Lever 1 : Activate the Person

The first lever is always the people. To accomplish anything needs people and people who are engaged and bringing their best selves and all their skills ti play. It is always people before process.  Process is important, because bad process will impact performance.

When I was working with 5 amazing coaches and when I arrived as their team lead I knew that I needed to find out who they were as individuals. I wouldn’t be doing the work, so I couldn’t just tell them how I would do it. They aren’t me! How I coach is based on my strengths. I have had to learn how to blend content and knowledge with those strengths. Our starting point as a team was a simple question, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how are you experiencing being a coach right now ?”

A couple of things on this. If you have been working inside a corporate for a while you may have a very strong frame of reference around ‘scores’ and an expectation that low scores are bad and need to be turned around. The point of this question isn’t to focus everyone on getting to a 7 and above and staying there, come hell or high water. The point is to have a conversation. I want to know and understand where everyone is at. If it is a 3 then it is a 3. A 3 isn’t wrong or bad. It is reality. The question is how can we shift that reality because no-one is going to be doing their best when their experience is a 6 or below. The conversations we have then are around what is missing for you ? Where could you see yourself getting ? A 7 perhaps ? What would thqt look like and how would you get there ?

Simply put. Until we can see and talk about how we are experiencing work we can’t change it. When we can see it we can start to understand what can be changed and what can’t (right now). When we start to talk about this in a non-judgemental way the power comes back to the individual.

For more on this lever, hop onto the blog series and Lever 1 : Activate the Person