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Coaching for Leaders
Five Ways to Thrive Through Inflection Points
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Apply to the Coaching for Leaders Academy by Friday, September 12th. - In this episode, Dave shares five ways to help leaders thrive through inflection points, including: Redirect vs. respond Set team norms Ask a second question
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Hey, Dave Stahoviak here. Today, I'm coming to you with five tactics to help you get through an inflection point. Whenever our Academy opens, I get into lots of conversations with applicants about this. That's because our academy helps leaders thrive at key inflection points. But what does an inflection point look like? Well, if you're leading in any capacity, you're going to hit inflection points in your career. Often, an inflection point actually comes right after something that happens to you. A promotion, leading a new team, a reorg, being told you're tapped for a new opportunity, maybe a new initiative. The change itself is often the simple part. Getting a new title, new organization, new team, new opportunity. But it's what comes after that change that's really the inflection point. And you know you're at an inflection point if what worked before isn't working quite as well, or maybe even at all right now. That especially happens with the people aspects of leadership. As our careers go on, more and more of the inflection points are about enabling the work of others, not just our own. So today I've got five tactics that may help you get through an inflection point. If you're at one right now. All of these tactics come right out of conversations we've had in the Academy in helping our members not only work through an inflection point, but to thrive during that time. I don't know if you're at an inflection point right now or not, but if you are, one of these five tactics might be the starting point for you. The first tactic is redirect versus respond. Now, this one came out of a recent conversation we had with one of our members who's a manager in financial services. And he came to the Academy and said, the thing that I need to get better at is delegation. He recognized in himself that he's jumping too much into the weeds with his team, tends to do more things himself than he probably should at this point in his career. And to his credit, he's recognized that. He sees that it's been part of his work throughout the Academy as we have been supporting him. And he's been doing great at shifting at that. I've been telling him, I'm super proud of you for taking work, delegating it to your team, talking things through, setting expectations. He's been amazing at that. And he came to us a few weeks ago and said, I still have an issue, though. The problem is now the rest of the organization they're used to me from years and years of doing a lot of these things myself, of coming to me with all the requests and the work, and so much is still ending up on my desk and it's not ending up with my team. So now I'm delegating this work, but all the external stakeholders are still having all their conversations with me. So we started talking with him about it and trying to figure out, well, tell us when stakeholders are reaching out, how does that go? What's happening? And he explained to us that often when a stakeholder reaches out with a request, one of the things that he'll do is he'll respond with some initial thoughts to the stakeholder and then he'll say, hey, I'm going to hand this off to someone on my team to go through the process of asking execution on it. And we listened to that and thought, wow, that's a really helpful kind thing to do to share initial thoughts. And it's probably working against him. And so we made the invitation to him stop doing that. Don't respond with initial thoughts when a request comes in from someone else in the organization. Instead, redirect. And what a redirect sounds like for him is, hey, I just received this request. Thank you so much, stakeholder, for sending this over. Lisa on my team's now handling this. I'm sending it to her. She's going to get back with you today. Done. And then we invited him. If you do have initial thoughts, if you have things that she needs to know in order to be helpful to that stakeholder to understand the relationship, understand some of the history, share your initial thoughts with her on your team, then have her loop back to the stakeholder so the relationship stays between them. Two things come out of redirecting instead of responding. One of them is when you do that, your team gets the development that they need. Oftentimes when I'm working with leaders on delegation, we think about delegation first and foremost as how do I hand off the work that I'm not supposed to be doing anymore in my role and instead have the person on my team who should be doing it doing that work? But we don't think about the other really important reason for delegation, and that is to develop our team members by taking the time to share initial thoughts with the team. What he's now doing is doing the people development work that he's been so intentional about beginning in recent months and sharing ideas and sharing resources and doing coaching with his team. Now that takes more time on the front end. No Doubt. But in the long term, it's great for him, it's great for his employees, and it's great for the rest of the organization. The other win that comes out of it is now the stakeholders, the folks external, don't see him doing the work. They have the relationship and the communication with the folks on his team who are now responding directly, even if they're getting support from him internally. So if you're working on something similar, of delegating more effectively and you find yourself jumping in and being really responsive in an effort to help, it often comes from a very good place. This tactic can be a great place to start. Redirect versus respond. Let's look at the second tactic. Set team norms. This came out of a conversation with one of our managers in technology, in a situation that is all too much the norm these days. Speaking of norms, which is reorgs, restructures, teams combining new teams, starting teams, ending. In this case, she was bringing a team together after a reorg. One organization that she'd been tangentially supporting, another organization she'd been supporting for a while, coming together for the first time. And she came to our academy session and said, how do I start? Well, I know it's important to begin. Well, I