Five benefits of coaching: for the workplace

At my work, we recently had a visit from the Career Mum where she extolled the virtues of coaching and mentoring. My workplace has invested in training eleven new coaches to join the ten it has already has to form a coaching community to benefit its staff. Institutions as we know don’t often put their money where their mouth is so it’s a pleasant surprise to see this happen.

There are numerous blogs, articles and websites about how coaching can benefit the individual to gain clarity, find their purpose and create a plan to reach their goals; however, when writing my assignments for my coaching qualification I didn’t find as much aimed at institutions. Those who hold the purse-strings in organisations can make a big difference to people’s lives through the choices they make so, based on the Institute of Leadership and Management’s (ILM) recent White Paper, Cracking Coaching: Five ways to make an impact at work, here are a few reasons why companies should invest in coaching communities:

1. Coaching increases engagement and productivity:

According to the ILM’s Whitepaper, coaching helps increase engagement and boost productivity, especially in new joiners and those returning to work. It states workers who experience coaching have ‘improved confidence, performance and productivity’ all which improve life for the individual. In turn, reduced sickness, absence and lateness rates boosts the organisation's performance as a whole.

2. Coaching can reduce uncertainty:

Technology increase and uncertainty regarding the political landscape means individuals must learn to adapt and be flexible so they can manage change effectively and with the least amount of mental pain as possible. They may find their roles have changed or disappeared altogether; however, according to the ILM, ‘four fifths (79%) of those surveyed believe coaching can help teams when adopting new technology and different ways of working’. As a result, coaching can help to improve the resilience of individuals. Additionally, the organisation can spend fewer resources on training people to fill the skills gaps created by such changes.

3. Coaching can improve confidence and reduce conflict:

‘58% said they felt more confident after coaching’. The ILM states ‘Coaching makes individuals feel valued and promotes a more inclusive culture within the organisation’. This should mean a reduction in stress and an increase in motivation and self-esteem. There is an argument to suggest coaching could help reduce conflict as staff become more open and solution-focussed – leading to fewer disciplinary issues.

4. Coaching can ease the transition back to work:

The report argues a drop in ‘morale, engagement and motivation’ will lead to a reduction in productivity for the organisation. This is especially pertinent for those undergoing a transition back to work, either moving into a new role or returning from parental or long-term sick leave. Coaching would reduce the amount of lost productivity as they ‘find their feet’ and a resulting low attrition rate would mean fewer costly recruitment processes.

5. Coaching can help future leaders:

Coaching can have a positive effect on the confidence of those leading or managing others, with ‘67% of those surveyed agree coaching would make them feel good about managing others’. It promotes the idea that the organisation is investing in its employees which would encourage employees to stay. A significant majority (84%) of leaders reported ‘coaching would have helped them in periods when they struggled to manage an individual’.

If you’ve ever received, or would like to receive, coaching at work, I’d love to hear about your experiences. What impact did it have on you and your work or home life?

A visit from The Career Mum: survival tips

March is the month we traditionally celebrate women, particularly mothers. International Womens' Day, Women's History Month, Mothering Sunday, and Matronalia all take place in this month and I'm sure there are even more festivals I am unaware of. It was fitting then for the Women's Equality Group meeting at my institution to choose March to host a visit from The Career Mum, Amanda Newman.

I've mentioned previously how much I value online groups like The Career Mum, especially as it can be difficult to get alternative support. Amanda created the Facebook group at the end of 2017 and I found it incredibly helpful when I returned to work after my second maternity leave. I'm sure that if it had been in existence after my first it would have been very helpful then too and I may have avoided some of the issues I had. The group welcomes everyone whether they are parents or not, working or not - Amanda is the career mum of the title. It is full of people who provide help with dilemmas around work, whether that be getting into work or balancing responsibilities once in it.

Amanda told us about herself and then followed with a Q&A session. Some of the biggest tips I took away from her talk were:

Map your life so far: I remember dong a similar exercise on the Aurora course and it really does help you understand how far you have come, what your drivers are and to identify your strengths and challenges. This was also the exercise I encouraged the students on the UCL leadership and Management course to do as I strongly believe that self awareness can help people become fantastic leaders.

