the payoff is rarely immediate. A task with quick, visible results creates a dopamine rush that validates their decision to put off the coaching, slowly moving coaching down their agenda.
At Thinking Focus, we fundamentally believe that developing people through coaching is an essential part of any organisation’s development toolkit. We also challenge the assertion that coaching is purely a one-to-one relationship, the same skills can easily be used to facilitate group development as they would develop individuals.
Developing skills and behaviours in groups requires three core elements – the skills (including confidence) to run the session, a defined outcome (what is the purposes of the session) and a structured process to follow. It’s likely you will have a skills matrix and behavioural template that will drive the outcomes you are looking to develop in your session, but ensure your session includes the following pillars:
Psychological safety to enable the individuals to feel comfortable being vulnerable among their peers.
Encourage individuals to access their experiences against the development topic
Create a shared pool of understanding for what works, doesn’t work and why – this will lead to a better answers/results
Collective buy-in to the way forward
Peer pressure to doing the right thing in the right way
Doing this in this way works and creates a host of individual and organisational benefits:
We know that time pressures are not going away any time soon; group coaching is highly efficient, which means you can develop more than one person at a time.
When developing in groups, you can leverage collective peer pressure, accelerate the adoption of knowledge and skills, which means you gain a return on your time, effort and your training investment.
Bring mixed ability groups together and share their different experiences to create a deeper pool of shared understanding. When they learn from each other’s experiences, it vicariously reinforces the desired behaviours and actions. This collaborative sharing means that groups are more likely to adopt the desired behaviours.
The shared experience, discussion and debate underpinned with purposeful coaching creates a shared understanding that leads to collective buy-in to the ‘best way’ for your team, department or organisation, which means more durable changes in behaviour.
Developing people in a group forum, when set up in the right way is more inclusive and psychologically safer. Contribution levels are higher, robust challenge more likely and outcomes more effective. This shared coaching experience means that coaching is no longer perceived to be a performance management tool with negative connotations.
Group coaching is an excellent forum for knowledge transfer, unwritten rules and undocumented practices that somehow make the company function now have an outlet. Sharing these ‘Spanish customs’ means reduced mistakes by people learning through error, which can be embarrassing and disengaging when they realise everyone else knew!
When groups work together on shared goals, it creates an endowment effect which means they are more likely to be committed and see it through. This collaborative approach means projects are delivered more efficiently and effectively.
Bring cross-functional groups together to create a broader systemic awareness of how to work more effectively together. This appreciation of others means that problems are owned and more quickly solved. This improved collaboration and cooperation mean organisations not only save enormous cost at the time, but they also build enduring cross-functional relationships that deal with issues more quickly, with less wasted time, effort and money.
Group coaching is not as well-known as traditional coaching and rarely utilised in development. The reason perhaps is because there is little development available to acquire the skills, so we decided that we wanted to help managers, coaches and organisations to realise the benefits available to them from Group Coaching.
Back in 2017, we researched what was available and found very little – and less that could actually be used practically in organisations.
With this in mind we developed a product that would bring group coaching to the mainstream. Our goal is to enable coaches to coach more than one person at a time, to make group coaching practical, relevant and easy and to deliver a greater return than one-to-one coaching.
We built a structured process, which supports and guides any coach and combined it with contextual and relevant subject matter. We harnessed social learning to enable organisations to raise the level of mixed ability groups at the same time. Reflection is in-built not just to land critical learning but transfer it to the day job.
‘What Would You Do?’ (WWYD) is the plug and play, group coaching solution that improves results and changes behaviour.
WWYD is available online and offline, from small groups to conferences and is engineered with social learning and group coaching to deliver durable behavioural change and improve results. It comes preloaded with ready-made content contextualised to the workplace. Scenarios frame a facilitated discussion among peers. The inclusion of game mechanics serves to create an environment where participants feel safe and openly share; the same mechanics include progress and jeopardy, and friendly competition maintains interest with the inclusion of scoring and league tables, all of which make for an engaging learning experience.
So, going back to the original question – is coaching all that? We firmly believe so, and while coaching may typically be limited to a one-to-one activity our own research has highlighted it can be much more than this; and our own desire to build on this has led us to create a unique product to support this. Just because coaching has historically been delivered one-to-one doesn’t mean that that’s the only way, or indeed the best way, of delivering it!
