It was Leo Tolstoy who said, “everybody thinks of changing humanity, but nobody thinks of changing himself.” (Mahatma Gandhi later said a variant, “You must be the change you want to see in the world”, but this is more about consciously standing out as a role model so that others will eventually come to copy you.)

 
Why is this a valuable idea in business life? As a development coach I hear all too often otherwise highly competent clients complaining about the problems caused by other people or by the system around them: “I can’t do this because my boss…..”; “If only they would manage their time better….”; Why can’t they be a bit more open to new ideas….”; and so on.

They seem to spend hours analysing the other person and finding solutions the other person could implement. If the other person saw it as a problem. If they were willing to make changes. If they were capable of making changes.

 
So that’s their situation; what is there for my client to change?

 
Option 1 - Change the other person. This may be possible if you are their boss (or you have some other power) and you are willing and able to direct or coach them or, like Gandhi, model the required behaviours over time to change their behaviours. Or to sack them and replace them with someone more compliant.
Option 2 – Change the system. You may be in a position to get changes made to the procedures or working environment that govern the other person’s behaviours. But how long will it take you? How much effort?
Option 3 – Change yourself. This is the option which is most likely the one you can implement. You can change your own behaviours so they impact on the other person and causes them change their behaviours. You can change your own behaviours to find a working solution, one that you can implement. You can change your attitude to the situation, for example learning to accept it as just a fact of life, however troublesome. Or you can walk away from it.

 
This is the line of questioning I follow with clients who complain about others, “What can you change in yourself to change the situation?”

I find my clients are now turning to the web more and more for their injections of knowledge. If you are a student of management and business in college or university you have to read academic books and articles to complete the course work, but most practitioners it seems can get enough of the same knowledge they need from online sites.

I think injecting structured knowledge is a good part of the learning process. While I always stress the value of experiential learning I know it can be a messy and painful process. Injecting small chunks of knowledge developed by other people can make your own experiences more purposeful, efficient and effective.

Here are five free knowledge sites I find reliable and practical:

Wikipedia – yes, it has its critics, but you will find descriptions and comments about most things relevant to running a business. Just last week, different bquest clients used Wikipedia to get intitial ideas about ‘lean manufacturing’, ‘pricing’ and ‘conflict management.’ I think Wikipedia can be an excellent starting point to get an overview of a topic – you can then use that starting point to go deeper into areas that are of specific relevance to you. You don’t need to ‘read the book’ from A-Z.

Mindtools – this wonderful site focuses on personal competencies. It presents concepts clearly and simply. If you were just to read the many pages of different management tools they provide you, and applied them to your job, you would have almost everything you need to be an effective manager.

12Manage – this site has short, pertinant descriptions of just about every business concept you need. This is knowledge chunking at its best.

Andrew Gibbons – this site has development tools created or collected over many years by one of the top UK coaches, along with a number of good book summaries. While the materials are obviously attractive to trainers, they can be used by the manager who wants to develop their own  people and many are equally useful for self-development. There is a lot that is free, and the price for the payable materials is worthwhile.

Bookboon – this is a new site to me, but it has a large number of easy-to-read books on many business and personal competency topics.

You have no excuses for not having the knowledge; I hope they help you!

When listening to the radio today I heard a commentator bemoan the quality of education. He said, “Today’s school leavers can’t separate facts from opinions.” This reminded me how we use Edward de Bono’s (famous?) model of Six Thinking Hats in employee development.

de Bono says we should think about how we think, and learn to consciously structure our thinking approach about issues by using different modes of thinking one at a time. By focusing on one mode at a time, excluding the others, we treat each mode fully. In this way, when we have gone through all the modes, we will then have looked at an issue systematically, comprehensively and in-depth.

You can use the different modes by yourself or with a group in a meeting.

What are the different modes?

• White hat – Looking for facts about the issue.
• Red hat – Looking for opinions and feelings about the issue.

• Yellow hat – Looking at the issue positively.
• Black hat – Looking at the issue negatively.

• Green hat – Looking at the issue creatively.

• Blue hat – Let’s recheck we have fully used the other hats, and then let’s draw conclusions.

de Bono uses the term ‘hat’ for mode because ‘putting on a hat’ is a simple mental discipline that aids self-control – “Let’s put on White hats so that we only consider the facts of the issue and exclude for the moment any opinions or feelings.” After you have done all your White hat thinking, you take off the White hat and put on the Red hat, when you look only at your opinions and feelings about the issue.

