#executive coaches

The essence of their approach lies in the meticulous application of evidence-based strategies—techniques that have been rigorously tested and validated across various industries and organizational settings.

I’m Gowri S Ramani, your Leadership Coaching India , and am very happy to welcome you here! I am currently in my 5th year as a coach, doing leadership coaching and executive coaching for senior leaders in corporates/not-for-profit organizations.

Asking powerful questions is a necessity for a successful coaching conversation. However, asking someone a bunch of random questions does not necessarily mean that you are coaching them. A coaching conversation has three distinct components:

Determining whether or not the situation requires coaching by using the Success Equation. Asking questions to create a dialogue that builds awareness about the issues at hand Empowering the coachee toward action that will create more effective behaviors

There is a simple process to Build Awareness and Move to Action, which you will find in Brian Emerson and my book, A Manager’s Guide to Coaching. We call it the W.I.N. B.I.G. model because when you help an employee become aware of what’s going on and take action, you WIN BIG and they WIN BIG.

There are six steps in the W.I.N. B.I.G. model. Three of them Build Awareness and three Move to Action. They are:

Build Awareness

W-onder About Root Cause

I-nvestigate Wants N-ame Possible Solutions

Move to Action

B-uild a Plan I-nsure Action

G-ive Affirmation

Creating a dialogue that progresses through these six steps will help you increase your employees’ effectiveness, make you a better manager, and allow everyone involved to WIN BIG.

Today we will talk about how and why to build awareness while coaching; in our next blog, we will talk about moving employees to action.

Build Awareness – W.I.N.

W-onder About Root Cause

When there is a problem at hand, most people want to jump in and immediately move to action. It’s easy to see that sales are decreasing, for instance, and assume that the sales team must be the problem. However, 99% of the time, what you see is just a symptom, not the real problem. Your job as a manager is to step back and wonder about the root cause of the problems that arise. Why are sales decreasing? What else is happening in the organization? How effective is your customer service?

It is often difficult to see the benefit of stepping back to build awareness about the situation. Yet, in the first step of coaching, Wonder About Root Cause, your job is to ask questions that will help your employee be curious about what’s really going on under the surface.

This stage can sometimes be a challenge for busy, problem-solving managers. Notice the first word of this stage: Wonder. It’s not Fix, Control, Stop or any other action-hero type of word. Coaches don’t, shouldn’t, and can’t have all the answers; the person in front of you has many more answers about themselves than you do. If you always fix their problem yourself, then you’ll be known as a good fixer and a so-so manager at best.

Start off by getting really curious. You know this employee can do good work, so what’s going on? Take time to wonder, but don’t judge. Because it’s your job to help your employee get curious so they can Build Awareness. Ask questions in a manner that makes this fun, not scary. Some good questions for this stage of the process are:

How does that impact you?

If you were watching this on TV, what would you say was going on?

What’s the main obstacle getting in the way here?

What’s underneath all of this?

Which of your buttons are really getting pushed here?

Don’t confuse ‘Wonder About Root Cause’ with getting all of the nitty-gritty details and facts about an issue. For example, if an employee comes to you frustrated about a conversation, she had with a team member, don’t ask for a recount of what happened. Instead, look for what the anger is really about—the root cause. In this case, you may find out your coachee has been working with someone who can’t meet deadlines, which interferes with her meeting deadlines, and therefore her ability to be successful in her role. In the case, the issue isn’t actually about the team member conversation at all.

On to stage two—Investigate Wants.

I-nvestigate Wants

As people, we usually get what we say we want; the problem is we usually aren’t clear on what we really want, so we end up with the wrong things. Raff is miserable at his job so finds another one. In a few months he’s miserable at his new job. That’s because Raff was miserable in the first place because he had no one to challenge him and help him grow. If he had known what he actually wanted before taking another job, he’d have been much more likely to find a job he liked.

The goal of the second stage in W.I.N. B.I.G. is to help your employees investigate what they really want (Investigate Wants). In the first stage, you create safety by asking open-ended wonder-type questions and get to the root cause of what is going on. Next, it’s time to look at what the person wants, how they want to be seen as things move forward, and what they want things to look like on the other side. This requires you to ask questions that open up possibilities and help the person paint a clear picture of what they want their world to look like. Here are examples of questions that help the employee think bigger and look to the future:

How would you like people to describe you as you resolve this?

What would success look like?

If you could use a magic wand to re-create the scene, how would you want it to look?

It’s important here, more than anywhere else, not to tell the employee what you think she should want. You have no way of knowing. We are all really good at thinking we know what others want, but we don’t. Be sure to give the person space and time to figure it out for herself. She may even need a few minutes of silence to think it through. Let her have that time without filling the empty space. If she feels stuck, just ask another open-ended question about her desired outcome. The bottom line is: deep down, we all know what we want. We just don’t always get a chance to voice it.

On to stage three—Name Possible Solutions.

N-ame Possible Solutions

There is a definite reason why this stage of W.I.N. is called Name Possible Solutions and not Name the Solution. Remember that you are still trying to Build Awareness, so the goal of this stage is to help the person become aware of the multitude of possible choices they have in the situation. Typically, if left to our own devices, we humans will go about implementing the same solutions that have worked for us in the past—even if there is a potentially more effective or efficient way of doing it. Your job is to get the employee to think big and outside the box, to explore all the possible options before settling on a specific strategy of action.

This is a tempting place for managers to jump in and solve the problem—to help the employee and maybe even save the day for them. But remember, coaching is about letting the person come up with his or her own answers. Your goal here is to help the employee have fun and brainstorm. A good way to do that is to ask questions like: The 85-year-old you is looking back at this situation; what does she say to do?

What do you have to do to get where you want to go?

How would Bill Gates tell you to solve the problem? What would it take to work this out? A key here is to be sure to ask follow-up questions. Do not settle with just one solution (even if you think it’s a great one). Inspire your employee to think bigger and consider different options. So, ask follow-up questions or statements such as: What else could work?

That’s a great idea; what’s another?

Great! Let’s think of 5 more. After you have generated lots of options together, you need to start weighing the impacts of the top ones. One of the biggest things you can do here is to help the person map back to what they said they wanted during Investigate Wants. Sure, their solution may solve the problem, but does it really get them what they want? When you have a few solutions on the table, ask questions like:

So which option gets you closest to what you want?

What would be the impact of your favorite solution?

What possibility is your favorite?

What would that get you? Now that we’ve looked in detail at how to build awareness of the problem when coaching an employee, it’s time to talk about how to move them into action. Stay tuned for the next post for all the how’s and whys.

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, or find me on Twitter.

By all accounts, low engagement levels and employee turnover rates plague organizations of all sizes and shapes. In fact, recent data from Gallup put employee engagement rates worldwide at about 15 percent and estimate that 51 percent of employees are looking to leave their current jobs. These statistics have significant economic consequences, as unengaged employees tend to be less productive, and organizations are forced to expend significant resources on recruitment and training to replace employees who leave.

Even the most high-performing organizations struggle with the ability to retain and engage high-quality employees. Nevertheless, despite incredible odds, we can also see some “bright spots” – organizations that have higher engagement rates and below-average turnover. Their secret sauce? These organizations promote “intrapreneurship” by encouraging employees to learn and apply entrepreneurial knowledge, skills and mindsets within their current organization. When done well, this approach increases employee engagement and retention by giving creative and growth-seeking employees opportunities to develop new products, services and business ventures – all without having to look elsewhere for these opportunities.

What’s more, there are three basic “leadership actions” taken by leaders who successfully advocate this approach in their organizations: they provide the right types of leadership development opportunities and employee engagement training program, they provide the necessary resources and they enable a culture of innovation. Let’s look at each of these leadership actions in more depth.

Provide the Right Types of Employee Leadership Development Opportunities

Not all leadership development is created equal, and as Deborah Rowland, change management researcher and author, notes, the most effective leadership development is experiential, influences participants’ intrapersonal emotional intelligence along with their external actions, is linked to participants’ specific contexts, and enrolls facilitators who act as guides rather than subject matter experts.

Not all leadership development is created equal. The most empowering intrapreneurship-focused leadership development experiences also specifically target the following proficiencies:

Being proactive and taking initiative

Embracing design thinking (solution-focused and oriented toward a desired future)

Enhancing emotional intelligence, especially coalition-building skills

Implementing project management

Taking risks and learning from failure        

In other words, while general leadership development, when done well, adds value for all participants, leaders and managers who want to cultivate intrapreneurs in their organization also need to ensure that they are providing training that addresses these specific competencies.

Provide the Necessary Resources for Self-identified, Employee-Driven Projects

More than talking a good game about innovation and creativity, leaders and managers who inspire an intrapreneurial mindset put their money where their mouth is by providing the time, space and financial resources necessary to support employee-driven initiatives.

For example, at Centiva Software Solutions, a Utah-based technical services organization, developers are given two days per month to work on a project of their choice. After learning about the problems faced by a local homeless shelter, developer Blake Kohler and his team were inspired to create a software solution that helped the shelter prioritize beds for clients. After developing and presenting an initial mockup to senior management, their team was given three months to further develop the product – the offshoot of which was a new product for the organization’s commercial line.

Similarly, with Kickbox, an innovation process designed by Adobe, employees or teams with an idea are given $1,000 and instructions and tools to measure progress, along with a Starbucks gift card and candy bar (purportedly to provide the necessary caffeine and sugar boost that innovators need). To date, Adobe has distributed more than 1,000 Kickboxes to employees around the world and made the program instructions available to others under a creative commons, share-alike, attribution license.

Design, Build and Encourage a Culture of Innovation

According to Clinton Longenecker, director of the Center for Leadership and Organizational Excellence at the University of Toledo, and Dale Eesley, director of the Center for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Franchising at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, organizational culture is the “key gateway” to intrapreneurship within a company.

In our experience, there are four defining features of this type of culture:

1. Employees are given a high degree of freedom and flexibility, which promotes autonomy and, thus, motivation.

Suzanne Smith, social entrepreneur and blogger, recalls how she started her career as a social intrapreneur within the American Heart Association: “The leadership, including now-CEO Nancy Brown, let me invent, lead teams, and grow in multiple roles within the organization.” Smith believes that by following the same methodology, other organizations can better tap into their existing talent pool and especially the Millennial base (those people born between 1981-1996).

2. Employees are encouraged to test out the competition and compare their company’s product or service to products and services from a different industry.

Justin Reilly, head of customer experience innovation at Verizon Fios, describes how he made the case for improving the company’s MyFios app: “On my phone, the Uber app is right beside the MyFios app. If I open Uber and hail a ride in two or three intuitive clicks, and then open the MyFios app and the experience isn’t as easy or fast, I’m going to judge Verizon Fios service on that experience. That means we’re competing against every customer’s last best experience. So that’s what we use as our guidepost to innovation and improvement.”

3. Employees are encouraged to ask questions and challenge processes.

Tim Houlne, a Fortune 500 intrapreneur-turned-startup entrepreneur, recalls that he received a lot of pushback for asking questions early in his career. Now, as CEO of Humach, an organization that provides customer contact solutions, he aims to create an culture where employees are encouraged to poke holes and rethink solutions: “As a tech startup, we must constantly look for better, cheaper and faster ways to operate; we have a culture where everyone feels comfortable presenting their ideas and innovative solutions are recognized.” So create an culture where employees are encouraged to poke holes and rethink solutions.

4. Employees have permission to fail (or understand which types of failures are acceptable and unacceptable).

Most researchers agree that risk-taking is a defining feature of entrepreneurs (cf, Antoncic 2003); however, one of the defining features of intrapreneurs is that they are actually more risk-averse than their entrepreneur peers. With this in mind, organizations that want to enable and empower intrapreneurs should regularly communicate that failure is a natural part of the innovation process and even celebrate failures. In situations where failure is not an option, leaders and managers need to make that clear.

At the end of the day, there are many factors that drive high levels of employee disengagement and turnover. As leaders and managers, we often assume that these factors are entirely outside of our control, which is a mistake. Promoting and enabling intrapreneurship is one strategy that can benefit both employees and organizations. While successfully implementing all three leadership actions is a significant undertaking, it’s also one that organizations would do well to consider, especially if they are struggling to engage and retain high performers.

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, find me on Twitter.