Reflections on a becoming a coaching leader

I have just completed the first part of a coaching leader programme that builds over four months and includes an academically recognised accreditation.  It's targeted at people who are either line managers or who work with line managers and its purpose is to develop coaching practice beyond what's normally expected from shorter skills development courses. 

Alongside the other things that I write about here, I am going to use this blog to share some of my learning reflections.

Practise to improve practice

First, there is lots of practise all of which is done using real issues generated by the participants.  No role plays, no actors, just practise in real time to develop practice, supported by observation and feedback from participants and the faculty. 

Manager as coach

Second, the programme is called the Coaching Leader Programme.  However, what I noticed in the first module is the emphasis on coaching practice as if coaching was mutually exclusive from management.  I struggled with this to start with as I wanted the connection to the everyday work of managers to be more explicit from the off.  Having spent more time practising and reflecting on my own coaching practice, what I'm noticing is the importance of taking a step back first to test out what it is I already know and have always been doing and to get feedback on the impact of what I am doing.  My interest in the connections with managerial work will follow as an continuing inquiry and topic within this blog.

  

Write down to write up

Third, participants are expected to make lots of notes as a continuous process of noticing, capturing and sensing learning.  In my experience the value of this step cannot be overstated.  What's encouraging is that the write up of the learning is mainly to be about personal reflections of practice and supported by theories and models, rather than the other way around.

A tip I picked up from one of the faculty on my masters course was that before you can write something up you have to write it down.  Continuous note-taking from readings, observation, practise is critical.  What works for me is to keep noticing what it is that I am paying attention to and making notes in a little black book.  

Where next?

To quote Michelangelo, I am still learning.  My personal inquiry through the process I'm now following is to make sense of the role of manager as coach.  It's not that I see these concepts as incompatible but there are some important differences.  Central to this is the distinction between somebody who operates as a coach who is external to the organisation and a line manager who must combine this with a direct role in the performance outcomes of the member of staff. 

 

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Managers/leaders can't 'stop the clock' they can only operate in real time, so let's teach them this way too

Training courses and management books feed a steady diet of models that, in their abstracted ways, paint a highly simplified picture of managerial work: one that is deterministic and sets managers in a special place over others.  The models also try to force a distinction between the work of managers and leaders - to my mind this distinction is artificial and rather too neat.

For example, managers create order through planning and budgeting whilst leaders inspire, create visions and take risks without ever placing these concepts in the context of actual practice.  

Of course, there are different types of managerial work and some of this work does lend itself to being chunked up into neat labels of activity.  At one level this could be helpful in, for example, analysing what type of work is being done over a period of hours or days and then making a plan to shift the balance.  However, there is a lot being taken-for-granted which management teaching chooses to either gloss over or ignore.

Managers are taught as if they are able to 'stop the clock'

So what's being taken-for-granted?  The common assumption in many of the models is that managers and leaders are able to exert their will on a system in ways that are unique from those whom they are influencing.  It's as if they, and they alone, have been given the gift of being able to separate time and space:  as if they were able to stop the organisational clock to allow them time to make plans before communicating them in an inspirational way, of course, to an expectant and uniformily receptive followership; if only it were that simple.

Leadership and management is about creating meaning with others

If management and leadership is about anything, then it is about getting things done with others.  To be able to get things done managers have to be able to create a shared meaning of their ideas and intentions.  The key point is that meaning making is a two way process of gesture and response and this is something that is taking place continuously.  To be effective, managers/leaders have to understand that they are always part of the process and cannot separate themselves from it.


   

Leaders and managers do have influence but...

Managers and leaders do have important roles and their position in a hierarchy does mean that they are able to exert an influence that is unequal to others.  They do, for example, create missions and visions, or design structures, or recruit the 'right' people or identify priorities.  However, in exerting this influence they are doing so as active participants with and not separate from others. 

In practice, their managerial 'products' will have been the result of many conversations with each person's response bringing forth new angles and insights that change the manager's first idea and which, in turn, brings forth more ideas.  The result is something that is always evolving from one moment to the next, never static and irreducible in terms of time and space. 

Implications for management learning and management development

The interactional work that managers and leaders do with each other and with those they lead/manage is highly complex.  The models that dominate so much of management development oversimplify practice and, rather more importantly, fail to encourage any real time understanding of how this interactional work gets done.  The models may make the ideas easier to grasp but in the increasingly complex world of organisations this approach is not viable.  It is the exploration of actual practice that will  connect learning with working and learners with workers/managers/leaders/etc. 

