What jazz teaches us about coaching

At the Club Inegales recently, down in a basement on North Gower Street, I found myself watching members of the house band, Notes Inegales, during their joint set with their guests - Uzbek musicians Abbos Kosimov and Sardor Mirzakhojaev. Nothing unusual about that? Except, most of them were not playing at the time. I had been drawn to their listening.

Abbos was showing his remarkable talent and expressiveness on the Doira – an Uzbek instrument, somewhere between a tambourine and a folk drum. The others were mostly listening. Each had their own style: some totally still but absolutely focused; others in motion, quietly showing their appreciation, enjoyment, and engagement.  And as I looked around I thought: that’s what good listening looks like.

This clearly matters for coaches, and anyone for whom listening is a core professional skill. The questions we ask are important and they help our clients to open up, be articulate and show themselves. But more than that, our clients notice how we listen to them when we are silent. Our physical response, the quality of our attention, helps them speak. 

Now I doubt that Abbos’s playing is affected by how his fellow musicians listen to him – he was brimming with confidence and playfulness. But I know that when I play music – with a far from professional level of skill - my playing is boosted if I notice my band-mates appreciating my efforts. I observe how I am being heard.

At Club Inegales, the format includes three sets: Notes Inegales, then the guest(s), and then the two combined. For the latter, they do some brief but intense rehearsal. The club is about fusion, about dialogue between different styles, cultures and forms of musical expression. It is also about improvisation. So, if my experience is anything to go by, the rehearsal creates the framework for the fusion so that the improvisation can take place. 

This too echoes the dance of coaching: as we meet our clients and work with them, two worlds come together, and we listen in order to understand and start to make progress, to make music with them. Like musicians, we have studied and refined out technique. We have mastered our instrument – ourselves – so that we can perform and enable the other to perform.

As we left the gig, one of my friends commented on the discipline of the playing. I had noticed the freedom. Both were evident. The first gave structure, the second fueled improvisation. As in coaching, our discipline enables us to hold the space and guide the process; our self-expression and creativity help us do what seems right in the moment. Like musicians, we bring all our investment in learning technique in service of spontaneity.

At its best, our dialogue becomes a duet. I saw this when the violinist Max Baillie took the lead with Abbos. They started with call and response and then they built. They moved from attention and reaction to anticipation and unison until their collaboration brought wry smiles to both their faces. Rehearsed or improvised? I don’t know but the energy and enjoyment I saw suggested that they were creating then and there.

I did not go to the gig looking to learn, or even think, about coaching. But it does seem that many areas of human endeavour have similarities and cross-overs, particularly when consummate performance is involved. That offers an intriguing prospect: next time you think about your future development as a coach, consider: where could I see some really good jazz?

Contradictions of Coaching

One of the questions about coaching that continues to fascinate me is “what is excellent coaching?”

I have written elsewhere on the route to coaching mastery.*

But what do great coaches actually do?

As I talk to top coaches, and as I reflect on what I do at my best, it seems that one of the core abilities of the excellent coach is the ability to work with and within the tensions inherent in coaching. The top coach navigates the contradictions of coaching.

Here are seven contradictions that I have noticed.  

1.       Being professional and authentic

As coaches, we combine what we have learnt with who we are. Clients respond to who we are and that helps build a relationship. And we have a role and a responsibility as professional coaches to choose what of ourselves we bring so we can serve them: being ourselves and being what they need.

2.       Having a signature presence and the flexibility to be what the client needs

How we are professional and authentic is one way we express our signature presence. That will be individual for each of us. But clients need different things of us and we need to flex and draw on our repertoire, including those aspects of ourselves where we are less comfortable.

3.       Following the client’s interest and using insight and intuition to spark their awareness.

This is the challenge at the heart of our commitment to being non-directive. Clients can be in the dark or blinded by the glare of their everyday experience. Our experience informs the questions and observations that help them shine the light. But what they do with what they then see must be their call.

