Scenario:

Mark. Director leading a cross-functional team of six located across three regions (Seattle, London, San Francisco).

Presenting issue(s): low management scores, particularly in developing others, trust, and transparency. Negative feedback on the manager internally (among team and external stakeholders) and externally (e.g., Glassdoor, etc.).

“I’ve been at the company two years in good standing. Recently, I was recently promoted to a management role. It was significantly more complicated than I understood it to be. I have a supportive manager, but rarely get concrete direction or feedback from him on what I need to do. My management scores tanked this last year; I was viciously talked about on the app, Blind; and, I feel overwhelmed and like I’m in a nosedive I can’t get out of.”

In this case, the client’s inability to manage group dynamics led to focusing on two primary aspects of how he led meetings. The client, Mark, needed to get:

more constructive feedback from his manager,
more input from directs and stakeholders that up-leveled the quality of discussions, and
better definition in his decisions.

He contracted to work with his coach for live team coaching at his meetings to help him and his team improve in these areas.

Key Concept: Pattern Breaking in Real-Time

It’s one thing to get a client’s account of their leadership challenges, but it’s quite another to see it in action. Observation of clients and live-action coaching gives coaches a deeper sense of the reinforcing patterns that clients and their teams contribute while sharing space in the systems web. It is, in many respects, just-in-time, on-the-job training and guidance of the client when it counts the most.

The coach looks for opportunities to change a client’s ineffective patterns, in real time. Let’s look at the situation of Mark’s struggle to manage both up and down effectively. He and I spent some time planning and looking at his side of the unsuccessful pattern. By looking at the gaps in sponsorship from his manager, the vice-president of engineering, he could lift one of his directs out of firefighting situations and help prioritize the team’s roadmap and backlog (two tasks that had been bogging him down).

Mark was now ready to address his own contribution to the ineffective pattern with his team as a unit. At the beginning of each meeting, Mark let everyone know no only the agenda for the meeting, but what he wanted to work on and why I was there to help him.

I had coached Mark to add one more thing: if anyone noticed him straying from these goals, they should speak up and mention it rather than wait for me to intervene. This gives some of the responsibility to the team for making sure the meeting is run well. After all, the team is always there, I am not. Building self-sufficiency from the start reduces reliance on outside coaches.

Mark, and each of his team members, contracted to initiate behaviors that Mark wanted to see and attain the goals each had identified to improve their individual effectiveness in meetings.

Watching this group in action, however, I witnessed the group continually losing track of the conversation. Decisions were not clear, which impacted the clarity of roles and overall ownership. Just fifteen minutes into the meeting and the conversation was disjointed, tangential, and unproductive. Either Mark didn’t notice or made no attempt to get the meeting back on track. When he took up a topic leading toward a rabbit hole, I intervened, “Mark, the meeting is covering a wide array of topics, what would be most helpful to decide upon right now?”

Over the course of the conversation, I intervened in several other ways:

To Mark: “A decision was just made, but I don’t think all the team members have clarity on what it was. Can you reiterate it so everyone is on the same page?”

To the Team: “The goal that was stated earlier is to hear from everyone. You can help Mark make sure that happens either by inviting comments from those who haven’t spoken or speaking up if you haven’t weighed in yet.”

To Mark: “Are you ready to move on, or do you want to hear from more people?”

To a specific team member: “To help you achieve your individual goal of speaking up and influencing, now would be the time to show your peer you understand what she just said before giving your opinion.”

My interventions above—to Mark, the team, to individuals—helps keep the people accountable to the conversation they want to have. It takes the confident vulnerability of a leader to invite constructive feedback on how they can become more effective, as well as each person doing their own part in living their vision for a successful interaction. In this case, that meant hearing from everyone.

This blog post is part of a series related to Driving Your Self-Discovery pending publication.