know starting a team and framing it is important, but where do I actually begin? And so we had a conversation about that. What did she want to have happen with the team? What did success look like six months, a year from now? And a little bit about the history and where we ultimately landed was a great place to begin, was to set a team norm, to have conversations about what does it look like when we meet together effectively? What is a team that you'd want to work on? What's an example of a team that hasn't worked for you in the past? And what didn't work when conflict comes up? How are we going to process that? How do we facilitate meetings? Some of those standard norms that many of us recognize are nice to have, but very few leaders actually start the process by doing that early on in teams. And so she took our advice and got the team together for the first time and went through the process of opening up a chance for people to share experiences and stories and talk about those norms. And they brought in food and they got people laughing and bringing folks together in an experience of just beginning to build relationships, to establish how we'll work together before any of the work even began. And some really interesting things happened. Two of them were people said stuff they had never talked about before. They talked about experiences they'd had in other organizations in that organization where things didn't quite work well on a team and what they would like to see happen differently. The other thing that happened that was really interesting is people who had never talked much in a team meeting environment before got talking and shared some things that were really helpful for people to know both about them personally, but how they worked well on a team. It gave them a place to start from if you heard the episode this week with Colin Fisher, it's episode 748. You already heard a little bit about the importance of a team starting. Well, if you are at the beginning stages of a team, or forming a team or thinking about that, it's a must listen and one of the points he makes in that conversation is that 90% of team success from the research indicates that what you do before and at the launch of a team is critical. The 10% is what you do after the team's underway. But 90% of success is often explained by what happens at the very start. Now, can you still set team norms after a team has started? Of course you can. I've done it before. I've seen leaders do it with great success. Is it better to do it at the beginning? Yes, if you can. If you're at the start or the early stages, do it early. If you're along the way in the work, though, it's never too late to set team norms. And if you're looking for a framework to get started, episode 192 of our podcast is a good starting point. The framework for setting Team guidelines Susan Gurke and I walk through step by step, exactly how to facilitate facilitate that conversation, what to do, what questions to ask, how to interact with people as questions come up and where to begin to begin to establish those team norms. You can get to it by going to coaching4leaders.com 192 but however you do it, setting team norms a critical tactic, especially at an inflection point with a team starting new or coming together in a different way for the first time. Now the third tactic, ask a second question. And probably that would have been better as the second tactic, wouldn't it? Have the second second question. Oh well, missed opportunity. Ask a second question is the third tactic. Here's how this came up recently, a conversation with one of the engineering managers in our academy about coaching. This is one of the topics, by the way, that comes up so often in my work with leaders in our academy and amongst listeners of the IS folks saying, hey, I know I need to Be more coach like, I have read the books and I've even maybe gone through some coaching training and I just really am not bringing into my regular behaviors and I want to be more coach like and I'm not sure how to begin. And this person in particular, one of our engineering managers said, hey, I've taken, I've read the books, I've even taken a coaching program. And I'm, I'm having trouble taking the theory of this, of coaching and just putting into practice. And as soon as she said that, I know exactly where she's coming from. Because there's a tendency when talking about coaching to sometimes get a little woo woo with it of, of thinking about or talking about being really mindful and having a good energy and being present with people and making good eye contact and, and all those things. And by the way, that's all really well intended and I certainly tried to do that in my own work when I'm working to be coach like, and yet sometimes it gets in the way of just really being practical of like, okay, where do I actually start? And so we talked about this as a cohort and talked about her commitment of wanting to do a better job of developing people because that's the outcome. It wasn't really so much about coaching for coaching's sake, it's how does she develop others. Here's where we landed. Rather than trying to think about all the coaching theories and models and being present and mindfulness and all that, we decided ask a second question in her one on ones with employees rather than just asking a question, listening to what someone said and then responding and getting into the conversation and details or whatever was going on that day, of actually to take a step back, listen to what was said and then to ask a second question. It's really interesting to me in observation of leaders, how often, and observing myself, by the way, how often we do not do this in practice, we know it's a good thing to do, we know we should be curious a little bit longer and yet we often don't. So it's taking that second or two just to stop and ask a second question. As she started to do this in practice, she noticed two things that happened. One of them was what happened that she thought might happen began happening is that people began coming to her, thinking through some new ideas and thinking about being a little bit more proactive in their work versus her telling them what to do or just jumping in with ideas. The thing that happened that she didn't expect though is she said all of A sudden, I'm hearing a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't hear before. What's going on in the organization, the politics, the what people are struggling with, stuff that has always been there, but that people just weren't saying because the space wasn't