A recap of our 2023 coaching masterclasses to help you set your 2024 coaching intentions

Back in December we revisited some of our highlights from our 2023 coaching masterclasses in one mega webinar – you can watch it here if you missed it. As we look ahead to 2024, we thought we’d revisit some key themes Leveraging the Seinfeld strategy, Back-of-house coaching, Mindset, Coaching skills and Future skills, to help you set your coaching intentions for 2024.

Leveraging the Seinfeld strategy to be a better coach

Seinfeld once said that all anyone needs to do to be a better comedian is to write better jokes (obvs!!), going on to say that to write better jokes, you need to write every day. He recommends recording every day you write on a calendar – marking it with a big X – and concentrating on ‘not breaking the chain’.

So how can this make you a better coach? David McQueen, GRIST Director and Head of Sales had this answer:

‘First off, it's really about the operating rhythm that we put in place to coach. It's about putting in a system that helps us to deliberately practice the craft. Seinfeld’s message is about having the discipline to do it regularly, so in many organisations, the rhythm that we see is often that of 1 hour per person per month. And when we really look into that, what we often see is that the conversation is filled with so much other stuff like performance metrics, operational issues and it doesn't actually end up being much about coaching at all. What we recommend is a shift towards more frequent and shorter coaching sessions that are focused on really helping the team member to improve their skill. And that's really where the magic happens, right? Leaders with these types of cadences get a grasp of their teams abilities really quickly, and the people that start to see and feel the leader’s desire to help them, want to get better. And THAT just about ends up showing in every performance metric that you can think of. So, it might not be about coaching every day, but it's definitely about coaching much more than once a month.

The second thing that I'd probably add here is when you're coaching more often, when you have that cadence in place, you actually have a chance to tweak your style. It's a little bit like refining your craft, so whether it's keeping conversations on track, dealing with tricky mindsets or just setting better quality goals, frequent practice helps you to improve bit by bit - just like Seinfeld did with these jokes, or how a professional athlete starts to perfect their technique. In our experience, when you have a very specific focus, it's amazing how quickly that you can improve. And as you get better, so does your teams engagement, and then so does your teams whole performance.

We have a whole article dedicated to the Seinfeld Strategy here if you want to read more.

Using coaching to drive performance in back-office teams

Learning & Development are guilty of focusing much of our coaching attention on front-of-house teams; i.e. the ones that are dealing directly with customers. But behavioural coaching can be just as effective for back-office teams. One program we ran in 2023 was the VicRoads TLC program (you can see the full case study here).

Senior Partner and Consultant, Mimi Wong, spoke about the effectiveness of using a behavioural coaching framework, like ACDC, with back-office teams:

‘When we started the VicRoads program, we deliberately mixed up frontline and back-of-house leaders into workshops. We had back-of-house leaders from support services, marketing, compliance, IT, workforce planning, properties and corporate services and I will say there were quite a few of those leaders who rocked up to that first workshop thinking “why am I even here”, had and aha moment quite quickly – changing to, “wow, what I do has got an impact when the for the customer, whether it was directly or indirectly”.

For example, think about workforce planning. They have to make sure they've got to have the right skilled people at the right place at the right time to not only to make sure they've got a clean and safe workplace for team members, but also for the customer as well.

So, they really quickly realised that those internal or external conversations still have an impact on the customer and that was really where the buy-in came. Naturally, across all those different roles and functions, everyone had different things that they needed to achieve - different performance objectives, strategies, etc, but inevitably, there was some sort of behavior, whether from themselves, their team members, or stakeholders that needed to drive those performance objectives. And that's where the ACDC coaching framework really came to life. It’s so agile that people found it worked in all those different functions and areas.

What was great to see was, as we walked through the buildings over the 3-6 months, we started to see ACDC framework huddles all around the place. It all, the leaders started to use it in their leader to leader activities which was one thing that the leaders wanted to prioritise and really work on.

A lot of our clients want to empower their people. It's a bit of a buzzword, empowering people, but ACDC framework provides a really good platform and safety for team members to come up with their own ways to solve problems with the guidance of their leaders.

The other way ACDC worked really well, was to help people feel safe to dare. Leaders started to realise very quickly they didn't need to be the expert, they didn't have to know all the answers. ACDC encourages and facilitates team members to come up with their own problems and ways to solve the problem.

