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MAY 2013 Hi folks, The prior two months, we discussed the impact of culture on coaching. We received a few comments on how much it helped in some coaching practices as well as from a couple leaders who were able to make more sense of the dynamics within their organizations. In both cases, there seems to have been some light shed on their situations. In this issue, we focus on how time is used within an organization through the article Coaching the Urgency/Priority Matrix. I develop the gestalt principles for intervention: (1) slow is fast, (2) less is more, and (3) small is big, and apply them to executive presence in the understanding of time. Next month, I am looking at the Momentum Trap that is briefly described in this month's article as a means to introduce several coaching principles on how we fix our perceptions and thereby prevent ourselves from seeing alternatives. There are several gestalt principles for perception formation that can be used in coaching to support client paradigm shifts. I hope you find these useful. If so, let me know and pass them on to your colleagues. If you are not getting these directly, sign-up for the CCG newsletter. You can unsubscribe any time. Respectfully, Herb StevensonHerb Stevenson, CEO/President Coaching The
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The purpose of the form is to distinguish the urgency (immediacy) from the significance or importance of the project. It enables a better means for addressing what needs done moment to moment versus falling prey to the perception that all projects are in near crisis mode.
One key learning was to stay with the organization's symptoms until a sense of what was actually happening could surface as a pattern. In addition, I recognized that the matrix allowed me to understand that "how time is perceived" directly relates to the capacity of the executive to be effective.
Typically, time is seen by most executives as something to manage. Every minute is accounted for and every effort is applied to create maximum efficiency and effectiveness. Time is treated more as a precious commodity than as a leadership tool.
Time as a tool evolves from executives that recognize that their job is to influence the work to be done. In other words, leaders are constantly focused on "work through" resulting in "work done by" others. Typical time management blurs this differentiation because it extricates the leader's presence and positional power from the equation. The focus is on how to get work done instead of how to get work done through the organization.
For example, there are a lot of barkers. They bark orders, crawl way too deep into the details, and demand immediate results. Generally, they tend to perceive that work is done by them. Leaders do not engage the frenetic energies of the system. Instead they slow the process to ensure they have a clear picture of what is happening or not, by whom, and seek a method of getting the work done by the organization. Leaders do not add crisis energy to the system except when absolutely required. They provide guidance, direction, resources, and insight. They seek to insure that their intent matches the impact.
This differentiation returned me to my Gestalt roots and the three principles of successful interventions: (1) Less is more, (2) Small is big, and (3) Slow is fast. As leadership is by definition a form of intervention, it became clear to me that leaders implicitly use them.
As taught at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, the three principles of successful interventions revolve around an awareness of the counter-intuitiveness of our intention versus our impact in every intervention. The leader takes the time to ask what is the most effective process I can apply to any intervention. Returning to the above statement that there are a lot of executive barkers instead of leaders, we can apply these principles.
Executive barkers do not understand positional power except as a tool to force action. An executive leader understands that every action will ripple deep into the organization and therefore uses the position to influence the organization through providing guidance, direction, and insight. Intent is closely monitored for impact.
When we apply the three principles of an intervention (any act of leadership), we begin to discover a leadership presence and maturity. For example, if the executive is a barker, he will tend to push more, bigger, and faster down through the ranks. As suggested in the early paragraphs, the impact is that those in line with this tidal wave of force will be bulled over. There is no time taken to differentiate between urgency or priority. The acceleration trap locks the organization into a spiral towards burnout, the momentum trap locks the organization into a target that might not apply anymore, and many of the employees will suffer from ADT.
The leader, on the other hand, recognizes that when positional power is used to influence and motivate the organization, it evokes the true power within the organization to do what it does well. Hence, the most productive approach is often by focusing on how to match the intention with the impact. This means the executive provides guidance, direction, and insights that are well measured interventions. Typically, these interventions are smaller, less intrusive, and slower than directives and spontaneous decisions. The leader seeks to insure that the desired impact is consistent with the intention. Once this consistency is managed, the positional power begins the process of moving the message throughout the organization.
Returning to the Urgency/Priority matrix, as the clients began to utilize it in weekly planning meetings, it became clear that the matrix enabled the clients to focus their energy and their intention to manage work completion versus attempting to force work completion through typical time management. As this progressed, there was evidence that there was less stress from the direct reports. More dialogue evolved in the planning and weekly updates. A general tenseness was greatly reduced within the meetings. They each learned that less is more, slow is fast, and small is big if intent is matched to impact.
Michelle Barton, & Kathleen Sutcliffe, Learning When to Stop Momentum, MITSloan, Management Review, Spring, 2010, Vol. 51., No. 3
Heike Bruch & Jochen Menges, The Acceleration Trap, Harvard Business Review, April 2010
Edward Hallowell, Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform, Harvard Business Review, January, 2005.
John Kotter, A Sense of Urgency, 2008.
1A Lesson from Kotter: John Kotter noted that establishing a sense of urgency by examining market and competitive realities and identifying and discussing crises, potential crises, or major opportunities is imperative for leading in today's market. It can drive the changes needed to traverse the many perils in today's environment.
Kotter added that a false sense of urgency is driven by pressures to perform that actually create fear, anxiety, and anger. Because it is a false sense of urgency, often created through veiled threats, the resulting frantic activity is more distracting than useful. Unproductive noise is created that wastes time, energy, and brainpower. (A Sense of Urgency, 2008)
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