I finally had enough hitting errand backhands.

Opponents were deliberately targeting my tennis backhand, and for good reason as the ball would either fly-off my too-open racquet, or alternatively, plummet into the net. In a last desperate effort before turning to racquet-ball, I engaged our club pro who coaches, not executives as I do, but weekend warriors with still lingering fantasies of ripping winners if not like Nadal, than perhaps like McEnroe, even the 2009 vintage McEnroe.

As a psychologist engaged in executive coaching, I like to entertain the fantasy that I do something special. I like to think that my training and professional development provide a certain uniqueness in how I intervene to improve performance or solve workplace problems. My illusions about uniqueness were quickly dispelled after an hour’s tennis lesson.

Firstly, I should introduce my pro – Konrad, whose young countenance appearing below should not divert you from his 10 years of competitive playing and now teaching experience.

Konrad began with what I would call an assessment. Although he didn’t use these words, I would refer to the assessment as multi-modal, in other words, he used various perspectives to see my problem. He first asked about my backhand, inquiring about typical errors and what playing situations elicited those errors. He then performed what I would call a behavioural observation where he observed my backhand in action – action that varied with the pace, direction and spin of the balls that Konrad sent me.

I didn’t say anything, but what Konrad did in his assessment bears a great deal of similarity to how I perform an assessment with a business client. I first elicit a self-report of the problem, then, I often include some real world simulation that allows me to view the problem as close to the actual working situation as possible. In my assessment of leadership problems or anger management, I have a particular interest in determining the factors that improve or impair performance – my own equivalent of varying the speed, direction and spin of the ball.

After assessing my backhand, Konrad initiated the intervention stage by describing the playing context for the modified stroke that he was about to add to my repertoire. He described how the new two-handed top-spin backhand would help me in various game situations. In my own coaching work, I call this the coaching rationale where I describe how a new skill or competence can effectively readdress the workplace problem that is hampering my client. This first step in skill acquisition involves understanding how the new skill will bring results.

I won’t take you through all the remaining steps of the lessons except to mention these highlights; 1) Konrad’s demonstration of the required biomechanics, 2) my practicing of the new movements in progressively more difficult situations, and 3) the final linkage of the multiple motor components of the new backhand into an easily retrievable and unifying image. I won’t say anything except to highlight how a psychologist often uses modeling, shaping and imagery training as principle ingredients of executive coaching.

I will however tell you how he ended the training – with relapse prevention. Although the phrase derives from work in addictions, the term’s applications should be used in all behavioural change interventions, especially coaching.

In essence, the technique involves preparing to cope with mistakes before they occur – talking to a now abstinent drinker about what he or she might react to a slip of control, or talking to an executive about what how he or she might react when they do forgot their coaching sessions and lose it with an subordinate.

It’s a hard phase of coaching, because after working and succeeding in training a new skill, we are reluctant to even mention that things might not continue to be rosy moving forward. We fear that if we mention it, we might encourage it. Well, Konrad like all good coaches did not suffer from magical thinking and ended the lesson with his own version of relapse prevention talking about what emotional and procedural responses I might bring to bear when I revert to my old backhand form.

I left Konrad’s lesson with a better backhand. But, I also left with an appreciation that my executive coaching sessions bear a great deal of similarity with what a good tennis pro or probably any teacher or coach does on a routine basis.

I still retain the fantasy, however, that we psychologists invented it.

executive coaching

In my executive coaching practice in Montreal, many of the business issues that I discuss with my clients concern prediction. These prediction problems are rarely conceptualized as such, instead they are couched in jargon of the particular business using words such as “forecasting,” “planning” or “analysis”. However, the underlying psychological process is prediction.

For example, in the retail clothing business, senior executives and their teams make predictions at least four times a year about what fashions will be in style six months down the line. Credit teams in financial institutions make routine predictions about a potential lender’s ability to repay his or her financial obligation. Marketing executives attempt to determine the public’s response to their newly created campaigns.

Predictions are not only routine in most executive jobs, but they are also extremely important since they can be the main drivers of the company’s success or the source of an employee’s bonus.

Now here’s the sobering news from psychology. We, humans, are not very good at this type of cognitive activity. My profession of Clinical Psychologists went through this epiphany over forty years ago when a generation of dissertations tackled the following question:

Who’s better at predicting things about patients – expert clinicians or machines?