Map out who can help you: I'm terrible at doing this even though I regularly help others and give them this same advice. As a consequence, I probably struggle through a lot that I don't necessarily need to. Taking this on board, I have just texted a neighbour to see if she can recommend a plumber!

Take up coaching or mentoring wherever possible: I'm completely biased here as I'm training to be a coach; however, I've taken up offers where my colleagues have needed to practise on people and it has already helped me move forwards with a number of goals and stopped me ruminating over them. There are coaching and mentoring circles being set up within the Facebook Group so if you have one near you I would strongly recommend it.

Build your resilience: I've mentioned previously that taking some responsibility for your own happiness, wellbeing and resilience doesn't let the organisations and power structures who make lives very difficult off the hook. However, we can to some extent help ourselves become mentally, physically and emotionally stronger by engaging in exercise, eating well and participating in mindfulness.

Lastly, own your identity. This ties in with the first point about self-awareness. Our identities can be very much tied up with work or those we care for and, while this can be fine, it can lead to problems if there are major changes. Finding out what else interests and drives us can offer some protection. As Stephen Covey wrote in 7 Habits of Effective People, know who you are otherwise others will shape you and your life.

I'd love to know your response to these tips and how you may have approached them? Leave me a comment below!

Future Skills: values, networks and lifelong-learning

"I believe the children students are our future

Teach them well and let them lead the way" 

(Whitney Houston - slightly amended)

I have recently completed the Aurora course (a development programme for female leaders in higher education) and I wanted to share one of the ways I have been passing on what I have learned. To hear more about the actual course, look out for a future article in CILIP Update as well as further blog posts!

In 2016, I was asked to provide a guest lecture for students on the Masters Library and Information Course at UCL as part of their management module. At the time, I was asked to talk about marketing, promotion and engagement activities. The session went well; I highlighted the great work we had done at my workplace as part of the Customer Service Excellence Standard process and our interactions with students via social media. There was a lot of discussion afterwards.

The proposal

This year, I was asked to do the same thing. I was tempted to just say yes as it was the easiest answer – I had the slides which I could easily update with new activities our Library had been involved in and it would have been straightforward to do. However, I am no longer involved in those activities to the same degree as before and it didn’t feel right to be doing it, even though I knew it would be received quite well. The other possible option was to say no.

The programme

The Aurora programme focuses on values, strengths and the importance of sharing what you know. I pondered this as I drafted my email response to the module leader. I could say no but I could also use my strengths and talk about something authentic to me which they would find useful. I had liked listening to other people’s experiences at the events I had attended and enjoyed their enthusiasm and optimism for the future, so inspired by this I took a risk and offered my alternative.

The workshop

My workshop looked at the future skills that students on the LIS course may need. We looked at tips from others who had done the course, then proceeded to look at passions, values, networks, having a purpose and the importance and means of continually developing and learning. I shared my own personal story with a number of its ups and downs as well as a number of things I wish I’d learned much earlier in life.

The tips (some of them)

• Consider your values and your passions - how do they fit in with where you are now and where you want to be?
• Never stop learning: there are ways to find accessible material or development opportunities. Use what your workplace offers but if they can’t or won’t use what you can to find somewhere better
• There are numerous special interest groups to be involved in with roles needing varying commitment and action – a lot of the social media training I currently provide would not have occurred without my own involvement in CILIP and LIKE
• Create networks/ safety nets – it took me far too long due to a whole history of personal baggage to allow people to help me. Try not to make the same mistake!

The slides from the workshop are available below:

Future skills and conclusions from Sarah Wolfenden

People and plans: the key to successful project management.

I have led and been involved in several projects over the years and despite having no particular skills in this they all, generally, seem to have worked out okay. However, I thought it is high time I do something a little more professional than winging it and so decided to attend a course.