The structure of the six thinking hats makes sense. The first pair, White and Red, separate facts and opinions, something that our education system apparently doesn’t get school leavers to do. They are complementary hats. I am sure most people would say that decisions should be based on an analysis of the facts. But, we don’t always have all the facts and, even when we think we do, we may take different perspectives of them. After all, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. So, we begin with White hat thinking in which we look only at the facts (and identify gaps in our factual information which we will then aim to fill).  We then put on Red hats to ask what our gut feelings are. By surfacing our feelings, our intuition, we expose our biases and perhaps hidden knowledge which influence the way we look at facts, and we also trigger the search for more or different facts to support our feelings.

The second pair are the Yellow and Black hats. They are also a complementary pair. As a natural optimist, I tend to wear a Yellow hat but there are other people who are Black hat pessimists. By wearing the two hats one after the other, we can get pessimists to put aside their “It’ll never work” look at what might be possible. And we can play devil’s advocate to (naive) optimists, to bring them down to earth, and to be practical about the possible problems.

The Green hat stands alone. This asks, “If we do this, what else might it offer us?” Creative thinking is valuable because it frees you from the immediate constraints of the issue and can bring extra value.

And then finally the Blue hat takes you back to check you have used all the hats fully, and then to say “After all this thinking, what conclusions can we now reasonably draw?”

In bquest, we use the Six Thinking Hats in team development settings where we aim to develop the team’s collective skills in evaluating new ideas. And we use it in 1:1 coaching to get an individual to manage their thinking.

It is a simple powerful employee development model. Maybe they should use it in schools?

Any manager, coach or parent interested in helping someone to learn and develop should know the power of asking questions. Telling somone the what, how and so on ‘pumps in’ knowledge that often gets forgotten, or is not properly digested and not really understood. Asking questions on the other hand ‘drags out’ ideas and answers by getting the person to think for themselves; the knowledge, insights and understanding gained this way are deeper and more likely to be remembered and absorbed.

I made a note of the question types I used last week in development sessions with bquest clients:

Ask for facts – when someone is in an emotional state, it can help them to become more rational and therefore more likely to come up with answers if you ask them for facts, “You say your boss treats you badly. How often does this happen?”

Ask for feelings – the opposite of asking for facts. When a person has been rationally chewing something over and cannot find the answer, ask them to say what their gut says about it. Often, when expressing feelings, hidden information or ideas emerge.

Systematic question structure – helping a person make sense out of chaos of partial or complex or conflicting data is hugely valuable. The most famous ‘structure’ for making sense is Kipling’s 6 Honest Serving Men – Who, How, Why, what, When and Where. This enables a person to look at each component of an issue one at a time. And to be creative you can ask the follow-up question for each one ‘Who else…?’, ’How else…?’ etc. I also use de Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats and the Fishbone (Ishikawa) as ways of structuring questions.

5 Whys – this is another systematic technique used in lean manufacturing that helps get to the root cause or ‘truth’ of a problem.

Innocent / naive questions – we all know the story of the innocent child who asks why the king is wearing no clothes. Sometimes the innocent question posed by the non-expert can open up blocked minds.

Heroes and villains – another way of unblocking is to use a creative questioning method that gets a person to look at a problem from a different perspective. For example, ‘Think of a hero of yours; how would they approach the problem? And now think of your worst enemy, how would they do it?’ It doesn’t have to be heroes and villains, just something that is off-centre and makes the person think in ways that are different to their normal approach, for example it could be as bizarre as ‘How would an elephant answer that?’

Evaluating questions – some issues and ideas are more important than others. To find out what is really important you can ask ‘On a scale of 1-10, how important is that, really?’ Or you can ask them to prioritise ‘Which of those two is more important?‘ Or, using the Pareto formula, ‘Which 20% gives you 80%?’

Confronting or provoking questions – John Heron includes this as one of six ‘intervention’ methods when helping someone. It can be strong ‘Come on, you don’t really believe that do you!’ or ‘Yes or No – do you think that…?’ Or it can be milder ‘If you were to look in the mirror, what would you say to yourself?’

Concluding questions – after a lot of thinking and reflecting, you need to help a person make sense of it all, pull it together, and reach some new understanding. This is the point where we can say learning has been achieved. In the experiential learning cycle this is called ‘theorising’. ‘So what conclusions can you now draw? What does this say about…..?’ And the softer side of ‘conclusions’ – ‘What hypothesis do you now have about…… From what you’ve seen and learned, what if…..?’