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Mapping social settings

I like maps.  As an outdoor type, I've a real respect for the art of the cartographer. The maps produced by the Ordnance Survey of the UK are practical and very clear; great for planning, route finding and problem solving.  They serve very well the purpose for which they have been designed.   

But maps, depending on how they are drawn, can be much more than aids to spatial awareness.  A recently published book - 'History of the World in Twelve Maps' by Professor Jerry Brotton describes how maps, through history, have shown us different things about the political, social and economic interests of a point in time.  The Mappa Mundi, for example, is not suitable for route-finding but it gives something of use and interest about the Christian world, based on the topography of the Bible. 

 

Mapping social settings

 

If you follow this blog you will know that I see it as important to be able to learn from practice through processes like learning by doing, learning from experience, learning from peers, noticing what's happening in the day-day always occuring action of the workplace. 

In terms of learning practice, this is not a discussion about blending content and media  - this helps  - but a disruptive challenge to the status quo.  Our practices in management learning are too reliant on theories and models; too abstracted from the workplace. 

  

An alternative is to place practice centre-stage and to make it available as a source of learning.  And this is where maps come into this, especially if we were able to produce maps of social settings.

Topographical maps have been designed to be practical: to help people understand something about a place, to make choices before taking action, to problem solve once in action.  The same must also be true for the mapping of social settings and for the design of practice-based learning.  In writing this blog I took a look at how online maps, like Google Maps, were created and discovered a number of parallels to my interests.  

Insights into real-world usage to better serve the needs of users

Good maps demand an understanding of users' needs.  The designers of Google Maps have used ethnography and usability research to create and refine a product that has become the benchmark.

Mapping as a local exercise—with cultural, ethnic, and region-specific quirks and nuances

If your interest is to understand how things work, in practice rather than in theory, then it follows that the better the detail, the better able you are to account for the practices that are important in that setting. 

For example, the designers at Google Maps found that, generally speaking, people navigate primarily by street names in Western countries and by landmarks and points of interest in the East. This is due to a combination of factors including a lack of road names, e.g. in India where locals rely on landmarks, or just a more complex street addressing system , e.g. in Japan where street numbers are assigned by date of construction, not sequentially. 

A feeling of friendliness, clarity, and simple focus

What if an intangible benefit of practice-based learning, based on social maps, was that it helped learners because it could be trusted to provide data-driven practical information that was easy to use? 

A collection of zoom levels, imagery, angles, and on-the-ground panoramas

What's taken for granted about maps?  That the birds-eye view of the ground is the only view?  Maps have always offered a range of scales (zoom levels if you like) but what the likes of Google Maps has done is to put us into the territory with satellite imagery and street view perspectives.  What else could be added?  - for example, sounds, temparatures, real-time data, user reviews, wikis?

Getting the data

 

Quite clearly, the investment required to gather the data on which Google Maps has been based has taken a great deal of time and money.  But what it has done is show us what can be achieved by getting into the detail as opposed to sticking with the status quo.

If we are going to be able to get the data from social settings, which has the level of detail to be able to construct something like a map of, say, human dynamics, then we need technology to help us.  It's why I have been following the work of Sociometric Solutions with interest.  It's an organisation that evolved from the MIT Media Lab and they have developed an electronic badge, similar to a security pass, which collects voice, body language and other proximity and location related data. 

Some of their work was featured in the April 2012 edition of HBR 'The New Science of Building Great Teams' pages 59-70.  If you follow this you will see examples of maps of intra and inter team interactions that are very interesting for the detail and the data that they produce.  To my mind, it is not difficult to see how this type of analysis could be extended to produce a range of social maps that, just like their counterparts from the world of topographical maps, might provide the base for overlays, search results and personal customisation.

Of course, even a Google Map is not a real-time representation of the territory and judgement and expertise is still required.  The emerging technology from Sociometric Solutions is giving a glimpse of how the gap to the social world of the workplace might be bridged. 

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Performance development - moving away from the garage refit model

Some of my work includes programmes for managers in which I introduce them to the 70:20:10 model and its implications for how to think about development.  What interests me is that whilst managers have no difficulty in accepting the premise of the model - in fact there is almost a sense in which I might be stating something rather obvious - when I dig deeper their practices are somewhat wide of the mark.

