The Boilermaker

 

As I mentioned in my recent post about Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, a significant part of executive coaching is about helping people to make better decisions by encouraging them to think about issues in new ways. A great way to do this is through the use of metaphors, stories and parables.

 

When reading this week’s sales tip from negotiation guru Tom Beasor I was reminded of the story recounted by Steve Andreas in the forward to the neuro-linguistic programming book “Frogs into Princes” by Richard Bandler and John Grinder.

 

In the story, a boilermaker was hired to fix a huge steamship boiler system that had broken down. The shipping company owner was in a real flap because his cargo was delayed and he ran the risk of losing the best price for his shipment. Meanwhile the workers still had to be paid and costs were mounting so the owner hired the boilermaker to fix the problem.

  

The boilermaker listened to the engineer’s description of the problems and asked a few questions then went to the boiler room. He looked at the maze of twisting pipes, listened to the thump of the boiler and the hiss of escaping steam for a few minutes and felt some pipes with his hands. Then he hummed softly to himself, reached into his overalls, took out a small hammer and tapped a bright red valve, once. Immediately the entire system began working perfectly, the boilermaker went home and the ship sailed within the hour.

 

When the steamship owner received a bill for $1,000 he complained that the boilermaker had only been in the engine room for fifteen minutes, and requested an itemized bill. This is what the boilermaker sent him:

 

For tapping with hammer:          $ 0.50

For knowing where to tap:      $ 999.50

Total:                                $1,000.00

 

So…How much would you pay an experienced executive coach who makes a significant difference to your bottom line?

 

Do you know where to tap?

 

How to Improve Executive Coaching ROI

 

In a report published last year in Personnel Today, human resources consultancy Chiumento gave some good advice on how organizations can maximize their return on investment (ROI) in executive coaching. Your HR department is probably best placed to play a coordinating role in acting on these simple suggestions.

 

• At the beginning, discuss and agree what you want to achieve from executive coaching with the coach, the coachee and their sponsor or manager. 

• Ensure that these target outcomes are not only realistic but specific enough to avoid any misunderstanding. They should be genuinely relevant to the coachee’s professional development as well as to the business.

• Draft a “coaching contract” that records these target outcomes and agree at the outset with the coach, the coachee and the sponsor that the targets will form the basis of measuring success of the coaching assignment.

• Develop measures that can be used to monitor success against the coachee’s targeted outcome.

• Get regular feedback during the coaching assignment from a cross-section of other staff.

• Have a half-time review with the coach and coachee to ensure that the assignment is on track and to take corrective adjustment where needed.

• Establish a coaching budget and monitor the costs and hours of coaching against your budget and your arrangements with your coaches.

• Manage the coaches in your organization and be clear about those that deliver quality and those that don’t.

• Integrate coaching with other development initiatives within your organization such as succession planning and performance management.

• Make sure that business leaders are involved in reviewing the effectiveness of coaching. Coaching is much more than delivering statistical improvements like staff retention rates. The involvement of business leaders will significantly improve the way that coaching provides significant tangible improvements to the bottom line.

 

In my opinion, this last point is the most important. An effective coaching programme that delivers material and lasting benefits to the bottom line will only work if it has the involvement of a fully committed member of the business leadership team.

 

Six Executive Coaching Hats

 

“An antelope grazing in Africa hears a sound in the grass. Immediately all the neuronal clusters concerned with danger are activated so that the lion is recognized as soon as it emerges from the grass, and the antelope is able to escape. Such sensitization is a key part of how the brain works and why it is so efficient.”

 

So begins the introduction of “Six Thinking Hats” the book about strategies for improving thinking by Edward de Bono, the guru who coined the term lateral thinking. According to de Bono if we are to be good thinkers we need to be able to maximize our brain sensitivity in different directions at different times. As he says, “It is simply not possible to have that maximum sensitization in different directions all at the same time.”

 

A significant part of executive coaching is about helping people to make better decisions by encouraging them to think about issues in new ways. Edward de Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats” provides a good framework for this by giving people new perspectives on a situation so they can spot issues and opportunities which might otherwise be missed.

 

The “Thinking Hats” are described as follows:

 

White Hat

White is neutral and objective. The white hat is concerned with objective facts and figures. When wearing this thinking hat you focus on facts not opinions or feelings. You listen out for information that is not grounded in fact and you stay neutral and objective.