Luckily, my workplace was holding a two day course delivered by Metice Development Solutions. There were ten people in attendance with objectives ranging from gaining more confidence to tips on keeping to time. My objective was to get as many practical tips as possible so I was expecting lots of Gantt charts and other project related paraphernalia that I had heard about but had never got round to using

A project, according to Alan Reynolds our instructor, can be defined as “a series of interrelated activities undertaken to achieve a specific end result within a set time-frame” and usually contains the features listed below:

• A start and end point
• A specific projected goal or objective
• Linked interrelated activities
• A team  of people
• Involves change

And the key to a successful project is:

• A clear plan - to keep everyone on track
• Context – all project participants should understand how their roles and responsibilities fit in to the bigger picture
• Contingencies – have these in place for when plans go awry
• Appropriate reporting – this should be in place to check that everyone is keeping to time with the plan
• Enough people (and with different skillsets) to do the job to prevent overloading
• Enough budget
• Alignment with the organisation’s objectives

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?  The main message that came out of this two day session was that this IS the easy part and that project management is not so much about Gantt charts but much more about relationships and the power to influence. So to run a successful project, the manager of it needs to have the following skills:

• Leadership
• Organisational
• Communication
• Motivational
• Ability to model best practice
• Strategic thinking/an overview
• Delegation - Ability to identify skills & match those with people
• Perseverance
• Positive attitude
• Knowledge of reasons for project
• Knowledge of key people to contact
• Promotes strong team building
• Resilience i.e. can be calm under pressure

For a project to be successful everyone needs to be moving in the same direction.  From FlickrCC.

Preventing milestones from turning into millstones
A point raised during one of the many group activities was about the necessity of milestones and we agreed that they are important as they break down the main task into manageable chunks, provide an opportunity to review progress while also offering a sense of achievement.

To make the milestones work for everybody they should be specific, measurable and with deadlines. They must also be agreed upon by everyone in the project team. Last but not least, they should be the right number, size and frequency for the project – too few and the project may run off course, too many (or too large) and they become unrealistic and turn into millstones.

Situational leadership
Because of this emphasis on leadership skills we spent a significant part of the workshop looking at the Hershey and Blanchard model of situational leadership.  Their theory being that the style of leadership depends on whereabouts in the situation you are, for example, a new group needs information and clear direction whereas an experienced team require trust rather than micromanaging.
According to Hersey and Blanchard, there are four main leadership styles:

• Telling (S1) – Leaders tell their people what to do and how to do it.
• Selling (S2) – Leaders provide information and direction, but there's more communication with followers. Leaders "sell" their message to get people on board.
• Participating (S3) – Leaders focus more on the relationship and less on direction. The leader works with the team, and shares decision-making responsibilities.
• Delegating (S4) – Leaders pass most of the responsibility onto the follower or group. The leaders still monitor progress, but they're less involved in decisions.

We filled in a questionnaire to identify our leadership style in this context and according to the results I tend to use a mixture of S2 and S3 styles. I think this is generally because in the projects I’ve been involved in I haven’t been anyone’s line manager. Neither have I been tasked with getting other people to complete the project as it’s been much more of a team effort.
Day 2 of the workshop was even more focused on practical exercises and we started by identifying the lifespan of a project, namely:

• Project definition – checking the scope and how it aligns with organisational strategy and departmental goals
• Analysis and exploration – asking all the big questions such as who’s needed, what needs to be risk assessed etc
• Planning the project - very similar to analysis and exploration but in much more detail
• Implementation – putting all the plans into action at the scheduled time
• Review – producing a clear, transparent report suitable for external and internal parties with outcomes and recommendations for future opportunities

Final conclusions
Halfway through this workshop I had misgivings as we seemed to be primarily focused on people management and leadership. While it is always an interesting topic, I didn’t feel it was what I had signed up for. However, as the workshop progressed and we incorporated the practical elements of planning into the theoretical elements of relationship building it all started to mesh together into a worthwhile exercise.

Ultimately, what I learned is that while it's important to have a plan and it's important to have people and leadership skills, it's absolutely vital that the project manager uses both of these equally and simultaneously to be successful.

Using coaching skills to help people GROW

To coach somebody is to unlock their potential. This was the inspirational message to come out of the Introduction to Coaching session held at Brunel University on 16^th January. I was interested in attending this for several reasons: I had once attended and enjoyed Karen Drury’s session on Life Coaching for LIKE; I thought it might give me some extra tips to use with my students while teaching and answering their enquiries; I’m considering becoming a CILIP mentor; and finally, I had just won a book called An Introduction to Coaching Skills. I like to attend things that hit a lot of objectives and this certainly seemed to fit the bill.

