Tag: Master Corporate Executive Coaching
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How To Use 360-Degree Feedback For Executive Coaching
Executive coaching has been on the rise for decades as a strategic investment in human capital. When well-designed and delivered, coaching has been found to be one of the most effective approaches for developing senior leaders and enhancing the performance of their teams and organizations.
One of the most important components of executive coaching is the 360-degree feedback that the coach gathers for coaching participants about their strengths and development needs, how they are perceived, and what they need to do in order to achieve a higher level of performance and positive impact. Feedback can be gathered via automated online surveys or one-on-one interviews.
The first decision for coaching participants, their managers, and the coach is whether to collect data online or through in-person, video conference, or telephone interviews, or some combination thereof. Online 360s are more convenient and less costly, but, if correctly formulated and well-structured, interviews can help provide additional context and information. Sometimes an executive coach can use both, and follow up on a previous online 360 or performance review by interviewing designated feedback providers, in-person when possible, and via video conference or phone for those who are traveling and/or who work in different locations.
Once the approach has been decided on, the next decision is who should participate. The list of feedback providers should generally include anyone who has enough familiarity with the coachee’s work to be able to contribute useful observations and suggestions. The list should also be inclusive rather than exclusive, and should include all of the coachee’s direct reports, peers, and managers. It’s important to take organizational politics into account when drafting the 360 list: internal or external constituencies, such as customers or counter-parties, may also have helpful feedback to provide, and inviting them to participate can send a positive message, indicating that the coachee cares about their views and feedback. In order to ensure that the feedback providers will have a balanced perspective, there should be no sample bias, wherein only those who have positive (or negative) things to say are invited to participate. As far as process is concerned, it’s generally best to have coachees draft the initial list, and then run it by their boss, and possibly even HR, for refinement and approval.
In advance of doing the online 360 or conducting the interviews, it’s important to define who will see the feedback reports, either in full, edited, or summary form, and to clarify whether comments will be given “verbatim” in the feedback providers’ own words, or whether the coach will offer filtered/paraphrased feedback. Generally, we recommend that verbatim comments get shared in the report in order to include the most direct feedback. However, it should be clear to everyone who participates in an online or interview 360 that their verbatim comments will be shared, and in the case of an online 360, it’s useful to provide feedback providers with a sample report so they can see how their comments will be reflected in the report. We also suggest that the online or interview-based 360 should be shared in full, but only with the coaching participants themselves, as this increases the comfort that people have in being open and honest in the feedback that they provide without concern that tough feedback and/or specific criticism will somehow end up in the coachee’s “file.” However, once participants have received the full report, they should be willing to share a summary of insights gained, and/or developmental plans made, based on the feedback in order to ensure that they will be (and feel) accountable for making progress based on the report. Regardless of which option is chosen, the choice needs to be made and communicated before the interviews are conducted, so that parameters are fully clear in advance to all participants, and they know exactly how, and with whom, their feedback will, and will not, be shared.
Once a consensus has been reached about the list of 360 providers, and who will see the report, the next step is drafting the questions that will be asked. If a standard online 360 will be used, it can be helpful, at times, to include a few additional context-specific questions, including open-ended questions, to gather more relevant information for the coachee. The boss and the coaching participant will likely be interested in each other’s preferred additional open-ended questions, as these questions will reveal their respective priorities and goals for the coaching program. If the boss wants to ask questions about executive presence or presentation skills, that is a signal to the coachee that the boss believes that those areas are relevant and improvable. If the coachee wants to ask what he or she needs to do in order to get promoted, that informs the boss that getting a promotion is a current goal or expectation for the coaching participant.
It’s important to achieve consensus between the boss and the coachee about how broadly or narrowly to focus the questions, whether or not to include questions about the individual’s role and organizational constraints, whether to ask about potential future roles for the coachee, and whether or not to ask the same, or different questions to different people. Every question will also send a signal to participants about the coaching participant’s (and potentially the boss’s) coaching concerns and priorities, so it’s important to also consider organizational politics in drafting the questions in order to make sure that they are conveying the right messages. As with the participant list, we recommend that the coaching participants first draft the list of questions and then ask their boss (and possibly HR as well) for any edits, additions or changes.
