Do you want to enable others to perform at their best?
Would you like your team to share a vision and enjoy high levels of commitment and creativity?
Do you wish you had some practical tools and skills to build ambition, support learning and achieve great results?
These two new courses have been designed for you…
Isabel Mortimer and Claire Antrobus are coaches who work with individuals, teams and organisations to enable them to achieve great results, develop people and performance and work collaboratively. We have designed these two one-day courses to offer you the opportunity to explore the coaching tools and skills we think are most helpful in managing individuals and teams.
Our emphasis in on practical, simple and effective tools that can be used immediately in the workplace. Courses are accompanied by a course workbook including background information and further resources.
Isabel is an experienced performance coach, focussed on getting positive results for clients. She specialises in leadership development, cultural change, and enabling positive team dynamics. She works with a portfolio of coaching and leadership programmes and has supported cultural exchange and team development work across a range of high profile organisations. She is a fellow of the prestigious Clore Leadership Programme and is employed by The Clore Leadership Programme to help support fellows in developing as transformational leaders.
Claire helps individuals learn to change via coaching, facilitation and training focused on creating high performance. She has over 25 years’ experience in the creative, education and cultural sectors and currently designs and delivers training on developing teams, creating change and leadership for Clore Leadership Programme, HEY Confident Futures, engage’s Extend leadership programme and Leeds Arts University.
How to be a great manager – 10 March, 9:30-4:30, online
If you want to enable great performance, the ability to create productive working relationships with clear roles, responsibilities and boundaries is key. A great manager believes in your potential and creates opportunities for you to improve and develop, offering feedback and support. Whether you’re new to line-management or looking to refine how your work with others, this course offers you some practical tools and skills to become the kind of manager you’d love to have yourself!
We’ll help you reflect your strengths and style as a line-manager, to identify what you find challenging, and also share some tools, skills and research that can help you get the best performance from yourself and others. As developing skills takes practice, we’ll also create opportunities to you to connect with others on the course and continue to develop your skills together after our session.
Topics we’ll cover include:
How to have more productive conversations
How can we set up working relationship to be more successful
The art of Active Listening
The benefits and techniques of different leadership styles
How to ask great questions
£125 standard price/ £105 early bird – book now to reserve your place.
How to be a great team leader – 31 March, 9:30-4:30, online
We spend most of our time working with others, rather than alone. With the rapid pace of change over the past 18 months, and with many teams increasing working remotely and flexibly, the challenge of creating high performing teams has never been more urgent or important.
Coaching enables us to perform at our best by creating a high trust and high challenge culture, supported by clear goals, high levels of commitment and regular honest reflection and adjustment. This one-day workshop introduces simple practical tools and techniques to enable you to create a coaching-based culture of high performance in your team or organisation.
Topics we’ll cover include:
What does great team performance look like and what can enable it?
How to stop getting in the way of your team
Reviewing and improving your work as a team using reflective practice
Creating shared vision and plans
How to set goals that are useful and motivating
How to make meetings more productive and focused
£125 standard price/ £105 early bird – book now to reserve your place.
When working as a coach or facilitator I always ‘contract’ with people before we start work together: we agree boundaries, expectations and ways of working.
‘Contracting’ is the technical term for these conversations, but I prefer to think of it as ‘setting things up for success’ and it typically involves:
agreeing honestly and as clearly as possible what is expected from one another
the purpose and boundaries for the work
identifying what behaviours will enable you both to perform at your best and anything that would be unhelpful, and,
how you’ll review how it’s going so you can adjust accordingly.
We contract before we start work together, but also check-in how things are going periodically.
Before we start…
The kinds of questions we might use at the start of a project or assignment include:
What do we want to achieve?
How will we know we have been successful?
What are our respective roles? What can we offer and for what do we accept responsibility?
What requests do we have of one another in terms of how we work?
How will we know whether things are on track?
How do we want to handle things if it’s not working well for either of us?
What obstacles might get in the way of us working together? How can we avoid this happening?
Are we still on track?
Review questions can be as simple as:
What do we notice about how we are working together?
What is working and what is not working?
Is there anything you want more or less of from me?
What do we want to change to make this relationship have more impact?
Taking 5-10 minutes to include some of these questions in our meetings with others can help ensure we get off to the most productive start with new projects, or review and realign those already underway.
Unfortunately, despite being fully vaccinated, I caught COVID 19 recently. And whilst the acute symptoms lasted only a week I’ve been left feeling very tired – as often happens after a nasty virus. Much as I’d love to return immediately to my usual level of activity, I realise that it’s important to take time to recover properly.