There are lots of coaches out there in the world; sports coaches, life coaches, nutritional coaches, executive coaches, to name a few. You can have a coach for almost anything as long as there is a clear and SMART goal involved. This particular session was focused on organisational coaching. Organisational coaching is slightly different to other types because it must focus on work-place objectives agreed by the coachee and their line manager, but the fundamental skills and principles remain the same.

I’m going to break down the session into what I think were the key elements:

The difference between coaching, mentoring and counselling

Counselling, mentoring and coaching use many of the same skills, for example, listening and asking the right type of questions. The difference between them is actually quite small, yet still significant. A lot of counselling tends to focus on deep rooted past emotional issues which would get in the way of benefits of coaching and mentors often provide advice from their own experience. Coaches do NOT provide advice and they don’t offer solutions. It is the person being coached who comes up with their own solutions.

The key skills of an effective coach

According to the speaker, and my book, a coach should have a ‘toolbox’ of skills and traits. These should include the following:

• The ability to ask a range of Open, Closed, Probing and Reflective questions and the knowledge of when to use them, as well as knowing when to be silent and when to just listen
• To be able to actively listen; i.e. to show you are listening through your gestures and to summarise points back to the coachee to check for understanding
•  The ability to be focused, ethical and honest
•  The belief that the everyone is capable of achieving more and that this potential can be unlocked through encouragement, raising self-awareness and inspiring ideas

Multiple representations - unfurling of potential, GROW model, and
also very similar to the ones I am  nurturing in the garden mentioned below.
Found on FlickrCC.net

The GROW model

Coaches have to follow a framework when they coach and, while most of the content will come from the coachee, the coach needs to remain aware of the process they are following. There are several models one can add to their skills toolbox; the one the class was introduced to, and which seems to be most common, was the GROW model. The GROW model was created by Sir John Whitmore and the acronym stands for Goal – Reality - Options – Will. 

In the goal stage, the coachee establishes what she wants to achieve – this must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and have a time measure. In the reality stage, the coachee’s goals are checked against the reality of the situation in the present, for example, if I said I wanted to write but had put off doing any writing because of moving house, bringing a garden back to life which hasn’t been touched for several years, and learning to drive, then one might question whether this is a realistic achievement…

In the options stage, the coachee identifies possible routes between how things are at the moment and how he would like them to be. And finally, in the will stage, the person being coached needs to commit and take responsibility for the agreed actions. For example, if I said I wanted to write but hadn’t written a blog post for a while nor had I touched the pile of books I need to review which are on my desk for several weeks, one might question my commitment. I would need to commit to finishing all my half-written blog posts at least…

I guess what I found most interesting is that the coachee does most of the work. I’d always thought that coaches tell you what to do, when to do it and would keep on at you till you had completed whatever it was that you had set out to do. Actually, it turns out, the coach’s role is to test a person’s boundaries and unlock the potential inside, potential that the person may not even know they have. 

I think we often underestimate our abilities and those of the people around us and many of us have something we’ve always wanted to do and haven’t quite got right round to doing it. Coaching can be a good way to get us to set goals, write them down and achieve something we want to. Wouldn’t it be great if we all had a personal coach? Just think what could be achieved.

I’d love to know if anyone has had any experiences of being either a coach or being coached. What difference, if any, did it make?

Effective influencing skills

The ability to influence is not just a management skill. It is a life skill. It means getting a result which meets the legitimate needs of both parties involved, changing a mindset in the process. It is a very useful skill to have.

I attended a day-long session on developing influencing skills on 10th July, led by Alan Richards from Metice. We were a small group of attendees, six in all, which gave us lots of opportunity to tell our stories, practise our newly developing skills and reflect on them. I attended this session, primarily, because I wanted some tips to enable me to encourage senior academic staff to get behind some reading list software we have introduced at the university, but also to help give me more confidence in doing so.

Influencing, we were told, is not about using Machiavellian techniques nor is it about being a bully. Using either of these styles when managing can often get things done but does not influence, does not 'bring people along' and often means the person in charge won't get the full picture of what's going on as people are wary of engaging in a full discussion. Influencing is much more about instilling trust and cooperation.