For interview-based 360s, here are some open-ended questions that we find helpful as a starting point:
• How would you describe Jane’s leadership and management style?
• How would you describe Jane’s communication and collaboration style?
• What are Jane’s strengths?
• What are Jane’s areas for development?
• If you could give Jane one piece of advice, what would it be?
• If you could make one request to Jane, what would it be?
If the boss and organization are open to it, the coach can also ask contextual questions like:
• What organizational factors or changes outside of Jane’s department present challenges and opportunities?
• What organizational factors or changes inside of Jane’s department present challenges and opportunities?
• What leadership suggestions do you have for Jane and her department to be more successful in the future?
• What organizational suggestions do you have for Jane and her department to be more successful in the future?
After all of the above decisions have been made, the next step is for participants to email their feedback providers about the upcoming interviews (or online 360). Sharing the questions in advance can have the dual benefit of giving people time to prepare their answers in advance, and also providing reassurance that everyone will be asked the same questions in the interviews. Furthermore, gaining alignment about the timing and logistics of the interview-based or online 360, including the list of participants, the questions that will be asked, and the confidentiality and reporting parameters can help set up the process for success. When the coach asks the most topical and timely 360 questions of the right sample of feedback providers, the answers will enable the coach to provide the most specific, relevant and useful feedback to coaching participants who can in turn utilize it to develop their skills and professional capabilities. Often, the process of selecting feedback providers, drafting questions, and deciding on timing, logistics and parameters can itself be an important learning opportunity within the overall coaching process. When it comes to 360-degree feedback, the questions (and the process of the coachee achieving consensus with his or her stakeholders about how the questions will be asked, of whom, and how and with whom the report will be shared) can be as important as the answers to those questions.
In brief, although it can be laborious and complex to get it right, there is no better source of evidence for an executive’s reputation, and no better way to enhance their self-awareness, than through 360s.
Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a Professor of Psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the Chief Talent Scientist at ManpowerGroup
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There’s only one way to truly understand another person’s mind
It’s often said that we should put ourselves in another person’s shoes in order to better understand their point of view. But psychological research suggests this directive leaves something to be desired: When we imagine the inner lives of others, we don’t necessarily gain real insight into other people’s minds.
Instead of imagining ourselves in another person’s position, we need to actually get their perspective, according to a recent study (pdf) in the Journal of Personality and Psychology. Researchers from the University of Chicago and Northeastern University in the US and Ben Gurion University in Israel conducted 25 different experiments with strangers, friends, couples, and spouses to assess the accuracy of insights onto other’s thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and mental states.
Their conclusion, as psychologist Tal Eyal tells Quartz: “We assume that another person thinks or feels about things as we do, when in fact they often do not. So we often use our own perspective to understand other people, but our perspective is often very different from the other person’s perspective.” This “egocentric bias” leads to inaccurate predictions about other people’s feelings and preferences. When we imagine how a friend feels after getting fired, or how they’ll react to an off-color joke or political position, we’re really just thinking of how we would feel in their situation, according to the study.
In 15 computer-based experiments, each with a minimum of 30 participants, the psychologists asked subjects to guess people’s emotions based on an image, their posture, or a facial expression, for example. Some subjects were instructed to “consult their own feelings,” while others were given no instructions, and some were told to “think hard” or mimic the expressions to better understand. People told to rely on their own feelings as a guide most often provided inaccurate responses. They were unable to guess the correct emotion being displayed.
The second set of experiments asked subjects to make predictions about the feelings of strangers, friends, and partners. (Strangers interacted briefly to get to know one another before hazarding guesses about the preferences of they had just person they met.) The researchers wanted to see if people who had some meaningful information about each other—like spouses—could make accurate judgments about the other’s reactions to jokes, opinions, videos, and more. It turned out that neither spouses nor strangers nor friends tended to make accurate judgments when “taking another’s perspective.”
Imagining another person’s perspective doesn’t actually improve our ability to judge how another person thinks or feels. “Our experiments found no evidence that the cognitive effort of imagining oneself in another person’s shoes, studied so widely in the psychological literature, increases a person’s ability to accurately understand another’s mind,” the researchers write. “If anything, perspective taking decreased accuracy overall while occasionally increasing confidence in judgment.” Basically, imagining another person’s perspective may give us the impression that we’re making more accurate judgments. But it doesn’t actually improve our ability to judge how another person thinks or feels.
