In the shift to more autonomous and remote work, supporting team members with tools and processes to help them make decisions on the fly is critical. Today I am connecting with what are commonly known as Cartesian Questions, attributed to the work of Rene Descarte. 

​The Cartesian questions are useful to help people think through possible change, and decisions they are making.  This in turn can boost productivity in the long run. 

​The four Cartesian Questions are:

1. What WOULD happen if you DID make that change? OR What WILL happen if I DO this?
2. What WOULD happen if you DIDN'T make that change? or WHAt will happen if I DON'T do this 
   
3. What WOULDN'T happen if you DID make that change?
   
4. What WOULDN'T happen if you DIDN'T make that change? OR What Won't Happen if I DON'T Do this?
   

​Each one of these questions helps a person look at different angles of the decision and change process.

​The first, "What would happen if you did make the change?", allows the person to visualize or forecast themselves in being successful with the change. There is a range of research which shows the importance of visualization - from Olympic sports training to personal productivity. 

​The second question "What would happen if you didn't make that change?". This question helps us explore lost opportunity. If I did not do it, what then....

​The third question "What wouldn't happen if you DID make the change?" will be popular for those who like to mitigate risk. This gets us thinking about what we might avert.

​Finally, the fourth question "What WOULDN"T happen if you DIDN"T make that change?" or 'WHAT WON"T Happen If I DON'T Do this?" helps us gain further clarity.

​Have you used Cartesian Questions? If so, what impact have they had?

I hope that you will try them out and see how useful they are.

Best
Jennifer

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This week's video brings to life Teams365 blog post #784 where I explored four flags which may signal that coaching is not the right approach for the conversation. in a coaching conversation, the person being coached must want to be coached. They are the one who needs to set their own goals, and take the action towards the changes they want. In this video I cover four common flags around "coachability" and suggest a couple of resources you may want to check out to learn more about coaching.

Enjoy!
Jennifer

As part of this week's #FlashbackFriday I am reaching back to a couple of older posts I wrote in 2014 on Peer Coaching. This is an area which is often overlooked in workplaces today, especially in team-based environments.. Are you equipping your team with skills in the area of peer coaching?

Here's what I wrote back in Teams365 post 199:

"Over the last couple of weeks  we’ve been focusing in on coaching skills for leaders. A reminder that we can also build coaching skills on the part of the team members we work with. In fact, peer coaching can be a powerful tool for teams, and groups, to leverage.

Core peer coaching skills to foster:

1. Asking great questions. You may want to revisit the Baker’s Dozen post earlier this week or some of the many questions we’ve posed over the past six months. Powerful coaching questions are typically short (5-6 words), are open-ended, and seek to expand understanding or support action.

As I’ve written in past posts, WHAT questions often open up the largest terrain. How questions may put people into a process mindset (HOW CAN I DO THIS) which may get people stuck. WHY questions may put people on the defensive.

2. Listening deeply - Really being present and listening to their colleagues, with out judgement and interruption

3. Knowing when to jump in with advice - Coaching is not advice giving. As peers you may have valuable insights to offer.  If you are tempted to jump in with advice, ask if this is wanted/valued.

4. Really being present - In today’s pressure pot of business, it’s invaluable to have a moment to pause and reflect and also be heard. Really being present is key for success.

5. Support for accountability - Peer pressure can be a positive thing when used as a support for accountability around goals you, yourself, have set. How can you hold each other accountable for the actions and commitments you have set for yourself?

What other peer coaching skills would be useful in equipping your team members with?"

Questions to consider:
What can you do to boost skills in the areas of listening, presence, questioning.?
What opportunities do team members have in coaching their peers?
When is coaching appropriate in your organization? When is it not the best way?

For those interested in this topic of peer coaching, I would also invite you to check out a longer article I wrote on the topic entitled "Leveraging Peer Coaching for Better Results". You can view it at Teams365 #1149.

Have a great long weekend,
Jennifer

Fostering strong team connections where team members can take turns to lead and offer their expertise to others on the team is essential in today’s VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) environment. Helping team members improve their coaching skills with each other is an important part of creating a more collaborative environment.

Several of the core skills we want to cultivate in moving to a peer coaching environment are:
Questioning – the ability to ask open ended questions which will hep the other person widen their knowledge, explore options, gain clarity or create assumptions. In boosting our questioning skills it is also important to consider Are you leaving enough time for the person to reflect and then respond?

