Coaching Adaptive Skills in Others
This is the third and final post on the topic of adaptive skills and builds on the information in the previous two. The Growing Your Adaptive Skills post discusses how you break down an adaptive skill into its component parts for the purpose of practice. Since this method is the same whether it’s for you or someone you’re coaching, I won’t repeat it here. Instead, my focus here will be to step back and discuss how to work with someone who needs to change but who either doesn’t see the issue or doesn’t want to see the issue (and yet has been told to “change”).
Since this post is about coaching, and coaching always involves giving feedback, you’ll want to be familiar with this one as well.
How to Give Great Corrective Feedback
So…you are being tasked to help “fix” someone who’s showing up to work with poor adaptive skills? The task can seem daunting for all the obvious reasons. Consider the following real-world examples:
A director of operations goes out of her way to avoid contact with an employee when she feels tension in their working relationship, a pattern that’s reflected in other ways as well. Employees experience this as a passive-aggressive punishment for no apparent reason.
An otherwise skilled mid-level sales manager is blunt, harsh, and demanding with his employees to the point that some are leaving the company because of him. This is all done in the name of “getting results”.
A senior director of operations habitually interrupts and talks over others in an important weekly meeting. She is considered by all to be an otherwise gifted communicator and valuable employee, but those in attendance have adapted to this by participating as little as possible.
A warehouse manager is slow to make decisions, struggles with enforcing decisions from senior management, avoids addressing poor employee behavior, and is reluctant to set meaningful goals beyond what’s achieved with minimal effort.
A senior VP who is considered uniformly upbeat and friendly by his peers, nevertheless, uses subtle put-downs, comparisons, and personal slights with his subordinates. Because of his positive tone, these are presented as “feedback” …but others don’t experience it this way.
Our adaptive skills reflect a complex mix of emotions, behaviors, motives, and (often) a lack of self-awareness. For this reason, they are a challenge to coach. Where do you begin? Personally, I find it’s helpful if I consciously acknowledge the internal barriers I often experience in these situations since that makes it easier to move past them:
Awkward – Some adaptive skills are such that they leave us scratching our heads: This is an obvious issue, why doesn’t she see it? Do I really have to tell him to grow up and learn some social skills? Why should I need to have this conversation in the first place? As a colleague of mine once said, “sometimes good coaching requires that we help grown adults figure out how to dress.” Life is such that from time to time we’ll come across people with gaps in their maturity and we have the privilege of helping them close these a little.
Subjective – A capable manager who consistently demonstrates caring and respect for her employees might deliberately choose to show frustration over missed deadlines or substandard work. As long as trust and respect are high, this display could easily provide the wake-up call the team needs to get back on track. On the other hand, if this is the only way she communicates, we have an adaptive skill problem that will negatively impact workplace culture.
To coach effectively you will have to be confident in your assessment of the employee in question. Does what you see truly compromising productively and professionalism? If so, be confident and make your case.
Personal – It goes without saying that most poor adaptive skill situations feel personal and they extend well beyond the domain of work. While we want to respect boundaries (i.e., we’re not therapists), we have to accept the possibility that in the coaching process deeper personal issues might just come to the surface. We’ll need to feel comfortable navigating these and know our professional boundaries while we help the individual in question.
Because of these factors, I remind myself that it’s likely I’m not the only one who’s experiencing these behaviors. This is another “mindset” shift that I find helps me to confidently embrace the sometimes-messy work of coaching adaptive skills. Do you think the manager who constantly interrupts or talks over others in meetings is doing something similar at home? Very likely. What about the manager who avoids discussing any topic that might make him or her look bad…do you think this avoidance manifests itself elsewhere? Again, very likely. I find this helpful since it reminds me that the work I do might have a positive impact far beyond the workplace.
1) Be clear about expectations
It’s imperative that you be clear with the employee about what needs to change, the level of urgency, the desired timeline, and any consequences if these aren’t met. As someone who has coached many professionals in a variety of settings, I’ve seen firsthand what happens when this isn’t made clear.
On the one hand, I’ve seen employees not take the coaching process seriously because their boss didn’t communicate any seriousness. On the other, I’ve seen employees think they were on the edge of termination because their boss made some friendly suggestions for how they might be a little more effective at some small part of their job. This only creates unwarranted fear…never helpful in the workplace.
Another reason to clarify expectations is that the employee may disagree with your assessment. Remember, adaptive skill issues often exist in our blind spot and we might not think there’s a problem. As the one in charge of coaching, you need to decide what is your minimum level of expected change (if there is one). In other words, even if they don’t agree with you, what do you need to see? This is a worst-case scenario but being ready to clarify this, if needed, will help you avoid misunderstandings in the future.
2) Adopt a coaching posture
This is where all good workplace coaching begins: you bring both compassion for the individual as he/she struggles with a fundamental part of their life AND the resolve that this issue needs to improve for the sake of workplace professionalism and productivity. These are not mutually exclusive and both will need to be demonstrated in your coaching if it’s to be effective.
3) Focus on specific behaviors
This is crucial. From the outside, it’s easy to take a “just stop it” mentality because the behaviors in question might seem obvious to everyone else. From the perspective of the individual, however, this is often not the case. In my experience, the behaviors you see on the outside are often just a small part of what the individual experiences internally.
For example, consistently talking over others in a meeting might be just one expression of an internal posture that feels impatient and controlling with most people, most of the time. Though much of this doesn’t leak through, it’s still there and could feel overwhelming to deal with as a general feeling. When you focus on the specific behaviors, the employee now has something that’s clearly defined and actionable…and this is empowering (not to mention that others are more likely to notice the positive change…itself a morale builder).
4) Start small and simple
This is implied in the point above but let me make it explicit. Changing a longstanding habit is difficult and the smaller the steps involved in changing it, the easier it is. But the setting is also important. If I struggle with confrontation, for example, an annual performance review with a challenging employee might not be the best place to practice new skills.
As the coach, you want to help your employee find simple, low-intensity situations that allow them to practice new behaviors. What these are will depend on a few factors, but I’m sure you get the picture. High-intensity situations (e.g., the employee review above) will usually evoke lots of anxiety and this is a tough way to practice new skills.
Finally, you can’t underestimate the power of small victories to spur on greater change efforts. This is especially true if the employee in question has been struggling personally with this for a while. Always keep in mind that if a behavior doesn’t work for you, it really doesn’t work for the employee either (at least not in the long run). Helping an employee gain control in an area of life where there’s been a lot of struggle will pay dividends well into the future.
5) Make this conversation safe and stay engaged
This is Coaching 101 but is easily forgotten, especially if coaching employees isn’t your full-time job. Due to the nature of adaptive skills, employees can feel vulnerable during this time for all the reasons that I’ve stated above. Because of this, you’ll need to carve out mental and emotional space to avoid sending the message that you’re losing your patience and think this should have been fixed in three easy steps. Again, the goal is to be understanding of what the employee is experiencing without sacrificing the need for behavior change.