4.       Being alongside the client and separate from them

Getting drawn too far into the client’s story is one of the pitfalls of the curious and empathetic coach.  Walking beside them, we can appreciate what they see. But if they are walking in the weeds or lost in the forest, we need to take the helicopter view so we can help them see more and further. Similarly, we need to care and not care. We can then serve them rather than please them.

5.       Attending to process while allowing issues and insights to emerge

A key role of the coach is to manage the process. I’m a great fan of inviting the client to do ‘experiments’ during coaching. Often they agree and the outcome is powerful. Occasionally they decline and that’s fine – something else will emerge. I always know where the client and I are in terms of the ‘stages’ of our exploration and sometimes we are lost for a while. That can be a vital ‘stage’.

6.       Feeling empathy while remaining curious about the singular experience of the client.

This is the paradox of shared humanity: I am just like you and I cannot be because we have lived different lives. So we must hold our empathy lightly.

7.       Having a beginner’s mind and an expert mind

It seems that so much of managing all these contradictions amounts to bringing all we can in service of the client at the same time as knowing that we know nothing. Curiosity and insight. Openness and intuition. Awe and recognition. Newness and wisdom. 

A lot more could usefully be said about these and other contradictions. But they can’t be resolved by ever finer analysis. For the great coach, they are not contradictions. They bring no tension. They bring life, energy and creativity. They are resolved in practice. By working with them, the top coach holds the space in which the work gets done, they hold themselves, and they hold the client, elegantly creating simplicity out of seeming complexity.

   Tell me what you think. Do you recognise any of these contradictions in your own practice? 

                       What have I missed? Email me at stephen@gibsonstarr.com

*”The Mystery of Mastery” via http://www.kensmithcoaching.co.uk/page11.htm

Scouting for Coaches

“What do you do to get into the ‘zone’?” asked my friend and colleague Mark when we worked together last week.

We were delivering workshops to an exec MBA group on Executive Presence. I explained that I did three types of preparation to get into the ‘zone’:

First, I get absolutely comfortable and clear about my content, the context and my audience. This is so I know what I am saying, can relate to my group and manage the process with authority. But it’s also so that I can relax and release myself to be my best and focus on the needs of the group. A design or agenda is, after all, only a framework. The needs of the people in the room are paramount and if I am anxious about the content I won’t focus on them. 

How much detailed preparation I do depends on the subject matter. For coaching and familiar workshops, it’s a brief reminder and re-read my reflections from last time. With new workshops, it’s the hard graft of fully absorbing the agenda, the logic and flow. And it’s important not to over-do it: excess preparation leads to tightness by imbuing the detail with a significance it does not have. I aim to do enough to enable myself to perform and trust myself that I will. The aim of all this preparation is to look effortless.

My second type of preparation is a personal check in with my readiness to do the work. That involves FOE – three questions that I ask myself:

      1.     How focused am I?

   

      2.     How open am I?

 

      3.      How is my energy?

Focus is about clearing my head, quietening the noise of other concerns, ensuring that any residual anxiety becomes anticipation, being fully present.

Openness is about getting rid of assumptions – about what might be easy or difficult, what the client(s) will bring, what it will be like working with them.

Energy has two dimensions: quantity and quality. I need sufficiently high energy to bring pace, confidence and lightness to my work. And I need calmness – not a frenetic energy but relaxed concentration.

In response to each of my three questions I give a mark out of 10. I aim for a 9 or better. If I am below that, being aware is often enough: I shift my focus, I move my attention outward to work with what is rather than what I assume, and I either draw on my reserve tank or breathe deeply to find the level and type of energy I need.

And my final check, and last piece of preparation, to is to adopt the pose: I know how I naturally sit or stand when I am properly ready. This is personal – there are commonalities but each person has to find their own pose.

I find that the issue of preparation comes up often with my clients. They want to perform well in a situation that matters. They want to show their best self. They want to have a strong, positive impact. I point out that feeling some anxiety is normal: so long as it does not tip into panic, it’s the fuel for the hard graft of preparation. Tension and release is a natural rhythm. And my approach seems to help: attend to the detail until you are relaxed enough, apply FOE and adopt the pose.

