The current business climate in Romania is very unpredictable, unstable and also interconnected. Regarding things from this point of view, companies should concentrate a lot on their most important resource: people.
Which obstacles can arise in teamwork? What are the blockages faced by a coach when working with a management team? What skills does a coach need in order to work at this level? But first of all… What is happening with the management teams nowadays?
From all points of view, the management team is the most important team in an organization. It has the strongest power to influence the way things work. Its decisions have repercussions not only upon the usual members of the organization, but also on the future of the company. Many of you might strongly wish to reach the management level. Many of you might actually be there and might realize that, most of times, the management team has too few resources and abilities to reach their objectives.
The members of the management team are usually chosen due to their functional responsibilities. In addition, there is another criteria that, no matter how emotional it may sound, weighs heavily in the balance of expanding the management team: ‘X person can’t be left out, he’s … important’. Also, most teams don’t feel safe enough to assume until the end the design and the future of the company. Most times, the management teams are actually a group of senior managers, each of them owning their personal responsibilities but they have no idea of how to work together otherwise than through interactions and individual debates.
Maybe you will be surprised with the following information: using management teams in the top of the organization is a relatively new phenomenon. The way structural and functional leadership is organized in companies is formed of a sum of very strong cultural patterns. In the last decade, using the management team has become more and more important due to the growth in the complexity and diversity of issues that appear in the specific market (that became global) but also inside the company (that has been forced to adapt to global business patterns).
The difficulties of team work
In each management team, there is a series of functional blockages and difficulties in creating relationships that, from the coaching point of view, hide really huge development and performance opportunities, which can overcome the usual results regarding the implementation of the company’s business strategy. Take a look at some of them:
1. Firstly, everyone in the organization (and not only) is paying a lot of attention to what is happening in the management team. Everybody is analyzing and waiting for ‘signs’ from it. Also, the competition. And this is one of the reasons why the management environment is not encouraging at all the creation and development of a climate coverage for strategic reflection and openness in sharing information and ideas.
2. The dynamic of politics and power is a central phenomenon in all of this group’s activities. Each choice, each decision is held in the light of the results but also in the perspective of the way it affects the influence and the future plans of each manager. The fact that the CEO is also the leader of the team and the chief of the organization contributes heavily at the complexity of the subject.
3. There are always tensions – more or less visible – regarding the collaboration between the management team members and the implicit competition between them. Simply said, this group gathers around the CEO position, both as status and skills. Once a manager reaches the level of being a member in the management team, the available career developments are either assuming the CEO position, or leaving the company. Implicitly, the competitive stakes are high.
4. Usually, the managers from the management team are the ‘stars’ in their fields of activity. They have been known as ones and rewarded for their individual results. In most organizations, rewards are offered for the success in their functions, not for their contributions to the success of others. And also usually, these managers have overconfidence in their own abilities mixed with a poorly managed fear: they don’t really know how to treat other colleagues that are on the same level as them and especially how to manage the challenges they face together.
From my personal coaching experience in Romania, the most important blockage that can occur in the management teams is absence – completely or partial – of a forum, a reflection and dialogue frame on topics such as the challenges they are facing and the individual and team roles they need to take. Team coaching offers a sustained help in overcoming the difficulty of creating and maintaining a climate that encourages interpersonal transparency. And this transparency helps further, in creating an impulse, an energy that no longer belongs to an individual, but it belongs to the entire system of the team, allowing it to collaboratively manifest and to reach above average results.
Working with a management team is truly special and transformative. Of course, if the team aims towards a transformation. The dedication and motivation of the coached team are so important, that without clear proof of involvement and determination the coaching program will stop, maybe even before it begins. It is needed to be understood that the management teams’ purpose is neither the change, nor the orientation towards organizational attitude and collective behavior transformations, but maintaining the stats-quo. The most difficult place to do coaching inside of an organization is the management team.
We will now explore another series of difficulties while searching for ways to coach the management team. From my coaching experience on this level, the biggest difficulties come straight from the coach, not from the team that exists in a state of relative internal equilibrium.