 

Red Hat

Red suggests anger (seeing red), rage and emotions. The red hat gives the emotional view. If you put on the red thinking hat you look at a situation using intuition, instinct or emotion. You listen to your gut but also try to think about other people’s feelings.

 

Black Hat

Black is sombre and serious. The black hat is cautious and careful. It points out the weaknesses in an idea. With this thinking hat on you try to see the negative side and why something might not work. By being pessimistic or defensive you highlight weaknesses and wearing the black hat can help you test the resilience of your theories about a situation or anticipate pitfalls and avoid failure.

 

Yellow Hat

Yellow is sunny and positive. The yellow hat is optimisitic and covers hope and positive thinking. Hope is a powerful emotion and positive thinking helps you see benefits and opportunities as well as keeping you focused through a tough period.

 

Green Hat

Green is grass, vegetation and abundant, fertile growth. The green hat indicates creativity and new ideas. Putting on the green hat helps you to think about creative solutions to a problem.

 

Blue Hat

Blue is cool, and it is also the colour of the sky, which is above everything else. The blue hat is concerned with control, the organization of the thinking process and the use of the other hats. Wearing the blue thinking hat helps you to stand back and manage the process of thinking as opposed to the content or the thoughts themselves. 

 

Executive coaches should encourage their clients to try on different hats while they are being coached. This gives the coachee a richer appreciation of their situation and provides them with more choices and better solutions.

 

And this isn’t just for coachees; when coaching their clients, executive coaches should make sure they try on all the different hats themselves too.

 

Why does executive coaching work?

 

Executive coaching works because of the tools and processes that executive coaches use with their clients. Perhaps another way to ask the above question is “How does executive coaching work?”

 

Executive coaching methodologies draw on a variety of disciplines from business management, leadership theory, behavioural psychology, adult learning models, systems theory, neuroscience and neuropsychology. Neuropsychology, for example, is an interdisciplinary branch of psychology and neuroscience that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relate to specific psychological processes and overt behaviours. Greater understanding about the way the brain works can help us learn how to change our behaviour to improve our effectiveness.

 

The human brain has evolved over millions of years to deal with some pretty basic survival needs. Part of the brain called the orbital cortex is built to detect changes in our environment and alert us to anything unusual. The orbital cortex is also very closely connected to the amygdala which is where the brain processes fear; this is very helpful when you are face to face with a sabre-toothed tiger. But the orbital cortex and amygdala compete for processing energy with the prefrontal region of the brain which is where a lot of higher intellectual functions operate. So when we are under stress or faced with a challenging environment we tend to act more emotionally and impulsively as our animal instincts start to take over our logical and rational thought processes. This is can be less than helpful in a business situation.

 

By learning from other disciplines, executive coaching can help clients improve their self-awareness and help them explore how to improve their effectiveness. Executive coaches help their clients analyse their goals more objectively and make decisions about what actions they wish to take to achieve those goals. The executive coach provides a framework for this and to support their client make permanent changes in their behaviour to help them achieve their desired objectives.

 

This example of the relationship between the orbital cortex and the amygdala is just one of many ways in which other disciplines contribute to the executive coaching profession. A good executive coach is alert to new insight from other fields and draws his tools from other branches of learning. Here are some examples of such tools:

• Using lateral thinking techniques to help re-frame issues and give alternative perspectives to problems
• Exploring a client’s core values and how these values influence their personal decision making process
• Identifying the core motivation behind an objective
• Helping a client to identify the full range of their skills and strengths as well as undeveloped opportunities
• Helping a client to brainstorm alternative courses of action to generate greater choices or a wider range of potential solutions
• Provide a non-judgemental, non-threatening, trusting environment to encourage creative thought
• Encouraging a client to express their goals as SMART objectives
• Driving behavioural change through a disciplined and action-oriented development plan

Part of the success of executive coaching stems from the fact that it isn’t just a one off exercise but a sustained period of learning. Executive coaching is not like a morning spent in a seminar being told something that is forgotten within a couple of weeks. Executive coaching is about a close focus on a particular aspect of your personal improvement until it becomes second nature – lodged in your subconscious so you can work towards your goals armed with a new way of thinking and equipped with new skills, behaviours and habits that stick with you for years.

