To complete your Assignment, review the three types of active inquiry outlined in this weeks Learning Resources.?Compose a coh

February 2011 | Vol. 32 no. 1 www.learningforward.org | JsD 57

g eoffrey Canada said in a recent presentation, “Education is the only business I know of where

you can change anything you want, as long as you change nothing” (2010).

After so much debate and so many policies, why is our education system still failing so many of our children? What are we either missing or pretending not to know?

Reforms only work when people who implement them are on board, engaged, and valued. What gets talked about from the boardroom to the classroom, how it gets talked about, and who is invited to join the conversation determines what will happen or won’t.

Are the driving conversations dividing or connecting stakeholders? Are they catalysts for change and accountability, or are they further entrenching people in fear and blame? Is mandating accountability preventing us from hearing and seeing the competing truths that exist about our students, classrooms, and schools?

Amid the spinning wheels of education reform, an essential component seems to be missing: conversations that speak directly to the heart of the issue, engage people’s curiosity to uncover the truth, galvanize people, and create collective responsibility.

Leadership that attempts to create accountability with top-down mandates, rather than by engaging and connecting people, leads to or exacerbates a culture of blame and excuses. Mandating accountability, while it may sound effective, simply doesn’t work. Why? Because most often in practice this approach is fueled by the same thing victimhood is fueled by — blame. And as long as that’s the case, there’s no time, energy, or vision left to create real solutions.

A NeW VIeW OF AccOuNTABILITY The long-term benefits of

accountability have enormous implications for the quality of our lives and of our education system. There is a direct correlation between any organization’s health and the degree of

accountability displayed by its employees, top to bottom.

Accountability is an attitude, a personal, private, and nonnegotiable choice about how to live one’s life. It’s a desire to take responsibility for results, and for that reason, it cannot be mandated. It requires a personal bias toward solutions, toward action.

Rather than hold people accountable, hold them “able.” Rather than equate the word accountability with culpability, begin with yourself and model the kind of accountability that is empowering. Accountability has to come from within. Model it and show people how accountability benefits them. When it’s clear how accountability benefits someone, accountability becomes an internal drive.

While we don’t always have a choice about the situation in which we find ourselves, we do have a choice about how we view or judge it. Consider shifting your perspective from ‘Since this is a tough situation, I can’t do it, I’m not willing to muster the courage, will, skill, energy, focus, needed to do or say what needs doing,’ to taking the stance that says, ‘Given my current reality, let me explore my options, clarify the results I want to produce, and figure out at least one step to take in that direction,’ and then take it. Rather than bonding with others over

To encourage others, model the kind of accountability that is empowering

• In each issue of JSD, Susan Scott ([email protected]) explores aspects of communication that encourage meaningful collaboration. Scott, author of Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success At Work & In Life, One Conversation at a Time (Penguin, 2002) and Fierce Leadership: A Bold Alternative to the Worst “Best” Practices of Business Today (Broadway Business, 2009), leads Fierce Inc. (www.fierceinc.com), which helps companies around the world transform the conversations that are central to their success. Fierce in the Schools carries this work into schools and higher education. columns are available at www.learningforward.org. © copyright, Fierce inc., 2011.

collaborative culture sUsAN scOT T

JsD | www.learningforward.org February 2011 | Vol. 32 no. 158

collaborative culture sUsAN scOT T

mutual scars and wounds, find people who are in action themselves and who will support your success.

When we become entrenched in feeling powerless, we put time and energy into identifying all of the reasons we can’t do something instead of focusing on what we can do to accomplish our goals. One shift in our outlook on any situation can change everything about the results we produce.

So beyond modeling accountability, how do we motivate others to choose to be accountable? First, please don’t do the following: Tell them to get a grip, avoid them, complain about them to others, get angry, tell them what they need to do and how to fix things, or tell them that their context is false. Not only do these actions not work, they’ll set you back and make the situation worse.

