I’m very pleased to share with you this interview I recorded with Tina Brazil, People Director of the digital marketing agency Profero.

In 2006 Profero won a Special Award for Most Innovative Initiative at the Excellence in CPD Awards of the Institute for Practitioners in Advertising. (CPD = Continuous Professional Development.) If you remember my interview with Jill Fear, CPD Manager for the IPA you’ll know that Jill and her colleagues have high standards when it comes to professional development - so Profero have obviously been doing something special to win the award.

When I spoke to Tina, Profero had also just won a coveted Gold Cyber Lions Award at Cannes, for its Mini - Follow the White Rabbit campaign - the only UK agency to win Gold at Cannes this year.

In the interview, Tina spoke about why people development is so important to Profero and how they inspire ‘boundless creativity’ in everyone at the agency - not just the creative department.

Profero’s award-winning CPD initiative included the following elements:

• An ‘inspirational speaker’ series including Lord Puttnam, Greg Dyke, Neil Christie of wieden + kennedy
• A ‘lunchtime speakers’ series on practical industry topics
• Boundless creativity projects set for cross-disciplinary teams
• People skills training from Dawn Sillett
• A training intranet to act as an agency blog and raise awareness of available training options

For more details of the programme, you can download the Profero case study from the IPA website.

Profero

Profero is Europe and Asia’s leading independent full service digital marketing agency. Since it was founded in 1998 it has delivered over 5,000 effective and innovative campaigns for clients, more than any other agency of its kind. Profero specialises in advertising, web development, media buying and relationship marketing solutions. Its client base includes Mini, Astrazeneca, Western Union, Johnson and Johnson, Central Office of Information, Channel 4, Expedia.Over 200 imaginative people work as one team out of London, Hong Kong, Paris, Munich, Milan, Madrid, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney engaging clients with the world of digital communications by demonstrating its creative, connective and brand building capabilities.

Tina Brazil - People Director

Tina Brazil is responsible for ensuring Profero’s award winning people practices retain its talented team and attract untapped talent to the agency. This forms many guises from training and development, benefits, and maintaining Profero’s all-important culture by making sure people have fun along the way.

Tina started her career as a PA in Publishing before realising that she’d like to do her job in a more creative environment. After joining Redcell as a PA Tina moved to Profero as an Office Manager where evidence of the development culture can be seen with her appointment to the operational board as People Director.

Tina’s moto is: ‘It’s not what you do it’s the way that you do it!’

Click the icon below to listen to the interview.

 Interview with Tina Brazil: Download

Over the past year it’s been a pleasure to follow the rise to fame of David Airey’s graphic design blog. David is someone who really gets what blogging is all about - his posts are thought-provoking and full of useful information. He’s also a real gent - commenters are made very welcome and are guaranteed a thoughtful response. So when David invited people to donate prizes for a competition to mark his one-year blog anniversary, I was happy to offer some free coaching sessions.

EDIT: the competition has now closed. Congratulations to all the winners.

My prize - free coaching sessions

• 2 x 45-minute coaching sessions via telephone or webcam.
• You can use the sessions to work on any aspect of your professional development. Most of my clients are creative professionals, but I’ve worked with people from all walks of life over the past 11 years, so whatever your background, I hope to help you find some new options for reaching your goals.
• My specialisms are creativity, communication, collaboration and management - so you may find the sessions particularly helpful if you are facing current challenges in any of these areas.
• The first session will help you clarify your goal and make an action plan; the second will review your progress and help you overcome any obstacles encountered.
• As a coach, my role is not to give advice (sadly, I’m not the fount of all wisdom!) but to listen carefully and to ask questions that will stimulate your thinking and help you clarify your goals and options for achieving them.
• The sessions will be strictly confidential.

The other prizes

I’m taking part in the competition via my prize so won’t be in the draw, but frankly there are a lot of prizes I’d be very happy to win. Have a look through them and visit their sites. Good luck! N.B. the following list was written by David Airey… Read the rest of this entry »

Following on from Key Coaching Skills in the Introduction to Business Coaching series is the GROW model. Devised by Sir John Whitmore and described in his book Coaching For Performance, it is probably the most common coaching model used in business, at least in the UK. It offers a way of structuring coaching sessions to facilitate a balanced discussion:

• GOAL - defining what you want to achieve
• REALITY - exploring the current situation, relevant history and future trends
• OPTIONS - coming up with new ideas for reaching the goal
• WHAT/WHO/WHEN - deciding on a concrete plan of action

In practice, since most coaching is driven by questions, this means that different types of question are used at each stage:

• GOAL - questions to define the goal as clearly as possible and also to evoke an emotional response
  [What do you want to achieve? What will be different when you achieve it? What's important about this for you?]
• REALITY - questions to elicit specific details of the situation and context
  [What is happening now? Who is involved? What is their outcome? What is likely to happen in future?]
• OPTIONS - open-ended questions to facilitate creative thinking
  [What could you do? What ideas can you bring in from past successes? What haven't you tried yet?]
• WHAT - focused questions to get an agreement to specific actions and criteria for success
  [What will you do? When will you do it? Who do you need to involve? When should you see results?]

