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Grace & Gigabytes Blog

Perspectives on leadership, learning, and technology for a time of rapid change

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This is the fourth post in a series on coaching high performers. In the last post, we explored how coaching high performers creates sustainability and produces competitive advantages.


Researchers continue to find correlations between workplace coaching and employee engagement. When employees receive consistent coaching, they are more productive, motivated, and committed. 66% of employees who receive coaching state that it increases their job satisfaction. Two-thirds of Millennials committed to staying with a company for 5+ years have a workplace coach. It's, therefore, no surprise that coaching drives employee retention.


But when we pause to consider who receives coaching, we have to wonder if we're motivating and retaining the best people. Most "coachees" fall within two categories. The first is executive coaching, a practice utilized by 50% of organizations in which a high-ranking leader works with an external coach. The second is performance improvement coaching, in which a low-performer works with their manager and/or an HRBP in an effort to meet expectations. As we've explored in past posts in this series, high performers receive at best sporadic coaching.


So if we combine the data that coaching drives retention and engagement with the finding that most of our coaching falls outside of the high-performance segment, we can infer that we are boosting the retention and engagement of two groups: highly-paid executive leaders who are likely to stick around by virtue of their compensation packages, and low-performing individuals at all levels of the organization.





The practice of workplace coaching needs to evolve to engage and retain high performers, not just because hiring a new high-performing employee is prohibitively more expensive than retaining an existing one, but because it is essential to an organization's culture of innovation and sustainability.


Talent developers should explore three relatively simple actions that can improve the engagement and retention of high performers.


First, ensure that every high-performer has a high-performing coach. The best way to do this? Recognize that high performers might need a coach from outside of their "chain of command." Nearly every high-performer has a people manager, but most people managers are not effective coaches. Approximately 60% of managers are not seen as good coaches. Talent developers can change this by identifying high performers and pairing them up with an effective coach, internal or external. It should be the talent developer's responsibility to convene, check-in with, and evaluate these pairings, which will often cross org chart demarcations. Sometimes, these pairings will bring-in voices external to the company. We spend over $1B every year in the United States on external executive coaches. In the event a great coach isn't readily available internally, why not extend this same benefit to high performers across the business?


Second, enable the high-performers to be the next generation of coaches. The employees who drive results in your organization likely know what they would like to get out of a coaching/mentoring relationship, but they might lack the vocabulary to initiate, sustain, and optimize coaching partnerships. So don't wait until these individuals are promoted into a management position. The talent developer should resolve to create a new class of coaching talent by upskilling high performing individual contributors (ICs) in the practice of coaching. Don't just create a one-off training for this group. Continuously invest - in workshops, micro-learnings, reading materials, and job shadowing programs, so that the best of your best might continuously sharpen their coaching skillset. Then pair high-performing ICs with peers who need a boost - before you need to move those same peers into a formal performance improvement plan.


Finally, convene the best of your best for regular group coaching check-ins. Identify the best coach in your organization, and empower that coach to engage high-performers in a group setting, such as a monthly lunch group or quarterly happy hour meetup. Group coaching is particularly useful for high performers as it creates a sounding board with which innovative ideas can gain traction. The key to successful group coaching in this context is to bring together a cross-functional selection so that coachees can vet their ideas with the greatest minds in your company, and so that they can continue to work on their own coaching aptitude.


It's no longer a great secret that coaching is correlated with engagement and retention. The question now turns to whether we are engaging and retaining the right people. When we stop neglecting and start coaching our highest performing employees, we elevate the odds that our brightest minds will still be with us for years to come.

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Updated: Mar 4, 2020

This is the third post in a series on coaching high performers. In the last post, we explored how coaching high performers leads to widespread innovation.


Organizations are notoriously inept at seeing and acting on problems of great significance (see: Kodak, Blockbuster, Lehman Brothers, Target in Canada, etc). And while there are many explanations for this myopia, I believe this inability to respond can be explained, in part, by company cultures that suppress the whistle-blowers, that hide the canaries in the coal mine, that obscure the proverbial pause buttons.


In today's workplace, we're encouraged to develop a "solutions-oriented mindest," and a high level of "change resiliency." Neither of these is problematic in and of itself.


But when an organization becomes too focused on solutions, it actually narrows its focus on internal and external challenges (see Adam Grant, The Creative Power of Misfits). When an organization focuses too much on change "resilience," it sacrifices some of its ability to ask critical questions, surface unforeseen challenges, and act upon the subtle yet significant problems that accompany any change.





And that's where coaching high performers comes in.


While it's true that high performers can be problem-solvers, they may be equally valuable for their capacity to flag the otherwise ignored weaknesses and threats confronting an organization. It might be said that a true high performer is best deployed not just a problem-solver but as a problem-flagger!


Part of coaching a high performer involves developing a "problems-oriented mindset," and perhaps even a bit of "change skepticism." We ought to hold coaching conversations with high performers in which we analyze and identify the competitive challenges that the rest of the organization chooses not to see. In these discussions, we should seek to put teams and organizations on a path towards sustainability - by surfacing factors undermining longevity.


We should seek to have these conversations with high performers - but we should be judicious and discerning about what constitutes high performance. It's likely that anyone in an organization can articulate a few conspicuous grievances about their peers or their day to day work. But we're not looking for senseless griping about obvious annoyances. Presumably, someone has already thought about these. We're looking for the hidden challenges, we're seeking to understand the imminent problems that are not readily seen by all. That's why these conversations are a perfect fit for your high performing team members: those who know the business, who know how it runs, and who know how to contribute to its success.