An effective way to point anyone toward personal accountability is to engage him or her in a Mineral Rights conversation (see box below). When someone comes to you with a problem or an issue, start with step 2 of the Mineral Rights model. Use this question-based model to help the other person facilitate a conversation with themselves — to think out loud in a far richer way than they otherwise might — and create self-generated insights, the kind that stick and are mostly likely to lead to behavior change. This model

is a powerful way to get anyone, including yourself, out of a mind-set of feeling powerless.

MINeRAL RIgHTs cONVeRsATION There are seven steps in Mineral

Rights conversations. The key in taking someone through a Mineral Rights conversation is to remain empathetic and genuinely curious during the conversation. Questions only. No advice. By engaging people in a Mineral Rights conversation, they identify the root of the issue, see the prices being paid, what’s at stake to gain when the issue is resolved, and come up with a plan of action. They own the issue and the solution. They are much more likely to act.

While engaging someone in a Mineral Rights conversation to help them break out of feeling powerless, avoid common traps that make the situation worse: • Discount their reasons for why they

can’t do this or that. • Get caught up in their story,

sympathize, placate, or rescue. • Give advice. • Skip some steps and jump right to

“What are you going to do about it.”

• Tell them how you handled a similar situation.

• Become judgmental. Remember to:

• Go into the conversation with the motivation to help, not further a hidden agenda.

• Dig deep. The two best words are “What else?” or “Say more.”

• Inquire about their emotions. Emotions give the lit match something to ignite. “Given the scenario you just described, what do you feel?”

• Find the neutral place from which you can remain empathetic without judgment. No matter what the reporting

structure may be, consider this a conversation between equals.

An accountable perspective is that the solution/problem/situation is mine: Given the long list of terrible and very real conditions that exist, what can I do? What we focus on expands — problems or solutions. It’s our choice. A culture of fierce conversations inspires and instills a desire to want to take responsibility and ownership.

cONNecTIVITY, AccOuNTABILITY How do you get collective

responsibility? Accountability and the ability to connect on a deep level with each other go hand in hand. When you have a team of people internally driven, people who feel they can make a difference, the impossible becomes possible. They connect at a deeper level.

Improving our schools, teachers, students, and communities requires the courage and ability to collectively initiate and sustain conversations that speak to the ground truths while connecting with one another at a deep level, one conversation at a time.

True accountability doesn’t happen without human connection. True accountability and human connectivity go together. When we engineer environments where true connectivity and accountability are present, we awaken the sense of collective responsibility.

Despite our differences, it’s going to take collective responsibility to get us where we want to be. While no single conversation is guaranteed to change the trajectory of a career, a school, a relationship, or a life, any single conversation can. It’s not a matter of which program is under discussion, which mandates are established, which carrots are dangled, or which sticks are shaken. The conversation is the relationship. Nowhere is that more important than education.

ReFeReNce Canada, G. (2010, November 10).

Address to the Seattle Foundation’s Annual Luncheon. �

steps in a mineral rights conversation

Step 1: identify your most pressing issue. Step 2: clarify the issue. Step 3: determine the current impact. Step 4: determine the future implications. Step 5: Examine your personal contribution

to this issue. Step 6: describe the ideal outcome. Step 7: commit to action.

For an in-depth understanding of how to use the Mineral Rights model, read Practice #3 (“From holding people accountable to modeling accountability and holding people able”) of Fierce Leadership: A Bold Alternative to the Worst Best Practices of Business Today (Broadway Books, 2009).

Copyright of Journal of Staff Development is the property of National Staff Development Council and its

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www.trainingjournal.com September 2009 TJ 63

coaching

Turning ideas into reality I

n my naïve, innocent, early days, coaching was working with the client, imparting my worldly knowledge and wisdom as well as,

sometimes, working on their ideas. Of course, it’s actually about working solely on the individual’s agenda, developing his ideas, stretching his thinking – hands-on coaching and hands- off coaching.

Coaching creative talent can be exciting, hugely rewarding and extremely challenging. Alec McPhedran outlines a coaching framework for developing creative people – GENIUS

One of the key skills within coaching is managing the process of the coaching session in a timely way, as well as making good use of your questioning and listening skills. In the creative industries, in which I mainly work, it is critical that ideas and solutions came from the client, and that’s really hard when you believe you know what the solution is. But surely that’s one of the points. It’s not

what you believe the solution is, it’s what the client believes it is.