And remember the scout motto: Be Prepared

From Hank to Hendrix: leadership lessons from the godfather of grunge

Last Saturday I spent 3 glorious hours in the company of Neil Young at the O2. The man is 70 and, supported by band members who looked well short of half his age, he delivered with few words, great presence and a strong connection.

Some 55 years on from his first gig, he still finds the passion and energy to really perform. How does he do that? And what can we, and the leaders we coach, learn from him?

Neil Young started in about 1960 playing covers of instrumental Shadows numbers. He helped create folk-rock and country–rock with Buffalo Springfield. He produced stunning acoustic albums that show-cased his song-writing ability. And he produced a brand of hard rock that earned him the sobriquet “the godfather of grunge”.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame website says “Young has consistently demonstrated the unbridled passion of an artist who understands that self-renewal is the only way to avoid burning out”. But he has not jettisoned what he once knew or who he once was: he brings it all together in what he now is. When I saw him he showed his range as a performer: he started soft, reflective and melodic; and concluded visceral, driven and challenging.

Neil Young is not afraid to upset expectations. He was once sued by the owner of his record label for making music that the label-owner regarded as "unrepresentative" of himself.

The parallels with the mind-set and approach of engaging, experienced leaders is striking. I notice that the best leaders I coach relish the next challenge. Those who continue to progress and achieve, evolve as they learn. Self-renewal is a barrier to burn-out.

Long-lived leaders look for different ways of using their hard-won wisdom. And that keeps them sharp, stretched and engaged. They look for how they can combine new learning with the insights that have served them well. And that shows them as wise and fresh.

So if you want to keep on rocking as a leader, you could do worse that let Neil be your guide. Like him, be forever Young. Long may you run.

Coaching the caged bird to sing

Last week I was enjoying delivering a leadership workshop with my great colleague, Andrea when I was reminded of one of the many wonderful phrases crafted by Maya Angelou. She said of herself: “I am fine as wine in the summertime.”

It’s bold, evocative, succinct and the words have music in them.

A lot of my work centres on helping my clients to find their voice as part of developing as a powerful leader. When they find something as simple and compelling as Maya’s words, I know that I have done my work well.

But if you don’t have Maya Angelou’s gifts, where and how do they find those words?

The first step is to decide: what it is that you want to offer? A client’s initial answer is often framed in terms of the competences or characteristics that they bring. It’s worthy but unexciting. And it’s not really what they offer. What matters is what it’s like to be led by them. It’s what people remember. It’s what they need to convey. In the words of Bernadette Jiwa (whose blog ‘The Story of Telling’ is one of the best marketing blogs around) – “Don’t sell the guitar. Sell the music.”

The second step is to ask: what is special about you? Marketing gurus often challenge us to find our own USP. Good in theory but difficult in practice. Why? Because few of us have something that is truly unique. If you do, go with it but if not then three truths help:

• You are interesting (especially if your audience is the right one for you) and
  
• You are unusual or extraordinary in some way and
  
• You have many facets (some of which stay mainly hidden)

And in combination, these three can make a voice that is close to unique.

The third step is to find new ways and fresh language in which to convey who you are. Language has a life-cycle and we are all tired of the familiar so we have to dig in unbroken ground. My approach is to get my client digging with freedom. Then the gems appear. And the richest ground is often:

• ·         Metaphor and simile – “what’s it like working with you when you’re at your best?”·          

•            Out of the mouths of … “what’s the most powerful feedback you’ve ever had?”
  
•            Story and anecdote – “how were you when you did truly great work?”
  

And we don’t stop until the client finds words that evoke and excite.

The fourth step is the hardest: being willing to show yourself fully, putting the words out there. That takes confidence – not so much in yourself but in the value of what you bring. It takes courage – your audience might not like what you say. And it takes compassion – loving yourself, “warts ‘n’ all”.

And when I get that tingle down my spine, and hear the energy and wonder in my client’s voice, I know they love the voice they have found. You can imagine the mischievous smile on Maya’s face as she said:

“I’m determined to go through life with passion, compassion, humour and some style.”

If this short piece speaks to you, I’d love to help you find your voice. stephen@gibsonstarr.com