PENAS A LOS DEPOSITARIOS O INTERVENTORES DESIGNADOS

As a child my mother believed that performance was best encouraged by pointing out what was missing. With the best of loving intents, she would point out that 18 out of 20 meant that there were two things I had not addressed properly, or that coming second in an exam meant if only I had tried harder I could have been first. The intent was to motivate, the outcome was an internal collapse as the inner voice shouted, ‘I will never be good enough’.

In contrast, solution focused thinking gives praise and acknowledgement for what the other person has achieved. It is praise beyond the automatic ‘well done’, but rather acknowledgement that tries to help the other person understand ‘how they did it’.

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Sophie came to coaching with her own ‘never and always’ story, which said ‘I am hopeless at interviews’. She also had plenty of evidence to back up her assessment. Through coaching she was helped to understand what of herself she could take to interviews that would help her, so that she did not feel out of control whenever she sat in front of an interview panel. Her success at her next interview was not in getting the job – which she did not – but in experiencing herself differently in a situation where hitherto she had programmed how she would be. The praise I gave Sophie was for having taken the risk of being different, and the acknowledge-ment I gave her was for the specific things she had done to prepare herself, so that those behaviours were magnified for her and could be used again.

When reading these principles, they may seem too simple to be effective.

Particularly if you value your analytical skills, to accept that it is not necessary to understand the cause of a difficulty in order to bring about change seems counter-intuitive. This has been a regular challenge made to the pioneers of this approach. However, they can point to their own experience based on 30 years work that by using these principles, individuals need only a small number of sessions to make desired changes to major difficulties, and that the learning sticks.¹²

Principles are good as a compass guide to your behaviour when coaching, but knowing when and how to apply them within a conversation requires a structure.

The remaining chapters provide that structure. It is a structure that you can use whether the conversation lasts for five minutes or ninety. At the begin-ning it will feel like a strait-jacket, because it will make you conscious of what you are doing. Moving from step to step will feel clumsy, in much the same way as changing gears is a self-conscious process when learning to drive. Each impending gear change brings a tug of anxiety. With practice, when to change gear seeps into your unconscious, so that you access it without thinking and apply it with skill. Similarly in coaching, with practice you will move seamlessly around the framework, using whichever part is helpful to reaching an outcome.

The structure that will support you in having successful coaching conversations with your staff is STARTED.

STARTED

S Set up T Tangibles A Assumptions R Reality bites T Targeting

E Emergent solutions D Delivery

Each letter will form the basis of a chapter, where you will be offered tools to help in the management of that stage, and examples of how the tools can be applied.

Each letter has a strong link with the principles we have established for solution focused coaching and with the skills that effective coaches use.

As the conversation progresses, as a Manager Coach you will be moving through the STARTED structure, but you will also be moving within yourself as you shift from each of the four skill areas in response to the other’s need. A coach who easily offers support for thought could miss out on the possibilities that emerge when challenge is brought into the picture. A coach who rushes to challenge thought without addressing the need to support thought at the beginning may quickly identify a target for coaching, but in the process miss the point. A coach who encourages the emergence of solutions but does not address the challenge of delivery will have wasted their time. Coaching is a dance, and developing your

Structural Stage Coaching Skill

Set Up

Establishing the purpose of the conversation and creating the conditions in the coach and the coachee for a helpful conversation

Support for Thought

Tangibles

Allowing the person to define the situation as they see it, and expanding the perspectives from which they see it

Support for Thought Challenge for Thought

Assumptions

Testing out the assumptions that they bring to the situation, and the limitations these are placing on them

Challenge for Thought

Reality Bites

Grounding their thinking through clarifying when the problem does and does not happen. Helping them to see the situation from other perspectives than their own

Challenge for Thought

Targeting

Identifying the goal that is appropriate for them. Enabling them to revisit their original purpose and reconsider its value in the light of the coaching conversation Emergent Solutions

The identification by the coachee of the ‘right’ solution for them at this time. Helping them to highlight the skills, knowledge and experience they have within them that they can bring to the situation

Support for Thought Support for Thought

Delivery

Scoping the size of the solution to be delivered. Learning from failure and supporting success

Challenge for Action Support for Action

Figure 4.1 The STARTED structure

core skills within a structure will enable you to deliver those skills whether you are operating at the pace of a waltz or a salsa.

Summary

This chapter has differentiated coaching from other forms of helping and per-formance development. It has argued for a solution focused approach as the basis for effective and time-efficient coaching within organizations. In doing so it has:

g introduced the principles of solution focused thinking

g laid out the STARTED framework for structuring conversations

g linked that framework to the coach’s application of both support and challenge.

References

1. de Shazer, S. (1988) Clues Investigating Solutions in Brief Therapy. Norton.

2. de Shazer, S. (1994) Words Were Originally Magic. Norton.

3. de Jong, P. and Berg, I.K. (2002) Interviewing for Solutions. Thomson Learning.

4. Greene, J. and Grant, A.B. (2003) Solution-Focused Coaching. Pearson Education.

5. Megginson, D. and Garvey, B. (2004) Odysseus, Telemachus and Mentor:

stumbling into, searching for and signposting the road to desire. The International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching, II, 1, July. Available on line at http://www.emccouncil.org

6. Gallwey, T.W. (2005) Keynote Address: The Inner Game of Work.

International Coach Federation European Annual Conference.

7. Gallwey, T.W. (2000) The Inner Game of Work. Orion Business.

8. Olivero, G., Bane, K.D. and Kopelman, R.E. (1997) Executive Coaching as a transfer of learning tool: effects on productivity in a public agency.

Personnel Management, 26 (4), 461–69.

9. Saatchi, M. (2005) If This is Conservatism, I am a Conservative. Centre for Policy Studies.

10. O’Hanlon, W.H. (2000) Do One Thing Differently. Perennial.

11. Stone Zander, R. and Zander, B. (2000) The Art of Possibility. Harvard Business Press.

12. Gingerich, W.J. and Eisengart, S. (2000) Solution focused brief therapy:

a review of the outcome research. Family Process, 39 (4), 477–98.

5

Set Up

Without looking, describe what is on the back of a £10 note. Logical thinkers will start with the number 10; the watermark; the signature of the head cashier – but is that on the back or front? The visual thinkers will see a head of a famous man – but is it Shakespeare, Darwin or Robert Stephenson? You may remember a bird – but which bird? You will remember the colour brown but what other colours are used? Find a £10 note and see just how much you have missed. There is a wealth of information conveyed on that piece of paper: the hummingbird sniffing at a flower; the magnifying glass showing up the stamens of flowers; a galleon sailing towards the viewer; a compass; the head of Charles Darwin and colours from across the spectrum. The reason it is unlikely you have recalled all this detail is that you don’t need to. From the time you started to manage your own money, you learnt to scan notes for the minimum amount of informa-tion that you needed to ensure you handed over, and were handed back, the correct note.

The ability to scan is a useful one, it minimizes effort. In our daily lives, we scan to quickly read situations. We scan people in order to assess their age, approachability, socio-economic group, lifestyle and likeness to ourselves. Our accuracy rate will depend on our level of observational and intuitive skill. The same approach transfers into our working lives. Someone new comes into our work team, we pay close interest in the first few weeks and months as we try and assess their strengths and weaknesses, their ambitions and motivations. When we think we have enough information we switch from observing to scanning.

We develop a general view that we access when we are judging whether to give a piece of work to A or B, or whether to ask C or D to stand in for us at a meeting. It allows us to make decisions quickly. However, if we are to position ourselves as offering coaching to our staff, it is important to switch off our scanner and become an active observer.