Golf is a very challenging sport.
The physics of hitting a golf ball hundreds of yards amplifies every twitch you put into the driver: a small tick in the motion equals a big miss off the tee.
Picture this scenario: you have been working with a skilled swing coach, and he’s fixed your hook. You’ve got confidence that the next time you shoot 18, the ball will fall gracefully in the middle of the fairway. He’s given you one focus area to be mindful of during your swing and you know you need more practice (typically full rotation). Just to be sure, you grab a bucket of balls on the driving range.
Yes, you’ve conquered the hook.
Then you go out for your next foursome, usually with three people you’ve just met, and it’s your turn to put the ball in play. You strike the ball and it takes off to the right of where you were aiming before diving back to the left like a running back faking a linebacker.
What happened?
A Coaching Example
Recently, I was working with an individual who is a highly-qualified subject matter expert who has now risen to lead the technical operations for a business unit in the firm. The presenting issue was that the leader was having a very hard time taking off her subject matter expert hat and putting on her senior leader hat.
As you might imagine, the inconsistent way she was showing up led to team performance issues. Up and coming leaders felt stifled in their growth. Customers were going underserved due to the bottleneck of every decision needing to be reviewed by this leader. When multiple high visibility events occurred, her instinct was to stack them and solve them serially – rather than leverage her highly-qualified staff to solve them in parallel.
We got to work and laid a foundation of preparation and focal points to help her be aware of how her authority, power and influence could be rechanneled to meet all her stakeholders’ needs. We did frequent check ins, and her ability to build and leverage flourished.
It was then that there was a significant quality bust with one of their major customers. I watched carefully as her initial instinct was to hop a plane and roll up her sleeves. It was then that her team actually stepped up and came to her with an action plan that used her expertise, but did not have her run point on solving the problem – even though everything in her wanted to push her back to her instinct.
Past personal success told her that she needed to be the hands-on lead. Current responsibilities showed her that she could trust in her team.
Not an Isolated Example
This principle shows up in many different situations:
- The production lead keeps some “off the book” scrap during a lean project because they don’t trust the upstream team to keep them in material.
- A product manager is consumed running down line-item sales inquiries rather than completing the portfolio work that would make the firm more successful.
- A business unit leader insists on detailed, time-bound planning while telling the group they are empowered to be Agile.
The pain point is usually well known in these projects, and usually teams have tried to resolve them on their own. The reason these issues persist, is they are deeply rooted in successful efforts and have served their stakeholders well.
This success welds in a deep behavior. You can think of it as an emotional foundation: a team member can sit in on all the sessions, be intellectually bought in and participate when the “seas are calm and the winds favorable.” But in the first crisis, they reach back to a previously successful behavior that just “feels right.”
The path to success lies in a combination of individual and team work that brings all this to light, and builds supportive and effective infrastructure to move to the higher-performance framework and trust it. This involves looking at where the team has come from, where they are moving to, and what the ultimate goal is.
People who train for high-stakes situations like flying an airplane or military engagement call this “primacy of response.” In plain English, it means what you learn first, you tend to learn best (so be very picky when it comes to initial instruction). When you have built a near reflex action, it means that when the chips are down, you go there – seemingly without thinking.
The coaching work is two-fold: Find the deep underlying behavior and then practice it under the watchful eye of a coach. At first it’s going to seem like the most unnatural thing in the world, but with time, it will become the new primary. If you can find a way to anchor the change to the team and process, progress can come faster.
Heart Surgery | Transformation Zone
Just as a healthy adult creates collateral circulation in their heart muscle, healthy firms create fresh paths to increase their ability to efficiently serve their stakeholders.
The benefits are substantial. Just as we enjoy longer healthier lives as individuals, firms that get to work on these hard issues see a strong surge in performance.
Support
You can get a start on this with internal resources, but to truly get an objective assessment, you’ll need to get an external viewpoint. To paint a fresh picture of the frameworks that are active in your business unit, we typically undertake a diagnostic that consists of 1:1 interviews, team “ride alongs” and management layer dialogues culminating in an assessment document.
I work with a select group of clients in complex firms who have a technology background and are sponsoring or leading transformation in their firms. They have exhausted off-the-shelf tools and knowledge and need integrated, bespoke solutions to achieve their goals.
Together we use proven diagnostics to expose hidden patterns that are holding back their journey to value creation. If you’d like to accelerate your success with a validated model, please use this link to put a call on the books or reach out to me at scott@scottpropp.com.
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