My coaching activities give me the opportunity to see many people develop through their career, some I have worked with at different stages as they have progressed (and as I have been coaching for longer!) and others I meet with at a specific point in their career. Often this is when people have experienced change – change into a new role, new organisation or new context; perhaps their team has been moved into another area, they have a new manager or new demands are being placed on them.
My activities also give me a unique insight into how people cope which such changes at a personal level; are the changes stressful for them? Invigorating? Energising or simply scary? Either way, coaching definitely helps them to view the changes more objectively and to manage them better.
One common theme that I have observed across all these situations is that after change, some people forget some of the skills that have got them to where they are now – perhaps because the demands of the role are significantly different or because their expectations of themselves have changed. It’s a difficult problem to identify – how can the coach know what someone has forgotten if they aren’t aware of it themselves?
For me, it has emerged in a variety of ways; some key questions, such as ‘what else do you know that could help in this situation?’ can uncover a range of skills that someone is not using. Or ‘what would you have done in your former role / life / organisation?’ changes someone’s perspective and helps them identify those learnings that they’ve used in the past but hadn’t thought of as being relevant to their current role.
I’ve seen two great yet similar examples of this with clients in the last couple of years. Both had been promoted from customer facing roles to more senior internal roles, where they needed to influence a range of internal people, who were doing a range of different jobs, spread across the globe.
My clients were grappling with trying to make things happen in a matrix structure; one in which they would be judged on the outcomes of projects but where they had no hierarchical authority over those they were influencing to make the projects happen – they couldn’t simply resort to a ‘just get on and do it’ approach. In both cases I asked just one question ‘how would you have positioned this if you were trying to influence a customer / prospect to get this done?’ Out poured a broad range of effective sales and marketing strategies that they could use to not only influence the outcomes of the projects but to make people engage willingly and positively – strategies which meant that there was no need to be authoritative, simply to treat the internal contacts as internal customers.
This is just one example I have encountered where people have forgotten, possibly even neglected skills that were once so crucial to their success. So, what have you forgotten that you know? And how could those skills help you be even more effective at the job you’re doing now?
Tina Dickens Coaching Solutions 