The machines were represented by statistical algorithms that used historical data to make predictions about such things as;

• which patients will improve with psychotherapy
• who is will likely get discharged earlier from the hospital

In short, which was better: clinical or statistical prediction?

Well, after numerous studies, the verdict was resounding – statistical prediction based upon tested algorithms were better than the trained experts. It was a hard pill for us psychologists to swallow but we survived and moved on.

What are the implications for business?

Firstly, recognize that prediction is tough. Research in many fields has shown that people making the predictions are notoriously over optimistic about their abilities. In fact, the more of an expert they are – the greater their certainty, but not necessarily their accuracy.

Secondly, require that business people making predictions be explicit about the decision and what is underlying their prediction. What factors did they consider? How did they weigh these factors? What things did they not consider?

At one point in my career, I was running a large department of clinical psychologists who routinely gathered at weekly Rounds to present and discuss cases. The meetings were interesting with a lively debate about the likely outcome of various therapeutic interventions. However, the meetings also reflected the old joke that two psychologists in a room yields three different opinions. In the clinical meeting, all the opinions were offered with justifiable reasons, some even citing relevant research. But, almost invariably, each proffered statement was countered by an opposing equally elegant point of view. It was like a merry-go-round, great fun, but when the music stopped everyone was exactly in the same position that they began – convinced in the rectitude of their own view.

I decided to change things by introducing a bit of reality feedback. Henceforth, at the end of the meeting, each psychologist was required to document his or her prediction in a one-page sheet that recorded the prediction and the underlying reasons, listed in terms of importance. Then, six months later the patients were presented again, and the predictions evaluated. The results of my changes were interesting. People began to be more cautious in their judgments, they began to consider more information and listen more to the ideas of others. I didn’t stay in the position long enough to see if feedback had any long-term effect on accuracy, but I suspect it did.

Here’s the bottom-line for business.

1. Recognize when you are making predictions.
2. Then ensure that people making the predictions are explicit not only about the outcome but the underlying decision-making process.
3. Finally, collect data and feedback the results in a way that employees can learn from their successes and failures.

executive coaching · prediction · psychology

In my practice as an executive coach in Montreal, I often hear managers complain about the stress of conducting business meetings.  Their major worry is conflict.
My first response is almost always:“you’re lucky,” especially if those anticipated conflicts contain the seeds of contrarian ideas that might help the business.  In today’s economic climate; heaven help the boss surrounded by sycophants!
However, our natural tendency is to shy away from conflict, fearing that if it is not contained, it could lead to bruised egos, perceived loss of authority and perhaps permanently strained relationships.

Here are some tips that might be helpful in dealing with conflict in productive ways.

#1 Clearly identify the issue.
As a leader, even a leader whose ideas are being opposed, take the initiative and clearly formulate the opposing view. If you are proposing incentives to a sales team and someone heatedly objects, hear them out and then take back the argument by re-stating their own objections. Do so clearly, but ensure that your re-phrasing adds an additional layer of conceptualization.

In our incentives example, someone might challenge the manager by claiming:
“… but our salespeople aren’t monkeys working for peanuts in a circus.”
After listening, you might respond by rephrasing their objection in this more generalized question:
“That’s interesting. The question is, to what extent do we all respond to rewards?”
In this way, by listening and then rephrasing at a more conceptual level, the heat is removed.  In addition, you have taken back the control that the questioner may have intended to wrestle away from you.

#2 Get multiple views.
When conflict arises in a meeting, spread the discussion. Often, leaders react badly to challenging questions sensing an underlying threat to their authority and position. Often, the natural tendency is to argue it out with the proponent leaving everyone else as spectators to a prize fight.
Don’t make this mistake, involve others in the discussion. In this way, the potential for individual conflict with you, the leader, is reduced while you can benefit from other points of view. The only caveat is that you stay on-topic until resolution. Opening-up the discussion means increasing the range of speakers and opinions, not topics. If asides occur, gently bring the group back to the issue at a hand.

#3 Collect data.
Many of the senior executives that I coach work in industries where subjective judgment plays a considerable role. For example, predicting what style of dress is going to be a hit in the next season is not something likely to be generated from iterations of differential equations from econometrics.