WWYD is interactive and experiential, to experience it for yourself you can:
We are looking forward to attending the Festival of Work, a fantastic new event run by the CIPD, and showcasing our game-based learning resource What Would You Do? (WWYD).
Running in London on June 12 and 13, the Festival of Work
combines the CIPD’s Learning and Development and HR Software and Recruitment
shows, with an added element focusing on the future of work.
It should be an informative and inspiring event for HR and L&D professionals – and we’re hoping some of them might like to drop by our stand and try out What Would You Do?
Based on concepts of peer-assisted learning and psychological
safety, the game aims to prepare managers for potential workplace situations
before they occur in reality.
We’re firm believers in the power of game-based learning, and we’ve witnessed the benefits for ourselves while introducing What Would You Do? to L&D practitioners.
So this blog takes a look at the reasons why game-based
learning is so effective in helping to solve business and management issues.
Read on to find out more.
Why use game-based learning?
It unlocks latent tacit knowledge and skills
All employees have knowledge that’s almost never
utilised. Game-based learning can unearth this hidden potential by bringing
people together to discuss everyday scenarios, and share knowledge and insights.
It brings
learning to life
Fed up with not getting ROI from your training
investment? When learning lacks practical application, it fails to stick. Gamification
brings teams together to discuss how the theory they’ve learnt in the classroom
would work in practice, test meaning and find a solution to common issues.
It removes
friction and improves collaboration
Gamification makes learning social, which improves collaboration,
communication and team work. It helps to break down internal friction and
barriers by increasing awareness of peers’ roles, ideas, perceptions and
experience.
It
removes silos and presents the bigger picture
Specialised teams (silos) can be susceptible to a lack of
communication, an insular perspective and unhealthy internal politics.
Game-based learning brings people together from different teams, increasing
collaboration and communication, creating continuity, and helping individuals
see issues from a wider viewpoint.
It creates
psychological safety
Gamification creates a safe environment for players to
share thoughts and ideas, and to discuss and debate issues in the interest of
playing the game. This means players can be more open, communicative and
creative without fear of failure.
It’s
engaging and fun!
Traditional training can be uninspiring and fail to
resonate with learners. Instead, when people focus on a game, they are so
engaged, they don’t even realise they are learning!
Find
out more about our game-based learning tool What Would You Do? by visiting stand
F11 at the Festival of Work on June 12th and 13th at Olympia London.
Social
learning is about the way we learn, while the 70:20:10 model concerns where we
get our learning from. Both are linked and relevant, we think, to the work that
we do at Thinking Focus, so we thought we’d take a closer look at them.
The
social learning theory first formulated by Albert Bandura in 1977 shows that we
learn best by imitating the behaviour and actions of others. It’s all about
people learning from each other; picking up new skills, ideas, opinions and
experiences from those around them.
This
applies equally to learning in the workplace. Think about it: where do you feel
you have learnt most of what you know? During formal education? Or from your own
experience and the insights of your colleagues?
Social
learning in the workplace is about interacting with others through good
communication, knowledge sharing, discussion, collaboration, and being
transparent about what you’re doing and why. Colleagues can help each other,
either explicitly or tacitly, to understand ideas, experiences, systems,
methods and processes. Yet most of us come into work with the rules set that
tells us to do exactly the opposite, work it out on your own, don’t share,
don’t copy other people’s work. These are the learning rules that schools
operate by.
Most
L&D professionals are familiar with the 70:20:10 model proposed by Charles
Jennings. In fact, it has become a standard part of discussion regarding
learning and development processes in the workplace. The model evolved from a
report in the 1980s which analysed a survey of 200 senior managers. It found
that they reported that 70% of what they knew had been learnt on the job or
through experience, 20% had come from social interaction with other people, and
just 10% had been learnt through formal education.
Although
there’s been some criticism of the 70:20:10 model, some of which we agree with,
we nevertheless think it’s useful in showing the rough proportions of
experience, social interaction and education needed for learning. It does
broadly tell us is that, to meaningfully and effectively learn new things, your
experience and the input and experience of people around you is the most
important thing. Social learning does tend to fit into 90 per cent of this
model.
It’s
all a great starting point for reflecting on how individuals within your
workforce learn and what the best ways therefore might be for their personal
development. It can be used as the basis for a wider L&D strategy that can
have far reaching effects on the culture and mindset of the organisation as a
whole.