If you would like to hear how a VicRoads back-of-house manager found the program, you can read more here.

Why mindset matters – and how you can address it in coaching

Coaching to mindset takes skill and a good understanding of your coachee. But just how important is mindset when it comes to coaching on performance? Mike Dunn, Director and Consultant, shared his thoughts:

You would probably say that mindset is literally the very beginning or the starting point of all performance at least any performance that that people are involved in. If there's an outcome that is people-related, their mindset is crucial to getting any result and those of you that know our basic model, it is mindset shapes behavior which shapes results.

How a person thinks will determine what it is that they do or don't do and what they do or don't do will determine the results that they actually get. It's often referred to as skill and will.

And people can have a whole lot of skill, but if the will is not there, they often don't use the actual skills required to get the result that they want to get.

There's been a lot of research done on the importance of skill versus will and it's a little bit varied, but depending on what book you read, the general consensus is that as much as 80% of your likelihood to be successful or get a result does come down to your mindset and how you think, and it may be only 20% skill related, assuming you have the skill to do the job that you're employed to do. So if you're a leader thinking about an individual and how important their mindset actually is to performance, it really is about being able to help your people get into the best sort of state or mindset that they can so that they can achieve the various outcomes that you're after for them to achieve.

We can talk about sort of coaching skills, that's often where it begins - that's the easy stuff, but the real art of leadership is the ability to really sort of cultivate a mindset within your business or within your teams that helps you get where you want to go. And I'm sure there's a lot of leaders that have got a lot of experience in trying to do that. And what you're generally find with mindset is that it can be very fickle. Mindset can be very transient. There are times where you can have a team really humming and operating almost at their peak, and there are other times where the mindset or the thinking of the team can really go in a different direction. It can be very, very difficult to manage and very, very difficult to align people to strategic goals and outcomes if the general mindset or thinking within the team is not supporting what you're trying to do.

Probably the most important thing for a leader or a coach to remember is that they are actually, if not the number one, at least in the top two primary experience givers, that their people have. And what I mean by that is we have a sort of a more extended model at GRIST that expands out to experiences that people have shaped their mindset, which shapes the behaviour, which shapes the result. And your team’s primary experience giver is the leader. Leaders are always being watched. Everything a leader does is seen, it's noticed and there's a message received from what leaders do and those messages start to form a set of beliefs within a person's mindset which dictates their behaviour and what you often don't see leaders or coaches do enough of is really get deliberate around what is the mindset that they want to create within their team. What are the values and beliefs they want their sort of people to embrace and what experiences do I as the leader of the coach need to give those people consistently to start shaping that thinking that supports where we want to go.

I think what happens a lot with mindset coaching or leadership is accidental mindset creation through subsets of experiences that leaders will offer, but not necessarily with the intent of trying to create a certain way of thinking.

What's the mindset you want cultivate in your team and what experiences do you need to start delivering as a leader to shape that thinking? Probably the most important thing is towards generating performance, which is the group think.

You can listen to more of Mike’s thoughts here.

Why coaching and development is key to unlocking the skills you need for the future

We know how important coaching is to help an organisation to thrive. But will that still be the case as we walk towards a changing future? Here’s Peter Grist, Managing Director with his thoughts:

I'll be a little bit controversial, but I think many organisations are sleepwalking towards a talent and capability cliff. It's no news to anyone that we're living in times of unprecedented change, and if you look at all the trend analysis that shows no sign of slowing down, it's probably going to move quicker.

COVID accelerated many underlying trends that were already underway. Working from home is just one example - we just couldn't make it work and then all of a sudden, particularly in Australia, when we had a lockdown, all of a sudden we made it work. We're also seeing technology has been driving change for decades now, but with the introduction of AI, you can just see how it's going to go to another whole level.

We can see that the rate of change is happening quickly, so that leads to a very logical conclusion that the skills that your people have today are not the skills that they're going to need tomorrow. In fact, the World Economic Forum is telling us that 60% of the entire workforce will need to be retrained by 2027. Just you stop and think about that - six out of every 10 people is going to need to be retrained in the next 3 years. That's why we're talking about the L&D function being so critical.
If we add the demographic changes in countries like Australia and New Zealand, where we're seeing aging populations, we'll have a smaller cohort of young people entering organisations, so the ability to retrain and then retain the people in your organisations is going to become absolutely mission critical in the future.

