Story presented by Brad Meyer in response to a corporate request for information in April, 2004

Requests for coaching are often seen as a ‘last resort’ in hierarchical organizations.

I had a growing reputation among my host’s colleagues for devising simple solutions with immediate impact and lasting learning.

Operating as a content-free coach, my ignorance of my client’s business work flow can be a great strength.

Pacing a team’s expectations is essential, before they will trust you to help them realize their greater potentials and options.

The cultivation of a perspective and a language and a set of behaviours that are disconnected from how people actually feel is in my opinion a corporate epidemic.

For business in the western world, there is no such thing as ‘strictly business’. Everything is personal.

A team can be collectively ‘in denial’. This is often the result of small, socially encouraged omissions of observation that are repeated over time.

Morale issues cannot be handled by decree, so managers need to be seen - and known - to listen, learn and leverage their new understanding of a staff’s perceived situation.

While my focus was the morale issue, I bridged the gap between staff and management objectives through TQM.

As an outsider, I was ‘permitted’ to ask the ignorant questions in a way that allowed the human elements to surface.

A highly emotive issue can provide the very best opportunity for a coach to tap into, touch and promote what people most value – while promoting their work too.

I listened.

I showed that I listened.

I helped people find their own reasons to want to work things out together.

I helped people believe that they could work things out together – and to find ways to do so.

An organisation’s catchphrases are its ‘folklore’ - its ‘writing on the wall’. We need to read, understand and

respond to it.

We also need to see clearly how we contribute to it ourselves – intentionally or otherwise.

Paraphrasing something I once heard Zig Ziglar say,

“An action repeated over time creates a habit.

A habit repeated over time creates a personality.

A personality repeated over time creates a character.

A character repeated over time creates a destiny.”

I was asked to work with the senior management team of an organisation of several hundred people where quality and productivity had been in decline.

The assumption by the management team was that some business process re-engineering (beyond what had already been recently implemented) was required and they asked me if I would come in to help them talk through and identify the innovations that would effectively turn things around.

While I was unfamiliar with the details of the business, within several minutes of walking into their open office environment for the first time, I felt that the root problems they were facing in their operation were more people-based than business process or technology based.

The depressing atmosphere was all too apparent to me as an outsider - even though my host did not seem to notice this as he was walking and talking me through the complex. It seemed the people were just sitting out their workday on autopilot.

I was formally introduced to the full management team. I listened, as they each described to me the primary challenges they were experiencing in their respective operational and functional areas.

Referencing back to what they had said, I asked them as a team to fill in the following template, which I drew on a whiteboard;

The desired outcome for this coaching period is: ______________.

	If the outcome is achieved	If the outcome is not achieved
What will happen	[Answers go here]	[Answers go here]
What won’t happen	[Answers go here]	[Answers go here]

Using this approach, we teased out and worked through a number of discrepancies and agreements in their presuppositions regarding their customers’ requirements, their contractual obligations and their staff’s needs.

Then, after establishing with them that I was going to ask them some seemingly off-topic questions, I turned the conversation towards what I felt would help them acknowledge what seemed obvious to me when I first arrived;

• Looking at their body language, I asked them if they could tell me what they felt, walking into the office this morning, before meeting with me. I listened to what they said and especially to what they did not say. I reminded them that I was asking about their feelings – not their thoughts – and I waited. After reflecting, they spoke about their individual and collective feelings.

• I asked them to recall the last time they had felt good walking into their office and greeting their staff. Few could find a recent time. I asked them how they thought this impacted their work on a daily basis and over the last quarter. I asked them to reflect on their personal performance levels and how they were operating as a management team now and in comparison to when they accepted their current leadership positions.

• I asked them to tell me more about their interactions with the staff at-large. I asked each of them in turn and I asked them to look through the room’s glass wall – out across the open office environment – and tell me what if anything they as a management team might be pretending not to know about their staff. I asked them to imagine what a difference (e.g. in quality and productivity) it could make if they and their staff looked forward to coming in to the office to work with each other.

We took a break and when we re-grouped, I asked them if they were interested in continuing to work with me along these lines of inquiry. They said that they were, so I asked them how comfortable they felt about my working in a similar fashion directly with some of their staff. They felt agreeable to this too, although they were concerned about how they would introduce my presence into their organization.