Used judiciously, the GROW model offers an excellent framework for structuring a coaching session. It is particularly useful for beginners, helping them to see the wood for the trees and keep the session on track. However, Whitmore is at pains to emphasise that models and structures are not the heart of coaching:

GROW, without the context of AWARENESS and RESPONSIBILITY, and the skill of questioning to generate them, has little value.

I prefer to think of the GROW model as a compass for orientation rather than a rigid sequence of steps to be followed. I don’t think I’ve ever taken part in a coaching session that began with Goals, then progressed smoothly through an analysis of Reality, then brainstormed Options before settling on the What?/When?/Who? and How? of an action plan.

Coaching can begin at any of the four stages of the GROW model. A coachee might begin by telling you about something she wants to achieve (Goal), a current problem (Reality), a new idea for improving things (Options) or by outlining an action plan (What). As a coach, it’s usually a good idea to follow the coachee’s lead initially by asking a few questions to elicit more detail, then move onto the other steps.

Personally, I always start a coaching conversation by asking a goal-focused question (e.g. “So what do you want to achieve?”) as a way of setting the tone for the discussion. Sometimes the coachee replies with a description of a problem (Reality) which is fine - I’ll listen, probe for a few details then as soon as possible return to Goals, to keep the conversation focused. On the other hand, if someone comes to me full of ideas and enthusiasm (Goals, Options), I’ll do my best to help them maintain this while taking account of hard facts (Reality) and getting a commitment to specific action (What). As so often with coaching, the important principle is balance.

Next in this series - Formal and Informal Coaching.

Excellent piece by the experienced creative director Gary Sharpen in this week’s Campaign, on the issue of hiring and developing young creative talent. He relates how a creative director at a top direct agency told him “We don’t do placements and we don’t hire juniors - we don’t have the time to develop them”. Sharpen then goes on to describe the business case for investing (not spending) time developing junior people:

Time is, of course, money. When we invest time, we invest money. We may have to spend that little bit extra time with juniors, but the return on that investment is substantial. They will give you a fresh angle on an old problem. They will suggest media that you didn’t even know existed. They will enthuse the senior members of the creative department (and give them some healthy competition). They will bring an excitement to a project because it isn’t the umpteenth car insurance or charity brief they have worked on, it’s the first. All of these things, and more, create an energy that is infectious and which will be felt throughout the agency. They will deliver great work and, after all, its great work that our clients are paying us to come up with. It isn’t just altruism we are talking here, it’s business. This use of your time will deliver a very healthy return on investment for your company.

“I don’t have the time” is probably the single most common reason I hear from managers and directors for not coaching their teams. And it doesn’t just apply to graduates - people at all levels can benefit from being challenged and supported by a manager with good coaching skills. But as Sharpen points out, it’s not just the recipients of the time and attention who benefit - there is also a lot in it for the company.

Fair enough, you might think, I can see the benefit for the team members and the company, but if I’m the manager I’m the one who’s got to find the time and I’ve got plenty of other things on my plate. What’s in it for me? Here are some of my usual answers:

• Better performance from your team - as a manager, your job is to get the best out of the team, it’s hard to do that without investing time and energy in helping them improve.
• More commitment- think of the boss who was most interested in and supportive of your professional development vs the one who took the least interest. Who did you work hardest for?
• Knowing what you need to know - it sounds obvious, but if you don’t stop to listen to people, you could miss valuable information about the people, situations and problems you are working with.
• More and better ideas - people notice what you are interested in and respond to it. If you show that you value their ideas they will bring you more of them. If you take the time to help them understand why some ideas work better than others, they will start bringing you better ones.
• More capable people to delegate to - you can’t do everything, so the more people you can trust with important tasks, the better. The more time you invest in development, the more of these people you will see when you’re looking around the office.

None of this is rocket science. Listed like this, it looks like common sense. But it can be hard to keep it at the front of your mind when you’re under pressure.

Yet it needn’t take all that much time. More often than not it’s a change of mindset and behaviour that’s required, rather than freeing up a whole day for ‘training’. Like stopping and asking a question to unlock someone’s thinking. Or taking five minutes to listen to that ‘half-baked’ idea to see whether something can be done with it. Or making the effort to find out about someone’s ambitions and interests and how they relate to what they are doing in your agency right now.

