IDEAS TO GET STARTED ON EFFECTIVE COACHING

To become an effective coach, your coaching should aim at having the following traits:

• Coaching has to be goal oriented, in the sense that it has to take place in ‘the here and now’ situation that your employee is faced with. It should help your employees deal with current problems and issues in their current job.
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  Put a strong emphasis on self reflection, which promotes selfdirected learning and supports sustained behavioral change on the part of your employee.

• Do not provide answers or solutions to issues raised by your employee. You should assume that the person being coached has the necessary insights which your coaching should help bring to the surface. This way your employee will go through a learning process.
• Be not afraid to make critical comments when needed during the coaching or to bring taboo subjects into the conversation if necessary, as long as this is done in a positive way meant to help your employee grow.

“All through my career at Microsoft I have been coached, both in and outside the company. Many of the conversations focused on self-reflection. I have always benefited a lot from my coaches. Now, I have a mentor on the business side, somebody I can use as a sounding board. Although we are functionally on the same level I can learn a lot from this person. I also have an external coach who I see from time to time to get a fresh perspective. This emphasis on development and a desire to get better is also a core value of Microsoft. In turn I am a coach to other people, and I mentor eight people. How do I know I am a good coach? I wouldn’t profess to say I am, but I do have a clear philosophy on leadership and the legacy of a leader. Building a sustainable, outperforming organization is the most important and satisfying task of a leader, well ahead of any functional capabilities. I spend much time on that and really enjoy that part of my role. Microsoft is serious about continuing to develop its talent and I feel responsible for helping the company to achieve that.”

Rik van der Kooi, Microsoft USA

• Decisive: a manager values action, speed, efficiency and consistency in decisionmaking and once a decision has been made he or she sticks to it and moves on to the next decision.
• Flexible: a manager values speed and adaptability, getting just enough information to choose a certain action and changing that decision when deviant information becomes available.
• Hierarchical: a manager values getting much information and first extensively analyzing that before making a decision that will be adhered to for a long time.
• Integrative: a manager values options and therefore taking broad decisions which leave many courses of action open.

It turns out that HPO managers change their decision-making style during their career. Early on, when they are a lower-level manager like a supervisor, they put emphasis on the decisive style. This is because the work they supervise is operational of nature and requires a focus on getting things done. When moving up the organizational ladder, HPO managers put less emphasis on the decisive style and more and more on the flexible and integrative decision-making styles. This is because decisionmaking at higher organizational levels is more about listening, understanding, the long term, getting cooperation and buy-in. Non-HPO managers however stick to the decisive style and therefore become less effective. In addition, HPO managers make their decisions quickly. They do not suffer from ‘paralysis by analysis’: they do not overanalyze but balance thought and action. These managers take enough time for adequate decision-making but then turn their decisions quickly into actions to solve problems immediately.

IDEAS TO GET STARTED TO STIMULATE FAST DECISION-MAKING

It is important that the organizational structure supports rather than hinders the decision-making process, which means that it has to be clear which functions in which organizational units and levels have to make which decisions. To get the right decision structure in the organization, you have to do the following:

• Identify the organization’s key decisions, which are the decisions that will have a major impact on value creation and therefore are critical to the success of the company. To this end, ask yourself for every decision: For which good business reason should we do this?
• Determine where in the organization those decisions should be taken.
• Organize the organizational chart around the places where value-influencing decisions are made.
• Decide what level of authority decision makers need to be able to make the value-influencing decisions quickly.
• Align other elements of the organizational system, such as information systems and processes, with the decision-making process to facilitate quick decisions.
• Help managers develop the skills that are necessary to make the value-influencing decisions quickly and well. Some of these skills are knowing what needs to be known for a quick decision; balancing thought and action while avoiding overanalysis; and being able to prioritize.

IDEAS TO GET STARTED TO FOSTER INTEGRITY IN THE ORGANIZATION

Integrity is, like trust, a characteristic that is difficult to improve. It seems you either have it or you don’t. However, you can start creating an environment of integrity by doing the following:

• Make ‘integrity’ one of the organization’s core values and make sure everybody knows it.
• Ensure that there is only one standard of integrity throughout the company. Ingrain this standard so much in the organization’s DNA that the meaning of integrity is constant and not affected by the chief executive officer who is in charge at the time.
• Install integrity procedures to describe how to develop, foster and maintain ethical decision making.
• Formulate integrity metrics for each business process. Hold managers accountable for positive results on these performance indicators.
• Discuss ethics and integrity frequently and openly during all kinds of meetings.
• Reward people for blowing the whistle on ethical and integrity breaches. Employees should not have to be afraid to hold their managers accountable for integrity problems.
• Check that there is no disconnection between the organizational targets and integrity, so that people do not have to resort to unethical activities to achieve the targets.

