There is only one coaching question

When I heard Sir John Whitmore  make this assertion a few years ago
I was taken aback. It's a nice, pithy line but surely coaching is more
complex, more subtle than that. And I have so many great questions -
what am I supposed to do with them? Understandable reactions but
recent experience suggests that Sir John has a point.

A few months ago I worked with colleagues from iOpener at London
Business School. Our brief was to help 400 MBAers improve their
business writing. Session 1 was the technical stuff. Imporant but not
exactly existential. Session 2 was applying the learning to a cover letter
for a work placement. Here it got interesting. The drafts were mostly
technically ok; and some were good. All were worthy. But very few
excited me or gave me a feel for the writer. What was their USP? What
did they bring that was exciting or different, beyond their undisputed
competence.

As we talked, I probed and dug, listened for the peaks of energy and
interest, shared my reactions to the anodyne - and what hidden gems
we found! Not all the gems were unique but plenty were rare. And if
some had no precious stones, their combinations of baser metals still
glistened when we shone the light on them.



It seems that the foremost issue was not 'writing well' but for each
person to become aware of what they had to say about themselves - to
find their best story; to have the courage to tell that story; and then to
express it in a way that was clear, energetic, compelling and fresh.

This experience echoed last week when I coached some senior
Whitehall civil servants through their 360 degree feedback reports.
Most reports were 40 pages long. We'd not met before and we had 1
hour to reach some conclusions and capture them in a development plan.
A challenge. Where do you start?

Sir John came to the rescue. I needed to get my coachees to show
themselves to me so that together we could find their learning edge -
that heady mix of self-awareness, operational need and appetite that
fuels personal change at work. And mostly we succeeded as I gave my
full attention to the person opposite, using the report as fuel for our
conversation.

So maybe Sir John was right, there is only one coaching question:
who are you?

And if that question interests you, please comment or email me
stephen@gibsonstarr.com

Smile or Die

I stopped off in Waterstone’s at Charing Cross yesterday to find a book recommended on Aboodi Shabi’s stimulating website. It’s an angry and insightful book called ‘Smile or Die’ about how positive thinking has marginalised critical thinking. Good stuff. But also of interest was its location in a new section called “smart thinking”.

It made me wonder what sort of thinking was to be found in the rest of the shop. I didn’t research that but I did have a brief look at what was in the “smart thinking” section. It had some books by Malcolm Gladwell, the latest Daniel Goleman, Freakonomics and The Men Who Stare at Goats. I wondered what the criteria were for inclusion because there is a thin line between simple wisdom and hokum. It struck me that the books that I recognised all challenged assumptions, lazy thinking and restrictive commonsense, often bringing the insights of scholarship to a wider audience.

I like to think that there is some wisdom on those shelves, made accessible by keeping it simple. Lots of these books are relevant or have implications for leadership. And it seems that much of what I offer and explore when I am teaching leadership is in fact conceptually pretty simple.

And in my work with executives young and old I find myself offering ideas about leadership that are not only simple but far from new. A couple of years ago I heard two passionate presenters introducing what they called “the new leadership”, drawing on Goleman’s work. Grumpily, I thought it was only ‘new’ if you count Lao Tzu’s teachings as ‘new’. So I got quietly cross with the presenters and left.

But I should not have. Wisdom is timeless but to be heard it needs to find the right contemporary expression. Something may be old hat to me but it can (and thankfully sometimes is) mind-blowing for someone with different experience to me. And there is so much noise, so many unexamined assumptions and so much self-serving ‘commonsense’ that if we find a simple truth that helps us make sense of the world and be more effective in it, then we should repeat it until we hear lots of people saying it back to us. Or as Andre Gide put it:

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was                                       listening, everything must be said again.