Whilst I am generally manage to attend to the bigger tasks to keep myself healthy, like fitting in a long run once a week, I’m not always so good at the smaller things that are just as important. But taking care of your health involves doing lots of little things on a regular basis – sticking to ‘good’ habits and avoiding ‘bad’ ones. Some of the habits I’m trying to stick to currently to recover from the virus include:
Getting early nights – going to bed by 10pm
Eating well – including drinking ‘recovery shakes
Doing 15 mins stretching and conditioning daily
Practising 15 mins daily reflection – what went well/ less well and what I want to do differently.
Creating new habits is a topic that crops up often in coaching conversations and I recommend James Clear’s Atomic Habits as a useful resource. As this brilliant book outlines, there are two main reasons why habits are helpful:
Firstly, goals or one-off achievements are often the main focus of our work in organisations or via coaching. But habits help us to focus on the building-blocks of discipline that underpin success – the daily tasks or behaviours which are just as important to creating success.
Secondly, the more of our daily tasks become habitual then the more ‘headspace’ that leaves for other things. Through repetition if we can reinforce our positive behaviours so they become automatic, we can focus instead other activities that require more effort and attention.
Clear suggests there are 4 main ways we can help ourselves get into a good habit:
Make it obvious
Make it (more) attractive
Make it easy
Make it satisfying
It’s a great book, and I’d encourage you to read the whole thing – but as a taster for coachees I created a ‘crib sheet’ which includes some of the top tips that help us stick to the good habits. And I’ve used some of these techniques to help me stay on track over the next few weeks with these habits.
Getting early nights – going to bed by 10pm
First up, make it obvious. It’s important to be specific and simple – 10pm is more useful than ‘early’. There’s no ambiguity if there’s a specific time. Reminders are another way to make it obvious – personally I find a reminder on my phone 30 mins before I need to do something useful.
Eating well – including drinking ‘recovery’ shakes with my breakfast
These are not tasty! I’ve made it easier by setting up the equipment to make them (a blender and the ingredients) in the kitchen. It’s obvious because I’ve left that stuff next to the kettle – the first thing I do each day is make a pint of tea so I am reminded then to make the shake. And I’ve made it more attractive by buying some frozen fruit I can add to the mix to disguise the taste.
Doing 15 mins stretching daily
This is something I find very hard to stick to, as here’s no obvious reward to doing these activities. Do them and they help avoid you getting injured, but if you skip them there’s no immediate bad consequence.
One of my favourite tips from this book is about making it obvious via habit ‘stacking’ – scheduling a new habit to be directly before/ after something you always do to help you remember to do it. So I do these 15 minutes of exercise after breakfast each morning, in the same room, at the same time, and I have the equipment I need (a yoga mat and resistance band) ready on hand – making it easy. It’s basically all about taking any thought or effort out of it – so nothing gets in the way.
Practising 15 mins daily reflection – what went well/ less well and what I want to do differently.
Again, I know I should do this but I often struggle to do this regularly. I’ve found being unwell and needing to slow down tough mentally. Making time for reflection will help make sure I’m not overdoing it and also help my motivation, especially if I use these coaching-style reflection questions.
Making it obviousby sticking to a regular time slot helps, so I’ve identified 30 mins each evening when it’s normally quiet. And I’ve set myself a reminder on my smart phone to make it even more obvious. Plus whereas before I was taking notes on my laptop I’m now using a note-taking app to jot down my thoughts to make it easy. So far I’m managing about 50% of the time – which is a start!
And – finally – as an overall reminder of these healthy habits as well as having a ‘to do’ list each week, I now have a simple checklist of the daily/ weekly regular tasks (or habits) which is next to my desk and which I tick off. There’s a simple satisfaction to ticking things off and feeling like you’ve accomplished a small step. And the list also serves as a visual cue or reminder to do these things, once again, making it obvious.
As Clear concludes, creating habitscan be hard because a lot of these behaviours are not satisfying in the short-term. When cause-effect are disconnected we are less inclined towards changing our behaviour. With ‘good behaviours’ the effort or inconvenience is short-term, whereas and the payback days or weeks, or even years, later.
But at least we can give ourselves a helping hand by using these 4 simple tips from behavioural psychology to make these habits more likely to take root.
This week I’m running a ‘Making the Most of Your Board’ training session for charity leaders, so I’ve been thinking about governance.
Governance is rarely a sexy or fashionable topic of conversation, but I think it’s critically important. If I had to choose the key factors that were likely to determine the success of an organisation, good governance and diverse leadership would definitely be in my top five. And, if I was running an organisation today and I wanted to improve our performance, relevance and impact then I’d look at ensuring my Board reflected the wider community we exist to serve, and that it functioned well. Both diversity and effectiveness of our Boards are important: in fact they are inter-dependent.