In the creative world of television, film, music, arts, theatre, games and music, the idea is the asset. Talent always shines through. On that basis, creative coaching, and indeed training creative people, relies on always working with the talent and their ideas first and foremost.

Great creative talent coaching is about working the individual, his imagination and his aspiration into an inspiring and exciting reality. Not yours. It has to be owned by him. So your inputs have to be really relevant, valid and appropriate. You, the coach, act as the conductor. The individual has the talent. The creative coach’s role is to get the best out of the talent.

Like most coaches, I have come across a number of really useful coaching models, including the often-used GROW model

coaching

(Goal, Reality, Options and Will do). Another useful model is CLEAR, developed by Peter Hawkins. CLEAR concentrates on Contracting, Listening, Exploring, Action and Review. However, within the world of creative talent, these two models as a guide to the structure of a coaching session don’t always quite work as effectively as the situation requires.

Creativity, innovation, exciting aspirations, firing imagination, new territories and fresh new ideas all need turning into a reality. That’s the great challenge in media and arts with creative coaching. For me, a new approach was needed that worked differently for some of my clients.

GENIUS GENIUS coaching developed following a chat with a pretty cynical script-writing friend who felt coaching had its place but most definitely not in the world of creative people.

Her previous experience of being coached at a leading broadcaster had been helpful only in career progression, not in her desire to be the best in her field of telling stories. A number of coaches had been unable to really fulfil her aspiration.

This made me think about myself, my own ability to go further than I had been before with people and, therefore, how I could meet her challenge. Yes, we do offer stretching objectives but are we held back with the SMART objective format, particularly with the Reality part? Whose reality? Her point was whether we really always push past the boundaries. Was I helping my coachees by agreeing to their initial objectives or was I really stretching them, taking them to new and exciting areas, sometimes scary in their ambition?

Coaching creative talent, of course, has its challenges. Buy-

in, first of all, is often an issue. They don’t often think there will be a benefit because ‘nobody understands them’.

In business or management coaching, we develop objectives for personal and business improvement where appropriate. With creatives, this causes automatic eye-glazing – a weird and unusual symptom, I find. However, once they acknowledge that it’s linked to helping them turn ideas into reality, a script into a film, an idea into an image, they become engaged.

Coaching talent has other challenges, typically in keeping up with the fast-paced process of exploring options and ideas and managing the flow of ideas without trapping them. Equally, the use of a coaching programme or session

objective can very

often change as the ideas and enthusiasm move in different directions.

Remember that, in the creative world, the idea is the asset. In many cases, it’s not right to pitch your creative ideas unless you have the passion for them. In coaching, as the idea evolves and the passion for it grows, that is when the objective can change – becoming more challenging, more exciting. The different approach here is being able to stop, reflect, review and revise, if appropriate, the coaching objectives.

Over the following months, therefore, I revisited my sessions, the processes I was using and the results we were getting. Goals were being achieved but I was wondering if they could have been wider, more challenging – daring to be truly different.

The GENIUS model of coaching evolved after testing it out on some knowing victims with mixed success. People who were really up for a new adventure opened their mind to great new ideas and opportunities that truly seemed off the wall. It made others feel uncomfortable and my learning was that you have to work with the aspiration and the reality of the coachee’s ambition. Again, not my ambition.

Eventually the GENIUS model came about, probably the result of a fire,

aim, ready strategy. It’s now one of my favourite models, particularly when working with exciting talent.

GENIUS coaching is simple. It’s another model for coaches’ toolkits, drawing its inspiration from the likes of GROW, CLEAR, OSKAR and other useful models.

64 TJ September 2009 www.trainingjournal.com

Great creative talent coaching is about working the individual, their imagination and their aspiration into an inspiring and exciting reality

coaching

Goals The first step of GENIUS is to set the goals – an obvious starting point. We know the goal is critical for a number of reasons but, primarily, it provides us with the reminder of what it is we are working on, what needs to be achieved, and it makes sure all future conversation is relevant to achieving the goal.