Throughout the day we took part in several exercises, below are three which particularly stood out for me:

The Push/Pull exercise - in pairs with palms facing each other, one person would push the other and then vice versa. Then both partners would push each other.  This exercise not only got us out of our seats moving around but demonstrated the push and pull flow in a conversation. To influence effectively, Alan explained, there has to be some push (stating what you want, expressing views, opinions and feelings and using pressures and incentives) and pull (actively listening, encouraging and questioning, being open to suggestions and building rapport). If both parties are being assertive, both pushing, then it is more difficult for progress to be made. I liked this exercise for its simplicity in making this point - it's easy to talk about it but when you're physically pushing against someone the process is instantly recognisable.

Some examples of language to use in these situations:

If someone is being too aggressive or assertive, say "can I just stop you there" . This will then give you space to be assertive in response

To build rapport:

• "what do you need from me?"
• "tell me a little bit more"
• "what difficulties are you facing?"
• "how can we work together?"

Active listening - in turn we listened to our partners speaking about a particular topic of interest to them and then had to relate it back to the room. I've done similar exercise before, most recently at LIKE 43, however, despite listening intently and caring I don't always remember the details. Active listening comprises:

• giving full attention
• reflecting data
• reflecting feelings
• interpreting
• encouraging
• summarising

While I tend to give my full attention, reflect feelings and encourage, I realised I could perhaps reflect, interpret and summarise a bit more. In the exercise, I was able to re-call quite detailed information, which I still haven't forgotten, so I'm looking forward to trying this out more often.

Found on flickrcc.net

Saying 'I want' and 'No' - Due to spending lots of time with my nanan and her friends when I was younger and because my family weren't well off, I was brought up to mind my ps and qs, to respect my elders, to do as I was told,  and to never ask for anything. So saying 'I want' and 'no' in the group sounded very impolite to me. However, they are direct, clear and decisive statements and don't need to be said aggressively - tone is important here. I often say 'I'd like', 'I'd be grateful if' or  'it would be really nice if' and while these are still the polite thing to say in a conversation, when I want to get a task done they are far too passive to use.

This all may seem very obvious to some people, none of it is revolutionary and I'm sure we've all heard it before at some point or another, however, how many of us actually do it? Despite attending this session for a specific purpose, I discovered tips I could use on a daily basis and it encouraged me to reflect on the way I communicate with people.

The psychology of leadership

Who would you rather be? A three times married, luxury car and yacht collector CEO or a CEO who gives himself/herself $1 annual salary and is focused on employee welfare? And who would you rather work for?

This was the question asked by Professor Mark Van Vugt to open his lecture I attended Wednesday 13th February entitled Follow me: the evolutionary psychology of (charismatic) leadership and power. Mark van Vugt is Professor of Group and Organizational Psychology at the VU University Amsterdam and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University.

He explained that leadership is something that all cultures have but that there are many models of leadership with no scientific value and people can make a fortune writing about it. This is something I am beginning to discover in the Library Leadership Reading Group – everyone has a theory but few have the evidence to back it up. Despite there being so many publications, Mark informed us, there are still many questions unanswered such as:

• Why do tall leader candidates usually beat shorter ones in elections?
• Why does power corrupt?
• Why do women CEO’s attract so much hostility?

His theory is that leaders and followers are inevitable in social structures; these techniques evolved as strategies to ensure coordination of activities, for example, food gathering, making shelters etc. If our brains think we are under threat they have evolved to recognise what to do to solve the problem and this includes following physically stronger people if we are in physical danger or experienced people if we are feeling unsure about something.

Mark gave examples of leadership in the animal kingdom and explained that while many are leaders through their dominance, occasionally the leader is someone unexpected. Elephants, for example, follow the oldest female as she knows where all the waterholes are. I didn’t figure out why the oldest male wouldn’t know this and it seems to be the wrong place to make a quip about asking for directions.



Bees do a waggle dance to signify their leadership

According to Mark, humans are natural born followers as it is the default setting in our brain. This is probably a good job as there isn’t the space for lots of leaders; however, I have never seen a book entitled – how to be a good follower. Reasons why we follow others could be because we want to be leaders in the future so are watching how it’s done, because we want to learn new skills and/or because we want protection.  Mark told us how humans are generally egalitarian and moralistic and have an aversion to being dominated, hence groups like Occupy, Anonymous and cases like Wikileaks spring up as a defence against big corporations, politicians and other groups we perceive to be bullies.  While I’d like to believe him, I think his statistic that for two thirds of employees the most stressful aspect of their job is their boss indicates we are still a little way off treating everyone as equals.

