Coaching The Missing Ingredient To Performance Management Transcript

Insight on Coaching Coaching: The Missing Ingredient to Performance

Management Transcript

Prepared for:

IEC: Insight Educational Consulting

Prepared by:

Ubiqus Reporting

2

Confidential | October 22, 2008

Coaching: The Missing Ingredient to Performance Management Transcript

Time Speaker Transcript

0:25 Tom Floyd Hello, everyone, and welcome to Insight on Coaching.

Insight on Coaching explores the many facets, flavors, and sides of the professional coaching field.

I'm Tom Floyd, the CEO of Insight Educational Consulting and your host for today's show.

Well, today's show is dedicated to performance management.

Now, throughout our show, we've heard that many companies are continuing to embrace professional coaching as a strategic element of their performance management systems, and we've heard this so frequently that we really wanted to have a show that provided an overview of how and where coaching can be integrated into a company's performance management process. I'm personally pretty excited about today's show.

Performance management is something that myself and that my company discusses with clients on a daily basis.

I live it, I breathe it, and I'm definitely a firm believer that coaching is absolutely a critical component in a successful performance management solution.

In fact, as many of our listeners know, I believe it so much that I have two coaches myself to help hold me accountable for my own performance.

But in terms of really getting our arms around how coaching fits into a performance solution, we're going to have a lot of ground to cover today, and to give us as much time as possible.

I want to go ahead and jump right into today's discussion.

We have four guests on today's show who'll be sharing their perspectives and experience in integrating coaching with performance management. And let me go ahead and give a quick overview of each of our four guests.

Our four guests today, Schweta Khare, Doctor Jeremy Lurey, Michele Volpe and Celia Young.

I will start with Schweta.

3




1:45 Tom Floyd Shweta Khare is the founder and president of Careerbright Career Coaching Services.

Shweta specializes in coaching women who are in career transition or struggling to re-enter the workforce after an employment history gap, and is also passionate about helping career women who struggle with work-life balance issues.

Shweta is also the co-chairperson of the Career Resource Center at ICC in Milpitas, California, where she organizes and speaks at monthly career workshops and seminars. She has an upcoming book: BEYOND THE CAREER GAP– The Complete Plan for Women RE-ENTERING the WORKFORCE IN THE 21ST CENTURY, and her Blog http://careerbright.blogspot.com has been listed as one of the best career sites by CHIMBY.

Shweta has her Masters of Technology degree from IIT Roorkee in India, and is a member of the International Association of Career Coaches (IACC).

Welcome back to the show Shweta!

2:54 Schweta Khare

Thank you, Tom. Glad to be on the show.

2:55 Tom Floyd Great to have you back.

Our next guest is Doctor Jeremy Lurey.

Dr. Jeremy S. Lurey is the Founder and Principal of Plus Delta Consulting, LLC.

Dr. Lurey specializes in organization and leadership development and works closely with his clients to manage large-scale organizational change initiatives.

With more than 12 years experience as a management consultant, he has worked with clients ranging from small start-up operations to Fortune 100 corporations.

Jeremy has particular expertise in transforming business processes, facilitating executive and management development, and enhancing team performance.

He’s also written several publications on organization development, leadership excellence, change management, and virtual team effectiveness.

Before establishing Plus Delta, he worked at both PricewaterhouseCoopers and Andersen Consulting.

Welcome back to the show Jeremy.

http://careerbright.com/

http://careerbright.blogspot.com/

4




3:41 Jeremy Lurey Thanks, Tom.

Great to be with you.

3::43 Tom Floyd Our next guest is Michele Volpe.

Michele Volpe is a certified coach, having completed the Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara’s professional coaching program in November, 2004.

Combined with her 18 years of corporate executive experience leading communications functions at firms including The Walt Disney Company, Barclays Global Investors, Charles Schwab and Silicon Graphics, Michele brings a strong and experienced business orientation to her coaching work with business leaders.

As a coach, Michele has worked successfully with business leaders and executives to enhance their skills and capabilities in the areas of professional and personal growth and development, including leadership, communication, and influencing and conflict management.

Michele has a master’s degree in international management from the American Graduate School of International Management and a BA in French from the University of California, Davis.

Welcome back to the show Michele.

4:28 Michele Volpe

Thanks so much, Tom.

Great to be here.

5




4:30 Tom Floyd Great to have you back.

And our last guess is Celia Young.

She is president of CELIA YOUNG & ASSOCIATES, INC. has provided coaching and consulting services to FORTUNE 500 companies for over 20 years.