With GENIUS coaching, there are three types of goals to set:

The aspirational goal of the 1. overall coaching contract. What will we have really achieved at the end of the coaching programme? This should be highly ambitious, breaking into new territory for the coachee Session goals. What do we need 2. to achieve by the end of each coaching session that directly supports the aspirational goal? Action goals. As a result of the 3. coaching session, what steps does the coachee need to take by the time we next meet to achieve the aspirational goal? Using this three-step approach

to goal setting provides the coachee with consistency and focus for making things happen and a clear understanding of why he needs to do things.

The key skill for the coach is managing and setting the aspirational goal.

Energy Once the aspirational and session goals have been set, the next part of

GENIUS coaching

is to look at the energy of

the coachee. He may want to achieve

something that is far reaching for him but does he really have the energy?

The desire to achieve and the energy to do something can sometimes be poles apart.

www.trainingjournal.com September 2009 TJ 65

Get the client to rate his energy levels for making this work, perhaps with a score out of ten. Without the genuine energy to achieve the goal, is the goal the right one in the first place? Discussing energy allows you to explore why that rating has been given, based on reviewing the current situations, issues he is facing and other things he has tried.

Nurture Once goals and the energy levels needed to achieve them have been established, you need to nurture a range of ideas and opportunities. This, again, is where the coach’s questioning, listening and creative thinking skills come into play. Your ability to explore ideas and encourage the creative thinking of things that are really off the wall – that have never been done before – is absolutely critical.

Nurturing ideas should ideally be treated in the same way as a pure creative thinking session: pull out the ideas, don’t critique too early, set the parameters linked to the objectives and work through some of the ideas. My experience has shown that many creative people have good visual thinking skills, so do use Post-Its, flipcharts with colour pens, magazines and the like – visual stimulants are fantastic. Equally, having a range of soft toys or items around can be a useful sub-stimulant.

This is also a great time to use challenging and creative thinking tools such as de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats (data, emotion, negativity, positiveness, feel good, innovative thinking and process). Often, Six Thinking Hats generates all the issues and options as well as creating new ideas. It also provides the coach with an opportunity to contribute to the generation of ideas when using the Green Hat.

In one session, a young writer and I explored how he could promote his work to television people and, through the Green

Hat discussion, identified an idea that eventually became a web- based drama using new actors and quality mobile phone film clips.

The website now has a following of more than 250,000 people and he will be meeting an American television station to explore new projects.

Once you have looked at each idea, work through and prioritise the key actions that came out of the nurturing process. Priority one is the way forward. Options two, three and four are potential back-up ideas or ideas for further discussion at an appropriate time.

From the Six Thinking Hats model, you will then be able to move into the next stage of GENIUS coaching, thanks to identifying emotions and negatives from the Red and Black Hat discussions.

Inhibitors You need to revisit the agreed priority actions from the nurturing stage and identify the inhibitors. What’s going to stop the ideas from working? This is really powerful as you seek out the negatives. Again, de Bono’s Black and Red Hats significantly help here. The use of the Yellow Hat helps to explore benefits and counter arguments to any potential inhibitors. It’s those negatives that you then address with the client to establish how they will be tackled if, or when, they crop up.

I guess it’s the development of the cunning plan B scenario. We are great at planning the perfect life but, unfortunately, life’s not perfect. Therefore it makes sense to anticipate inhibitors and manage them into positives. It’s worthwhile at this point revisiting your nurtured actions to see if they need revising to reflect the points identified in the inhibitors stage of the session.

Utopia So, we now know what the client wants and how much energy he has to achieve his goal. We’ve

66 TJ September 2009 www.trainingjournal.com

coaching

Alec McPhedran is the managing director of Skills Channel TV. He can be contacted on +44 (0)845 8377763 or via www.geniuscoaching.co.uk

generated some great ideas, and have identified the potential problems and the likely responses to any negatives. If it all works fantastically, then… utopia: an imagined perfect place or state.