I'm blogging about this because it feels really important to me to challenge what's being taken-for-granted.  To be straightforward, based on what I hear people talk about, development planning feels half-hearted, an after-thought, individualistic, transactional, about formal interventions, for self-starters or the career-minded only, and, rather crucially, separate from performance. 

If it is true that most of what we know, or can do, derives from 'learning by doing'  it follows that most development activities, which are linked to performance, should be about the work and done in the workplace setting.

Why is this not so?  Here are some of the things that I notice when I talk to managers:

Performance Development Plan = appraisal, not development. 

Notwithstanding the efforts by HR departments to emphasise the dual purpose of the PDP process to both review and rate historical performance and to plan development, I notice that managers see this process as being solely about  giving the performance rating.  The machinations of the rating process, with its levelling discussions and forced distributions, tip the balance towards appraisal and away from development.

   

Development = formal development

Discussions about development usually mean discussions about course nominations.  This taken-for-granted is deeply embedded and hard to shift.  The analogy of development being like a garage workshop fits well with how many managers talk about this topic – “remove a group of managers/team members from the workplace, repair or fit higher performance parts as instructed, lubricate if necessary and return to service.”

Development  = for special occasions only

Not only is development seen as a formal activity, it's also for special occasions only, related to a change in responsibilities, or the implementation of a new system or legislation.  If this is right, then I suspect that part of the issue is that workplace development just happens naturally within the normal course of everyday work.  As such, it's not being noted as development activity and therefore it's existence and purpose is being glossed over in the workflow.   

Development = '95% pull'

I notice that the narrative about development in organisations is that managers should 'pull' not 'push'.  I think this comes from the notion that development is an individualistic endeavour.  Clearly, individuals do have a responsibility here, especially when it comes to following their learning interests, but managers are responsible for driving performance and this must include setting development plans linked to the work itself. 

'They aren't career minded so there's very little that we can plan for' 

Many managers talk about only being able to have conversations about development with those who are self-starters or career minded.  They talk quite disparagingly about members of their teams, often younger or older workers, who just want to do the job, don't want to progress and who show little interest in being developed.  This distinction isn't helpful either for the organisation or the individual.  

Conclusion

I am finding that talking to managers about how we learn and stimulating their thinking about the practical things that can be done to plan work-based development is helping to change perspectives.

However, my reflection is that the taken-for-granteds are deeply embedded, especially by the ways in which the performance development process works in practice. 

Much more work needs to be done to help managers shift their thinking and their practice.  If there is an answer, it lies somewhere in making the connection to the work itself.  And as I have written about before - see observing practice - the root of this in learning to observe the work and to place it centre-stage.    

 


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HOW are people learning?

 HOW!?

In his address to the Digital Media and Learning Conference in San Francisco in March 2012, John Seely Brown (JSB) said a number of interesting things about the changes required in learning to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.  For the transcript follow this link.  For an animated video summary of the presentation follow this link.

Here are some key points on which I want to comment, which I see as fundamental to the debate about change:

• 'Just being able to learn as individuals is not enough'
• 'How do we invest in new types of social practices and new institutional forms and new skills?'
• 'What are the social practices?'
• 'How do you participate in the ever moving flow of activities?'

Learning as an 'everyday' participation in ever moving activities

The question 'how do we participate in the ever moving flow of activities' is the right one to be asking.  The emphasis that I want to make in this post is about the 'how'.  And not just how do we participate but also how we learn.

Right now in the workplace, people are participating with each other and learning collaboratively.  This is being done through a process of meaning making that's accomplished through talk: day-to-day, everyday talk about work; done under pressing conditions of time and space to achieve some kind of understanding to enable something to be done; by people who are uniquely skilled to understand the context in that place, at that time.

When we look at work in this way it is irreducible from learning.  People are learning continually and ongoingly through a constant web of interacting elements.  

This web is now being extended by the effect of social media.  I think what we are seeing is the same  process of meaning making in action but amplified on a bigger stage with the opportunities to make new connections over and above what would have been possible in more cellular places of learning, e.g. a meeting, a schoolroom (JSB's reference), a 1:1 conversation across the desk, a phone call.  This process is also generating new institutional forms and skills.

Learning as a social practice

Whilst John Seely Brown's encouragement to, say, do more 'playing' and 'tinkering' might be pointing us in the right direction, these are glosses that miss out on lots of details and therefore we don't have an understanding of exactly how these practices work.