Designing the conversation – helping peers be in dialogue around what they want to purpose and outcome of the conversation to be is important This could include asking questions such as:
What do you want as an outcome for this conversation?
What would be most helpful to you? To brainstorm? Be asked questions? Consider solutions? Other?

Listening – Being able to listen deeply is important. The ability to listen on multiple levels is key to peer coaching. Listening around
One of the biggest stretch areas for peers is learning not to give advice but lead from questioning and listening

A starting point for peers to experiment with their sills is dedicating 20 – 30 minutes a mot to peer coaching conversations. Pair team members and have them bring a current business challenge or opportunity which they want to explore. Give them one to two minutes to outline what that is to their partner and then provide 7  minutes to coach and then one minute to identify specific next action steps. Rotate to the next person.

Peer coaching can be done virtually with virtual teams as well, using breakouts or separate calls between the session. Consider how you could integrate peer coaching into your upcoming conversations and team development

Yesterday I spoke here in Washington DC on Team and Group Coaching Virtually. As leaders, many times we are called upon to coach our team members, but are they ready to be coached? Here's a post from 2015 which you might find interesting - Four Coaching Flags, or four things to be aware of when coaching your team.  Consider what are flags coming up for you and your team right now.

Here's what I wrote in Teams365 #784:
A key success factor to supporting any learning or talent development initiative is to make sure that the approaches we are using are the  right fit. Whether we are coaching, training, mentoring, it is important to take stock regularly on what's working and what's not.

Sometimes there are flags which signal that things are not going as they should. In the coaching approach you may see:

• Lack of follow through on the part of the person being coached
• Circling of the client
• Person not showing up for their coaching sessions
• Jumping from one topic to another
• Client not seeing value of coaching

Questions to ask:
Is this person coachable? Do they really want to engage in the coaching process? Without their active participation it is not possible to coach a person. While people can sit passively through a workshop, in coaching they need to be an active participant?

Is it time to revisit the coaching goals they have set for themselves? Are these goals SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timebound)? Are the goals stretch goals?

When the client "circles" it may be for several reasons. This often signals a place where the person is fearful or feeling dis-empowered It may signal an "inner critic" or "gremlin". For more information on this topic i'd highly recommend Rick Carson's book Taming the Gremlin.

Finally when a client is saying they are not seeing value in the coaching process it may be time to have them take stock of their accomplishments and learning since the start of the coaching process. Sometimes we are so in he phase of learning that we have not stopped to reflect and note what is different and what changes have happened.

There are several more flags you may see around coaching, however, thse are four very common ones experienced by coaches as leaders, as well as internal and external coaches. What other coaching flags have you experienced?

Have a great weekend,
Jennifer

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As part of our Sunday video collection I am pleased to bring you a short video on 20 Coaching Questions To Bring Into Your Upcoming Conversations. This has been one of our most popular posts over the years and I felt warranted a short 2 minute rendition in video form. As I write in my new book, Effective Virtual Conversations, questions are the backbone to any great conversation - in person and virtual. Enjoy!

To link back to the original post, please check out #Teams365 #1277: 20 Coaching Questions or #Teams365 #778.

For more on the art of  coaching and questioning check out these posts.

A focus for us here at the Teams365 blog during the month of June 2017 has been on questions to incorporate into your upcoming conversations - whether you are speaking with your team, holding one-on-ones, or leading a virtual meeting. Having a robust series of questions at our fingertips is an essential leadership tool.

Another significant focus in our work is on supporting leaders to develop enhanced coaching skills. The ability to deeply listen to what your staff is saying, and ask questions to help prompt new awareness, insights and connection. That's the impetus to head back to a post from February 2017 entitled 20 Coaching Questions for your next conversation. These are questions you may want to incorporate into upcoming conversations. Notice their impact.

Here's what I wrote last year in Teams365 #778:

For more than a decade now I’ve had the privilege of running coaching skills training - for leaders, professional coaches, HR professionals and trainers. Regardless of the context they have been within one of he core skills for coaches to develop is the art of the powerful question;
 
One activity which can be useful tis to develop a list of questions which you can use in upcoming conversations. While you would never use all these at one tie, here’s 20 of my favorite:

1. What’s the most important goal you are working on right now?
2. What’s really important about that
3. What could get in the way?
4. What additional supports would help you be successful?
5. What perspective are you in around x?
   