At
Thinking Focus, we recognise that we essentially offer the 10 per cent ‘formalised
learning’ part of the Jennings model, but we do so as the basis for encouraging
people to behave in the 20 per cent of the Jennings model by interacting with
people, and to share the 70 per cent, their experience and knowledge.
In our coaching sessions and training workshops, and through our learning resources such as the Strategy Wall and our management development board game What Would You Do?, we are encouraging behaviours that enhance social learning. We create environments where the group learn from other and teach each other, generating conversations and giving people the tools to go and do the 20 per cent in real life. We are highlighting the untapped knowledge and experience that people could access from their colleagues.
We encourage
meaningful face-to-face discussion and debate. We offer formalised learning
elements and use them to highlight, encourage and create social learning by
developing skills and behaviours that cause peer-based learning and
self-reflection.
In
our work helping business teams to become more engaged and active with
learning, time and again the concept of cognitive disfluency comes up. The idea
that we process information differently depending on how much effort it
requires is a fascinating one, so we thought we’d take a look at it in more
depth here.
What is cognitive
disfluency?
Cognitive
disfluency is a term that was first coined by the psychologist Adam Alter, assistant
professor of marketing and psychology at New York University’s Stern School of
Business.
What
it essentially describes is the idea that people process information
differently, and that some of it is easy (fluency) and some of it requires
effort (disfluency). An example of how this works was shown in an experiment
that presented a printed question in two different typefaces – one hard to read
and one easy – and asked people to spot the mistake. The proportion of people
that noticed the error in the hard-to-read font was higher than the
easy-to-read one. Alter suggests that a harder-to-read font makes us put more
mental effort into reading, and we are therefore more likely to retain the
information.
On
a wider scale, fluent processing allows us to take in key information quickly
but not necessarily to retain it or even understand it in a meaningful way. The
whole experience becomes meaningless, less engaging and unsatisfying. Conversely,
we process disfluent information more carefully and deeply, and this naturally
results in us understanding it better. This is why the idea of cognitive
disfluency has been suggested as a great way to assist learning.
Why is cognitive
disfluency important in business?
Think of all the data and information that is presented before us – or our teams – within the workplace. Most organisations now offer their people key decision data in an easy (fluent) way, whether through dashboards, reports or search engines. While these tools can be invaluable, they can also make the data meaningless and hard to retain because they allow people to get to the specific number, target, forecast or performance data whenever they want to. This often means we don’t have to think about, generalise or extract the data.
So
why is that a problem? Well, if people don’t have that data with them when
making key decisions, or if they don’t have an intuitive understanding of the
information and what it means, they will be unable to incorporate it in their
decision-making. They will also be unable to learn from it. Data creates
knowledge, and knowledge creates understanding – but when there is too much
fluency in the information, it reduces this second step.
So should we make
information more disfluent?
A
lot of the data that we use day to day needs to be fluent. We need to be able to access and use it
quickly, so it should be easy to digest.
However, information that is easily consumed is also easily forgotten.
In almost everything we do there are a few key measures that tell us how we are doing against our goals and targets. Data such as production data, sales information or financial projections need to move beyond abstract numbers and become more intuitive, becoming much more central in our awareness, moving from organisation knowledge to personal understanding. It is this data that needs to be deeply understood so that it can underpin the decisions we make.
How should
organisations present their people with important details and data to ensure it
is meaningfully understood and retained?
It’s a good idea to look at the fluency of key data
or information within your organisation. If it’s being presented to people too
easily, make it more disfluent so they have to think about it. You can do this
by:
Asking for
reports that require some small amounts of manual work to create, such as
looking stuff up
Ask people to
interpret data, not just produce it
Change layouts
so people have to search a little, or read more carefully, to find things
But beware
A
word of caution, though: Disfluency should be used sparingly. We’re not
suggesting that you should make your people work hard for every piece of
information they need. After all, not all data needs to be retained or fully
understood.
In addition, too much disfluency can be draining. It
uses up more energy, increases complexity and heightens stress levels. Instead
of continuous disfluency, there should be brief moments of it when appropriate
for processing essential data and information.
Over the last 15 years I have worked with many senior
leadership teams that are grappling with necessary organisational changes.
These are often to take advantage of market or political trends, consumer
demands, or to gain first mover advantage. Having said that, in one case a
number of years ago, it was because the senior team had been given the feedback
that the vast majority of people in the business were unhappy.
It was around this time that I became interested in the
subject of trust.