There were no gender differences in the results. Across the board, men and women tended not to guess another’s perspective very accurately when putting themselves in the other’s position. But this did increase self-confidence in the accuracy of their predictions—even when their insights were off.
The good news, however, is that researchers found a simple, concrete way we can all confidently and correctly improve the accuracy of our insights into others’ lives. When people are given a chance to talk to the other person about their opinions before making predictions about them—Eyal calls this “perspective getting” as opposed to perspective taking—they are much more accurate in predicting how others might feel than those instructed to take another’s perspective or given no instructions.
In the final test, researchers asked subjects both to try putting themselves in another’s shoes, on the one hand, and to talk directly with test partners about their positions on a given topic. The final experiment confirmed that getting another person’s perspective directly, through conversation, increased the accuracy of subjects’ predictions, while simply “taking” another’s perspective did not. This was true for partners, friends, and strangers alike.
“Increasing interpersonal accuracy seems to require gaining new information rather than utilizing existing knowledge about another person,” the study concludes. “Understanding the mind of another person,” as the researchers put it, is only possible when we actually probe them about what they think, rather than assuming we already know.
The psychologists believe their study has applications in legal mediation, diplomacy, psychology, and our everyday lives. Whether we’re negotiating at a conference table, fighting with a spouse, or debating the political motivations of voters, we simply can’t rely on intuition for insight, according to Eyal. Only listening will do the trick.
“Perspective getting allows gaining new information rather than utilizing existing, sometimes biased, information about another person,” Eyal explains to Quartz. “In order to understand what your spouse prefers—don’t try to guess, ask.”
https://qz.com/1319441
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Putting an End to Leaders Self-Serving Behavior
by Morela Hernandez
View original publication on MITSloan
Although we might hope that leaders in business environments will embrace their decision-making responsibilities with a clear head and an open heart, empirical research has shown otherwise. Instead, business leaders are often selfish. Access to resources in many organizations is a moving target, leaving many managers feeling protective of what’s theirs. And when they take more than their fair share — extra resources for themselves at the expense of others — they often do it because they honestly think they are entitled to these resources and believe they have earned the right to take more.
Where does this kind of entitlement come from?
As I’ve tried to reconcile current political events — such as the European Union’s reaction to Brexit, the continuing global refugee crisis, and the ongoing debates in the United States about tax and health care reform — with scholarly work on ambiguity and decision-making, I’ve come to think that feeling entitled to a larger share of a resource might come not from objective assessments of reality but rather from what social scientists call motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning occurs when people “selectively notice, encode, and retain information that is consistent with their desires.” People use this kind of reasoning to reach conclusions that help them support their self-serving beliefs. After all, reasoning, it has been said, “was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.”
Understanding the effects of self-serving beliefs is a tricky business. In the last decade of research in behavioral ethics, for instance, scholars have moved away from a “bad apples” approach in which only people with poor moral characteristics are deemed likely to behave unethically. Instead, researchers have examined how people can engage in self-serving behaviors while convinced of the rightness and fairness of doing so. Few studies, however, have explored the circumstances in which this type of selfishness — one that comes with a sense of entitlement and justification — is likely to arise.
Working alongside my colleague Laura Noval of the Imperial College Business School in London, we sought to understand how organizations enable self-serving behavior. Specifically, we investigated how certain contextual and individual characteristics can facilitate motivated reasoning aimed at justifying self-serving decisions.
We explored this issue through two experimental studies, one using a hypothetical business decision-making scenario (in which 395 people participated, 52% women) and the other using a behavioral task in the laboratory (in which 239 people participated, 52% women). In both studies, we assigned participants to conditions in which they received either identical performance information with respect to another party (strong, unambiguous context), or in which they and the other party were favored by different performance criteria (weak, ambiguous context). In the latter case, participants could use motivated reasoning to convince themselves that their own performance criterion was more relevant for the task at hand, thereby convincing themselves that they deserved larger shares of the resource.