So when I recently saw that the Charity Governance Code has recently been updated in terms of the Integrity Principle and EDI I was delighted. Diversity has to be at the heart of good governance, and for many organisations we have a long way to go to achieve governance that is both effective and more representative of our wider communities.
I know from my own experience that bringing in a wider range of voices to decision-making can have really big benefits. When I worked as Assistant Director at mima we employed two apprentices from the local community who were half the age of many of the staff. Our Director Kate Brindley encouraged me to include them in steering groups for some of our trickiest projects. I’ll confess, initially, I wasn’t sure how useful these less experienced staff members would be – but I was wrong. Our apprentices had lived in the local area all their lives, unlike those of us who commuted into Middlesbrough. We didn’t have a Trustee Board (we were part of the Council) but hearing the apprentices’ voices around the decision-making table freshened up our thinking and challenged our assumptions.
On the other hand at the age of 47, I still find myself often the youngest person in a room of Trustees. And I suspect I’m also often in a minority having attended comprehensive school. Our boards are too often ‘male, pale and stale’; as was illustrated beautifully by Suzanne Alleyne in a brilliant talk at The Wild Conference 2019, in which she showed very starkly the homogeneity of the Boards and Executives of ACE NPOs in terms of colour.
Recently, whilst facilitating a Board strategy day for a client I was struck by the blindspots that emerge when a group that lacks diversity. On this occasion, a staff proposal around climate change was dismissed as ‘irrelevant’ by the Trustees. I found it shocking how anyone could not see climate change as relevant to a 10 year strategy. And I challenged the group, asking had there been anyone in the room under 40 the discussion might have been different.
I’d go as a far as to say unless your Board reflects the demographic profile of the community you serve you might want to flag this on your risk register.
So how can you improve Board effectiveness and diversity?
Below I’ve listed a few resource that can help:
The Governance Code – is a great first step for understanding what good governance looks like – although I find the Governance Wheel (below) a more practical tool for assessing how well we are doing as Boards and what needs to change.
Governance Wheel –this my favourite diagnostic* to use with Boards as it defines success clearly and helps us understand what that looks like, as well as helping us understand our strengths and areas that need improvement. If you’ve not experienced great governance it’s not always obvious what good looks like. Lots of Trustees tell me they find the definitions in this tool really helpful. The tool is now only available to NCVO members, although any non-profit can join NCVO.
Young Trustees Movement – is a non-profit focussed on how to increase involvement of under 30s in charity governance. I particularly like their recruitment checklist, and they also advertise opportunities for young trustees and offer training.
Governance Tomorrow – Clore Leadership are running a 3-day event in July exploring young trusteeship which looks great.
*yes, I realise how tragic this sounds (and I don’t care)
Amazon lists over 100,000 books about coaching. If you were to read only one title on this subject Time to Think by Nancy Kline would be a great choice. It’s a simple, effective, radical and highly compassionate approach. There’s plenty of research to back up the assertions in the book but I really like that her approach arose through her observations as a teacher and coach.
At its simplest, the Time to Think approach involves enabling someone’s best thinking by listening intently to them and using ‘incisive questions’ to remove any blocks that might be limiting that thinking. It sounds simple – and it is which I really like. But this simplicity can also be very powerful. The principles of this approach have application way beyond 1-2-1 coaching into leadership, parenting, education, politics etc.
Kline believes people do their best thinking when we create what she terms a ‘Thinking Environment’; and she identifies ten ‘components’. You don’t have to adopt the model in its entirety. Instead I see the Thinking Environment as a useful checklist in my work as a coach and facilitator. If you are involved in supporting others to develop and perform well then I think there’ll be something on this list you will find useful.
Her book offers a whole chapter exploring each component. Below I’ve briefly summarised each one to offer a taste of the book (go read it!):
Attention
Listening to others without interruption or judgment and with keen interest in their thought and perspective.
The power of being really listened to, and the impact of not feeling heard, is hard to convey – it has to be experienced. If you’re interested in experimenting with ways of listening then try this short Liberating Structures exercise Heard, Seen and Respected.
Incisive questions
Noticing the assumptions which might be limiting thinking and replacing with a freeing alternative. For example, if you’ve always seen yourself as shy and unable to speak up in meetings ask yourself ‘if I had all the confidence in the world, what I say?’. If you only try one thing from this book make it use a few incisive questions. The number of times I’ve seen individuals and teams completely transform their thinking when I’ve asked these beautiful hypothetical questions….