You probably do some of this already - when you feel you have the time. You might not realise how much time, energy, enthusiasm and creativity you could create by doing it a bit more.

I had a great time last week with the Wardle McLean team, doing some facilitation for their away day. It’s interesting to read Kevin McLean’s take on the aikido activity I did with the group - I introduced it as a way of highlighting the difference a sense of purpose (peaceful resolution) can make to apparently mundane activities (basic drill steps). It also struck a chord with Kevin as a metaphor for conversation, which seems obvious to now, but wasn’t the reason I introduced it. That’s one of the nice things about this kind of activity - it acts as a metaphor with a rich variety of meanings for the participants, taking you to places you wouldn’t reach if you focus too literally and narrowly on a specific topic or situation.

The Wardle McLean Art of Conversation blog is well worth checking out, as is their Little Book of Qualitative Wisdom. As a practitioner of a conversational art myself, I can relate to a lot of what they say about research conversations. And I like the way the flipchart just happens to be showing the words ‘endless’ and ‘inspiration’ in the photo.

I was delighted to receive an e-mail from David Parrish this week, telling me he’s releasing his book T-Shirts and Suits as a free e-book.

T-Shirts and Suits is a ‘guide to the business of creativity’ and does an excellent job of making business advice ‘user-friendly’ for creative entrepreneurs. For a start, the eye-catching design means it doesn’t look like a business book. Inside, David addresses the basic subjects at the core of any creative business - marketing, intellectual property, accounting, business feasibility, leadership and management - in a way that makes them accessible and relevant to people who are creatives by choice and business people by necessity. It’s also one of the very few books on creative business to use the word ‘coaching’ in a management context - for which it receives an honourable mention in my forthcoming research paper.

I asked David what had prompted him to write the book:

“I’ve been designing and delivering training workshops for creative entrepreneurs for some years now and the book grew out of my training material. T-Shirts and Suits is a condensation of what I’ve picked up from my own experience, great ideas from creative enterprises I have worked with, combined with some business techniques I learnt at business school and from other research. I want to share my experience and knowledge with creative people who want to learn more about business to make their creative enterprises even more successful. The book has proved to be a great way to do this.”

Having gone to all the trouble of writing the book and getting it published, I wondered why he was prepared to give it away for free?

“There has been an interesting debate in the publisher’s offices about releasing a free e-book version. Some people believe that giving away a free e-book could kill book sales, whereas others see the e-book as a way to actually increase sales of the paperback. My own view is that it will help sales, but even if it doesn’t, it’s not my main concern. The bottom line for me is to share what I’ve experienced and learnt with as many creative people as possible - and to continue to learn from successful creative enterprises and feed it back into the world-wide network through my website, training, consultancy, and further publishing projects.”

As Seth Godin puts it, “ideas that spread, win”. And Seth has done a pretty good job of spreading ideas and selling books by giving them away for free. I hope it works for David as his ideas are much-needed for anyone trying to run a business fuelled by creativity. So if that’s you, I would download the e-book for free before you get stuck into today’s spreadsheets.

More good news - David is also sharing his ideas on his excellent blog.

Having looked at the big picture of Coaching and Leadership, I’m now going to focus on the small picture of the key skills involved in coaching.

Most of these appear on any standard list of coaching skills, with one or two additions of my own. Some of them, such as goal-setting or giving feedback, are to some extent susceptible to being broken down into discrete steps and taught; others, such as empathising and intuiting, are abilities that a coach naturally possesses, or which emerge over time as a result of practising the other skills.

Goal-setting

Coaching is a goal-focused (or solution-focused) approach, so the ability to elicit clear, well-defined and emotionally engaging goals from a coachee is one of the most important skills for a coach to possess. Like many aspects of coaching, there are both formal and informal aspects of this ability. On the formal side, a coach needs to know how and when to introduce goal-setting into the coaching process, and will usually be familiar with models such as SMART goals (a SMART goal is Specific, Measurable, Attractive, Realistic and Timed). On the informal side, a coach will typically have the habit of thinking and asking questions from a goal-focused mindset. For example, “How does doing x help you reach your goal?” helps the coachee to evaluate whether what she is doing will help or hinder her.

Another common habit of a good coach is reframing problems as goals - e.g. if a coachee talks about the problems he his having with a ‘difficult’ colleague, the coach might ask “What needs to be happening for you to have a workable relationship with this person?”.