there to do that. You know, this is one of the most common things that we are all working together as leaders to do better is to become more coach like, so that we can develop people, so that we can listen, so that we understand what's happening in the organization and then we can do a better job leading. I love what Michael Bungay Stanier keeps reminding us and teaching us over the years in the coaching habit and in his work of inviting us just to be curious a few moments longer. That is a wonderful place to start, to begin to be more coach like. And that's why this tactic of asking a second question is a great place for you to start as well. All right, number four, picture tomorrow's commitment today. This comes right to the heart of time management and juggling all the responsibilities and meetings that virtually every leader deals with. This is a really common challenge. Almost everyone in our academy is dealing with this challenge at some level, of schedules, overbook, tons of meetings. And this particular tactic came up in a conversation with a sales executive who was in our academy and thinking through how he would handle his schedule better. And he shared with us that he was running into this regular problem almost daily where he'd get to work in the morning, he'd look at the schedule for the day, or he'd look at the schedule the night before for the schedule of the day. And he'd pretty consistently have the same feeling. And the feeling, he told us, was something like a quarter to a third of these things that are on my calendar today. I really regret saying yes to. Like, I had. I had accepted them. I agreed to do them when they went on the calendar. But now, in retrospect, looking at my day ahead, it's not the best use of my time. And he was really struggling with this reality of day after day after day. He kept having these things show up that weren't the best use of his time, which in and of itself is annoying, but not necessarily a huge problem. The problem was he was supposed to be spending time and needed to spend time on the bigger picture things. He knew he needed to spend time doing planning and doing deep work and getting into conversations on things proactively for the organization. But that wasn't happening because he literally did not have an hour in his schedule to do it. And he looked at it and said, I know where. I know where my margin could be. It's these meetings that keep coming up and that I make commitments to, but I don't have the time and the bandwidth. So we talked about this as a cohort, and someone said, picture tomorrow's commitment today. And what they suggested is, rather than thinking about something coming in as a request for two, three weeks from now, or whenever you next have the commitment on your calendar, and just booking it that far out, or whenever the margin is, is think about every request that comes in in the context of, if I had to set aside the time and resources to make this commitment today, would I still say yes? The effect of thinking about it that way is you think in the context of making it real. It's so easy when accepting a meeting invite or someone asks for time to put it two or three weeks out and to not have to think about the realities of time and resources that come with that for all of us. But by picturing the commitment like you were doing it today, it makes it easier to be able to arbitrate what is a good use of time and also what is not. He started doing that, and it took a couple of weeks because he had to work through the queue. But all of a sudden, he was starting to find time. Half hour a day, an hour a day, 90 minutes, once or twice a week, to sit down, to plan, to do deep work, to schedule the strategic meetings, to get in conversation with his team about things they'd been planning to do for a long time but were never getting to. It is a starting point. It can't be alone, your time management system, but it's a place to begin tactically, to get control of your calendar. Interestingly, Scott Keller is coming back on the Show. He's with McKinsey here in a couple of weeks. And we talk about some of the practices that top CEOs use when they take on the job for the first time. And this is one of the things that comes up in their research that some of the CEOs do as a practice, actually thinking through when requests come in. If I had to make this commitment today with the time and resources I have, would I still say yes? And if I would, to be able to do that and do it joyfully, and if I. If I'm not to be able to say no now or to find another resource before it's taken up time on the calendar that's better used for someone else, picture tomorrow's commitment today. That's the fourth tactic. And now number five, this one's a little weird, so stick with me for a second. Hold a funeral. I don't mean for a person, I mean a thing. Let me explain. A while back, one of the directors in our academy who was overseeing a large software team, came to one of our sessions and said, I have a problem I need your help with. We as an organization, our team have been using this software package internally to build software for clients for years. Our team loves the software, I love the software. And unfortunately, our larger organization, the Enterprise, has decided that they are no longer going to pay the license fees for the software because it's expensive. And instead they want us to use a much cheaper package where we now have to use multiple different pieces of software. It's less good. It, yes, it saves a little money on the front end, but it's actually going to cause the team more work. It's going to cause issues. We've all been in situations like this in organizations, right? And they had done the good work over the last month or two prior that of trying to make the business case, influencing up talking to the senior people and saying, hey, this is a mistake. We shouldn't be making this change. And she'd lost the software was going away. The team knew that, and everyone, understandably, was really grumbly about it. And she came to us and said, hey, I want the software to stay too. But the reality is, is that this change is happening. It's done, it's been decided, it's already been done, it's out of the budget. How do I help people to transition and process this change in a way that's healthy and to move to the new system, inferior as it is. And we talked through this and we talked about different ways that she might help the team process change. And I had a few ideas and a couple other folks had a few ideas. And then finally someone said, oh, you just need to hold a funeral. And we all said, wait, what? And then she explained, she said, no, no, no, just hold a funeral. We did this in our organization a while back. We had a system that changed and they had to sunset it. And what we did is we got everyone together in a room one afternoon and we had a lunch and we decided to just hold a funeral for the thing that was going away. And she said, you just need to invite someone to write a eulogy and then have someone, have someone bring the food. And then people talk about it and it's like a. It's like an ending point. And we all sort of thought about that and thought, wow, what a, what a weird thing to do. And yet it does kind of sound like something that maybe would be helpful in a situation like this. And our director who had brought the situation said, ooh, I love it. It's exactly what we're going to do. She went back into the organization with her team. They decided to hold a funeral. They booked the conference room and folks showed up and gave speeches about how much they loved the software and all the things they were going to miss about it. Someone had written a eulogy, someone did cardboard of making a headstone out of things on the board. People did a set up a buffet. It was like a whole event. People from other departments ended up hearing about it and coming to attend the funeral. It went from this huge issue on the team to what she described later as literally the most hilarious day of her career. I've seen all these people come together and talk about the little tabs on the screen and why when it clicks this way, I love it. And it was hilarious. And also what was really interesting is that afterwards, people still weren't happy with the change, but they were ready to move on having that event, that moment of just marking, hey, this thing is ending. Let's all grieve together. It gave people agency to take the step for what's next. Now, there is a lot of change happening in the world right now and in a lot of organizations. This is not the right answer for every ending. Maybe not even for most endings, but once in a while, a little humor can go a long way to help people process change and have agency over their feelings. If you find yourself in a similar situation and looking for an ending of a thing or a process or software or whatever, maybe consider holding a funeral for it. All right, so let's review the first one. Redirect versus respond. If you're at the inflection point right now of no longer needing or wanting to be the point person for everything, if you're working on delegation, redirecting versus responding, a helpful place to start, that may be where you begin. Secondly, set team norms. If the inflection point you're at right now is a new team starting or maybe about to begin, or maybe you've taken over leadership of a team recently, or a team's combining, there's been a reorg setting team norms, a place to start. Number three, asking a second question. If the inflection point you're at is no longer doing the work so much yourself, but enabling others to do the work, developing their skills, wanting to listen more effectively, wanting to hear more about what's happening in the organization. Asking a second question is a great place to start. And by the way, if you don't know what that second question is in every situation, that's okay. A great starting point is listening to episode 237. Michael Bungay Stanier, the author of the Coaching Habit, and I had a conversation about the seven questions that are in his book that are just great starting points. Pick one of those questions, get started, maybe read the Coaching Habit. It's a great starting point for just thinking about how you get a little bit more coach. Like the fourth one Picture tomorrow's commitment today. This is a helpful starting point if the inflection point you're at is I need to spend more time at elevation and getting to altitude, thinking big picture and thinking three, six, 12 months ahead, planning, strategy, deep work, and I can't find the time on my calendar for it. Picture tomorrow's commitment today. Before you say yes, that may be your starting point to begin to find some of that margin. And then finally, of course, number five, Hold a funeral. If there's an ending happening right now, an ending for a thing, a process, software, procedure, whatever that is, a funeral may just be the humor, may just be the point of agency and people to express their feelings. That helps people to move forward. I would love to know which one of these you put into practice. If you're at any similar inflection points and what happens when you do, send me an email@feedbackoachingforleaders.com to tell me. Especially if you hold a funeral, I would love to hear about it and what you did. You know, the hard part about inflection points is that they don't go in straight lines and you don't get through them instantly. In fact, you get through them sustainably when you experiment, test, get feedback, listen, and then take the next step. Just like I shared in these five examples, it's a process. That's exactly why it's helpful to have structure, accountability and support while you're doing it. That's why I've been leading the Coaching for leaders Academy since 2015, 10 years now. Because the best leaders I know not only get past inflection points, but also learn how to thrive through them and then use that practice at the next inflection point. Our Academy cohorts are all small group coaching spaces of five to seven leaders every session. Led personally by me, we work together to help each other thrive through those inflection Points if you're at an inflection point right now, it's the right time for you to consider the Academy. Here's where you need to go. Coaching4leaders.com academy the entire structure of the Academy is there details, common questions, and most important, the application. It is a application based program and I'm accepting applications right now through this Friday the 12th. It's the last time this year we're planning to open the Academy, so set your calendar or set a reminder for this Friday so you make it there before then. Again, the link you need is coaching4leaders.com academy or just go over to coaching4leaders.com and you'll see the Academy button at the top of the page there. Until Friday or here in the notes of this episode of this audio on your podcast app. If you're leading well, you're going to hit inflection points. Our job in the Academy is not just to get you through that, but to help you thrive. Thanks for listening in and I'm back on Monday with the next regular episode.