In these conversations, workplace leaders can use three familiar tools in slightly novel applications:


The first is the SWOT Analysis, a look into a team or organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Long applied in strategic planning meetings or executive retreats, SWOT Analyses have been the tool of senior leaders and those in the upper echelon of the org chart. But they shouldn't remain there exclusively. High performers should regularly be encouraged to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats confronting their team, with a keen emphasis on weaknesses and threats.


The key to using this tool for competitive advantage lies in using it consistently with high performers, in encouraging them to focus on the "W" and "T," and in naming weaknesses and threats that are not readily apparent to all others within the organization. The key coaching question in these conversations becomes: "What weaknesses and threats are you aware of, that others are not giving enough thought to?"


The second tool is "Five Whys," a technique often deployed to uncover a problem's root cause. With the Five Whys, a coach asks their coachee "why" a problem exists. Upon their answer, they ask "why" again, prompting a deeper level of reflection than we typically apply to workplace challenges.


Five Whys can help high performers evaluate proposed changes to a team or an organization, so as to identify what downstream effects such a change might create.


The third tool is "Value Stream Mapping," a process-mapping activity that identifies all of the steps involved in delivering a product from a business to a customer. Value Stream Mapping identifies redundancies and unnecessary steps that create waste.


Value Stream Mapping can help high performers to identify possible sources of clutter, or sources of clarification. With Value Stream Mapping, a coach encourages high performers to think about what an organization should add to or remove its critical paths in order to protect against competitive threats.


High performers have an aptitude for sensing consequential problems before the rest of the organization. Often, they are sensing these vulnerabilities at the same time our competitors are thinking about them. When we help high performers to identify meaningful problems - and not just to offer solutions - we buffer our organizations against future disruption.


So give your high performers permission to dwell on problems, and to be skeptical about changes. It may just be the competitive advantage you require in order to avoid stay relevant.

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Updated: Feb 26, 2020

This is the second post in a series on coaching high performers.


High performers bring many positives to the workplace. They drive results, promote collaboration, elevate morale, and set performance standards. But workplace leaders tend to see high performers as primarily as productive individuals who get things done - which is part of the reason that they receive so little coaching compared with the low-performers on their team. When the high performers do receive coaching, it is often aimed at increasing individual efficiency or ratcheting up productivity: "We like what you're doing, now do more of it."


But it can be short-sighted to view a high-performer just in terms of productivity, and counter-productive to focus coaching on low-performers. Workplace leaders should instead view high-performers as force multipliers, keys to unlocking greater performance and productivity from all of those around them.


And that's what we're seeking when we coach them. Coaching a high performer is not an exercise in facilitating productivity, at least it shouldn't be. Coaching a high performer is an exercise in building a culture of innovation.


High performers perform effectively not because they work longer hours or are more committed to the daily grind. They perform effectively because they find new solutions to old problems.



When we coach them, we're not looking to multiply their outputs - we're looking to explore their inputs. When done well, these coaching sessions empower high performers to take the lead in scaling what's working well to the broader organization - to multiply all of the outputs in the system. As coaches, our goal is to enable high performers to be positive and self-sufficient change agents who raise the game of the greater team.


When done correctly, all high performers in an organization will receive consistent coaching. These coaching sessions will lead to the wide-scale adoption of new ideas, approaches, and processes. Because that's what we're looking for when we coach high performers: not more productivity, not even greater sustainability: rather, we're seeking new ways of working. We're resolving to build a culture of innovation, starting with one high-performer at a time.


So how exactly do we do this?


Coaching to create a culture of innovation is a process of identifying the motivations and behaviors that high-performers use to solve old problems - and exporting them to the broader team.


Step one: Explore the mindset. An effective coaching conversation with a high-performer somewhat resembles psychoanalysis. As a coach, we likely know the behavior that led to high performance - we can see the pitch deck that closed the big sale, we can read the patient survey that described the great healthcare interaction, we can observe the actions that the mechanic took to fix the broken engine. But what's not always obvious is the underlying motivation that enabled high performance. The key question becomes - when you were at your best, what was going through your mind? With this question, we're seeking to understand the motivations, intentions, and broader mindsets that catalyze great performance, to connect and make known the thought processes and the actions of our top talent so that others might benefit.


Step two: Refine and generalize. Once motivations, intentions, and mindsets are established, the next step is to explore the possibility of sharing and scaling. The key question here is what would it take to transfer both behavior and motivation to the organization. As a coach, it's our job to help the high performer differentiate motivations and behaviors that are uniquely situational, from those that are universally transferrable. The key question here becomes - what is the likelihood that others will find themselves in this situation? And if that likelihood is significant, how can we help others to exhibit similar motivations and practice similar behaviors?


Step three: Provide a change vector. Coaches must seek to transfer motivations and high-performance behaviors by creating action plans. These plans might be as simple as a quick training session, in which the high performer shares what's working well. They might be as complex as reconfiguring the physical office environment to spark the types of motivations that drove the high performance - or changing the incentive structure within the team to drive different behaviors. The key question for this third step becomes - what changes can you personally make to this team that will inspire similar motivations and behaviors? And this is the crux of high-performance coaching: taking what's driving great outcomes for some, and using them to drive great outcomes for many.


When coaches start to have these conversations on a recurring basis, a culture of change and innovation emerges. Many team members are given the opportunity to export what's working well for them and what could work well for all. All team members begin to buy-in to an organizational habit of continuous experimentation and improvement.


And the high-performer we started coaching begins to see themselves not just as an engine for producing solid individual outcomes, but as an innovative force transforming the world around them.


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@ryanpanzer

Leadership developer for digital culture. Author of "Grace and Gigabytes" and "The Holy and the Hybrid," now available wherever books are sold.

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