How does your role as an HR Professional and Business Coach, increase leadership capability and improve business performance?

At a recent breakfast briefing for senior HR Leaders, Full Potential Group Managing Partners, Carole Gaskell and John Blakey, chaired a debate on this highly topical issue focusing on the following questions:

1. So why focus on leadership capability now when we all have 101 other priorities and challenges?  

Three recent industry reports concentrate on the rapidly changing business climate we face as we move from recession to economic recovery and growth, and all confirm that leadership capability is a growing concern for HR Professionals.

The Randstad ‘Shifting Sands’ report highlights that  22% of organisations surveyed are concerned about a shortage of appropriately skilled senior managers.
The Henley Business School ‘Corporate Learning Priorities Survey 2011’ surveyed HR/non-HR senior managers in organisations employing more than 500 people, with results clearly highlighting ‘developing people to achieve growth’ as priority number 1, closely followed again by talent retention. The Mercer ‘2010 Talent Management Survey’ echoed these findings - 78% of respondents expecting talent management to be a top priority within the next three to five years, with leadership succession being of particular concern.

The last two years have seen many organisations suspend or cut back on their talent management initiatives and now we see an increasing demand to re-focus on the ‘people agenda’. Many of our own clients are taking the opportunity to refresh and re-invent their talent management programmes to reflect new business drivers, new media and the shifting expectations of participants and sponsors. It is an exciting time to create new ways of thinking in this field.

Participants in our roundtable highlighted two particular trends in this area:-

i) Developing talent in emerging markets – global organisations face the increasing challenge of developing talent using a consistent global framework yet adapting this to meet local cultural expectations and norms. What works in the UK and the US is not necessarily what works in China, India and the Philippines.

ii) The need to lead in a ‘new way’ – the impact of the financial crisis and subsequent recession appears to have left a legacy in terms of the expectation of leaders and their behaviour. Staff are even more cynical of corporate hype, feeling vulnerable to changes beyond their control (mergers, restructures, global events) and are increasingly expecting an ethically sound stance from their organisations.
  
It is clear that the skills, behaviours and mindset of talented people are going to be fundamental to business recovery and high performance. HR leaders have the opportunity to be seen as the catalysts necessary to shape and direct the organisation’s future, creating the cultural framework necessary for a business to excel while anticipating the trends that these discussions reveal.

2. How your role as a business coach can affect individual and business performance?
 
At our roundtable, senior HR professionals acknowledged that they are in a privileged position, sitting on the top table and representing the ‘talent agenda’. The challenge is how best to leverage these Board relationships acting as a genuine ‘business coach’ to the leadership team. Now is the time for HR professionals to have the courage to step into this role more fully and to ‘role-model’ the organisational change they want to achieve. We should all acknowledge and draw confidence from the quantum physics ‘Butterfly Effect’ principle which identifies the fact that ‘a small change at one place in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere.’ Could you be the ‘butterfly’ in your organisational system that triggers a far reaching cultural shift through your own subtle yet transformative interventions?

Participants at the roundtable commented that they believed it was HR’s role to challenge leaders and be provocative. To do this effectively requires courage but also relies upon a firm foundation of trust that has been built into relationships over a period of time. Many leaders have been ‘fire fighting’ as the recession has taken hold and there are many ‘burning platforms’ that are creating a frenzied atmosphere at Board level. In this climate, an HR leader can use coaching skills to clarify ownership and accountability, to build confidence in handling uncertainty and to bring ‘bigger picture’ perspectives to the table. 

This conversation then led to an acknowledgement that succession planning and building the talent pipeline is key to ensuring that a new generation of leaders emerge at the right time, and with the right skills, to cope with 21st century expectations of business leadership. We live in a world where delivering financial results alone is not a sufficient measure of success – how these results are delivered in terms of leadership behaviour, environmental impact and stakeholder management will be just as critical to the sustainability of individual and organisational performance.

3. Coaching tools and techniques currently used at Board level
 
On a more practical level, it is useful to review some of the tools and techniques HR leaders can use at Board Level since it is our ‘day to day’ behaviour and our ‘person to person’ conversations that start any process of change. In our work with CEOs and Managing Directors we work on three levels - the thinking brain, the heart brain and the infinite brain.

One simple technique for stimulating the thinking brain is to use laser questioning to gain clarity and focus around challenging issues and complex thinking. Asking a laser question such as “What would create an immediate breakthrough?” catalyses people to cut through layers of often excessive, complicated, confused thinking, to laser straight into the essence of a situation and move forward. The simple, yet powerful question “what else?  what else? what else…?” (asked 3 times) is a superbly effective workout for the thinking brain!

Engaging the ‘heart brain’ in the conversation will generate greater returns and the potential for change is taken to a new level. ‘Emotional intelligence’ can be a complex subject but can also be simple, for example the question ‘how do you feel about this?’ as opposed to ‘what do you think about this?’ is an immediate gateway into this level of engagement. Often when asked this question leaders respond by saying ‘Well, what I think is….’ but this is thought not a feeling! Hence we would challenge at this point and feedback that ‘you just told me more about your thoughts, I am interested in how you feel about this so let me ask you again – how do you feel?

Working at the ‘Infinite brain’ level opens up the potential for significant transformational shifts since it taps into a deeper level of a person’s identity and purpose. This is a very personal domain and requires sensitivity and trust to navigate skilfully. A gateway into the ‘infinite brain’ can often be found in the creative use of metaphors and analogies.

An example of this is a question posed to a CEO in conversation earlier this week, when asked “What comes to mind as a metaphor for your role in driving the growth agenda in your organisation?” after some thought he replied “Our marketplace is undergoing radical change, I need to get us all across the river as the bank on the other side presents significantly more opportunities than the side we are currently on. I’ve already rowed to the other side and started to explore it, I’ve taken some of my leadership team over there, but so far only in a rowing boat. The challenge is for some of us to start to set up camp over there, get established and build the bigger boats to bring everyone else across…..” The conversation continued with the coach asking questions and the CEO building an increasingly more vivid and compelling image in his mind of the job at hand and how to step-change his effectiveness in navigating the river, getting to the new bank and delivering results.

Participants at the roundtable had developed and deployed their own tools for engaging with their peers at Board level. Again many of these were simple steps yet did require courage to implement. For example, one HR Director holds monthly ‘one to one’ conversations with each of his Board level peers that are positioned as informal coaching sessions. The very fact that his busy colleagues prioritise this time and turn up each month demonstrates the value which they place on this support. This routine immediately sends a message to the organisation that the Board values investing time in personal development and will be far more powerful than a slide presentation proclaiming a grand talent management vision, underlining it is through our actions not our words that our behaviour is ultimately judged.

We hope that these observations and perceptions from our roundtable have been thought provoking and we look forward to hearing your comments or answering your questions. Our challenge to all HR Professionals is to be courageous and remember the ‘Butterfly Effect’ when working with your Senior Leaders – ‘the ripple effects of your individual initiatives can generate significant change throughout a complex organisational system.’
 

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