“The issue with integrity is not so much about things going wrong – as in business there is always something going wrong – but about how one responds to that. So, you are not trying to check if people are doing things perfectly all the time. It is about whether they are open and transparent about what they do, that they do not hide their problems. There is an ongoing dialogue between us about what we are trying to achieve in this business. You know, conversations can get very heated, we can disagree. I can say, “Look, I have seen this data and this is your strategy, I disagree with that strategy and this is what you should be taking into account, and I really think you have ignored this and you need to go after this.” And then, the manager either accepts what you just said and says, “I acknowledge we missed these things, we are going to change this”, or the manager says, “You were here last week, you challenged these things. I have looked at it again and I am convinced that what I am thinking is the right thing to do.” And frankly, most often my judgment will be to let the manager do what he has decided, I trust his integrity that he has done what What makes a high performance organization he said. In fact, people here take bad performance personally, it literally upsets them. They have so much integrity that they are very determined to solve the issue, they have got to fix it, no matter what.”

Alan Clark, SAB Miller Europe

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Scandals in the business world seem to be increasing both in frequency and in their negative impact on the economy. The financial crisis, which was caused, in part, by the bad behavior of banks, is a point in case.
• The era of continuing growth is at an end. Predictions for the Western world keep pushing the economic recovery back in time, and state that the exuberant growth of the nineties will never return. In addition, double-digit growth figures in Asia are becoming less common, and while emerging markets are growing, globalization means they are not immune to what happens in the developed world. These countries can therefore rely less on their exports as a means to grow.
• Much of the created value during the so-called boom years has been spent on projects that didn’t create much social value, but were squarely aimed at making short-term economic profit. See for an example the housing boom in Spain or the office space surplus in most Western countries. This means that society has not profited from sustainable benefits which could have been created.
• Eminent management researchers and writers are increasingly advocating that companies should change their focus from shareholders to stakeholders, and from trying to create economic value to creating social value, as the current economic model is no longer viable. Interestingly, Michael Porter and colleagues have shown that striving for social value actually makes economic sense as it, since as a side effect it also creates economic value.
• Generation Y, which has grown up in an era of abundance, now notices it is the first generation since World War II which will be, in general, less educated and certainly will earn less money than its parents. At the same time, this generation had the chance to notice there is more than work alone and that family and a livable environment are also important.

So it seems that business leaders don’t really have a choice and are ‘forced’ to go with option (b). The interesting thing is that this choice is actually beneficial, not only for the stakeholders (customers, suppliers, employees, government, society, and yes, shareholders) but for the company itself also. The High Performance Organization (HPO) research shows that HPO’s – defined as an organization that achieves financial and non-financial results that are exceedingly better than those of its peer group over a period of time of five years or more, by focusing in a disciplined way on that what really matters to the organization – actually puts its focus on stakeholders and on long-term sustainability and thus gains the advantage over its competitors. This actually causes the organization to do business in a different manner, which makes option (b) the natural way to go. The HPO research gives the four phases in which you can transform your organization into an HPO and as such can choose option (b). In the starting phase, the importance of and need for becoming an HPO is discussed with everyone in the organization and the benefits of the organization as HPO are visualized. In the preparation phase, a transition strategy is determined, and a team is assembled of people who will act as pioneers in the transition to HPO. During the execution phase, the transition strategy is put into practice. It is decided which transition activities will be performed in which order. Finally, in the perseverance & arrival phase, the organization checks whether it has improved its organizational results, and identifies additional and, if necessary, transformation actions. This phase is repeated until the organization reaches the HPO status, which is then, of course, celebrated with all stakeholders.

André de Waal, PhD, MBA, MSc, is Academic Director of the HPO Center, an organization which conducts research into high performance organizations. He is also Associate Professor of High Performance Organizations at the Maastricht School of Management, guest lecturer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Erasmus University Rotterdam, and visiting fellow at Cranfield University (United Kingdom). André has conducted several years of scientific research, examining 290 international studies and analyzing studies in 50 countries involving over 1,470 profit, non-profit and government organizations. His latest book, ‘What Makes A High Performance Organization’ is now for sales at Amazon.com and other booksellers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A new blog by André de Waal on TLNT shows that bonuses and reward systems are not distinguishing factors for creating and sustaining an HPO.

The high performance organization needs to have an appropriate reward system (whether or not it includes bonuses) that is considered by employees to be fair and equitable. If such a reward system is not in place, the organization will run into trouble and opposition from employees, rendering the goal of becoming an HPO virtually impossible.

Read this new blog by André de Waal on TLNT!