Requisite Coaching or How Capability Develops

Speaker A The reason I put this slide up here is that development is not linear. There's a tendency for us to think because we work in models where we have to put things in boxes and lines and stuff, development is not linear and therefore we're going to see things change a lot when we look at developing people. This particular slide indicates that you want to be very careful with how you manage development. Development can be done in a scale free network, which means that we have a system called Power Law distribution. Very few people have ever seen this because it's not in vogue. Because all of our statistics are based on central limit theorem. Power Law distribution has to do with a meaningful few. There's a few things that are connected to everything. In my view, when you get an opportunity for requisite, you have to find the meaningful few. And since in coaching it's very difficult, especially in a requisite intervention. And one thing I might say is we almost never go on in as a single coach because you're going to have whoever asked the content and process question, you've got it because they're learning a whole bunch about content and how to be requisite in their level. And on the other side, there's this who out there that's being, having, doing and becoming. That's probably pretty freaked out. So you've got to find the meaningful few with which you're going to work on in your system. Now, one of the things that you have to understand is that you're going to have different goals at the different levels and in the different positions. So you want to be careful to make sure that the content and process I don't know whoever asked that question, but thanks. You have to understand that depending on where you're going to be in the organization and at what level you're going to be working and what their goals are, the content and the process and the form of the requisite coaching have to meet that somewhere. So when you go in, you have to really understand that coaching, say at levels two and three, will be lots different than some of the other levels. And of course, you'll coach fours different because you have some fours coming out of that three transition that need lots more content because they don't even know their job very well. And so you can't spend a lot of time on process in the form of development. The other thing that I find all the time is that requisite coaches never get to go in and set the system up really. So you got to come in and work with a system that's already there. So you've got ongoing training interventions. In fact, one large company we went into, they were paying consultants $7 million a month. They had 14 interventions going on at the same time and they were trying to bring in requisite coaching. It's really impossible. So what we've designed are little systems that bolt on. We found out that we can bolt on management and leadership systems to the main system as long as you understand these relationships. Because remember, as you're going in most of the time the organization will almost never be requisite. In fact, few organizations are requisite. One of the way to give them a taste of requisite is to ease it in. And so what you have to understand is that you need a chief coaching officer or somebody who's actually going to coordinate and be a boundary spanner amongst the coaches. And then you've got that thing over there, that giant monster, the ongoing training interventions and remember the managers are being pulled every which way but loose. So you have to take that into consideration and then create a structure. What they can couple to that will give them the opportunity to be successful. I just put this chart up yesterday but I want to make sure you understand that coaching is important because it links together so many different developmental pieces. I wanted to show you this as well because I normally don't put this slide in here. But you have to understand at the very center of everything, even the smallest decision making tool we have, which is a neuron that Valuing is at the center of the process. And I know that there's a lot of talk in the requisite community about values and they're sort of sort of dealt with but it's always dealt with almost as a sidebar because the knowledge, skills and experience and the level of capability get moved in there. But to me, remember Valuing is at the center of everything including those decision points in your brain. Now I put this in here just to show you all the stuff that's going on with a person as they make memes. Now remember requisite is a meme plex. It is a constellation of algorithms that create structural dynamics. So you've got all these things going on here with a person that you have to realize is existing out there. You can't work requisite coaching in a vacuum because if you want to talk real world, if you want to talk what it's really like and get below all this crap that's going on, these are the kinds of dynamics that exist and you as a coach are going to deal with these. And I think it's important you saw a very candid conversation. Obviously this would maybe even be a requisite conversation in some ways because there is emerging here a significant amount of trust and certainly candor. And the real key though was attitude reflect leadership. So if you're not able to understand how to get us into leadership as coaches then we're going to create a real problem because this development stuff is very messy. You start opening these cans of worms with people and you get real ugly stuff. Now the reason I put this up there is to show you that the coaching system itself is very complex because you are now in a position where you have no requisite authority and accountability. This is the real danger point that I see because coaches are coming in and they're not part of the requisite system. So you have to deal with this issue. So there's all this stuff going on at the same time. The system itself is a dynamic and you've got all of these things going on at the same time. Just to remind you that there's lots of stuff going on as you're playing your little game behind closed doors. The business system is in process in some ways. There are certain challenges that the business itself has. You have to understand what's going on there. Now the thing with this particular slide, even though it's coded for spiral dynamics, this is one of the first elemental charts that I showed them about five years ago. The key here though, is to understand this as a metaphor, which is that the person is going through an evolution, okay? The complexity that has the organization has the people has the requisite system is also going through an evolution and the culture is also going through an evolution. You could very well have three very different evolutionary paths that you somehow as a requisite coach, have to bridge. This is important to keep in mind as you move through the process that more things are happening. Obviously, you need to be in the level four range to be able to handle this stuff. Now, when we look at