I agreed to give it a go if they would provide me with an office, email access to the staff and a middle management (as opposed to a senior management) point of contact/entry. We agreed that my work would be introduced to the staff at-large under the banner of “quality management”. The term “coach” had not as yet been widely used in this environment and I was keen to ‘choose my battles’ – with a new relatively esoteric title not being one of them.

Over the course of my first week on-site, I introduced myself to everyone via email as someone who had been invited in to help identify and implement opportunities for staff to work together more effectively. I then began to meet staff by joining their regular team meetings – taking the opportunity there to extend personal invitations to come talk with me about anything they saw as being related to effective collaboration.

What surfaced from these initial conversations was that the staff had recently been outsourced from their long-term employer. In fact, a solid, floor-to-ceiling wall had actually been built within the office building – physically separating the outsourced staff from their former colleagues.

These outsourced staff felt personally and collectively treated like a severed arm. Their access to the heart and mind of the business as they thought of it had been virtually cut off except through formal channels of communication defined by “service level agreements”. I realized that the heart and mind of their new employer had not as yet become apparent to them. So they were left feeling literally ‘cut off’.

As it turned out, shortly after my arrival on-site, an employee submitted an advanced notice of resignation, giving the reason for resigning as racism amongst the management team. This was an extremely emotive and very difficult moment for everyone.

As I had introduced myself as someone whose remit it was to help people work together more effectively, I felt that I was able to put myself forward as management’s initial point of contact for discussing this issue. My management colleagues agreed with me.

Via email, I invited everyone in the organisation to meet with me – either in-person or in small groups – to talk about any issues they felt might be race-related. They came to talk with me in my office alone, in pairs, in threesomes and occasionally in larger groups. They walked in almost hourly for the first week and several times a day during the second week.

According to the staff that worked outside my office door, when people came to see me, they were pensive, shoulders forward, eyes averted - or angry, shoulders squared, eyes glaring - ready for an argument or worse. When they left my office, they were mostly relaxed, sometimes even positively excited. The staff outside my door began to refer to me as the “office exorcist”.

What happened when people met with me was actually fairly straightforward. I had a small office, simply furnished with a few chairs, a desk, a ream of photocopier paper, a pack of marker pens and some bluetac. For each of my visitors;

• I opened each conversation by asking what it was that was most important for them to talk with me about and what it was that they hoped might happen as a result of their meeting with me. Keeping what they valued in mind, I encouraged our conversation to open up and move forward…

• Every time I heard someone use a phrase that I had heard more than once before, I picked up a marker pen and wrote it down on a sheet of the A4 paper and stuck it on the wall. If I had already heard and tacked the phrase up on the wall during a previous conversation, I raised my eyebrows and pointed to it without saying anything while we talked, to allow people to;
• realize that they were not alone in their perspective
• know that I personally acknowledged what they were saying was significant
• realize that I (representing management) was actively determined to keep the issues out in the open, rather than behind closed doors.

• I asked myself “in what ways might what I am hearing from this person help me find and emphasize the intentions, values, views and experiences that are shared by both staff and managers across the office?” When a possible connection formed in my own mind as a result, I would wait for the opportunity to ask, “In what ways might what you are now talking about relate to… [I would point to some of the writing on the wall]”.

• Regardless of how many points of shared identity, purpose, values, beliefs and experiences surfaced during the conversation, the underlying message of my conversation was one intended on promoting their self-empowerment. So, paraphrased as a question, I was asking each person to consider, “What in your past experiences in life tells you that you very probably have an innate capacity to successfully connect with, manage and work with your colleagues in this difficult situation?”

I met and engaged with perhaps 40 percent of the staff and middle management in this way in the space of just a few weeks. Soon my walls, windows, the sides of my desk and parts of the ceiling were filled with catchphrases used by the staff. I invited the senior management team into my office to read, acknowledge, discuss and understand the writing on the wall.

Once people began to actively share the challenges of their situation with each other, we had enough energy and interest ‘in the room’ to discover and devise more effective ways to work together – transcending many of the prior limiting beliefs about themselves and each other.

In the end, the resignation that was tendered based on (perceived) racism was taken back and the employee who had submitted it became a positive and productive member of the team that helped turn the organisation’s energy, focus and ultimately its reputation around.

A lasting learning for the senior management team was that the three dimensions - people, process and technology - ALL need their responsive attention. Change management initiatives driven by process and technology change are only sustainable by attending to the people involved.

A lasting learning for the staff-at-large was that we ultimately create our own destiny through the simple actions (including decisions to not take action) that we make each day.