Equality
Treating each other as peers. In the workplace we have been conditioned to listen to those other power, as if their ideas are better. When I’m facilitating a group I like to highlight and challenge this assumption head-on when we talk about how the group wants to work together.
There’s a fun acronym I picked up from Henry Stewart for one such assumption – the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). I suggest to a group that there is no evidence that suggests people in more senior positions have better ideas than their junior colleagues, so invite them to banish the HIPPO.
There are some very simple techniques Kline uses with groups to encourage equality. These include turn-taking where everyone is invited to speak at the start (and again at the end) of any meeting. Interestingly, recent research at Google has shown that equality of contribution in meetings was a feature of the highest performing teams.
Appreciation
Kline states her research suggests a minimum ratio of five pieces of appreciation for every critical comment is needed to avoid defensiveness and encourage our best thinking.
One practical way to keep things weighted in favour of the positive I sometimes use in a review situation is to invite people to identify 3 things they like about an idea or situation, and only 1 thing they would improve or do differently.
Ease
Kline added this condition later, noticing the festishisation of busyness and urgency in many workplaces and how this was the enemy of creative thinking. As an endurance runner, I am reminded of the importance of pace – if we set off too fast we crash and burn. Trying to go too fast is a mistake at work too – resisting the pressure to rush, to do too much is important to ensure we perform at our best.
Encouragement
Again this runs counter a common but unhelpful assumption that competition produces the best outcomes. As has been thoroughly documented in Daniel Pink’s book about motivation Drive, competition is only useful in a very limited range of situations and in most workplace scenarios will produce worse results. For complex and creative situations we need collaboration not competition. Encouraging, rather than trying to beat, one another will serve us better.
Feelings
Counter to the prevailing attitude (in Yorkshire at least) that tears and emotions more generally have no place in the workplace, Kline suggests acknowledging emotions enabling better thinking. Shutting down emotions, seeing them as unhelpful, can prevent clear thinking and anecdotally I have seen many times a coachee suddenly come to a new realisation after a short episode of tears – as if allowing themselves to acknowledge their feelings has shifted their thinking.
There’s a great, very simple, exercise I build feelings into group conversations – using the 4F review framework in which a group considers Facts, Feelings, Findings (implications) and Future (plans) in turn. The simple inclusion of feelings as part of the data gathering helps generate better quality thinking.
Information
If someone doesn’t have the facts, or they have incorrect information, then this will prevent their best thinking. On the whole we are often too quick to offer solutions to others and Kline cautions against offering information unless we’ve fully understood the situation. As a coach you only rarely offer information to a client, but sometimes it can be very helpful. Recently in my coaching I shared a simple framework with a client to help him generate a fresh perspective on team dynamics, for example.
Diversity
When I think about the big steps forward I’ve made in my own thinking or development it has been when I’m working with someone whose style, perspective and experience has been very different to my own. Difference can make things tricky at first, and be unsettling, but our best work happens when we can find ways to embrace rather than stifle or avoid it.
Place
If the physical space in which we’re working says to us ‘you matter’ then this is helpful. Reading stories online of how people who’ve been forced suddenly to work from home have transformed their corner of a room into a better space to think seems to underline this.
What I love about this book is the simplicity of the model and the ability therefore for anyone to put into practice things that will contribute to creating better outcomes across all areas of society: work, home, community action. Part two of the book is filled with practical examples of how to put these principles into action in organisations and teams, as well as 1-2-1 conversations. Anyone with any kind of leadership role – whether a coach, manager, team leader, parent, teacher – can take away some useful tools from this book.
Maybe this list has whetted your appetite to find out more and read the book for yourself, or given you a few pointers about how you could best support someone else’s best thinking?
When I first trained as a Relational Dynamics coach over a decade ago, a key principle of this programme was that we learn a huge amount about coaching from being coached ourselves. Therefore in that training model trainee coachees are coached and reflect on their experiences as coachees throughout as a core strand of their learning.
At first I would notice little things which might undermine trust, for example of the coach glanced at their watch – probably just to check the time – I’d wonder if they were really listening to me, or was I boring them? Next time I coached someone else I’d make sure my watch was easily visible to me so I could avoid that mistake. Another time a fellow coach asked me to complete a short questionnaire before our first session that included some interesting and powerful questions that really made me think – so (with permission) I adapted those questions and created my own preparatory questionnaire.