She helps her clients develop vision and strategies to manage “change” in their businesses worldwide.

Celia is a faculty member of the Gestalt Institute of the Cleveland, Organization System Development Center where she teaches the theory, concept and application of Gestalt in the development of individual, groups and organization.

She is also uniquely qualified in the coaching and development of “Whole Person” leadership. Additionally, she is a professional speaker on Pacific Rim cultures, cross-cultural communication, organizational behavior, organizational change, multicultural leadership, diversity and creativity, and multicultural marketing strategies.

Welcome back to the show Celia.

5:18 Celia Young Nice to be here.

5:19 Tom Floyd Now, today's show is going to be a group discussion. I'm going to pose questions to all of our guests as a panel to get the group's thoughts and to kind of set the stage I want to start out with a big picture question.

A lot of people have different definitions of what performance management is, and it gets used in the same sentence with a lot of other terms, sometimes like talent management and human capital management, and things like that.

Just to set the stage for the show, I want to kind of get the group's perspective on a consistent definition that can use for performance management today.

So the first question is what's your definition of performance management?

Michele, let's start with you.

6




6:01 Michele Volpe Well, I would say performance management encompasses the whole gamut, the spectrum of feedback that helps a leader or a manager. It's actually for all employees, usually, in an organization.

Identify how they need to grow their skills and capabilities.

Some of it's formal in the way of performance reviews or 360-degree feedback, and a lot of it can be informal, as well in the process of providing a leader, an employee with kind of a road map, part of that generated by the individual, him or herself, as in where do they want to go in their career, and part of it from their manager, and the whole process of training, coaching individual skills development that a person goes through to develop themselves along the way.

6:51 Tom Floyd So includes both, from your perspective, formal aspects of things like 360 feedbacks, and annual reviews, and things like that down to informal things like ongoing feedback, and roadmaps for development, and things like that as well.

7:04 Michele Volpe I think so.

7:05: Tom Floyd Okay.

Got it.

Schweta, anything that you would add?

7:08 Schweta Khare

Yeah.

Just that there's definitely [phonetic] an ongoing process that I feel.

It should be carried on, not as a one-step process, but an ongoing process of planning, preparing, implementing, and monitoring career progress, and it's part of an individual responsibility as well, because as a coach, I feel that sometimes employees depend on the managers that will give the performance review or the performance management should come from the manager, or from the top bosses, but it is an ongoing process, and a responsibility for the individual to use the organization's resources, and use a system.

So it goes through all this process of the performance review and a follow up action plan that actually eliminates the complete process, and that's what I feel about the performance management as a whole.

7




8:00 Tom Floyd Now action plans—It’s interesting you bring that up.

I’m going to hold onto that for now. It’s definitely something that I want to bring up later in our discussion, but Celia and Jeremy, I want to go ahead and turn to both of you as well.

Anything that you would add in terms of what your perspectives or definitions are of performance management?

8:18 Celia Young This is Celia.

I think so far I haven’t heard something mentioned, so I thought I would.

8:25 Tom Floyd Okay.

8:26 Celia Young Performance and talent had to be fit—so the way we work had to fit the business objective, so in other words, whatever you do, if you really treat employees and managers as assets, then you had to do investment, just like any investment in the company.

How do you fit the business objective?

And how do set a certain kind of standards where people have to be held accountable for?

So whether it is coaching, whether it is looking out for the whole career life cycle for an executive had to fit into what this business is all about.

9:05 Tom Floyd So really making sure that it’s also associated with the business side of the equation as well?

9:11 Celia Young Yes.


Yeah, it definitely seems like that would be important to me as well. Jeremy, any thoughts?

8




9:18 Jeremy Lurey Sure.

Let me just add, and I agree with everything that’s been said so far, so let me just go back and reinforce a couple of things.

You were leading to before talent management strategies or human capital strategies as they’re often called.

Performance management is a critical component of an organization’s talent management strategy. It is not the end-all be-all. It is a piece of it.

So it’s important for people to recognize that it does fit into the larger picture, and unfortunately, I still even think today many organizations think performance management is that annual HR process that someone makes you do to fill out a review on your direct report, and it’s really not the case.

It’s much larger than that around setting goals, providing feedback, either formal or informally to employees, helping them identify what their learning plan is.

And I forget who it was before who mentioned this, but really, there are two critical roles within performance management.

There’s the manager, who helps identify new learning needs for their employees, actively participates in building their skills and helping them take on new tasks—they build those skills. And it’s also the employee’s responsibility.

We worked in many organizations where employees say, I haven’t had a review three years, or nine years—whatever.

