Leveraging Article
LEVERAGE
News and Ideas for the April 13, 1998-No. 7
Organizational Learner Pegasus Communications
for more information or to visit Pegasus Communications, click on the
book cover below.
FROM THE FIELD - Partnership Coaching
at Xerox
Used by permission
In 1995, Seth Silver, manager of organizational
development for Xerox's Production Systems Group (PSG), received
the results from a 360-degree assessment of the division's managers
and knew it was time for change.
Managers within PSG-a 3,000-employee division
of the company located in Rochester, NY, and Los Angeles, CA-were
assessed by their bosses, their direct reports, their peers and
colleagues, and themselves. The managers received their lowest
assessments in developing talent and delivering meaningful feedback.
Their direct reports and peers indicated that the executives needed
to improve in four areas: identifying and addressing long- term
staffing problems, coaching others to develop needed skills, and
accurately identifying strengths and development needs in others,
and eliminating inefficiencies and road-blocks.
After reviewing the data with others,
Silver decided that a coaching program for the managers could address
their development requirements. Silver knew the traditional, expert
coaching model wouldn't meet the company's needs, so he explored
a form of coaching called partnership coaching. At Silver's request,
consultants Diane Cory and Rebecca Bradley developed a two-day
workshop for the managers based on the partnership coaching model.
Partnership coaching, which draws its
inspiration from the work of Timothy Gallwey, occurs when managers
and employees work together to facilitate learning, improve performance,
and enable those being coached to create desired results. Bradlev
and Corv see partnership coaching as a mind-set or framework from
which a coach operates to support the learning and actions of another
person or of a team.
Successful partnership coaching comes
from focusing on what others are learning rather than on what the
manager is teaching. A coach can make this shift bv asking effective
questions, creating an environment that helps reduce What Gallwey
calls -interference----or negative self-talk--and providing learner-focused
rather than teacher-focused feedback.
Overcoming Barriers to Learning
For the PSG managers, the first steps
toward becoming effective coaches involved learning to ask open-ended
rather than "yes/no" questions and avoiding simply telling others
what they knew. According to Bradlev and Cory, effective questions
are nonjudgmental and lead coachees to more reflective and expansive
thinking.
In an environment of fast change,
one of the key challenges for managers is to provide quality
development and coaching to their employees.
The PSG managers went on to explore ways
to help workers overcome internal barriers to learning, or Gallwey's
concept of interference. Again, the key to reducing interference
is not in diagnosing it, but in asking the coachee a question that
shifts his focus from his own negative self-talk to one of the
relevant details of the activity he's engaged in. The question
coaches learned to ask themselves is, "Am I increasing or decreasing
interference in this coaching conversation?"
Offering Feedback and Developmental Assistance
Another goal of the partnership coaching
workshop was for managers to learn to provide workers with effective
feedback. In the traditional feedback model, the boss, or "expert" critiques
an employee's actions; however, this format often puts the employee
on the defensive. Bradley, and Cory encourage managers to give
what they call "edible" feedback--information that nourishes the
performer, increases her self-awareness and focus, and lets her
internalize the data for optimum learning. The executives learned
to ask the person what did and did not work for her during the
project or meeting; ask her what she might consider doing differently
next time, and offer useful feedback only after checking with her
to be sure she was ready to hear it.
From the survey data, Silver and the PSG
managers knew, that front-line employees felt they were not receiving
enough developmental assistance from their bosses. The partnership
coaching program taught executives how to help the people reporting
to them take ownership over their own learning processes--with
their bosses' support and guidance. "We taught the managers that
their job is not to manage but to serve," Bradley said. The PSG
managers came to see that the questions they ask are more important
than the amount of knowledge or expertise they impart to others.
They now know that, as coaches. they need to facilitate learning
instead of teaching per se.
Practical Results
According to Silver, there was a 9 percent
improvement in the attitude of the managers' direct reports in
the time since the partnership coaching workshop. To date, about
500 senior to mid-level PSG managers in New York and California
have been through the two-day workshop. Xerox is so pleased with
the results that other groups within the company, such as the Xerox
Engineering Systems group, have requested training in partnership
coaching. Bradley says that managers like the workshop because
it teaches them practical skills that they can begin using tomorrow,
not just a general philosophy or approach. According to Silver,
in an environment of fast change, one of the key challenges for
managers is to provide quality development and coaching to their
employees. "The old model is to be the expert and to have the answers;
the new model is to have the right questions." Silver said. "Most
often, the employees know what to do; the challenge is to elicit
that from them in a way that fosters learning and self-leadership."
© 1998 Pegasus Communications,
Inc. (781) 398-9700 LEVERAGE April 13, 1998
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