Now I will reveal the three main blockages that a coach faces when working with a management team:
1. Even before the beginning of coaching, things can go completely out of hand if the management teams and directors are not ready to go into a transformative program. As a coach, it is very important not to let yourself thrown directly in front of a team used to disqualifying quickly anything that may seem inadequate to their personal needs. By coaching a lot of Romanian teams, I have discovered that it is fundamental to have a coaching step before the actual coaching begins, in order to settle both your credibility as a coach and the clarity regarding the needs of the team you will work with.
2. Another great blockage is reflected by the impossibility of the coach to own two complementary attitudes necessary for a transformational process: the attitude of positive confrontation and also the one to grant permission and protection. If a coach invited into such a team can’t provoke and simultaneously support the team and their members, the coaching environment will not be sure and open enough and the directors will not be available to go through a transformational process with the coach. I have noticed that, almost every time, in the board teams, the actually important issues are rather overlooked, left aside in order not to create discomfort between the members. In addition to that, most of the problems and important decisions are expressed at the limit of the coaching frame: while going out of the meeting room, at the end of a break, before starting a meeting.
3. However, the biggest danger coming from a coach in a professional interaction with a management team is the haziness regarding the competences, role and also the limits he sets. A coach without the role and the limits well acknowledged and accepted will deeply disrupt the effective functioning of the team. I met dozens of cases in coaching, in Romania, when the directors and the teams were exposed to processes that have done more harm than good. As expected, they resisted with all their strength. Of course, there has been no transformation. Moreover, in most cases, the coach or coaches have tried to sell other products and programs, manipulating in a destructive manner the coaching frame (For example: ‘Coaching doesn’t work for you, we had to do something else before!’).
Accompanying a management team by coaching provokes a coach to know in advance the dynamics of a business, the strategic concerns of the organization and to have a deep understanding of the leaderships’ dynamics and the way the board team functions. And not only that.
This complex knowledge is absolutely necessary, you cannot mime or approximate learning a model of leadership or coaching that is tidy and structured. High performance coaches do not offer crutches to Olympic runners!
Often, a coach with experience in accompanying management teams will provide options and suggestions with specific reference to business issues and strategy, and he will work alongside with the team members. Coaches who arrive by chance (or by a seductive sales process) in this environment without the necessary internal expertise will be quickly rejected from the team. And this thing is, probably, the best result possible. Even worse, coaches who feel this rejection and don’t know what to do, will try to influence the decisions of the management team. And this is a potential disaster. Simply said, clients don’t need coaches to lead their organizations. They need coaches who are coaching.
Further on, I will present some details regarding the necessary skills in order to coach management teams. These skills have a major importance both for coaching in Romania and its development, and also for the ones that are considering working with a coach in order to optimize the organizational effort and to improve their business results.
• The ability to observe multiple levels of dynamic – both interpersonal and regarding the team as a whole – while this is happening. Each time, very interesting interactions appear between team members, between the team and the working environment, and even in every individual. An accurate and detached observation of these interactions and the changes it generates is based on a deep theoretical and practical knowledge of the group dynamics, team development processes and on principles of interactions between living systems. Of course, it also needs lots and lots of practical experience!
• In direct connection with the first skill is the ability to choose the interactions that are or may be productive for the functioning of the team. Most often, what appears on the surface in a team training can become highly productive if properly reflected by the coach. Of course, this skill is really useful only when the coach is able to decide on the spot (not to guess!) what is really important in the architecture of team development and what deserves indeed to be brought to the attention of all members as an observation that changes things for the better.
• The third skill is the self-awareness of power and influence and how these two types of energy move – free or controlled – within the team. To be an efficient ability, it needs to be accompanied by a qualified relative comfort of the coach to interfere and influence the ways in which the energy power is used for a group of managers. In this case, a suitable question for the coach is: Who owns what kind of power here and how/ when it’s used.
• The fourth skill is a linguistic one: to put in simple words what is observed, strictly delimited of any internally used jargon and to properly rephrase and reflect upon what is happening. The most intuitive picture here is the TV language: speak using words that can be easily understood by a 12-13 year old child. This skill has to be accompanied by the power of raising any type of issue to the team – no matter how difficult it may look – at the right time.
