In my last two posts, I shared my view on how CEO’s and managers discuss mistakes in their executive coaching sessions with me.  I pointed out how much the discussions focused on the emotional consequences of the mistake and not the underlying cognitive process.  This got me thinking about how my professional of psychology handles mistakes – not too well, since errors are rarely recognized.  Medicine is doing better by changing professional attitudes and teaching about the cognitive biases and traps that often blind a physician’s thinking.

In today’s post, I point to a high-flying example that we can all emulate.

Aviation Industry; a model

There are many admirable aspects about the aviation industry concerning the management of errors, perhaps because the consequences are obvious and dramatic.

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Mistakes · Problem-solving

We all make mistakes. Lawyers sometimes accept cases that they know they shouldn’t; teachers get into battles with kids that are unwinnable; and executives fail to consider all the variables in their strategic planning analysis. The question is; do we learn from our mistakes?  Regrettably, our current culture stresses apology over analysis.

In my practice of executive coaching I hear about business blunders all the time.  Actually, I don’t often hear about the mistake itself, more likely, I hear about the emotional consequences. I see people berate themselves or reach out for consolation after making a mistake that leads to the unleashing of a tirade from an aggressive boss. I hear people resolve never to do it again or vow to do better in the future.

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Mistakes · Problem-solving

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