3.2 Mentoring and Coaching
A key component to building competency is mentoring and coaching. Leaders who not only support such programs but actively participate in them will help to build a deeper level of connection with their teams, while increasing competency. In terms of persuasion and influence, the participation by the leader supports the principles of reciprocity, commitment and consistency, and scarcity (the leader’s time).
It is recommended that the following key elements be applied in such a program in the cyclical fashion shown below:
Onboarding
Career planning
Mentoring
Performance review
Figure 6: Career Development Cycle
3.2.1 Onboarding
When onboarding new staff it is important to get them to doing meaningful work as soon as possible. Some large organizations will have people sit through days or even weeks of frankly boring training materials. Usually, the onboarding process is administered and led by an HR department representative.
The leader to whom the new hire will report must be very active in the on boarding of the new hire, and this should start with the recruitment process. The leader to whom they report should even have veto power over whether the hire is made. New hire job task planning should start well ahead of the hire date and safety training ought to take priority in their first week as this is needed not only for legal compliance reasons but to ensure the new hire will be safe in the work environment and they will not be a danger to the people around them.
Situational awareness is a big part of safety, and an attitude of situational awareness should be coached for in all areas of work. While huge advances have been made in occupational health and safety in construction and manufacturing environments in the past decades, workers’ situational awareness is a key ingredient to creating safe workplaces.
In addition to threats, we are surrounded by opportunities if we have the awareness to recognize them:
For learning
For teaching
For new business
For process improvement
The new hire should be assigned meaningful work as soon as possible after starting, ideally mixing work in with the formal onboarding. Starting meaningful work early results in:
The new hire getting a sense of accomplishment and meaning sooner
The work will inevitably require working with others even if only peer reviewers and help with relationship building
It will help the organization bottom line by getting the person productive sooner
The new hire does not set into a complacent behaviour. It sets the tone of a sense of urgency…as Willink often says: “get after it”
Reflects the preparedness of the organization, which leads to a positive impression of professionalism
Yes, they may need closer supervision initially. Yes, there may be a little more rework. The best way to learn is by doing, and making mistakes, and when the new hire is closely supervised the mistakes are caught, corrected and learned from. All the training programs in the world will not achieve this.
Another helpful approach is to assign a “buddy” (maybe this is the Canadian-ness coming out…”hey buddy”…”what’s up guy?” complete with flapping heads for the South Park fans out there) to the new hire. This buddy is the go-to person the new hire can rely on for help in navigating the new systems and processes. This also goes towards building relationships.
During onboarding the supervisor must be keenly aware of whether or not the new hire will be successful in the organization long term. It is almost always known within a month or two if the person will not succeed in any way in the organization. It may be that they are in the wrong position and could fit elsewhere, but if they are not going to work out, fire fast.
Keeping non-performers in the organization is a drain on morale and reduces the level of mutual respect in the organization. The supervisor of a non-performer won’t feel respect for the non-performer and if the supervisor does not have the authority to fire, will also lose respect for the next level of authority if action is not taken. Not only that, but the supervisor feels a lack of respect or even disrespect from their leader for their recommendation to fire being ignored. The degeneration of respect has a very corrosive effect and must be stopped as soon as possible as Explained in Appendix 3.
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3.2.2 Career Planning
"The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay"
– Henry Ford
In the modern professional organization I would substitute training with development and I think this comes closer to the spirit of what Ford was aiming at. Career planning is the process by which we can accelerate people’s development.
Career planning is a form of forced reflection, enabling development of wisdom and accelerating the development of competencies the individual desires to build, and that benefit the organization.
The basic process is to;
1. Identify the individual’s aspirations
a. short term
b. medium term
c. long term
2. Identify any limitations or restriction they have (to travel, relocation, etc)
3. During a planning session, review with an organizational leader who understands the strategic plan. The session is facilitated by their mentor.
