Impact coaching for performance improvement (2)

Programming is the habits of thoughts we have that lead to habits of behaviour” (Pip McKay).

Clients come for coaching because they desire something new or something different, usually because they want something more. It could be that they want to make certain changes, and they need the coach to support and facilitate the desired change. In this regard, they want certain outcomes, which could relate to their life, career, personality, business, relationship etc. As a result, the success or failure of any coaching engagement is traceable to the outcomes. Are the outcomes well formed? Are they clearly understood? Are they realistic, attainable, or even possible outcomes?

Ensuring this is a fundamental responsibility of the top management of every organisation. In helping to facilitate this, an organisational or business coach would necessarily seek the following questions: How much do the people know about their present and desired state? How much is the desire and motivation to achieve goals? What is the quality (motive) and intensity (drive) of the motivation? Is there enough energy present in the system to activate performance? Is the change motivated by pleasure (pull factors) or by pressure (push factors)?

Ninety percent of all coaching is based on conversation between the coach and the client, where questions are generated and answers are provided, as progress is steadily made towards the unlocking of the dreams, desires, capacities and all that are stored up within the client. It is like a dance, where the dancing couple may strut up and down the dancing floor, moving in unison and in step to the rhythm of the music. The dance is actually within the dancers, and the music only makes it come out.

Just as the music gives the dancers the cue and beat to move with, so does the reality of the client produce the ‘cue’ and ‘beat’ for the ‘coaching dance’. It is the reality that a client and coach are both feeling that inevitably uncovers the accumulated layers of meanings, beliefs, and frames that need to be dealt with during the coaching process. And, since the coach has to depend on the client for answers (and not the other way round), the coach employs the tools of questioning to guide the process.

It is the structure and process for forming desired outcomes that makes coaching truly transformational. Even before the coaching process wears in, both the coach and client can very clearly determine, see and often feel the outcomes. Goal-setting is therefore at the very heart of performance coaching. If you want to really know how to set and achieve great performance goals, try coaching.

For a performance goal to be well-formed in design, the outcome must meet the following criteria:

Positive representation – You must state clearly what you want, and create a movie in your mind of life beyond the present challenge.

Empirical in nature – Outcomes must be stated in sensory-based terms (see-feel-hear) actions and behaviours.

Specific context – The context of the outcome must relate to where, when, with whom, how often, etc.

Action steps – There must be clearly stated actions and/or processes that bring about movement in the right directions.

Personal centred – The outcomes must primarily be within your control to initiate and maintain.

Resourcefulness – There must be the description of the needed resources and how they would be experienced in real time.

Evidence procedure – This relates to how you would know when you have arrived at the destination – how do you know that you have succeeded?

Forecasting – You must be able to locate your time-line, so that the action steps and pathway fits into your sense of the future.

The well-formed outcome pattern gives us a clear way to think about moving away from the aversions that presently exists, or that could arise if there is no change toward our expected and desired outcome. I referred to this in my book, Business Intelligence as the pull and push factors; the pleasure and pain scenario; and the carrot and stick possibilities. All these describe one major thing in realistic goal-setting in performance improvement. It is that you are either running toward something (positive or pleasurable) or running from something (painful or pressurizing), hence the desire for a change.

This pattern therefore hands over the responsibility for achieving the outcomes completely to the client and also facilitates the client’s ownership process. The pattern also enables the coach and client to have a valuable reference tool by which the progress of the coaching partnership can be measured during and at the completion of the coaching engagement.

So, what is your vision and what actions would you take in order to accomplish your vision? What capabilities are necessary to reach the goal? Which of the capabilities do you already possess and which other capabilities do you need to develop? All of these knowledge-capacity gaps are bridged through coaching. The major requirement is your wiliness to go further and achieve even loftier goals. It is all about having the right belief systems that the coach can work with.

Emmanuel Imevbere