This is where the coach’s NLP knowledge comes into play. Can you get the individual to visually, auditory and kinaesthetically imagine his utopia once the goals have been achieved? This is a powerful tool to make the end result feel real. What will he see happening, how will it sound and how great will he and others feel once it’s been achieved?

It’s that thinking process that turns the aspiration into the reality for a creative. Envisioning, recording or feeling that end goal gives it life. It puts utopia in the mind of the individual. I have in the past encouraged clients to make that picture real – getting a close or true-to-life image and placing it at their desk or work space. For the auditory types, a written statement always at hand has the same effect.

We’re back to the immense importance for creatives of goals linked to imagination. Once goals look real, they become real. Setting, writing down and imagining goals are an essential role of the coach to get the creative talent to understand this.

I believe that the best prediction of your future is whatever you believe it will be. The skill of the coach is to plant that positive and exciting future with the talent.

Steps Finally, the coaching session is rounded off by summarising the steps to be taken by the coachee. What will he do between now and the next session?

These are developed by writing SMART (specific, measurable, realistic, agreed and timed) action goals and clarifying the actual steps to take to achieve them. I guess in the good old days that was called action planning.

So there you have it – yet another wonderful tool for coaching. The very simple GENIUS coaching model. It’s about pushing and developing ambition and creativity for creative people, exploring wide- ranging opportunities and imagining the realities of what success will look, feel or sound like when achieved.

Obviously, I know this model may not be perfect for some –

that’s the beauty of the business we’re in. If we were all perfect, we wouldn’t have anybody to coach.

G – Goals to be achieved E – Energy to achieve the goals N – Nurturing and exploring options for achieving the goals I – Inhibitors that may arise on the way to achieving goals U – Utopia when the goals will be achieved S – Steps to be taken to achieve the goals. 

Goals were being achieved but I was wondering if they could have been wider, more challenging – daring to be truly different

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1

The Flow of Coaching James Flaherty in Evoking Excellence in Others describes a 7-step Flow of Coaching1 process from first establishing the relationship between the coach and individuals on the team to observation, assessment, providing feedback and reaching agreement on future steps. The following is a summary and elaboration of the Flow of Coaching model:

1. Establish the relationship – for coaching to work, the relationship must be genuine and based on mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual freedom of expression. The coach must facilitate open communications where information is exchanged without defensiveness or argumentation. Freedom of expression is grounded in openness, listening, and confidentiality.

2. Recognize the opening – an “opening” is an event or an occasion that makes the individual or team more approachable for coaching, for example, a process breakdown, a need for enhanced competency, or the introduction of a new process or technique.

3. Observe and assess performance – in addition to observing immediate concerns, the coach should observe and assess how the team is meeting its commitments, working toward its identified future outcomes, and maintaining a constructive mood, while also assessing the level of competence in the group and individual behaviors.

4. Enroll the team for a coaching session – the coach and the team should make explicit what they aim to accomplish together, discuss potential barriers, identify desired outcomes, reach mutual commitment, and identify possible obstacles to success.

5. Conduct the coaching conversation – during the initial session, the coach should clarify the desired outcome of the coaching session, observe the team’s performance, set up communication expectations, and plan a follow-up session. During the next session, the coach reports on observations, addresses breakdowns, discusses new behaviors, and assigns new practice. During the third session, the coach reports on the observations of the new practice, results of the new behavior, effects of newly acquired competence, and suggests recommendations for the future. The coach should acknowledge positive results and progress and ask the

1 Flaherty, J., Evoking Excellence in Others, Elsevier, 2010, p. 25

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team to reflect on what they have learned from their own observations of their performance.

6. Provide feedback – the feedback should provide time for the team to reflect on the coach’s observations of their performance and on their own observations. By conducting a self-assessment, the team will better understand the corrections in behavior needed for sustained improvement.

7. Agree on future steps – the coach and team members should agree on the focus of future coaching conversations, practice sessions, and new behaviors to master.