Many of his findings I found to be quite disappointing, e.g. children can often tell who will win an election by looking at the candidates’ faces indicating that voters prefer a tall, charismatic man regardless of his policies, that women are generally not seen as leaders unless it is to broker peace and that if you give anyone power their empathy reduces and they become more self-focused.

I had attended this lecture as I am interested in what makes people tick. Learning about leadership in the past has helped me not only increase my own skills when having to manage people and lead projects in the past but also helped me understand the people I work for. This lecture made me feel slightly disillusioned that people are swayed by superficiality when making important decisions and I know that this has always been the case but seeing  it in black and white on a screen makes stark viewing. This week I have also just finished reading The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson which outlines the charismatic charm which psychopaths use to get their own way. The combination of the two emphasised to me the importance of understanding how our brains respond to situations and people so we can recognise this and do something about it.

And to answer the question set at the beginning – most people would rather be the first person but would rather work for the second. I’ll leave that up to you to decide what that says about our moralistic and egalitarian race.

SLA Europe - Personal resilience workshop

On Monday 15th October I attended my first SLA Europe event since I won the Early Career Conference Award (ECCA). It seemed like forever since I had last seen everyone but in reality it had only been three months and it was lovely to meet some of the members again. The session was led by Cathy Lawson and Russell Thackeray from Continuum, and was held at the Lexis Nexis building in Chancery Lane

I had missed the previous SLA Europe meeting due to a clash with my teaching schedule and this one piqued my interest. Its main premise was that during the challenging pressures many of us are experiencing at the moment, we need to be able to cope with stress and ‘bounce back’ from adversity. I attended the event for a couple of reasons; I had only attended one training session before and I had really liked the set up of the small group and really learning from other’s experiences so I thought this might be similar. Another reason was that even though I am generally a resilient, persevering type of person who has had a decent amount of adversity to deal with, I had been feeling a little overwhelmed by life recently and thought a few extra tips might be quite useful.

Cathy and Russell were engaging speakers and explained to us that Continuum provide an eight day course where all the topics they were going to introduce us to are covered in a lot more detail and that this was a 1.5 hr version of this. Unfortunately, this meant it felt quite rushed, however, I think they got their main points across.

We were told that personal resilience was a step on from emotional intelligence, something I am particularly interested in due to various personal reasons and had read more about recently in Daniel Goleman’s book - Primal Leadership: Learning to lead with emotional intelligence as part of Jo Alcock'slibrary leadership reading group. Resilience is the ability to recover from adversity and to perform effectively under pressure. A balance of positive and energy is needed to do this, an example given by Russell was that an introverted person can still present well but the energy required is greater in that person than in an extroverted person.

The continuum model of personal resilience focuses on cognition, personality, emotion, physiology - if all these are at their most optimum then one can become a ‘business athlete’. We very quickly ran through some of these, spending quite a lot of time focusing on nutrition and exercise. Being someone who already appreciates green tea and an hour of yoga but knows when to balance it with a spot of chocolate and red wine, I do wish we had spent a little more time on the some of the others.

We had to write down a few items we were worried about and figure out which ones we could control and which we couldn’t. Once we had done this, we were then told that people generally worry about things they have no or very little control over and that letting go of these types of anxieties would help strengthen our resilience. There was a gentle murmur across the room at this point, whether this was in agreement over Russell’s point or recognition of the difficulty of doing this, I’m not sure. We all bemoan the state of the world at some point and who is to say we have no control over it? I guess the main point is not to become overburdened. At work, I am very good at knowing what I can and cannot control, however, I discovered that on a personal level I don't do this so well - so this is something I am trying to rectify.

One thing which struck me after the workshop while we were all enjoying some very lovely canapés courtesy of Lexis Nexis was something a fellow SLAChicago attendee said about finding the time to eat healthily, do exercise and still have fun. It reinforced something that has been niggling away for a little while. I generally make sensible life style options, however, sometimes I just really need to chill out more and have some fun and not feel guilty for relaxing.

Overall, I’m not sure I got anything new out from the session. I did get rather angry that people’s emotions were being played with by people who didn’t know those in the room but it also did encourage me to think about the things I enjoy doing of which I’m not doing enough of.