Well, it’s an employee’s responsibility to make this important as well, so you can’t just wait for a manager to come to you. In many organizations, the employee needs to take the initiative and say, how am I doing, and really start that dialogue around performance.

10:44 Tom Floyd Got it.

There are several things there. I was frantically scrambling notes here, but there are a lot of different components to performance management and I want to touch more on some of those things as well.

Just from a terminology perspective, do all of you feel that performance management and career development, as two different phrases, do you feel those are phrases that can be used synonymously, or do you feel—and it sounds like we might feel towards the latter—that performance management is larger than just career development.

9




11:19 Jeremy Lurey Absolutely.

This is Jeremy.

I would just say performance management is the larger piece. Career development is one aspect of a complete performance management program.

11:28 Tom Floyd Any thoughts from anyone else?

11:30 Celia Young I agree with you.

This is Celia.

Unfortunately, a lot of clients that I run into, they speak the terms, but they don’t really have any strategy or program to follow up, so at the end of day, like Jeremy said, it’s nothing but a performance evaluation system, and that, to me, isn’t enough.

11:52 Tom Floyd And that’s one of the challenges I think that I see from a consultant perspective as well, as first just trying to sort out how they’re using the terms, then kind of getting them to see kind of how they all interrelate as well.

Now, another important distinction to make, because this is one that gets thrown in there as well, is the difference between performance management and performance improvement, and Michele, I’m going tot turn to you. In your mind, what’s the difference between performance management and performance improvement?

10




12:22 Michele Volpe Wow, I should have read up on my business terminology before today’s show.

No, I’m just kidding.

I think the difference is that performance management is all about how are you doing in your job, what are you doing well, where do you need to improve and grow, what’s the overall feedback to how you’re doing on the job?

That’s performance improvement.

Where do you need to grow, and performance management is the whole picture. Where are you today? Where do you need to be overall, whether that’s improving or simply growing your skills, taking on new responsibilities, new job assignments—that sort of thing.

So I would say improvement is a piece of the overall performance management pie.


Got it.

Well, let’s go ahead and go on pause for a second. I’m hearing the music for our first break.

15:59 Tom Floyd More specifically, how coaching can fit into an organization’s overall performance management solution.

When we left off, we were just setting the stage.

We talked about the definition of what performance management is.

We talked about how that’s different from career development, and we also talked about, or were starting to talk about the difference between performance management and performance improvement.

Just to go ahead and get one last thought on that, Jeremy, from your perspective, what do you see is the difference between performance management and performance improvement?

11




16:38 Jeremy Lurey In most of my experience, Tom, working with clients, performance improvement becomes that dreaded plan that people put into place when people are struggling in their roles.

It’s the new PC lingo for corrective action plan.

And actually, our mission is improving performance through positive change, so I have nothing against the term performance improvement.

I use it quite a bit in my world, but when I end up talking to clients about performance improvement, they tend to refer to someone who is struggling, not really meeting expectations, and what do we do to help them improve their performance, so I think there’s, at least on the street, a real differentiator there between performance management, the broader program we’ve talked about more strategically intended to help people develop their skills and grow their careers, as opposed to the plan that people get put on when they’re failing.

17:28 Tom Floyd And I would say that I agree with that as well.

That’s the way that I kind of group it in my own head, too.

I know for some people, when they hear the term performance improvement, too, when I talk to some of our clients about that, there’s a definite fear that kind of comes on some people’s eyes that’s like there’s a more negative perception around performance improvement, because again, like you mentioned, it’s kind of a PC term for corrective action in a lot of cases.

Well, moving on.

So we’ll start to talk about how coaching can fit into performance management systems.

Are all of you seeing an increase in the number of organizations who are starting to integrating coaching into their performance management systems?

Celia, let’s start with you.

12




18:10 Celia Young I would say a mix.

Once again, those organizations do see talent management and performance management as part of the overall structure of looking at developing their people.

Yes, they would have a coach pool for their people to at least engage if it’s not too many hours of coaching, but at least they do enough of it so it’s sort of enhancing their performance.

And then there are other clients who still have to do coaching sort of under the radar screen, so it’s an individual event, but not at a system level of plan, so that’s how I see it.

18:54 Tom Floyd So when you say it’s under the radar, it’s not that it’s officially being communicated as a part of the formal performance management process. It’s being done one on one.

Some organizations could be doing it, and some organizations aren’t doing it necessarily.

19:11 Celia Young Yeah, because it’s all related to what the conversation you just had about how you see coaching.

Same thing as how do you see performance improvement.