As if that challenge is not big enough in itself, organisations where a large percentage of their workforce is now working from home, haven't got access to many of the tools that we used to use to train and develop people like get them together in a workshop observation, and osmosis. So there's some really big challenges coming down the line for the L&D.

 Whenever industries and organisations go through transformational change, I start by saying no one’s got the capability they need to be successful in the future. And I don't think L&D’s any different. The traditional approaches to L&D were built for another time, and they're just not going to cut it as we move forward into the future. There's a huge need for L&D to shift both their thinking and their mindset. What's their purpose? Why are they actually here? And they're going to have to shift their capability to align with that as well.

So how can they make that shift and change their role? Everyone's heard of a Chief Financial Officer, a Chief Technical Officer that very few people have heard of a Chief Learning Officer. My view is that the L&D inside organisations needs to shift up a level and I think it's mission critical to the point where we probably should have CLO’s (Chief Learning Officers) that have a seat at the executive table in organisations so that they can get the focus on the size of the challenge that is coming down the line.

Learning and Development has been very focused on building content and programs. Content and programs are going to become free and ubiquitous. There's been an explosion of content online. That's not the issue. It's about learning culture and L&D needs to be the custodian of the learning culture and think less about content and programs. They need to influence the organisation to realise that it's not just an L&D problem and the whole operational side of the business has to play their role. Learning to do new and different things just becomes what we do every single day and that's a change in mindset for both the L&D department and the operations.

For the L&D team to play that role, they're going to have to have very different conversations with their key stakeholders. And that's gonna require a whole new skill set of them where they move up to that trusted advisor level, helping the organisation make some strategic calls and building capability.

To hear more of Peter’s thoughts about unlocking L&D’s potential, read more here.

What skills we will need to coach to in the future

Coaching and development is still critical, and will help any organisation build the skills of the future. But what are those skills and how can you start to identify which ones you’ll need in your business? Stacey Makshakova, Innovation and Insights Manager, spent some time researching what future challenges we need to be prepared for.

The research that I was looking at, including international organisations like World Economic Forum, Industry reports, and, academic papers to get a comprehensive view of what kind of skills people will need in the future, and, depending on which research source you look, you will see around 3 to 4 categories of skills that people will need and the first one is of course that and digital skills. Usually when you mention their skills, people start automatically thinking about, oh, that must be something like data science, machine learning, cybersecurity and all other popular topics nowadays. But it also includes basic digital skills. You will be surprised how many people have relatively low digital literacy and it's really important to lift everyone up so everyone can confidently be using the technology. Interestingly, when I was looking into the research, I saw that in industries such as healthcare, retail and transport, almost 70% people will be spending 70% more time using digital skills by 2030 than they ever did before. So digital is one group of skills.

The next one is cognitive skills - that includes our ability to solve complex problems, think analytically, think critically and also think creatively. One of the latest World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report mentioned analytical and creative thinking skills as the top two skills that not only companies are mentioning that they need right now, but something that will be growing in importance in the future.

The third group is quite interesting one, because even though some call it skills, it's actually mix of skills, abilities and even character traits, and that includes things like resilience, self-awareness, motivation, and lifelong learning. Learning culture that speaks to our ability to continuously improve.

And finally something that is very dear to our hearts, the skills of social influence which include communication and leadership skills. Why is it that those skills are gonna become so important in the future? There are a few reasons for that. These are the kind of skills that are not that easy to automate. I know that ChatGPT can help you to write something much better than probably you would have without it, but it still is not going to automate the actual need for us to communicate and collaborate. Secondly, this is something that's fundamental to all of us, psychological research has shown that people have a need for relatedness. We need to connect with each other and communication is one way to do that. So there will still be a need to address that somehow in the future. The third reason is the time that we are going to spend communicating and collaborating is going to increase. Australian National Skills Commission ranked all different skill clusters in order of how much more time people will be spending in the future using their skills and communication and collaboration came up the top and it's logical because if you think that if you're going to automate some of the repetitive tasks, you will be spending the rest of the time communicating, collaborating, creating ideas and working together within the team.

Want to know more? You can download our Future Skills white paper here.

We’ll have a whole new series of webinars coming your way in 2024; to make sure you’re on the list and know what’s happening when, sign up here.

See you soon!