Ready, Willing and Able

After years in corporate life, I've learnt to be curious about the timing of conversations.

Particularly coaching conversations.

Now, if your experience is anything like mine, you may have encountered the word coaching used interchangeably with performance management.

You know the type.

"James, can we have a quick coaching conversation?"

Which sometimes translated to:

"Let's walk into this room where I'll tell you everything you've done wrong for the next hour, and then you can walk out feeling considerably worse than when you entered."

Perhaps you've had periods in your career when you weren't shooting the lights out on every performance metric.

I certainly have.

And perhaps you've encountered the dreaded Performance Improvement Plan — the PIP — accompanied by the promise that you'll receive "more coaching" to improve X, Y or Z.

Now, don't get me wrong.

I believe supporting people to improve their performance is both noble and necessary.

Done well, performance management can be an act of good leadership.

But I do object to the word coaching becoming synonymous with:

You're in trouble.

That's a story for another day.

The question I'm more interested in is:

Is now actually the right time to have this coaching conversation?

Brown-Out Scared

About 15 years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a National Executive meeting on behalf of my boss's boss.

I was excited.

And terrified.

Thinking almost brown-out scared, if you catch my meaning.

So I prepared.

Then prepared some more.

I knew every possible statistic.

I knew the statistic underneath the statistic.

I understood the commercials.

I knew the performance of the colleagues in my care.

And I knew our customers.

I'd been selling insurance to them for years.

I was:

GOOD. TO. GO.

Or so I thought.

This was long before video meetings became something we casually joined from the kitchen table.

If you wanted to meet virtually, you booked a special meeting room, fired up the Cisco equipment and connected one meeting room to another meeting room somewhere else in the country.

The only room I could book was ridiculously large for one person.

But it was free.

So there I sat.

Alone.

In my enormous meeting room.

Waiting.

Welcome to the Room

One by one, the other locations connected.

Onto the screens appeared people from around the country.

People I admired.

And, if I'm being truthful, people I was also a little scared of.

My SCARF trigger around status was firing beautifully.

Thanks, David Rock.

Then something happened that completely changed what I thought the tone of the meeting was going to be.

The most senior person there — the EGM — welcomed me.

Not with a passing acknowledgement.

Not with:

"James is filling in today."

He stopped.

And said something along the lines of:

"James, thanks for joining us today. We're really excited that you're here. Nitesh has been telling us about your career journey to this point, and as a team we decided last week that if you need anything, all of us are committed to dropping tools and helping you out. We want to see you succeed during this secondment."

I was blown away.

And I knew he meant it.

He'd already demonstrated it.

This was the same leader who had previously picked up the phone early one morning, talked me through his leadership legacy and helped me begin constructing mine.

But then he did something else.

Something I've carried with me ever since.

What Do You Need to Leave at the Door?

Before we got into the agenda, he said we were going to talk about our readiness for the meeting.

He gave us two questions.

The first:

"On a scale of 1 to 10, how ready are you to be open, honest, challenged and productively challenging so that we can get the best out of our time together?"

And importantly:

"Why did you give yourself that score?"

Then came the second question:

"What do you need to leave at the door to increase it?"

And then he spoke directly to me.

"James, jump in whenever you're ready. I know this might be new, so there's no pressure to answer immediately. I'm genuinely interested in understanding where you're at today."

What happened next was extraordinary to me.

People answered honestly.

Senior executives.

Experienced leaders.

People occupying very different positions in the organisational hierarchy.

There was plenty of status in that room.

But for those few minutes, status wasn't the point.

People spoke about what they were carrying into the meeting.

Frustrations.

Distractions.

Assumptions.

Things that had happened earlier that day.

Things they needed to put aside.

And in doing so, something changed.

We became ready for the conversation we were about to have.

Needing Coaching Isn't the Same as Being Ready for It

Years later, those two questions still influence how I think about coaching conversations.

Because someone can absolutely need coaching...

and still not be ready for coaching.

That's an important distinction.

Think back to the traditional performance conversation.

Someone is told they're underperforming.

They're worried about their job.

Perhaps they're angry.

Embarrassed.

Defensive.

They might believe the process is unfair.

They might not trust the person sitting opposite them.

And then we say:

"Right. Let's coach you."

Are they ready?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Perhaps there's something that needs to be left at the door first.

Perhaps trust needs to be established.

Perhaps they need to feel heard.

Perhaps expectations need to be clarified.

Perhaps there's a completely different conversation that needs to happen before coaching can begin.

Because coaching isn't something you do to another person.

For coaching to work, they have to participate in it.

Ready

So how do you know if you're ready for coaching?

I think that EGM gave me part of the answer all those years ago.

Are you ready to be:

Open?

Honest?

Challenged?

And perhaps even more importantly, are you willing to challenge your own thinking?

You don't need to arrive with everything figured out.

That would rather defeat the purpose.

You don't even need to know exactly what you want to work on.

But you do need some willingness to put what's really happening on the table.

Including the uncomfortable bits.

Especially the uncomfortable bits.

Willing

Then there's willingness.

You can understand perfectly well that something needs to change without actually wanting to change it.

I've been there.

Most of us have.

Sometimes we want the outcome without wanting what the outcome requires from us.

We want the promotion without changing how we lead.

We want the relationship to improve without having the difficult conversation.

We want more confidence without doing the uncomfortable thing that might build it.

We want things around us to change while remaining exactly the same ourselves.

A coach can't manufacture willingness for you.

They can explore it with you.

Challenge it.

Help you understand what's underneath the resistance.

But ultimately, you have to decide whether you're willing to do something with what emerges.

Able

And finally, there's able.

Not ability in the sense of being talented enough.

I mean:

Do you actually have the capacity to engage in this right now?

Sometimes the answer genuinely is no.

Perhaps you're navigating a crisis.

Perhaps something significant is happening outside work.

Perhaps you're so overloaded that adding another commitment isn't going to help.

Perhaps you need advice, support, training, counselling, mentoring or something entirely different.

Good coaching should be able to recognise that too.

Not every problem is a coaching problem.

And not every moment is the right moment for coaching.

What Are You Bringing Into the Room?

That executive meeting taught me something much bigger than how to prepare for a meeting.

It taught me that before asking people to contribute, challenge, reflect or grow, it's worth understanding what they're carrying into the room.

I still think about those two questions.

How ready am I for this conversation?

And:

What do I need to leave at the door?

They're remarkably simple questions.

But they're also deeply respectful ones.

They acknowledge that we're human.

We don't walk into conversations as blank sheets of paper.

We bring our history.

Our successes.

Our failures.

Our fears.

Our assumptions.

Our egos.

Our hopes.

Our bad mornings.

And occasionally, our brown-out-inducing fear of sitting in a National Executive meeting.

Are You Ready for Coaching?

You don't need to have a crisis.

You don't need to have everything figured out.

And you certainly don't need to wait until someone puts you on a performance plan.

But I think you need three things.

You need to be ready to look honestly at where you are.

You need to be willing to explore where you could be.

And you need to be able to do something with what you discover.

You don't have to score yourself a ten.

In fact, I'm usually more interested in why someone gave themselves a seven than hearing an automatic ten.

Maybe you're a six.

That's okay.

The interesting question is the one I was asked all those years ago:

What would help move you to a seven?

Because perhaps being ready for coaching isn't about arriving completely prepared.

Perhaps it simply begins with being willing to walk into the room...

and honestly say where you're at.