4. Identify win-wins where the individual is advancing to aspirations in a manner that also advances organizational strategic objectives
a. This should be doable IF the right people are getting on the bus as outlined in section 2.1
There should be homework done by the individual in advance of a career planning session with thought put towards what are their aspirations and realistic limitations. This should be put on paper and reviewed by their mentor and the leader in advance of the career planning session. There is certainly an art to this process and it takes a few iterations to get not-bad at it, and years of practice to get good at it.
In the absence of a well defined, well communicated and well understood organizational strategy this process may be of limited value to the organization.
The Japanese have a wonderful concept called Ikigai summarized in the figure below:
Figure 7: Ikigai
The top and left of the Ikigai diagram in the career planning are the individual, and the bottom and right are the organization, and if we are doing a good job of getting the right people on the bus, then finding opportunities for Ikigai should not be too hard.
The final output from the career planning session should be a development plan with specific actions. This could be coursework or other training, a particular type of project, when the opportunity arises, a specific strategic project. Discussion during subsequent mentoring sessions should focus on specific skills being developed in the context of progress across the development plan. The development plan also gives the supervisor a level of situational awareness about the individual team member so that when decision making is under way if there is a particular opportunity to work on a specific initiative that would be of special interest to a particular individual they may be assigned to that opportunity, providing a highly motivated team member to the initiative.
3.2.3 Mentoring or Coaching and the 1 to 1 Meeting
Should we mentor or coach people? Why does this need to be an OR question? Both of these relationships have their place where people will benefit from them.
Mentoring is a more relational process and is led by the mentee to leverage the past experience of the mentor in their development. Coaching is led by the coach, and is more targeted to the development of specific skills and has more concrete goals.
Direct supervisors will tend to be coaches, and have specific goals for the players to work towards that are related to their areas of responsibility. When a mentee is working with a mentor the mentee will have their own goals that they are working towards with the help of a mentor.
Mentoring is typically a voluntary activity, while coaching is typically a paid position.
So, in the context of organizational development a leader will need to play both of these roles and there is great value in being able to switch back and forth between the roles depending on the individual you are helping. It is valuable for a leader to be able to function in both capacities.
Once again past experience in athletics through coaching can be really valuable. Even as a player, having been on the receiving end of coaching will be instructive.
Coaches are not always soft and cuddly and in fact my favorite ones had some seriously hard edges. Coaches will be supportive, but occasionally, maybe more than occasionally, players need a kick in the rear end to get going. When a player is being complacent, a coach should call them out (privately). Mentors can do the same thing but it is usually a lot gentler. A leader knows when each style is needed.
It is perhaps instructive to examine the way in which different sports are coached. Examining Rugby and American Football we see two sports that have a lot of similarities: both physically very demanding, requiring both finesse and violence. Despite these similarities, the approaches to coaching are very different, especially on game day. In football one of the coaches is calling each and every play. In rugby the coach sits in the stands and the players decide the plays that will be called when there are set pieces, and the game itself is much more improvisational. I argue that high performing businesses where the leader can have time to work on the business and not in it, are going to be more like a rugby game than a football game.
The leader will prepare their players to go out and perform, make personnel choices and provide instruction at a few key times, but the players decide independently how to execute.
In any case a key benefit to a formal mentoring / coaching programme should be a Development Plan for the employee which comes out of their career planning discussed above. This plan should get regular follow up, at minimum every two months between the employee and their mentor or coach. Many organizations have an annual review that incorporates goals for the next year. Too often, after the performance review the goals collect dust and nobody looks at these goals for another year. It is a giant missed opportunity to help that person manifest their potential.
We chose to label our programme as mentoring program and focus on the more relational aspects as our work was project based. People would get plenty of coaching from supervisors as it related to highly goal oriented project based work. In reality our mentoring program was probably 70-80% mentoring and 20-30% coaching. In an organization that is not client facing and the work is more routine a coaching program may be more appropriate. There is no one size fits all approach to this and the leader should educate themselves on coaching and mentoring.