• The fifth ability is the professional ethics: the coach needs a very strong ethics kit, in confrontation with the risks that come alongside with working with a team of managers. In particular, the coach has to be aware of the consequences of identifying with only one team member – even if this person is the CEO or the CFO – or, in general, with any ‘part’ or ‘clan’ that manifests itself in an interaction. In this case it is very necessary to own the capacity to respond quickly in a judicious, honest and appropriate way to any challenge from the team.
• The sixth and maybe most important ability is the one of practical knowledge regarding the business, especially of the way in which the company produces money. In a management team, the coach wins trust by being an expert in the systemic processes that exists inside the team, and moreover, by understanding the businesses lead by the managers. The coaches that are not familiar with the conditions of the systems the company is part of (such as the market, competitive advantages, general challenges, etc.), the organizational structure and the work conditions of the employees are even harder to be trusted by the team that manages a business.
The information presented above contains a few elements that a team of managers should take into consideration when deciding to work with a coach. My intentions are not to offer a success recipe, but just to place some useful benchmarks, both for the organization that wants to work with a coach, for the management team and also for coaches who aim to work at this level.
Further on, I will present a case study regarding a leader and the maturity of his team.
CASE STUDY:
Situation: I have worked more than a year with the president and the CEO of a reputed company in the local business market (South-Eastern Europe) through individual coaching. His wishes were to extend his leadership ability and to reformulate his business vision for the next 10 years. Understanding from my own experience the power and results of the coaching relationship, he asked me to help him provoke his company’s managers’ potential, which, until that moment, were waiting for directions from him or from the company’s board. He told me in the first meeting that he wanted the managers to start taking responsibility for the company’s future, to make a change from being very good executants to helping the administrators develop the business on a various number of directions.
From my coaching experience in Romania, when a company grows healthy and overcomes the annual proposed results, there is an acute need for the management of the company to assume another kind of responsibility and to become true leaders. If this thing is not happening, the company stops its growth and the whole business is capped. Apparently for external reasons. But, if it happens – as in this case! – a management coaching program is the best and fastest way to lead the management through a transition for another level of business.
Objectives: Once having established the general coaching frame, we defined together what this ‘superior level’ of commitment for the company’s manager’s means. The following intense meetings resulted in several main development directions:
• Practicing strategic thinking and the assumption of decisions that arise from here
• Management based on incomplete/ imperfect information
• Stages planning correlated with the results
• Motivating employees, positive influence and personal impact
• Communication, feedback and direct reporting styles
Each of these directions were taken over by the HR department, which placed them in a matrix of observable behaviors.
Actions: I focused the coaching program on a group of 14 senior managers, who needed this transition in a short period of time. Together with them, we designed a timetable of workshops and development meetings, for a period of an entire year, using a time frequency adapted to their schedule.
What happened is that each of the 14 managers discovered their own specific development needs. And with these findings, we continued the coaching program almost naturally: people realized that coaching helps them develop personal, business and leadership skills, which can be used in a variety of contexts: with their clients, with their teams, with their life partners, etc.
Every 3 months I had a meeting with the CEO and HR, in which we openly talked about evolutions, limits, achievements and setbacks. That company had a developed corporate culture that is known in its industry as a place where people are encouraged to develop using the company's values and principles.
Already at the second evaluation meeting, there was a spectacular increase in leadership skills in 11 of the 14 managers in the program. From that moment until the end of the program, managers have assumed their development completely.
Results: By the end of the coaching program, most managers were able to sustain a level of activity very well connected with the company's future and the risks involved in the development of other markets. Moreover, they all realized that they need to rely on their teams instead of managing them at the level of details.
The communication style was easily formalized and the managers understood that an emotional communication serves nothing in terms of the image of leaders that they wanted to develop in front of their colleagues. By default, decisions started to flow quickly and there was no need for long-drawn discussions without any benefit.
In addition to that…
After another year, I received a phone call from my ‘old’ client: ‘Mihai, I’m deeply satisfied with our work for the second time now. My people moved to a whole new perspective and now we are developing business in … Asia!’. I congratulated him and I thanked him for the openness and involvement with which he treated the whole program.
He told me he was going to give me another call by the end of the year in order to get back to work.
