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Look to Your Successes - For the Answers!

In a recent Fast Company book excerpt called “Switch, How to Change Things When Change is Hard” I was excited by their approach to problem solving.  The author contends that our initial reaction is to always focus on the problem.  However, by focusing on the problem – and all the reasons why something isn’t working, you can become stymied by the size and scope of the issue.  Instead, the author suggests, consider taking the approach to finding out what is working – and clone that.  This approach can be taken not only when applied to problem solving, but also to staffing your teams.  You can look at it from a variety of ways, but here are a couple:

• Who are the most successful members of your team?  What is it about them that makes them successful at your company?  (the answers could include: culture fit, education, previous background, particular training, a consumer focus, ) Find what’s working for your team – and next time you hire, clone it!
• Look at your team from a key strength perspective.  What are Joe’s, Susie’s or Ann’s key skills?  Is Joe spending time struggling with a particular detail oriented project/assignment, etc.?  Perhaps Susie is strong in this area – and Joe can be relieved of this burden to focus on areas where he has strengths (and Susie can feel empowered/appreciated/strong for the chance to do more of what she’s good at).  Identifying these opportunities to help your current team shine, reassigning work to strengths, and hiring for “the missing pieces” will go a long way toward helping you develop the job description/spec for your next hire.

I love the idea that we can solve problems by looking to the positive when creating a path forward for our team, organization or world.  Having the mindset to work on scaling successes – rather than focusing on failures – is an exciting way to foster change. 

Performance Coaching Questions Answered - Part 1

We’re always reading about, researching and examining ways to improve performance in organizations…in addition to bringing in new talent.  We reached out to Garry Watanabe of Performance Coaching, who’s spent years bringing about positive change in both athletes and corporations in North America.  (We love the use of sport metaphor for performance in everyday life!) This is the first of several posts on the current state and future of coaching for performance.

Coaching vs. Managing - What’s the difference? You obviously have a strong feeling about coaching - why? What swayed you that way?

"You could take either of these two terms and expand them to be quite large. Rather than talking about what they are not, it might be more helpful to talk about what they are and understanding that there will be considerable overlap.

Management is really about how you effectively use your resources (people would be one component of that), managing them, in order to achieve organizational goals.   Coaching is a style of management that believes that if you grow and develop your people, expanding their capabilities, confidence and commitment to the task – that is an incredibly effective way to help move an organization closer to achieving its goals.

If you look up the word coaching in the dictionary, one definition you might find is, 'A vehicle used to transport people from where they are at to where they want to be.' And that’s not really a bad definition of coaching when you think about it."

We’ll be highlighting coaching for performance in our upcoming posts.  Do you have a question you'd like to ask?  If so, email Lori at: lori[at]thinkplum.net, and we'll get it answered.

Next up:  How might coaching as a management style benefit our organization?  How do I know if it's right for us?