When mentoring, empathetic listening with the intent to understand and the use of open-ended questions are crucial.
Where I draw the line between mentoring and coaching is the following: coaching is a coach-led process. Mentoring is a mentee-led process.
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3.2.4 Performance Management, Measurement and Review
Performance reviews are an interesting topic. Can an organization function and see improvement without formal performance reviews? Yes. Can formal performance reviews deliver value? Yes.
Any organization that wants to start measuring performance and adopt the oh so popular Key Performance Indicators for individual performance should first read Jerry Mueller’s excellent “Tyranny of Metrics” (Mueller, 2018). In short, what Muller explores is the idea that managers and leaders are surrendering judgement/discernment to metrics, that is: handcuffing themselves to what metrics say instead of relying on discernment of the various inputs to determine what an appropriate response is. This reduces discernment to a simple ‘if the metric says X, then the action is Y’. If the employee scores 90% on metric X, then they get a bonus of $10,000. Let’s illustrate this with a real-life story from my career.
STORY reserved for POMASYS Customers. Classic perverse incentive.
Discerning judgement can not be allowed to play second fiddle to metrics. Discerning judgement can actually be a leading indicator of performance. Some metrics can be leading indicators, most that are used in performance review are lagging indicators. A leading indicator is some form of a measurement that provides predictive power of what WILL be. A lagging indicator is a measurement of what WAS. Typical financial statements are the most commonly used lagging indicator.
When it comes to leading individual people the best form of performance review is contemporaneous feedback, including and especially:
1. Praise
2. Error correction
Both of these are discussed above. Refer to section 3.1.7.
Then the question becomes what is the point of a formal performance review? There are a few possible answers (in descending order of importance):
1. To provide feedback to help the individual improve (however there should be no surprises as the feedback was already delivered contemporaneously)
2. To get feedback from the team member on the organization and supervisors performance to stimulate improvement
3. To provide a milestone or marker. The person on the receiving end of the review can now mark the navigation in the next year on where they were at that documented point in time.
4. To get metrics in place for bonus compensation determination
5. To document poor performance in support of a termination and to put the person on notice through a performance improvement plan(PIP)
In smaller organizations the level of formality needed for #1 and #2 is low, and this is one of the beautiful things about smaller more intimate organizations. However, to make an organization scalable there is a need for the systematic aggregation and condensation of this type of data in order to inform the leadership.
Regarding #2, it is important that here we combine the active listening habit. This is a really great opportunity for growth. Some of my biggest lifts in performance as a leader came from listening to the gift of feedback from team members, including co-op students. Actively listening to their feedback and being grateful for it makes the person feel respected. Acting on it makes them feel like they made a difference. Receiving the feedback with gratitude is a way of showing respect to the team member.
#1 and #2 are relational and about leadership. #3 and #4 are transactional and about management. There needs to be a balance between these aspects. Most organizations suffer from an overly transactional performance review process. It doesn’t have to be that way.
If metrics are used the analysis should be connected to the strategic map concept presented in section 2.2.1. The metrics may change from year to year depending on the strategic needs of the organization, but be careful of perverse incentives.
Bottom line of KPIs: be careful of creating perverse incentives and do not be tyrannized by the metrics by throwing discernment and judgement out the window. Kotter’s comment about change efforts being over managed and under led comes to mind. Discerning judgement is a key component of leadership.
Second chances are great, and we all need them in life, maybe even a third chance. In a family you might give a child many chances. In a high performing business, keeping a non-performer erodes mutual respect. Putting them in a performance improvement plan and giving them multiple chances beyond what is reasonable will hurt your organization. The leader will be perceived as weak and loses the respect of the team. The rest of the team’s workload is increased to cover for the non-performer and even worse the non-performer is taking up salary which otherwise would be directed to pay out bonus to the other workers actually producing. Resentment builds. The high performers get fed up and leave:
“Low performance environments attract and retain low performers. High performance environments attract and retain high performers.”