If you see coaching as a remedial sort of thing, then they will have to do it under the radar screen.

Even the person who gets coached gets so much benefit from it, but if you see performance improvement as an overall developmental tool, to get the entire staff upgraded to the 21st century, then they wouldn’t have to be under the radar screen.


Schweta, anything that you would add?

13




19:46 Schweta Khare

Well, Tom, in that context, I would like to mention what Celia said. I was reading a book titled, “Survival of the Savvy: High Integrity Political Tactics for Career and Company Success,” and in that I would like to quote a few lines that really struck on the same chord, was that in physical health, you don’t have to be sick to get even healthier.

Likewise, you don’t have to be in trouble to receive development executive coaching.

So this process has to be understood as the management and the human resources, the HR level at the need to integrate coaching or performance management, performance improvement strategies and plans into the system, not as something that has to come up when you see that the employee performance or the leadership skills, or if something executive problems are happening, and then you need to call in a coach.

So I do feel that there is a widespread trend right now in the U.S., and the trend for coaching—the executive coaching, the corporate coaching, the performance improvement and the leadership skills coaching—is taking off, but as Celia says, it depends how well you are integrating it into the system, how well the management is supporting it, how well the HR management systems are taking it into the process as a company requirement, or a company process, not as just calling in the coaches now and then, but to have it in a complete process.

21:18 Tom Floyd And I am consistently amazed throughout both our current season with the conferences that I’ve been to in the past several months as well about how much is coming up about the desire to not have coaching framed as a fix it solution.

That is a question that I have, actually, for all of you later in the show as well, but just from a perception perspective alone, getting more organizations to see it as, you know, don’t see it as fix it—see it as growth, see it as self-realization.

Things like that.

The next question that I really want to move into is a success story question.

I want to turn to all of you and say can you give me an example that you think exemplifies the successful integration of coaching and traditional performance management, and can you speak a little bit in that example to what really worked well.

Michele, let’s start with you.

14




22:14 Michele Volpe Yeah.

I’d like to just piggyback on the last question for a second first, though, and just say that one of the exciting developments I’ve been noticing is just the integration of coaching into the performance management culture of a lot of companies, and actually developing coaching skills within leaders themselves so that they can do a better job of performance management with their employees, and I’m seeing a lot of companies put resources and time and effort into giving managers, equipping managers with those skills—those coaching skills—so that they can do a better job of giving feedback, and helping employees understand where they are with their own performance, so I am seeing that as a trend with the clients I’m working with.

In terms of an example of a successful situation, I think one of the clients I worked with, a senior executive in a bank in the Midwest, had some feedback from his review that he was doing well technically, he was a very competent performance, so overall doing quite well, but really needed to beef up his visibility, increase his leadership presence. His natural style lent itself to being to promoting himself in a positive way.

He tended to be too much in the background, so coaching became his way of practicing these skill sets, getting comfortable with how he could communicate differently, elevate his presence, network more efficiently, and it’s a really nice partnership, because the coaching gave him the opportunity to practice those new skills in a way that felt comfortable and then go out and start to put those into action.

So he was able to do that really effectively.

24:04 Tom Floyd And how did he find time available to him?

Had it been communicated from HR or something like that, that hey, this is an option for you?

24:12 Michele Volpe I’m sorry.

I missed the beginning of that.

24:14 Tom Floyd In terms of how he found out that coaching was available to him, was this—I think you mentioned it was a banking environment.

Was it that HR within the bank, or another group like that—

15




24:28 Michele Volpe This is available to a wide variety of leaders.

It started at the very top and went down to even the manager level, so the organization has really started to embrace coaching as a key component of performance development.


Excellent.

I want to turn to the rest of the group.

Any success stories that you can share where you’ve really see an organization successfully integrate coaching in traditional performance management?

24:56 Jeremy Lurey This is Jeremy, Tom.

I’ve got a couple of short examples for you, but just start to touch on how people take small baby steps to get to the maybe long term goal that you’re talking of, you know, the more fully integrated system.

I worked with one senior manager in an IT organization a few years ago, and it was amazing to me that performance management for her was that year end activity, HR made her do in December to document a lot of what was going on, and in coaching her around performance management and how she worked with her team, and how her managers worked with their direct reports.

It was amazing how a simple suggestion, like why don’t you print out occasional e-mails that you get when people say your folks are doing a good job and put them in folders throughout the years, so that at the end of the year you don’t have to try to remember what people were doing all year, or why don’t you ask project managers how your employees are doing on a periodic basis, as opposed to waiting until December when you’re now trying to justify the evaluation and pull it all together at one time?