As a result, many executives in the garment or fashion industry fear conflict since they know that, at the end of the day, all they have to back-up an opinion is their gut feeling.
In these cases, what I often suggest is taking a time-out to collect data. Again, after having clearly formulated the conflicting issue, ask the team if there are other sources of data that might resolve the issue. Sometimes, additional data can be obtained by asking other experts, or data-mining from past company records.  When feasible, the time-out could be longer to conduct a focus group or measure behaviour in a sample of store shoppers – anything that can shed light on the conflicting issue with something more than gut-feelings.

With these tricks at the ready, a manager can turn meeting conflict into a productive exercise.

Conflict · executive coaching · Meetings

A friend recently asked me about my practice in executive coaching. In particular, he wanted to know what the major mental health problems are that face the executives and professionals that I see in my practice. He had in mind the typical collection of diagnostic entities such as depression, anxiety, or perhaps more behavioural deficits, such as, perfectionism or excessive self-criticism.

I replied that my typical client has none of those things. Instead they have tons of little problems, most of them not of there own making. That’s because I view my clients not in terms of diagnostic labels but with myriad, and often impossibly difficult, challenges.

Similarly, I view my background in Psychology as providing me with a wide spectrum of tools both to conceptualize, and tackle these challenges. In short, I draw-upon psychological research to solve work problems not to “cure” executives. Psychology provides an extensive toolbox with to solve business or work problems. Let me provide you with one example.

A manager of a retail outlet wanted to send an under-performing sales person to another store to observe and learn from more experienced sales staff. In psychological terms, this type of learning is called modeling and its operation and effectiveness has been thoroughly studied in clinical psychology. Drawing upon this research, I was able to help my sales manager client in several ways. Firstly, I provided a common concept –learning through modeling- and as well as a subsequent vocabulary for his intervention. Then, I suggested several refinements including having the manager meet with the salesperson after each store visit to define in explicit terms what the inexperienced sale person learned. Research on modeling has revealed that more permanent skill acquisition occurs when the specific aspects of the desired model’s behaviour are identified and made explicit.  In addition, to aid future recall, I suggested that the manager link the observed salesman’s behaviour to the overall retail mission of the store. In psychological jargon, we were using “deeper cognitive processing” to facilitate long-term memory storage. Finally, we ensured that the sales skills observed were within the existing behavioural competency of the sales and aligned with theirown career goals.

This example of modeling provides but one small example of the richness of psychological research in providing executives with many creative and effective ways to crack the array of nuts they are presented with as daily problems.

executive coaching · Problem-solving · psychology

Dialectics in Sports and Business:

As a psychologist involved in helping professional athletes as well as senior executives, I have found numerous similarities in the challenges facing both groups. One such similarity is the dialectical tension of two potentially opposing tendencies – individual competitive achievement and team playing.

As students of philosophy appreciate, a dialectics represents a systematic reasoning process that attempts to resolve two opposing views.  In psychology’s use of the term, the reasoning can be conducted within the individual to arrive at some acceptable balance or equilibrium between two opposing drives.

In baseball, when the batter comes to the plate at the bottom on the 9^th with the bases loaded and two outs, straining every muscle to hit the ball out of the park is incompatible with the loose fluidity to achieve the desired result.  The more tense the batter becomes, the less likely he is to get even a base hit.  One has to care, but not too much.

Similarly, in my practice as an executive coach, I have been called to rescue career flame-outs fueled by unbridled ambition and drive.  The story usually begins well with a Young Turk entering the corporate world with a stellar academic background from a prestigious school.  The work is attacked vigorously and invariably successfully.  However, cracks in interpersonal relationships with colleagues soon began to form. Credit for successful performances is rarely shared, acknowledgements of the contributory efforts provided by colleagues or even secretaries go unmentioned. Performance in meetings is filled by sentences that begin with “I” continue to action verbs which are heavily modified by adverbs of achievement.

A similar situation can easily occur in the locker room, where an individual “attitude” begins to over-shadow the team’s success.  A telltale sign occurs when the athlete begins to believe the glowing press clippings of the record goal-scoring season or the highest game-winning saves.

In both the business and sporting world, promotions and stardom come more readily to those who can temper their individual ambition for the needs of the organization, the group or the team.  Successful career management demands this. Mentoring others, rewarding others, and sharing success with others are all activities that yield later dividends.

Success in the organization and the playing field involves finding and executing a successful compromise of these two psychological drives of individual achievement and team collaboration.

competition · cooperation · dialectics · executive coaching