Preparing Leaders to Coach Using Humble Inquiry

Presented By:

David Verble

Your organization is trying to create an environment in which staff and operators are engaged in problem solving.  But what do staff and workers hear when their managers and leaders talk to them about problems?  Do the things managers say and ask invite operators to share problems and their knowledge and thinking about them?  Do your leaders encourage staff to think or tell them what to think and do?  Do their questions lead to a better grasp of problems or do they shut employees down or scare them off?   No amount of training in continuous improvement or facilitation of rapid improvement events can overcome the tone managers and leaders set by what they say and ask at huddle meeting and problem solving reviews.

In most organizations responsibility for helping leaders change to behaviors more supportive of employee engagement is left to the Lean/CI consultants and coaches.  The challenges in this kind of upward coaching are many and great:

• Lean/CI professionals seldom have the position or authority to require leaders to change their behavior
• Managers and senior leaders got to their positions partly based their experience and they tend to believe they know what’s happening and needs to be done.
• People who rise in leadership usually have a track record as successful problem solvers and tend to believe in their own effectiveness.
• Traditional management thinking says managers are supposed to know and be the problem solvers.
• Most managers think they are coaching when they correct and tell because that is the most common image of a coach.

Many Lean/CI coordinators and consultants have improved their own effectiveness as coaches by learning the techniques of humble inquiry questioning.  But few have the skills for engaging and teaching resistant leaners or the training to lead others through the behavior changes to acquire similar skills. The challenges are not necessarily overwhelming or the situation hopeless, however.

This workshop will introduce some proven techniques Lean/CI coaches can use to engage managers and executives as self-directed learners and help them become more supportive problem solving leaders and more effective as coaches. It will focus specifically on using those techniques to coach upward and facilitate others in developing an appreciation and the skills for humble inquiry questioning.

Participants will learn to:

• Help leaders become more aware of their current coaching behaviors and their impact
• Model humble inquiry questioning to demonstrate its value and effectiveness
• Contract with leaders to support them in a process at self-directed behavior change
• Show leaders how to design, conduct and assess small experiments with new skills to gradually work toward behavior changes
• Help leaders use a simple procedure for reflecting on the impact of their habits and experiments to make incremental behavior changes

A research-based model of a process individuals commonly follow to make significant changes in their habits and behaviors will also be explored as a basis for this approach to non-directive coaching.

Participants are asked to be prepared to share their challenges in coaching a manager or senior leader with another participant who will be their coach in the 3 practice activities.

 

Facilitator Bio: