Space: the Final Frontier

On Tuesday evening I went to a preview of Martin Firrell's new
installation in The Vaults underneath Waterloo Station. It's called
"It ends here" and it's inspired by the Planet of the Apes and
explores human nature and the possibility of peaceful co-existance
with those who are different to us. I went with an open mind but
ready to find an 'installation' could tell me nothing about things I
care about. I was wrong.

The installation is just four rooms. Atmospheric, drenched in soft
sound, with smells and vapours, and sparsely lit. Each has just a
few words on a wall. It was the power of the spaces that hit me
first and has stayed with me. It was the use of space that allowed
the economy of expression to work.

Interesting. But what's it got to to do with leadership and coaching?

We know that the nature of a working space sends a message to
those who work there. If a leader has an important message to
give then choice of venue matters. Creative team work needs a
creative space with light, air and colour. Coaching literally and
metaphorically needs a safe space. But do we fully know or use
what different spaces can generate?

Think about what is happening when a leader gets others to enage
fully with a compelling vision, or when coaching provokes change.
It's not only the words, the insights, the actions that people take
away, it's also the felt sense of possibility -  generated in the
moment, in that space.

Martin's third room was the Brutality Room. Unlit apart from pencil
lights that some of us carried. A towering arched roof, dank brick-
work, squelching underfoot along a tunnel. It felt brutal. And it gave
onto the fourth room - small and gently lit with three words in gold
lettering on the facing wall: "Resistance is Grace". Tight, sofly
provocative and cathartic. Wonderful.


So what space might evoke your leadership message? How few
words would you need if you got the space right?

And if you see me coaching in an igloo, an art gallery or a tree-
house, you'll know why.

What do you do if they cry?

I had the pleasure this week of working with a group of bright, young tech
consultants on developing their coaching skills and practice. They impressed
me with their openness, their appetite for learning and the way they
wrestled with the practicalities and tensions of integrating coaching into their
practice as leaders and consultants.

As we focused on common blocks and challenges, one of the group asked,
"What do you do if they cry?" Good question. It seemed to us that coaches
call on two things: empathy and presence.

My friend and co-facilitator Sarah Brammeier flagged up the importance of
being clear on what empathy is and is not: "you can't walk in another person's
shoes". Indeed. As coaches we walk alongside, recognise our shared humanity
and draw on the experience that has shaped us to enable us to touch and be
touched by our clients. But as Zadie Smith said this week, "each person is a
world" and we should not presume to know a world.


Our presence as coaches helps create the space in which it is ok to cry. Our
clients sense our resilience: the fact that, whatever the particulars of our
experience, we are ok with our own strong emotions so we are ok being with
theirs. And we can recognise the power of their emotions without being
overwhelmed by them.

As we show that we recognise the power of the emotions that our clients are
experiencing, they know that they have been seen. And that's powerful stuff.
Seen and accepted. Not judged. Seen and heard. So why is that powerful?
I recall a notice in the entrance to a local church - St Nicholas, Chislehurst:

         "Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person they
           are almost indistinguishable."

Who are the least creative professionals?

Who are the least creative professionals - actuaries, air-traffic controllers,
civil servants? I don't know about the first two (and perhaps I am happy for
them to play safe) but I am re-evaluating my prejudices about the third.

I recently ran a half-day team-coaching session, focused on creativity, with
a group of eight senior civil servants. We warmed up exchanging accounts
of a recent professsional achievement that made us each proud. We got
loose with '10 ways to kill an idea' - with accolades for deviousness,
chutzpah and sangfroid. We got in the creative zone using de Bono's Six
Thinking Hats to focus on a real, current challenge.  We then got down to
generating ideas for how they might meet that challenge.

The output was astounding in both quantity and quality. And I hardly used
any of my favourite creative prompts ("what would a six-year old do?",
"what would Machiavelli do", "what would you do if you were leaving
tomorrow?). How did that happen? What was present that enabled the
group to be so producative and so creative?

It started with inclusive leadership: the leader identified the need, focused
the group's attention on it and then got buy-in to invest time in becoming
more creative. And this style permeated our coaching session.

The group gave the session time and space - moving out of the usual office
environment, dispensing with tables, plenty of room to move, and - despite
competing priorities - gave it the time needed to work with relaxed energy.

They shared a compelling purpose.They focused on something that was
real, current, important, with a real customer and for which all
members of the group had some responsibility.

They had the right attitude and spirit - despite the seriousness of the issue,
the tone and feel of our work was playful. They were open, encouraging of
each other and non-judgemental. If they did come up with potential
solutions then they would be taken forward but for the moment they had
freedom.

So for three hours, these experts were novices too: using beginners' minds
to release their expertise. They suprised themselves, revelled in each others'
outrageous ideas, sparked off each other and saw each other in a different
light. And, who knows, they may have cracked a problem that has defeated
all their predecessors.

What do you think enables teams to be creative?
Let me know: stephen@gibsonstarr.com

There is only one coaching question

When I heard Sir John Whitmore  make this assertion a few years ago
I was taken aback. It's a nice, pithy line but surely coaching is more
complex, more subtle than that. And I have so many great questions -
what am I supposed to do with them? Understandable reactions but
recent experience suggests that Sir John has a point.

A few months ago I worked with colleagues from iOpener at London
Business School. Our brief was to help 400 MBAers improve their
business writing. Session 1 was the technical stuff. Imporant but not
exactly existential. Session 2 was applying the learning to a cover letter
for a work placement. Here it got interesting. The drafts were mostly
technically ok; and some were good. All were worthy. But very few
excited me or gave me a feel for the writer. What was their USP? What
did they bring that was exciting or different, beyond their undisputed
competence.

As we talked, I probed and dug, listened for the peaks of energy and
interest, shared my reactions to the anodyne - and what hidden gems
we found! Not all the gems were unique but plenty were rare. And if
some had no precious stones, their combinations of baser metals still
glistened when we shone the light on them.



It seems that the foremost issue was not 'writing well' but for each
person to become aware of what they had to say about themselves - to
find their best story; to have the courage to tell that story; and then to
express it in a way that was clear, energetic, compelling and fresh.

This experience echoed last week when I coached some senior
Whitehall civil servants through their 360 degree feedback reports.
Most reports were 40 pages long. We'd not met before and we had 1
hour to reach some conclusions and capture them in a development plan.
A challenge. Where do you start?

Sir John came to the rescue. I needed to get my coachees to show
themselves to me so that together we could find their learning edge -
that heady mix of self-awareness, operational need and appetite that
fuels personal change at work. And mostly we succeeded as I gave my
full attention to the person opposite, using the report as fuel for our
conversation.

So maybe Sir John was right, there is only one coaching question:
who are you?

And if that question interests you, please comment or email me
stephen@gibsonstarr.com

Smile or Die

I stopped off in Waterstone’s at Charing Cross yesterday to find a book recommended on Aboodi Shabi’s stimulating website. It’s an angry and insightful book called ‘Smile or Die’ about how positive thinking has marginalised critical thinking. Good stuff. But also of interest was its location in a new section called “smart thinking”.

It made me wonder what sort of thinking was to be found in the rest of the shop. I didn’t research that but I did have a brief look at what was in the “smart thinking” section. It had some books by Malcolm Gladwell, the latest Daniel Goleman, Freakonomics and The Men Who Stare at Goats. I wondered what the criteria were for inclusion because there is a thin line between simple wisdom and hokum. It struck me that the books that I recognised all challenged assumptions, lazy thinking and restrictive commonsense, often bringing the insights of scholarship to a wider audience.

I like to think that there is some wisdom on those shelves, made accessible by keeping it simple. Lots of these books are relevant or have implications for leadership. And it seems that much of what I offer and explore when I am teaching leadership is in fact conceptually pretty simple.

And in my work with executives young and old I find myself offering ideas about leadership that are not only simple but far from new. A couple of years ago I heard two passionate presenters introducing what they called “the new leadership”, drawing on Goleman’s work. Grumpily, I thought it was only ‘new’ if you count Lao Tzu’s teachings as ‘new’. So I got quietly cross with the presenters and left.

But I should not have. Wisdom is timeless but to be heard it needs to find the right contemporary expression. Something may be old hat to me but it can (and thankfully sometimes is) mind-blowing for someone with different experience to me. And there is so much noise, so many unexamined assumptions and so much self-serving ‘commonsense’ that if we find a simple truth that helps us make sense of the world and be more effective in it, then we should repeat it until we hear lots of people saying it back to us. Or as Andre Gide put it:

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was                                       listening, everything must be said again.

Leadership is not a transferable skill

Why does my heart sink when I hear that Sir Stuart Rose of M & S
has been appointed to advise the NHS?

It's because I suspect that his expertise won't be directly transferable.
That's not to say that as a bright, experienced and successful man
he won't spot some useful improvements. He surely will. But his
success is particular, not general. And the same is true of all of us.

And it's not just that. You can be successful as the head of a large
organisation without being a great leader - you might have
exceptional analytical or strategic skills or be an inspired marketeer.
You might be just what your organisation needs given where it is in
its organisational life-cycle or in the prevailing competitive climate.

If you teach leadership, as I do, you also have to recognise that size
matters. Leading 100 people is different to leading 100,000. Very
few people can generate the intimacy and personal loyalty that is
possible in leading 100 when they have to lead 100,000. And where
they do it is more about how their leadership defines and
communicates the internal brand and organisational ethos than
about the personal relationships they make.

One consequence of this is that leadership in the middle is different
to leadership at the top.  If we look at the skills and qualities
required it's clear that many are the same. But context is crucial. So
beware your leadership prescriptions unless you really understand
the circumstances of your success.

Wisdom is about knowing where to look, not what you'll find there.
So welcome the stimulus of another's experience but make sure their
coat fits before you borrow it.