May 8th, 2022
Q: Can you tell me a little bit more about leadership coaching?
A: Coaching we have discovered quite early is essential. There is little value in pushing tools and training sessions out to people if you don’t have an effective way of supporting teams going through change. There is a lot of interest, but people don’t know how to make it all work. So, the coaching component read its head early on. The coaching framework he has pulled together results from learning our way through that. So the leadership coaching is a partnership with an external coaching accreditation association. Essentially what we are doing is developing a massive cohort of senior leaders and leaders (ex-co and ex-co minus one) who are accredited leaders and exec coaches. This is giving us two things. One is a network of people internally who know how to coach effectively and can act as our internal coach network. But it is also giving them coaching as a style for their own leadership. That leadership coaching is really important to us (HSBC).
We are seeing the results of that right now. There are certain tools and techniques that they teach you through the coaching process, like supervision and reflection. Which, actually, people are taking back into their teams now. I’ve seen some teams setting up routine supervision sessions and there has been some phenomenal feedback from that.
Some senior leaders and leaders think the transformation is for other people to do. So, it has been good to get our leaders involved and engaged on that journey. I think getting the leader coaches partnered with the agile coaches has been very important as well. The leader coaches are not branded as agile coaches, it is just a thing we want in our organisation in general. However, there is messaging in the coaching about agility, but it is not branded in that way. Hopefully, the leadership coaches will connect with the agile coaches as being the owners of the knowledge around what agility really means.
Q: Almost everyone I talk to runs into significant failure because of the degree of literacy of the executive leadership in agility practices. Especially, when an executive group, owner, or leader leaves that was driving agility, and new leaders come in that may not be. Is your coaching leadership program helping to ensure that that level of leadership is consistent among leaders and that there is top-down support?
Q: You talked about how you changed successful people and the importance of trust with those people. Is there a linkage between the level of trust and how much those successful people engage?
Q: Can you tell me about the journey of discovering that, of all the metrics, lead time was the most pivotal?