As coaches we can learn a huge amount through being coached
Even after qualifying as a coach, I still think it’s valuable to continue to experience first-hand being coached on a regular basis when you work as a coach. Yes I go on courses and read books about coaching, but most of my learning as a coach comes through direct experience of coaching (and reflection about it). As a coach I keep a reflective log and work with a supervisor, but I also take regular steps to learn through being coached. Over the past 12 months I have worked with a life coach on parenting; a running coach to help me prepare for a new challenge; and with fellow member of my local coaching network via their paired ‘co-coaching’ scheme on developing my business. I’ve also been a member of an Action Learning set (arguably a form of group coaching) for nearly a decade.
I don’t believe there’s one best way to be a coach…
…and hopefully any good coach will adapt how they work to their client anyway, so I enjoy experiencing a wide variety of coaching styles and seeing a range of professionals in action. So when I was reflecting recently about how I want to develop my coaching I started by thinking about some of the brilliant coaches I know and have worked with, and which of their qualities I would most like to grow more in my own work.
My first coach was a local legend and his athletes were legendary too
The first coach I remember was my very first running coach when I was around 12-13 years old. Roland was a bit of a legend at my running club because his group of athletes were by far the best around and also they worked notoriously hard. So when I was invited to ‘move up’ to his group I was equally intimidated by the hard work I knew would be involved and flattered that he had confidence in my potential. At that time I was very much a middle of the pack club-runner, but he trained people who won races and ran for the country. Surely enough within two years of working with R I was transformed as a runner: I had won several cross -country races and been selected to run for the county.
Looking back now as a coach at this, what I’d like to take from Roland’s example is the power of accountability. I’m not suggesting I want coachees to be afraid of me as coach (and let’s be perfectly clear he was a lovely chap – hard as nails but good-hearted), but that combination of encouragement and challenge captures something fundamental about the coach-coachee relationship for me. When a coach helps you to aim high you don’t want to let yourself down. At times that can feel like really hard work and the *fun* bit is that no-one else can do that work for you (and just look how much the younger me is trying in that photo!). The running coach literally stands at the side of the track cheering you on and observing how you are doing, but they aren’t the ones gritting their teeth!
Be more Isabel
At the other end of the spectrum is S, my current life coach, with whom I’m working on parenting my teenagers. She will challenge me to be clear, to focus on what’s in my control and not just talk about what I’m finding hard – but she also, very skilfully, offers encouragement because she can see that a lot of the time I’m being highly critical of myself as a parent. In doing this she enables me to notice my judgment is ‘off’ and I’m being too hard on myself at times. Her interventions help me see my own bias in how I’m interpreting and handling situations, which in turn means I can generate more options once those I’ve taken off those blinkers. In this she very much reminds me of my friend and associate Isabel Mortimer from whom I’ve learned a huge amount about encouragement in coaching ‘(be moreIsabel’ I regularly urge myself when I can feel I’ve over-done it on clarity and challenge with a coachee!).
Sports coaching isn’t actually always that different to leadership coaching
It is often said about coaching that the coach doesn’t need to know about the content to coach you on it – because they are not advising, they are helping you to think it through for yourself. And I’m struck that whilst I do most of my coaching with people working in charities and the arts I’ve actually learned a lot about coaching from coaches working in other disciplines: notably sports coaching. On the surface sports coaching is very different to life or business coaching because sports coaches are often eminent sports people in their own right and do offer advice at times. But many of the best sports coaches also use non-directive techniques and approaches – for example they encourage you to set your own goals and whilst the running coach I’ve worked with most recently, Kim, might offer advice about training plans she encourage me to make decisions about how best to schedule my training in a way that will fit in around my other commitments.
One of the things that has most impressed me about Kim’s coaching is how her calm focus on helping me develop a very detailed plan for the wildly ambitious things I sign up to gives me confidence I will be able do it, so long as I manage to follow the training plan. With her help I managed to complete my first 50-miler in 2019 (that big smile below is because I had finished after 12 hours in the rain and could finally have a cup of tea, a shower and a nice lie down).
There’s no judgement when I turn up to a coaching session declaring I’m going to try and do something way beyond what I’ve achieved before (like a 100 mile race 😳), just a calm ‘down to business’ conversation about how I am going to make that happen. Once or twice that’s enabled me to realise I may have bitten off more than I can chew so I might change my plans. But I decide to change my plans myself, I’m not cut down to size by someone with more experience. And more than once or twice that’s also enabled me to achieve new levels of performance. That focus on the very practical action planning side of coaching isn’t the most glamourous part of the job, but good plans build confidence, commitment and lead to success.
So, in addition to supporting me to achieve new levels of success in my running and work life, and happiness in my parenting, being coached has really helped inspire me to think about how I can be a better coach to others – focussing in 2021 on enabling high levels of motivation through accountability; offering encouragement when needed and supporting clients to develop their own world-beating plans.
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