3.2.5 Promotions
When we were a smaller company (20-30 people) a lot of the time the transition to a new position was organic. Someone would start at an entry level position and work on a project directly supporting me (as president and still wearing a PM hat from time to time). Often these projects would span 2-3 years and by the end of the project this person was the PM and I was acting as senior technical support / principal. Generally, the people that went through this process became high performers. The habits discussed above were lived out and their development was greatly accelerated. These people then went on to form the core of senior leaders in our organization. However, this creates a time lag to being able to scale the organization if the growth is strictly organic, therefore a hybrid approach is necessary in order to be able to unlock more rapid or immediate growth in the face of a pressing opportunity. The point here though is that in this organic process we often missed the opportunity to formally recognize this person’s promotion; it just kind of happened. A more formal public recognition and celebration would have capitalized on the opportunity for a morale boost and to show to other young people the success of one of their peers piquing their curiosity on how it was done, likely motivating them to do the same.
The recognition of achievement makes a person feel respected. In real life not everyone is a winner, and when people do get a real win, it is an opportunity to genuinely celebrate. We should have done this better and from discussions with other business leaders this is an effective tactic.
When someone is being promoted organically another potential miss is the re-boarding opportunity. It is easy to take some key aspects for granted with internal hires that would not be an external hire. The re-boarding can and should be abbreviated versus a full onboarding. If the promotion is into a position of leadership, then the following quote is apt and they should be presented with this idea:
“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”
– Jack Welch
I love this quote as it encapsulates a lot, and especially the idea of scalability. There is only so much one individual can do. If you as a leader can rapidly grow the people around you to high capability and keep them engaged you have greatly upwardly scaled the results that can be achieved and hopefully their meaningfulness.
3.2.6 Exit Interview
Before you get to an exit interview you will have received notice of an employee’s intent to resign. If you have been doing the rest of your job right, this will be in a face to face with the team member, and you will know before HR. My approach to this was to almost never try to get them to change their mind (especially by offering more money or perks): in my opinion this offer of more is disrespectful. Why didn’t you already make that offer? They are an adult and they have made up their mind. Be happy for them. They are moving on, you have been a part of their life and hopefully had a positive impact on them.
The exit interview may be an opportunity to get constructively critical feedback that was not provided in regular performance reviews. More often than not though people will be reluctant to be too candid in an exit interview for fear of burning a bridge or leaving some undesirable note in their file should a possible future employer call for a reference and a less than discreet HR staffer divulges more information than they ought to.
A function of the exit interview should be to make the departing employee feel like they are valued and if you want them to come back to let them know they are welcome back. Often the boomerangs are really great employees. They have gone out into the wider world and experienced things from outside the organization and can bring back some potentially game changing insights for you.
One of our biggest sources of turn over was employees leaving to work at our clients. They often became some of our biggest advocates simply because they understood from the inside our level of commitment to our clients and to our employees.
The exit interview is an opportunity to say farewell. I love the French Aurevoir: in English until we meet again.
3.3 Closing
At the level of the individual, competence can be described as the combination of knowledge and wisdom. In an organization this individual competency needs to be augmented by perseverance, humility, and emotional intelligence. With the right people on the bus, and the right people leading with the right habits, a virtuous cycle is created wherein competency is continuously being generated while the desired results are being achieved.
Appendix 1 and 3 explore theoretical frameworks that are relevant and significant outcomes of success in the above for people in the organization are that:
1. They will feel respected. (Ri, see Appendix 3)
2. They will have respect for the people around them. (Ro, See Appendix 3)
This is as a result of being surrounded by capable people who voluntarily undertake hardships in support of one another in executing the organization’s mission and in their learning journeys. They will independently pull together to make things happen, especially when times get tough.