Six Conversations of a Brilliant Manager?
What can you do about that?
The essence of this conversation is to work through the four-part structure only asking questions. As soon as you start ‘telling’, offering advice or making suggestion, you have stopped coaching.
- Help the person to identify a good goal
- Help the person to work out where they are in respect to the goal - where are they starting from.
- Help them to identify some options - different ways to achieve the goal, or different ways to get started; don’t just go with the first idea
- Make sure they tell you what they are going to do, what their first action will be, when they will do it and when they will come back to tell you that they have done it.
Who should really own this?
This is a very different conversation, although it too has a four-part structure. Your first intention here should be to find out what the situation actually is, getting down to hard facts. Then it’s about finding out how the situation has occurred, The critical thing here is to avoid blame.
- Where are we now?
- How did we get here?
- What can we do?
- Who’s doing what - and by when?
How should we be behaving?
Difficult conversations come in many guises. Usually they are difficult because we think the other person is going to react badly. The bad reaction might be resistance to the message, taking offence, or becoming upset or angry. So the first thing to do is try ot frame the conversation more positively to yourself rather than giving feedback think of it has a highly developmental conversation.
- State the problem behaviour
- Say why it is a problem
- Sway what you expect
- Ask for their perspective
- Ask for their solution
- If you accept their solution move on, if not say what solution you would accept
- Summarise the solution and agree when you will review it
Who is really doing this?
Do not talk about how it should be done, but just the what and why. In more complex situations you may need to cover phases of delivery, milestones, resourcing etc.
- Set the scene
- Describe the task.
- Set the timeline
- Be clear on the limits of authority
- Check the other person’s understanding of the for key points
Where are we heading?
The key to this conversation is that you are not taking on responsibility for the other person’s career - that’s their responsibility.
The key points you need to get across to the other person are that they need to:
- Fortify themselves with knowledge
- Broaden their experience and raise their profile as much as possible
- Look for new responsibilities
- Ask for feedback
- Confront themselves - work out what they really are good at, accept that we all have limitations, be honest with themselves about what they really want, and hear what other people say.
Who are we doing?
The appraisal.
- Recognise - recent achievements
- Empathise - listen and learn
- Encourage - what do they want to improve?
- Ask - them to consider your suggestions
- Coach (see conversation 1)
- Build - their confidence in future success.