As a social practice learning is constantly variable.  However, this variability also creates complexity, which is a problem for the field and hence why we use abstracted notions as a shorthand to create a sense of structure and certainty when, in reality each learning accomplishment is rather specific to the context and circumstances of the setting.  Harold Garfinkel, the father of ethnomethodolgy, described this as 'just-this-ness' as a way of explaining his attention to the 'work' being done in everyday settings and of their resistance to generalisation.

An example of a social practice in learning that has widespread acceptance and appeal is coaching.  As a practice people who take part in it say that it helps, which is evidence of something, but what?   The question I am exploring is exactly how does it work.  If it helps learning, what are the methods in use that enable this?  In fact, coaching is a composite of multiple practices like questioning, listening, sensing, probing and so on which are themselves glosses.  To be able to explicate them would require detailed analysis in situ and in vivo, i.e. in the place and with the people involved and taking into account the social context.  

My point is that if this is true of coaching, or of other accepted practices like action learning, or neuro linguistic programming, then it is also true for the social practices that are now evolving, which might also include playing and tinkering. i.e. exactly how these things work is important but they remain unstudied. 

How is this relevant to learning in the 21C?

The premis of JSB, and many other commentators besides, is that the world is changing rapidly, e.g. the half-life of skills being 5 years and so on, and therefore that learning and approaches to it need to change, be that social practices, new institutional forms or new skills.   

My position is that to understand what and how to change we should treat our current social practices as interesting in their own right and to avoid taking them for granted. This means spending time following the action of learning, especially the everyday always-occuring learning in the workplace, to find out what is being done and how.  This will inform and explicate the deeply social nature of our learning practices and enable clearer prescriptions for change.  

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Do we need management courses?

To what extent do we still need courses to teach managers?

I've been thinking about this question for a while now and then the other day I read an interesting blog post by Clive Shepherd 'Bundle resources and you may not need courses' that talked about this topic.

In Clive's work he says he is increasingly being asked to assemble bundles of resources that might include all of the following:

• Web articles, written in an engaging, journalistic manner, rather like blogs.
• More formal reference material, in HTML or PDF format.
• Decision aids, perhaps coded in Flash or JavaScript, but sometimes more simply provided as spreadsheets.
• Self-analysis questionnaires and perhaps quizzes.
• Short, simple videos and screencasts.
• Mini-scenarios that allow the user to check whether they can put what they have learned into practice.

My interest is whether the idea of bundling resources like this represents a prima facie case of a shift from the course (f2f or virtual) to resources?  My hunch is that this might be beginning to happen and, if this is so, then I think it's a really important turn towards what John Seely Brown calls cultivating the entrepreneurial learner.

In Clive's posting he makes the point, accurately in my view, that we still need something like courses, or at least spaces where people can meet, be that f2f or virtually to share ideas, get feedback or meet experts.  Even so, I still find myself challenging the continuing assumption of the need for courses, especially in management development. 

My own research on how managers learn showed that managers don't rely on courses to any great extent.  In fact, in my sample, they made no reference to courses at all when asked about how they had learnt to do the things that they did well..  This finding was supported by a more thorough piece of analysis done over 30 years ago by John Burgoyne and Roger Stuart at Lancaster University in 1976.  This research has been written up in the Manager's Guide to Self Development by Mike Pedler, John Burgoyne and Tom Boydell.

Notwithstanding Clive's observation, my own experience is that f2f courses remain a central part of the formal provision in many organisations.  And if this is still the case, then why is this?  Some of my questions are these:

• Does it, for example, reflect a tacit distrust in the assumptions of the 70:20:10 model?  In other words, although we do learn most of what we know from experience and our peers, is it that this type learning is too random to be sufficient to be an explicit element of the learning strategy to meet the needs of an organisation?
• Is it that the taken-for-granted role of managers to control and direct then leads to approaches that 'push' learning through courses rather than relying on learners 'pulling' on a bundle of resources?  
• Is it a coded way of saying 'we aren't yet brave enough' to cut loose and drop courses altogether, or at least to reduce their dominance? 

If courses do have a part to play, how clear are we about their purpose, what's expected from learners and the degree of control that we are prepared to release to the learner to follow their interests?

Since I have already hinted at the continuing requirement for courses, I need to help you, the reader, to make sense of where I am coming from by saying something about my interests.

How do we master our learning interests?