executive coaching, I just did a taxonomy about ten years ago to show people how difficult the executive role is, how difficult it is. And now imagine this in a request situation where you're having situations at four, five and six. So you've got a lot of things happening all at the same time and those have to be taken into consideration, at least in the background. It I think that tells a little bit. One of my clients sent me that, by the way. Now this is a chart I wanted to show you. It's really kind of busy, but this is how we begin to understand how to position requisite coaching. So many people today are hired to come in and coach performance or coach development when all of these things are not fixed. You must ready the organization and do not go into an organization when you as a coach. No accountability, no authority. And we add two pieces. Power and responsibility are not there and you've got this. This is what people are being hired to coach for in the real world today, to mostly fix people, okay? And you've got no control over these things. If you do not get those things at least stable or in some kind of way, you're going to fail right here as a coach. So that's just a warning, at least. That's my 20 years of experience. The other thing is that a lot of people ask me mike, what are the secrets of effectiveness for 3456? This is my little chart and basically just focus on the top level. At the top level, these are the things that executives need access to in their life to be successful. And you can see it's quite an array. Most executives can't afford this, nor do they see the need. But they already have these people. But they're not organized as a developmental team. One of the things I like to do in Requisite is to organize these people into developmental team so we can get formal feedback from them. The other thing is normally when you're doing a Requisite approach this top piece comes from Quantum Organization where you do eight simultaneous tracks in an organization. I just wanted to show you a little bit about the coaching process itself in terms of what we look at as basically this is a 26 week intervention. The timeline on it, the phasing of it. If you want to see some more about that later, I'll show you. But there's too much detail for today. I just wanted to show you that there needs to be a very formal process in place. One of the things that we're looking at in our work, which is a little different than most of what you'll see out there, is that you see a lot of the what and the why but there's not a lot of who and there's not a lot of levels of who. We believe that the levels of work could actually be contrasted with levels of self. Now they don't necessarily line up very well but you are a becoming type of person as you move through your mode and level. So you have to understand who do you have to become to do the level of work? And of course, if you're working at the executive level, the who changes. The who shifts are actually bigger than the other types of shifts. So we begin to understand how to do this kind of engagement. The idea is that we are trying to create self illuminating systems. In other words, we want people to be able to plug in their own cords. That's the idea especially. That's what I think Requisite is trying to do is to give people the freedom and the flow to be themselves and to really produce in ways that really help the company. I wanted to put this slide in here just a little bit because I wanted to remind myself that 70% of climate of organizational climate and it's these six things commitment, rewards, clarity, flexibility, responsibility and standards. 70% of that is predicted by managerial style. So managerial style is extraordinarily important. Climate predicts a third of your results. So you now have a leverage point. Remember I told you you got to find the meaningful few. That managerial style is one place in Requisite coaching. You have to begin to understand it is meaningful because it predicts so many things. Now, when we look at a requisite coaching system, most of the time we never bring in just a coach. We can introduce requisite at times. But one of the things that we're trying to do when we scope is we're really trying to figure out what is going on now and what's really the main thing, okay? And then we have to understand what the main thing is with the individual. We have to understand what the main thing is with the collective. And then in the design, most people stop right here because they see all the gaps emerge. But what we're attempting to do is we realize that a lot of people are not going to be able to change, especially right away. And you can't change the organization right away. So what is the transition design? You usually have to coach there. You have to coach in design because you do not have the resources to be able to change the system all at once. So when you bolt on, you bolt on design. That begins to create what Deming called demand pull. Bringing people to you, bringing people to the system. This is our process. Ecology. Just to give you an idea of the process. We basically look at a need, we scope it, we make a proposal. We involve a sponsor, we create a scorecard. The scorecard gets approved. We begin to work that through the sessions. The sessions go zero in one, we approve in two, three, four. We coach five, we bring back the sponsor to evolve the system. Six, seven, eight. We coach person one on one. In nine, we bring back the sponsorship, make sure we're still aligned in ten. 1112. We work through the system in terms of work metrics, tasks and limits. And in 13 we summarize what we've done. So we break these into about 16 week, 13 week sessions, about three weeks on the front end. We do a lot of the assessment work. We do the debriefs, the things like that, to set up the coaching. And then this is what it looks like kind of in a different way. The coaching actually itself, the scope of work. We create the proposal, the scorecard creates the accountability and authority. Remember, coaches don't have it. So you got to create it. It must be out there. You must be able to point to it. So we use the scorecard for that. We use 13 weekly check ins. They're very short. 15 minutes, 13 performance agreements. 24 hours after the person has the check in, they write us a little email giving us three or four things that they're going to work on so that we know where their attention is. And we also know if they have the resources available and they have the time available, so we can give them some feedback on that. Because really what this is, is a Cpqrt system. It's just disguised because a lot of times when you're doing this requisite coaching the system itself will not be fully integrated yet with requisite. So you're going to have to probably disguise, put some clothes on, some of this stuff or it kind of freaks people out. Twelve weekly reports come right before the check in. Just again attentional factor, real short email, no big deal. And then of course the scorecard is kept by the person. So we know that there's accountability authority in the system.