Looking

A good deal is rightly written about the importance of listening in coaching, but looking is often (ahem) overlooked. When running coaching skills seminars, I often say to the trainee coaches “The answer is right in front of you”. Meaning that the person’s body language tells you a huge amount about her emotional state and level of commitment, yet it’s so easy to ignore that if we are too focused on our own ideas about what needs to happen next. Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies for the interruption to my Introduction to Business Coaching series, it was one of the things that got put on hold as a result of moving house. Here goes for the second half of the series, beginning with a look at coaching and leadership.

If you’ve been following the series, particularly the post about The Manager as Coach, you won’t be surprised to hear me advocate coaching as an effective approach to leadership. But there’s there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when dealing with people, so it’s important to see coaching in context, to understand where, when and how it can be effective for leaders - and what the alternatives are.

In their well-known book Leadership and the One Minute Manager Ken Blanchard, Patricia Zigarmi and Drea Zigarmi present coaching as one of four basic leadership styles - Directing, Coaching Supporting and Delegating. They argue that managers need to be flexible in adopting the most effective style for any given situation. In a similar spirit, Daniel Goleman wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review called Leadership that Gets Results, in which he argued that managers should utilise “a collection of distinct leadership styles - each in the right measure, at just the right time”. The analogy he used (no doubt familiar to corporate executives) was of a bag of golf clubs:

Over the course of a game, the pro picks and chooses clubs based on the demands of tbe shot. Sometimes he has to ponder his selection, but usually it is automatic. The pro senses the challenge ahead, swiftly pulls out the right tool, and elegantly puts it to work. That’s how high-impact leaders operate, too.

What makes Goleman’s article really interesting is his presentation of a research project carried out by the consulting firm Hay/McBer, into the relative effectiveness of different leadership styles. He begins by identifying six basic leadership styles:

1. Coercive - demanding compliance
2. Authoritative - mobilizing people towards a vision
3. Affiliative - building relationships and promoting harmony
4. Democratic - promoting consensus through participation
5. Pacesetting - setting high standards by example and demanding the same of others
6. Coaching - delegating responsibility and developing people for success

Here’s Goleman’s characterization of the coaching style of leadership:

Coaching leaders help employees identify their unique strengths and weaknesses and tie them to their personal and career aspirations. They encourage employees to establish long-term development goals and help them conceptualize a plan for attaining them. They make agreements with their employees about their role and responsibilities in enacting development plans, and they give plentiful instruction and feedback

Read the rest of this entry »

Following on from my post about the External Coach or Coaching Consultant, this one looks at the the role a manager can play as a coach for her team.

Most people, when they hear the phrase ‘business coach’ think of an external consultant. Yet managers can have a powerful influence on their teams and the organisation as a whole when they adopt a coaching style of management. As a way of managing people, coaching differs from the traditional corporate ‘command and control’ approach in the following ways:

• collaborating instead of controlling
• delegating more responsibility
• talking less, listening more
• giving fewer orders, asking more questions
• giving specific feedback instead of making judgements

This is not simply a case of ‘being nicer’ to people - delegated responsibility brings pressure to perform and coaching managers maintain a rigorous focus on goals and results.

The role of the manager-coach is very different to that of an external coach. Whereas an external coach has the luxury of a laser-like focus on the coachee and his development and performance, the manager-coach needs to balance the needs of the coachee, other team members and the organisation as a whole.

Some people argue that it is impossible for a manager to act as a coach, given her position of authority over her team. While authority is an important issue, it need not be an insurmountable obstacle - as long as there is genuine trust and respect in the working relationship. It is also a fact that coaching frequently takes place between peers and even upwards on occasion, with some enlightened bosses happy to be coached by their team members.

In his book Coaching for Performance John Whitmore raises the issue of managerial responsibility and authority, and asks ‘Can the manager, therefore, be a coach at all?’:

Yes, but it demands the highest qualities of that manager: empathy, integrity and detachment, as well as a willingness, in most cases, to adopt a fundamentally different approach to his staff… he may even have to cope with initial resistance from some of his staff, suspicious of any departure from traditional management. (p.16)

Advantages of manager-coaches

In-depth knowledge of people and organisation
However well an external coach listens and observes, she does not have the same level of exposure to the organisation and its people as a manager, so will never have the same depth of knowledge about them. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Ritke of 49Sparks has just posted an interview with me we recorded last week. We talked about Wishful Thinking, coaching, people and creativity - including the use of online tools to facilitate co-creation.

Chris is developing some very interesting tools for project collaboration at 49Sparks - you can sign up for free to check them out - and has a great series of audio and video podcasts. I originally noticed Chris’s site when he posted an interview with Neil Tortorella of Business of Design Online (where I’m a guest author).

As well as project tools 49Sparks offers social networking for creative professionals - Chris explains it better than I can, have a look at this video to see what it’s all about.