I consider myself a mature learner with lots of experience of many types of learning.  Notwithstanding this, I still have a continuing and emergent sense of my learning.  And as an aside, this sense of emergence has been heightened dramatically by accessing the types of resources that Clive has mentioned.  This means that my learning never feels fixed or final.  I cannot know how the connections I have made and will continue to make, will influence my practice; and therefore, how am I becoming a master of management learning (or whatever topic you might choose to insert for yourself)?  

Learning as a movement of continuing and emergent change 

Learning as a process of change is itself a movement that is continuous and emerging rather than fixed.  This shifts the focus away from two periods of stasis - as in from point A to point B - towards a continuous process of becoming.  The key learning principle that emerges, if you accept my point, is that the question 'what is there to be learned about?' shifts from one which is dictated by the course designer and sponsor to the learners themselves.

Leadership is a process that emerges from social interaction

Learning and especially leadership learning is a process that emerges from social interactions.  Therefore, it seems rather obvious to me that leadership learning should be concerned with where, how and why leadership work is organised and accomplised in situ and in vivo and not in the classroom.  This constrasts with leadership learning that is about an individualistic endeavour where individual managers are acting as if they are separate from rather than as part of the system that they are influencing.  Leadership is taught with this individualistic perspective in mind and, as a result, is 'other focused'.  This approach in unhelpful, in my view, because it works on the basis that leaders learn to learn about things that can be applied, unproblematically, to fix other people's performance problems.  In reality, it is the dynamics of the social setting that need to be examined and understood, including their part in this process.   

Conclusion

In my way of seeing things, f2f courses might actually be doing more harm than good because they privilege, in taken-for-granted ways, abstracted knowledge over actual practice. They also affirm, again in ways that are taken-for- granted, the trainer's responsibility to define what is learnt and how and not the learners themselves.

It comes down to this: which came first 'the chicken or the egg'? Do we assume that change happens by placing the responsibility for that change in the hands of 'change agents': teachers/trainers in learning-speak, to teach abstracted knowledge to those who must apply it to actual practice, or do we trust learners to decide what it is they need to know based on what's important to them?

My position is that we do need courses to support management development but that they should be about helping managers to, first, develop the skills of observation, analysis and sense making about what it is that they are doing everyday and, second, to meet either f2f or virtually, to share what they are learning, to get feedback and challenge from their colleagues and external experts.  The acquisition of management theory will form part of this but this would be better placed if it were to follow the learning derived from everday social interaction and not the other way round.

And this is where I see great merit and need for the bundling of resources described by Clive.  It would allow and expect learners to pull on resources that are of interest to their work rather than being directed, in an instrumental way, by senior managers or trainers.

 


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Videos,digital reflection and learning

I've posted before about digital reflection and it's value to the learning.

My thanks again to Steve Wheeler from University of Plymouth for a recent post on Learning by Making which affirms the value of asking learners to go through a process of producing something tangible related to their learning interests.  In Steve's example, his students were given a whole day to create a 5 minute video on a subject related directly to their course of study. 

He makes a number of interesting points:

1. The process of producing the video required the students to come up with a creative concept, produce a storyboard and script, allocate roles, find props, scout out shooting locations, record and edit.
2. Learning in this way generated spin-offs that have the potential to transfer into other areas of practice like problem solving, making judgements and trade-offs, co-operating with others, delivering to a deadline and working with finite resources.
3. That theoretical ideas and concepts, normally abstracted from day-to-day practice when taught in traditional ways, can become concrete and situated in the real-life context of the learners.
4. That the skills demonstrated through this process are those that are essential for 21C working.   

What was equally interesting was the sceptism of many of his colleagues who argued that the time could have been better spent studying text books, writing essays or undertaking practical exercises.

As ever, the debate about learning practice rumbles on and, perhaps, the sceptics have a point.  When organisations are facing a range of very challenging economic and regulatory conditions alongside pressures being exerted by customers, suppliers and politics, whether from inside or outside the organisation, the urge to stick with traditional methods is extremely powerful.

However, in 21C working practice we are seeing a shift away from hierarchies and towards networks, collaboration and the democratisation of power.  All of these have big implications for working and learning. 


Digital technologies  - audio podcats, video, blogs and wikis - provide the means by which learners can make their own learning and then amplify this by sharing it with others through the social media.

My current interest is in the production of user generated content.  Here are some links that I've found from my fellow members of the Social Learning Centre of organisations that are using user generated video content to share knowledge:

• Dixons 

• Black and Decker 

• Telus

• BT

 I think we will see more examples of this type of content because it is engaging, democratic and a valuable source of deep learning.

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