So I think that gets at earlier around informal systems to make performance management a success at the end of the year so it is that kind of review-driven activity.


It’s about the formal aspects and the informal aspects, both really being equally important.

16




26:17 Jeremy Lurey More concretely for coaching and how feedback and working with senior leaders can really make a difference, but I worked with the president of a small consulting firm probably about a year ago, and was sharing some of our fundamentals on leadership excellence.

Coaching and giving feedback were some of those things that we have in our program, as I’m sure most of you all do as well, and it was interesting, after just a couple of months with working with him.

Sharing some of these fundamentals, he went into what you could call more of a hard conversation with an employee, partnering with the president to say you’re not excelling in these areas, we need you to shift gears and really pay attention, and how can we help you—it was really going to be one of those involved things. They had never given employee feedback, especially not for this person, but just in general.

The culture was not to provide feedback.

27:08 Tom Floyd They had never given feedback to anyone at all?

27:09 Jeremy Lurey No.

Really not in any structured way.

And the—

27:14 Tom Floyd And how did the employees feel about that?

I mean, was that something that people were asking for, saying hey, please give us feedback?

We need this?

17




27:20 Jeremy Lurey Here’s my point earlier about employees have some responsibility here. They weren’t asking loud enough to make a difference, and I think everybody was just so busy.

This is a smaller start up organization where they were quickly growing from 10 to 20 to 15 employees, and everybody was swamped, so the last thing they cared about was getting rich feedback, because they were just so busy, but in this one case, it was really interesting how the president had been through some of this coaching with me for a few months, was preparing his dialogue and his talking point for this feedback session, and he said to me kind of offhand, you know, if the CEO had gone through the same coaching, we probably wouldn’t need to prepare for this meeting at all.

We’d both be speaking off the same page, but since he has no clue what I’ve been doing with you, I’m going to actually schedule a session with him in advance so that we can go through this together, so that we can be on the same page, and we end up talking to the employee. And it was just really interesting to see how coaching one person just is not enough.

You really need to create a coaching culture.

You need to get the entire senior leadership team involved, and I’ve talked to clients from the past about I can work with you as long as you want, but until others are speaking the same language, it’s only going to get you so far, and he very quickly realized he would be at a disadvantage in this conversation with this other senior leader if the two of them weren’t speaking the same language and using the same tools and approaches.

28:39 Tom Floyd So it really was giving him a language to really have a more productive conversation if they had both had that around performance.

28:46 Jeremy Lurey Exactly.


Let’s go ahead and go on pause.

18




31:19 Tom Floyd Welcome back to Insight on Coaching.

For those of you just tuning in today, today’s show focuses on performance management.

More specifically, how coaching can fit in as a part of an overall performance management solution.

Now one of the points that we were just talking about, we were talking about successes in terms of some of the organizations out there that have really integrated coaching, have done it well, and one of the points that was made was around coaching really giving folks a similar language that they can use when they’re speaking to each other about performance, and I want to come back to that point, particularly as it relates to competencies and things like that as well, but before we move on, we talked about successes.

We also want to hear a little bit about the challenges as well, and in terms of the challenges, what are some of the biggest mistakes that some of you have seen organizations make when integrating coaching programs into their performance management systems?

Schweta, let’s start with you.

32:22 Schweta Khare

Okay, Tom.

Just to give a brief background about that, I feel that most of the companies, when they are thinking about performance management or asking for help through coaching, what they are thinking about is like why is the performance down or why is the enthusiasm down to present new ideas, or to work on the present ones, and why are employees just not performing to their best levels, or are they just doing the job on basis.

So all these things come in, and the HR, the management has to think about how do they need to meet these challenges and how can they address them effectively.

So for a few of the challenges that the companies meet would be on these lines, about the leadership skills, about seeing those deficiencies, or the employee enthusiasm, and the challenges—you want to talk about the challenges as the coaches?

33:19 Tom Floyd So, some of the challenges are—are you asking me from kind of the coach’s perspective, or the challenges that the organization has experienced?

More around the organizational piece.

19




33:28 Schweta Khare

Oh, the organization.

So mostly what I feel is that these are the basic challenges that they are encompassing right now is employee enthusiasm, employee performance, or even leadership or executive or corporate and leadership skills that they may be needed.

The other could be the teamwork.

What I feel right now in the present culture, we have a global work environment.

We have a diverse workforce, so a different kind of challenges that you come across is communication skills, a clean experience that perhaps the upper management of the people who are getting promoted, they don’t have experience with.