6. What’s another perspective around that?
7. What else?
8. 3 adjectives that describe….
9. If you were to make one change that made the biggest difference, what would it b?
10. If you were to do something in the next 24 hours, what would that be?
11. What impact would it have?
12. What’s aligned?
13. What’s not aligned?
14. What would “wild Success” look like?
15. What will help you focus?
16. What’s our vision?
17. What’s at the core?
18. What is really important?
19. Who is an ally for you in this?
20. Imagine it is now 5 months down the road. How will be you know you have been successful?
    

What other questions do you want to ask?

Notice the impact of these questions as you go out and have dialogue with your team and/or peers.

Have a great Friday,
Jennifer

Our focus this month here at the Teams365 Blog has been on teamwork. One of the core skills team leaders need to leverage in moving to a team based culture is the skills of coaching. I thought it would be fitting to take us back to a #Teams365 #783: Four Ways to Accelerate the Impact of Coaching, to provide you with the opportunity to think about how you might position coaching in your organization.

Let's take a look at #Teams365 #783: Accelerating the Impact of Coaching

As coaching is a widely utilized modality in people development, it is important to consider what are the things we can do to accelerate the impact of coaching – for the individual(s) involved as well as in the organization.

1. Make sure coaching is the right modality. Coaching is not training and a coach is not there as an “advisor”.  If a person needs to develop skills a blend of coaching and training may be the better solution.

2. Consider how coaching can build onto other initiatives in the organization. If there is a current training program round leadership development or change management, how can you follow up the training with several coaching touch points to sustain the conversation, and support those involved in integrating their learning, creating new habits and sustaining these changes in behavior and learning.

3. Encourage three-way conversations between the employee and their supervisor throughout the coaching process.  Coaching engagements should be supported by the supervisor, can can benefit from their input and support. While the coach cannot report the details of coaching (according to the Ethical code of professional coaching), the coach can facilitate a conversation between the person being coached and their supervisor.

4. Set those being coached up for success. It is important to co-design the coaching relationship, have the person being coached set goals for the work which are revisited throughout the coaching engagement.
 
What other things do you  see as critical success factors in maximizing the impact of coaching?
 
Have a great weekend,
Jennifer

Today's FlashbackFriday takes us to a blog post on Leveraging Peer Coaching for Better Conversations. One of our themes here at the Teams365 blog for the month of April is the importance of better teamwork and better conversations across the team. Today's article will give you some specific insights into building skills for boosting peer conversations, an area we often overlook as an essential in team based environments. In team contexts we need to ensure all team members, not just leaders, have enhanced skills in listening, coaching and asking great questions.

​Here's what I wrote several months ago in #Teams365 #1149: Leveraging Peer Coaching For Better Conversations:
​​This month a significant focus here at the Teams365 blog has been on enhancing relationships within the team. As a former team leader myself who led nationally and regionally as a leader, I was always amazed at the power and connections formed by peers. As a former virtual leader I also know the strength of the peer network, especially when your team may be based thousands of miles away - closer to each other, than to you. This in part what led me to discover coaching back in the early 2000s, before I made the move to establish Potentials Realized, and make coaching more of my every day work.

Today I wanted to share with you an article I wrote a few years ago on Peer Coaching. In my work across organizations as a coach, trainer and consultant, I often see peer processes not being harnessed to their full potential. I hope that this article gives you some food for thought around how you can equip members of your team to have better peer conversations.

Here's a copy of the article, which you can also download here:

Peer Coaching: An Untapped Resource
Jennifer Britton, October 2014. All Rights Reserved

The power of the peer process is often underestimated, for both good and bad. This article explores the concept of peer coaching and how it can be leveraged for learning and development within a team. The article also explores which peer coaching skills to share with your team members.
As a modality, coaching provides an opportunity for team members to expand their awareness and take action around issues facing themselves and the team. Coaching provides an opportunity to get clarity around future directions and the strengths that exist within a team. From research we know that exceptional teams, often known as high performing teams, are great at getting things done (referred to as productivity), and also have strong relationships (referred to as
positivity).
In recent years organizations have spent significant resources around having their senior leaders coached, by internal
and external professionals. As coaching cultures become more common place, and coaching moves beyond the C-Suite,
peer coaching provides an opportunity to expand the coaching conversation. Peers can play a key role in expanding the coaching conversation to a wider cross section of an organization.