Planning questions – I like the Options and Will stages of the GROW model of coaching where you focus on future actions. For any learning to be meaningful, for changes to be made, a person has to put it into action, and this needs planning. ‘What are you going to do now after all this thinking?’  ’How will you do things differently in future?’ ‘What might stop you and how will you overcome this?’

This approach to employee development forms a fundamental part of the bquest system. We use methods that generate real learning and change in people and their business.

I was confronted recently with the all-too-common  chicken and egg problem when beginning the bquest development process with a highly pressured employee.

To develop his marketing skills, he needed to find time. But to find time, he needed to develop time management skills. For which he need to find time! Over many years, I have come across many such blocks to employee development in small businesses, for example:

- I don’t have the time.

- I don’t know how to read books effectively and efficiently.

- I don’t have the energy or motivation.

- I am afraid of trying anything new.

- My boss says I must do things a certain way.

- Development isn’t a priority right now, I have other more pressing business problems to solve.

- Sitting, thinking is a waste of time that should be spent doing things.

- I’ve done things this way for years and it has worked alright for me so far.

- Academics and consultants with their ideas, pah!  They should join the real world.

- It’s alright in theory, but not in practice.

- I want you to give me the answer.

- Stop asking questions, you’re making my head hurt.

Give me an hour and I will come up with quite a few more.

Are these familiar to you? How do you manage them?

Blocks are blocks; the client needs help in removing or overcoming them or minimising them before they can get on with what they actually want and need to learn and develop.

Some of the blocks are mental blocks, and the client needs help to see them in a different way, to ’reframe’ or by giving them information that changes
their understanding. “So, you say you don’t value theories; but how do you organise your life now? What rules of thumb, assumptions and beliefs do you use? When you see a green traffic light, are you certain the driver coming from the side road sees a red light and will stop, or do you theorise it and still keep an eye out? Without such theories we would never be able to function effectively.”

Some of the blocks are actual blocks. Help might be in the form of some skills development (how to read, how to organise some time, etc.) or it might be in the form of changing their environment (influencing the boss, finding a quiet place, changing their shift, etc.)

Sometimes, removing blocks requires a bit of underhandedness. For the highly pressured employee who said he didn’t have time to develop marketing skills, we didn’t talk about time management. Instead, in discussion about his marketing ‘problems’, I asked how he priced his products. He got so fired up about this he immediately decided to get one of his people to collect some information about different ways of pricing.  A few days later, they had met several times, discussed the information, and decided to make some changes.

Afterwards, when he told me what he had done, and when I had encouraged him to reflect on what he had learned from this, it dawned on him that he had actually been using time management methods in the form of delegation. I haven’t heard any more from him about not having time to learn!

In bquest, as part of the initial ‘diagnosis’ of need we always identify mental or actual blocks. We make sure learning and development goals are achieved.

As a trained and experienced business coach, I fully accept the view that I should not tell nor persuade the client who is being coached what to do, but that it is the client who should set the agenda and who should find the answers to their questions. The goal of the coach is to enable or empower the client so they are equipped – and motivated – to sort out their own problems in the manner of their choosing. But what happens if I, the coach, see a problem in the client’s behaviours that the client doesn’t? Do I have a responsibility to point this out to them?
The simple answer is usually for the coach to find a suitable time and way to ask questions like “When other people see you doing (‘bad’) behaviour, what do they then say and do?” In this way, the client can get the feedback they need to make choices about whether to change those behaviours. Only if the (‘bad’) behaviour is being shown in the coaching session can the coach give direct feedback and say “When you do (‘bad’) behaviour with me, I feel…. whatever.”
On the bquest program, we often see clients who are not initially very self-aware and they identify their development needs inaccurately. They may not have identified a need because they are not aware of it. They may be ‘blind’ to it (remember the Johari window). Or they may downplay its significance - “My team are tough enough to put up with me when I shout at them and abuse them.” Or they may have identified a situation which they would like to perform better in, but their diagnosis of the ‘problem’ is inaccurate and they set out to develop the wrong competencies.

With bquest, it is part of our agreement with clients that we have a responsibility to point out behaviours we suspect may not appropriate to a situation. We go back to Richard Boyatzis and George Klemp, the people in McBer who kickstarted all the work done on competencies in the last 30 years. who said that competency development begins with the recognition of the competencies in action and then understanding their role in effective performance. Our skill in bquest is helping the client to achieve recognition and understanding in a way that they accept. After all, a lot of people don’t like to hear ‘bad’ news, however necessary it is, especially if they are paying for it!