These are the different kinds of challenges that the organizations are going through presently, and they need to address it if they want to enhance the performance, and they have to make leadership or the team building skills stronger in their organization.

34:25 Tom Floyd Are any of you seeing challenges like organizations having unrealistic expectations about some of the results that coaching is going to bring to an organization?

34:37 Celia Young This is Celia.

I would follow the theme that Schweta put out when it comes to organization. Organization culture has been formed, not through just one day—years and years of working to get to that status quo, so the unrealistic expectation has to do with—continue to see [phonetic] that coaching can change the individuals, and so if you only coach individuals, made the individual perform a little better, but did you shift the culture?

And so it depends on what your intent is. A lot of times the organization culture is in question at this moment, because Schweta mentioned something.

The work force is changing. Also, the market is shifting, so if you think about it, multinational and global entity, can you still hang onto the status quo as what it is, and try to give the employees to conform?

If that is your intent through coaching, then there will be a lot of failure there, because folks are not just individuals, and—

20




35:47 Tom Floyd It triggers something that came up in a show a few weeks ago for me, too, is I think it was either Patrick Riley or Michael O’Connor that was talking about this, and they said that sometimes there’s an expectation that people are just—exactly what you’re saying—totally going to change, and then the person shows improvement, and then somebody speaks up and they saw an action that the person took or something.

They said, you know what? She’s doing it again. She’s doing it again. It didn’t do any good. She’s back to where she was before.

Is that kind of what you’re saying, too, that people are just expecting it to immediately cure them, and they’re supposed to be perfect from this point going forward?

36:21 Celia Young Actually, no.

I’m trying to present a little bit different view.

It’s not about whether people catch you next time you do the old way, which is what I call habitual pattern.

What I’m really saying is what’s the organizational expectation on the individual member of that organization?

Do we expect the individual to do all the changes to fit the organization, or at some point the culture has to shift so that they could see the employees are actually different.

They can’t all fit into the same old standard, because when you apply coaching, if you don’t look at that, then you run into resistance, and you feel that resistance is all bad coming from the individual, and we had to shift or we had to change them.

Reality really isn’t so, and especially in a multinational entity, you got folks come from all over the places.

37:15 Tom Floyd So does it come back to some of what a lot theorists would say about management in general as well, is that you can’t manage people all the same way? We’re all individuals.

We’re all going to need manage differently; we’re all going to respond differently to certain feedback and things like that. And the same thing with coaching.

37:31 Celia Young That’s right.

And I’d like to see organizations do more than just individual coaching.

21





Got it.

37:40 Michele Volpe Tom, one of the mistakes I think I’ve seen with organizations with regard to coaching and performance management is that they often reserve coaching for their most senior executive people, and it’s not necessarily offered broadly down to, say, the manager level where, obviously, managers facing a great number of employees can benefit as well, so I think thinking of it as a special perk only for the top echelon can be a problem for some organizations.

At the same time, those organizations that are getting it and are training their own leaders to become more coaches, in addition to using, say, external coaches, are starting to embrace it as a competency that all leaders should have, so I’m seeing the trend on both sides.

38:28 Tom Floyd So it’s almost like its something only if you’re a VP in the company, or kind of at the top of the food chain, it’s available to you, but not if you’re further down.

38:37: Michele Volpe Yeah, in some organizations.

And I think that’s really myopic, because obviously, coaching with performance management in particular can just be hugely helpful for the line leader who had a lot of direct employees reporting to him or her.

38:52 Tom Floyd It almost seems like, in some case to me, it could be more helpful in that level as well.

Now in terms of when it’s being introduced into a performance management process—coaching being introduced—how important have all of you found that is executive sponsorship in really driving the integration of coaching into performance management process, or it could also be the importance of executive sponsors saying this is why we’re doing it.

You know, these are the goals we’re hoping to achieve, this is why it’s available to you, and it’s okay type of thing.

Are you finding executive sponsorship is important?

22




39:29 Michele Volpe I would say it’s about as important as anything, but it’s like any other major initiative.

Everything in an organization starts, or many things start at the top, and if a senior executive will sponsor coaching and endorse it and come out as this is a serious commitment we’re making, we believe in it, we expect others to take advantage of this opportunity, and really implement what they learn as part of coaching, it opens so many doors and paves the way for the coaching to be successful, and reduces resistance.

It greases the wheel so much. You can still make coaching work effectively without executive sponsorship, but in my opinion, it’s just a huge leverage to move forward.

40:15: Tom Floyd Anything that anyone would add around the importance of executive sponsorship?