It seemed to me that the leadership team mentioned above just
wasn’t trusted anymore. Nobody believed what they said. Since then, I’ve seen
it time and time again. A leadership team that thinks if they make the right
noises for a while, people will get on board.
A lack of trust in all walks of life makes things very hard.
Do you like being around people you don’t trust? Of course not. It brings a
heightened sense of anxiety and caution to everything we do. If you are in this
situation on a daily basis or in your personal relationships, it makes life
unbearable.
My work over the last few years has led me to talk to teams
about the need for them to rebuild trust or ensure they are trusted before
embarking on changes, big or small, in their organisations. As ever around the
subject of change, some people get it but many don’t. Many assume that just putting
a good plan in place and some positional authority behind what they are saying means
that people will just come on the journey with them.
So, as I explored the topic further, I began to develop
something I call the ‘Trust Index’. Although rudimental, it was based on hours
of talking to people in organisations. This simple research helped me identify
three key factors that are needed to build trust:
Competence, honesty and
reliability.
I would then ask people in the organisation three simple
questions based on these factors.
1. On a scale of 1-10 do you think the senior team are
competent as leaders?
2. On a scale of 1-10 do you think they are honest with you?
3. On a scale of 1-10 do they do what they say they will do?
I’d then take all the responses and convert the answer to
each of the questions into an overall percentage. As I said, very rudimental! However,
it did give me a really good guide about how much people trusted their managers
and team leaders.
I then went back to senior teams that were being given a score
of 50% or less by their people, and suggested that they should think twice
before making any changes of significance in their organisations, and instead
wait until they had won back the trust of their people.
Recently, I came across something along the same lines as my
research, although rather less basic! While on a long train journey, I was
flicking through Ted Talks on my laptop when I saw one by Frances Frei, a
professor of technology and operations management at the Harvard Business
School.
She had been working at Uber following their recent problems,
and had noticed three things that were broken in terms of trust within their
culture.
Her talk is funny, informative and a great watch. She puts
things so much better than I had been able to with my simple research. She talks
about the following three things being needed to gain, maintain and rebuild
trust:
Authenticity, logic and
empathy.
Firstly, I was really pleased to see that my own limited research had given results that were similar to those Frances was talking about. However, as only one of us is a Harvard professor, I am more than happy to take and work on her three factors!
We’ve created this diagram below based on what Frances says in her Ted Talk:
So, why not ask yourself the following three questions, either in relation to the people you lead or the people who are leading in your company.
1. Authenticity – Are they seeing the real you?
2. Logic – Does it (whatever it is you are proposing) or do
you make sense?
3. Empathy – Do people see that you care about them?
If any of these three are missing, the whole
thing goes very wobbly and certainly means you don’t have the basis on which to
launch a programme of change.
Thinking Focus has been announced as a finalist in the Learning Awards 2019, a prestigious celebration of outstanding achievement in workplace learning and development.
The company, which was founded in 2016, was among hundreds of entries from companies across the world, and is vying for the title of Start-Up Learning Provider of the Year alongside five other organisations based both in the UK and abroad.
Ricky Muddimer, a director at Thinking Focus, said: “We’re delighted to be shortlisted in the Learning Awards and to be recognised for our achievements since setting up the company just over two years ago.
“The last couple of years has seen Thinking Focus win 49 new clients, work on assignments in 12 countries and across 21 sectors, and meet, work with and develop well over 2,000 interesting and inspiring people. We’ve also taken on our first employee, produced a book and created a gamified learning product called What Would You Do? which helps develop managers in a way that makes learning stick.
“But what gives us the biggest buzz of all is seeing how our work delivers impact, and hearing our clients report fantastic results.”
Run by the Learning Performance Institute, the Learning Awards are a leading event in the learning industry, and recognise outstanding examples of high standards, best practice, innovation and excellence in the corporate L&D sphere. Around 400 people will attend the glittering presentation evening at the Dorchester Hotel, London, in February next year.
Thinking Focus are people productivity specialists who work with organisations around the world to unlock productivity, implement change and deliver sustainable results. Using a flexible and practical tools-based approach, combined with their proven psychology-based methodology, they focus on developing growth mindsets to enable people to think and work differently, and to help them define a clear and shared vision.
Ricky added: “We’re so proud that our hard work, innovation and growth has been recognised in these prestigious awards, and would like to thank all those who have helped, inspired and supported us: We couldn’t have done it without you.”