 

Are you paying attention? Are you really listening?

 

Are you a good listener? Most people like to think they are. But next time you are in a conversation with someone try paying attention to how you are listening. Notice how your mind is cluttered with all sorts of things other than what the speaker is telling you. It’s very easy to be preoccupied with something else: perhaps you find yourself preparing to rebut what the speaker has just said, or maybe you are half-focused on a solution to the speaker’s problem. Or are you are distracted because you’re running late for your next meeting? 

 

Even if you can suspend your judgement and prevent your mind from wandering, listening is still difficult because listening is about being able to understand someone and often people don’t (or can’t) say what is really on their mind. I’m reminded of this quote from master obstructionist wordsmith Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the board of the US Federal Reserve:

 

“I know you believe you understand what you think I said. But I am not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant.”

 

In executive coaching – indeed for all types of coaching – listening is critical and coaches train themselves to be better listeners. Good listeners – whether executive coaches, bosses or subordinates, husbands or wives, parents or children – all have the following characteristics:

• Good listeners suspend judgement and their personal prejudices. It’s not that they don’t have a view; it’s just that they don’t let it get in the way of listening to the speaker. 
• Good listeners are not defensive and do not feel compelled to justify themselves. This means they put their ego away and don’t allow negative, critical or blaming comments interfere with listening to the meaning behind what the speaker is saying.
• Good listeners can identify with the speaker and be empathetic but they don’t divert the speaker’s attention towards their own issues or get dragged into a “me too” mutual appreciation discussion.
• Good listeners hold back on giving advice. A good listener waits until he has really understood the speaker before offering advice – if at all. It’s easy to fall into the trap of providing advice when none is wanted.

Remember, as management consultant, Peter Drucker once said:

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”

A good executive coach will focus on the speaker not himself, attend to the speaker’s feelings not his own, and confirm that he has understood what the speaker has intended.

And if you don’t think you really understand what a speaker is trying to say then ask. And listen some more.

Bonus Time

 

If you were given a modest financial bonus that you were not expecting – a truly unexpected bonus rather than, say, a year end performance bonus that you were already anticipating – how would you use it? I’m not talking about winning the lottery here but something much smaller – say $5,000. It is important that you were not expecting it. Perhaps you were really, really expecting a performance bonus of $25,000 (or whatever) and you received $30,000 so the extra $5,000 is literally “beyond your expectations” but at the same time it is not a massive amount of money. Would you hoard it or add it to your savings? Pay off a credit card bill? Use it for a sensible purchase? Splurge on something?

 

How would you feel about a modest time bonus? Suppose, completely out of the blue, your boss said thanks for working so hard recently, why don’t you just take the day off tomorrow? Today in Hong Kong we are getting a bit of a battering by a passing typhoon so the city is pretty much closed down for the day. In theory, many of us can do some work from home but in practice most of us have suddenly found ourselves with a free holiday. How to spend the time? Stay in bed and catch up on sleep or slump in front of the TV with a DVD? Use the time wisely to sort out some personal administrative paperwork or to clear out the junk in the cupboard? Go for a walk on the storm battered beach? Or get together with your neighbours for an impromptu typhoon party?

 

Different people account for such bonuses in different ways. Behavioural economists such as Richard Thaler (who has written extensively on this phenomenon) call this “mental accounting”. Mental accounting is about the process whereby people evaluate economic outcomes by grouping their assets into separate (non-fungible) mental accounts. The classic example of this from Thaler is the snowstorm and the basketball game: A family has paid $40 for tickets to a basketball game at a town an hour’s drive away from their home. On the day of the game there is a snowstorm which will not stop them from going to the game but it will be a big hassle to drive there and reduce the overall pleasure they would get from the trip.

 

Most people believe that because the family has already paid for the tickets they will probably make the effort to struggle through the snow to watch the game. But if the tickets had been given to them as a gift, they would probably stay home. Surely the tickets are still worth $40 and, with the snowstorm, visiting the game requires a further investment in time and hassle? Yet if the tickets were a gift they might just chuck ‘em away and stay at home to watch the game on TV. There are some other great examples of mental accounting in this article from the Washington Post. 

 

So how did you spend your typhoon day in Hong Kong?