40:19 Jeremy Lurey Tom, this is Jeremy.

I think I would just reinforce that, absolutely. And we’ve been very fortunate with a Global 1000 organization just in the last few months to stop talking about talent management and really move forward in designing and implanting new programs, and the only reason it’s happening is because the CEO has said one of the three pillars for success this year is people, so that goes straight to the CFO, who says well, how are we going to build a world-class finance organization and retain our top talent?

And that really filters through the responsible ranks to well, we’ve now developed a two-year strategy around human capital and retaining top talent, and it goes through the entire employee life cycle starting with what are competency models and job descriptions for people, how are we going to recruit them?

Once we recruit them, what’s the career path? And we’re taking a very slow and steady approach where we may not even be talking about performance management per se right now.

That may be six months or a year off before we even look at coaching and managing performance more actively, but from the senior most levels of leadership, they’re now looking at talent, and ultimately, how do we build a world-class organization.

23




41:34 Tom Floyd So, a lot of things, I think that my organization is saying that we’re seeing as well is a lot of companies are taking an interest in competencies again. It’s coming up a ton, especially in sales—the sales parts of organizations.

Are any of you seeing more companies and organizations starting to try to tie coaching around competencies and things like that?

So if there are developments plans or road maps based on certain competencies, integrating coaching who kind of specialize in that competency to help further grow along some of those competency skills?

42:07 Celia Young Yes.

This is Celia. Some of these clients [phonetic] are moving, especially around—first of all, they’re basically revamping the entire competency system.

So in other words, set the standard, and then they go backwards to see what happened to their people.

Is there a gap between the two?

So then they put in—for instance, 360 has become a standard, so just like all the other—maybe not, but some—Meyers Brigg and all the other tools they use become standard, so now you could tie directly back to the individual, so there’s individual performance directly tied to the entire plan.


I hate to cut you off there, but I'm hearing the music for our last break.

Let’s go ahead and go on pause.

24




45:19 Tom Floyd Where we left off with today’s show, just to do a quick recap, this is on performance management, and how coaching can be part of a performance management solution. We were talking a little bit about, started to get into a discussion around how coaching can be tied to competencies, and things like that, within an organization.

Before we continue down that path, in our last segment, I’ve had a question that I’m dying to ask, because it’s something that I hear a lot from our clients and from other professionals about really driving performance management consistently throughout the year, and that what it relates to is that in many organizations, it seems like it’s difficult to get both managers and employees to focus on performance management consistently throughout the year, so that it’s not just a one-time event tied to an annual thing or things like that. It’s ongoing, discussions around performance between managers and employees.

And my question is from all of your perspectives, how can coaching help keep performance management top of mind for managers, employees within an organization throughout the year?

Who’d like to start?

46:35 Celia Young I will give it a shot.

46:36: Tom Floyd Okay. Go ahead.

46:39 Celia Young During the break, we talked about the resistance of clients who go to the last minute in deciding, and then also [phonetic] back away of a coaching program. Reality is many organizations have a certain amount of—a lot of certain amount of developmental dollars for each person. If you really look at it, it’s kind of pitiful in how much money they really allotted for per person’s development.

So the way to do it maybe is not about how much they can hire external consultants, or coaches to do the work to support ongoing. It’s to develop a coaching culture inside so that they use peers for each other in order to coach each other on an ongoing basis, and at the end of the day, evaluate not just individual performance, but as a group, how did they support each other in a way to improve their performance collectively?

And that will be one way to keep the coaching alive, so to speak.

25




47:39: Tom Floyd Okay.

What are everyone else’s thoughts?

Anything that you would add?

47:44 Michele Volpe This is Michele.

I think that the real value add of coaching is that a manager or worker, or somebody who’s working with a coach is really making a commitment on the part of—if it’s in an corporate environment—on the part of the company to work on performance on a regular basis. It’s not a one-time annual event, and that is truly what the value of coaching.

That ongoing work together means there are goals being set, hopefully new behaviors being practices, actions steps and planning so that it’s a fluid, consistent process and you’re seeing results along the way, and being accountable with your coach, and I think, really, it’s the key to making performance management more of an ongoing process, rather than an event-driven process.

48:39 Tom Floyd Do you feel that it encourages employees because they’re talking about their performance more frequently with the coach, for example?

Are you finding that it’s encouraging employees to have more frequent conversations with their managers about their performance and how they’re feeling, and things like that as well?

48:51 Michele Volpe I think so, and also with their own employees, if they, themselves, are managers.

It keeps the whole idea of performance management and growing your skills top of mind, and that’s a value add of coaching.