Core Elements in Coaching
Core Elements in any coaching conversation include a focus on goals, expansion of awareness, support of action, and ongoing accountability towards goals. First, any coaching conversation (by leaders, within peers) needs to be grounded in specific goals. This should be the starting point of any coaching conversation - What is the focus? What will success look like? During our time, what would be useful to explore. For example, a new leader may want to explore how their style matches the needs of their team. Overall, their goal may be to become a better communicator. Coaching conversations are designed to expand awareness, and support people in movement towards those key goals. Coaching is rarely a one off conversation and provides the real benefit of accountability and checking in around the commitments
you have made in getting things done.

Peer Coaching - Expanding the Conversation
As a coaching culture becomes established in an organization, peer coaching may be a natural next step for expanding the capacity for great conversation, action and accountability. As an approach, peer coaching involves peers coaching peers. Peer coaching often “ups the ante” around accountability. As peers it may be even more important to follow through when making a commitment to a peer, rather than a boss or coach. As a peer, it may also be easier to call out colleagues who don’t follow-through with their own commitments.
Peer coaching can be leveraged in a number of ways. Many organizations start by developing peer coaching skills as part of a training process - for example, equipping new team leaders. This may be a way to sustain the conversation outside of the training room, in support of integration and application of learning. If team development activities or team coaching is being undertaken, peer coaching can keep a focus between the team touch points. Peer coaching may also be a standalone process, a way of supporting conversation, learning, growth and sharing with in an organization
Many organizations are looking to action learning coaching as a way to intersect real life issues and application. Inherent in this is the involvement and interaction with peers.
Another coaching opportunity which is leveraged by many organizations today is a team coaching process. Involving all members of a team, team coaching is a form of extended team development, supporting teams in developing awareness and capacity in the areas of enhanced relationships and expedited results. Key to the team coaching process is multiple touch points, which may be supported by peer coaching conversations in between.
Another approach which leverages peer coaching, is group coaching. Group Coaching brings together individuals from across an organization, for example, groups of new managers. Coaching Groups may meet weekly or bi-weekly, to
explore topics of interest, share best practices, boost movement towards goals and expand awareness around shared themes such as leadership strength, vision, or values. Group coaching processes are usually led by a group coach who is internal or external to the organization. Here peer coaching plays a key role during the session itself as breakouts occur, or in between group touch points when pairs meet for discussion and sharing.
Finally peer coaching is being integrated is through the coaching skills training of all members of their organization to build capacity. Regardless of approach, provide pause points for peer coaches to reflect on what they are learning about being peer coach, and best practices they are evolving.

Peer Coaching Skills to Develop
In creating a successful peer coaching program, it will be important to provide peer coaches with the opportunity to
develop key skills in the areas of communication, questioning, listening, goal setting and accountability. Some of these key peer coaching/communication skills include:
• Mirroring- Reflecting back what you have heard. In mirroring it is important to use the language as they person said, so sharing things verbatim. Mirroring often creates new insights for the speaker.
• Listening - In a coaching conversation it is important to listen at several different levels. What do you notice about the pace and pitch of the speaker? What is being said and what is not being said? What is being said between the lines? What do you notice about the words and also the tone?
• Questioning - In coaching we want to use questions that are open-ended, or are not inviting a yes/no response.
In any coaching conversation (peer coaching, team coaching, leader as coach) t is important to use questions that open up awareness, prompt a new perspective, invite discovery or support action
• Direct Communication - Use language that is consistent with and impactful for the person being coached
• Curiosity - in the coaching process, the person being coached is the expert. This can be a 180 from our typical process where we the leader are the expert. Fostering curiosity in the part of those who are doing the coaching
is useful.
• Assumption busting and perspective shifting - Throughout the coaching conversation it is likely that you will be exploring and “busting” assumptions as well as shifting perspectives.
• Support for goal setting and achievement - Coaching is grounded in core goals as set by the person. A starting place for any coaching process is to identify goals and the focus of the conversations. The peer coaching
conversation should provide an opportunity to move towards those goals, as well as identify blockages.
• Creating Accountability Supports - Creating support for accountability is essential. As John Whitmore wrote in his seminal “Coaching for Performance” accountability is about getting people to specify “What will you do? By
When? and How will I know?” Holding people accountable, including yourself as a leader is foundational to the coaching approach.
As coaching cultures mature, peer coaching will play an expanded role in expanding the conversation, and impact, of coaching. It is an untapped resource in many organizations today. How could peer coaching expand conversations?

References:
Britton, Jennifer. From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching, Jossey-Bass, 2013.
Whitmore, John. Coaching for Performance.
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