49:04 Tom Floyd And it sounds like, and I believe it was Jeremy that brought this up earlier in the show as well, that you’re saying, too, is that coaching really is helping to drive more accountability for the performance management process throughout the year.

26




49:15 Michele Volpe I think one of the things employees who are getting coached feel is this is a real gift, it’s a real resource to me, and most of them take it really seriously and want to leverage it.

I see them doing their homework; I see them practicing the new skills, taking on the new assignments, and taking on the tougher growing edges that they need to in order to grow and develop their own performance. So I think they see that that’s a big commitment on the part of the company, or if they’re paying for it themselves, and as a result, they take advantage of it.

49:56 Tom Floyd And we hear things, like this comes from things like organizations like the Society of Human Resource Management and others emphasize providing ongoing feedback in coaching are really critical components of not only a successful performance management systems, but it’s critical in keeping employees happy, like you just mentioned, and motivated in their roles.

We’ve done series of shows on the different generations this season as well, and that came up around millennials—in particular, the folks in the millennial generation who really value that feedback and getting that on an ongoing basis.

Are all of you seeing that, too, is that—it really, in terms of driving accountability in meeting that need that employees have to continuously get feedback about how they can grow and improve?

50:43 Michele Volpe Yeah. I was just going to add that because a coach is an objective third party, and it’s not the person’s manager, it’s a place to feel safe and really explore options, discuss fears and insecurities, perhaps, about performance issues, and really look at how do I move forward in these areas, whereas, with a manager, it’s just a little different relationship.

So I think the coach can really work with somebody in a truly sort of open environment to look at realistic ways to grow skills and capabilities.

51:18 Tom Floyd Jeremy, anything that you would add?

27




51:21 Jeremy Lurey I would just add in and maybe to touch back to something we heard earlier.

It really is about alignment into business strategy, keeping people in alignment so that they are not just meeting current expectations, but their jobs are growing, and they’re building new skills to continue to help the company in the future, and that’s a pivotal role for coaching to be that active reminder of where an organization is going, how you can continue to perform and also stretch yourself with smart goals, we’ve heard come up, or just, again, keeping yourself aligned with where the organization is heading, because as an individual employee, most people often get so tunnel focused on what they’re doing today, or what fires they have to fight tomorrow that they really don’t have that chance to take a strategic view into what’s going on.

I think coaching is critical for that.

52:09 Tom Floyd So it’s almost helping people step back and take a breath, kind of like take a breath, look up, look at what’s going on, see how you fit in.

52:16 Jeremy Lurey And I really see coaches as just a very visible reminder of what you need to do.

So taking a step back is a great way to frame it, Tom, of this person’s in front of me, I’m having this one-on-one session with my coach.

Oh, I really should step back and think about other things besides the e-mails that I’ve been sending out, or needing some planning for tomorrow, and without that coach, we tend to forget, or we tend to get preoccupied with other things.

52:42 Tom Floyd Do you find, as a coach, that the question of you is sitting down with somebody and you just ask them rather bluntly what your organization’s goals are for the year?

And what are your goals for the year, and you contribute to the organization’s goal?

Is that a question that one asks that seems to throw people off, or is that one that people feel like they can pretty readily answer?

28




53:02 Celia Young I wouldn’t think they throw people off. I will think it’s about they sometimes don’t—it’s like what Jeremy was saying—if you’re just managing the tree in front of you and forgot the forest, this actually is a good thing to remind them.

They are connected to the larger system.

53:21 Tom Floyd So in many cases, it’s viewed as helpful, like, yeah, there actually is more that’s going on here that I need to be aware of.

53:27 Celia Young Absolutely.

And as a coach, I always have to concentrate on—not concentrate—I need to be really put inside my own mind that this is bigger than just this person in front of me.


Well, huge thank you to all four of you today. I think this was a very valuable discussion.

And as always, huge thank to our listeners as well.

For more information about our show, you can look us up on the Voice America Business Channel.

You can also visit our newly redesigned website at www.ieconsulting.biz. They have a whole new section about the Insight on Coaching Show, and you can also feel free to e-mail me: [email protected].

Lastly, don’t forget you can access the podcast version of our show via Apple iTunes. Go to Music Store, click Podcast, and just enter Insight On Coaching in the search field.

Thanks everyone.

We’ll see you next week.

http://www.ieconsulting.biz/

mailto:[email protected]

Coaching The Missing Ingredient To Performance Management Transcript

Business

Transcript of Coaching The Missing Ingredient To Performance Management Transcript