From the position of Expert Manager to that of “Coach Facilitator” Manager without coaching training.
On Friday, one of my clients, the Innovation Director of an international company, whom I have the honor of coaching, asked me: Marie Françoise, do you have any coaching tools? Her challenge in 2022 is to move from a position of knowledgeable and highly experienced expert with a long history in her company, to a position of Manager Coach, facilitator. Come and discover our business coach .
I therefore suggested that he build a coaching exercise based on his own experience , drawing on his expert talent and his cross-functional positioning (between R&D and Marketing on the one hand and between central Marketing and regional Marketing on the other).
In summary, it is a 3-band script….
- The intuitive expert knows how to go about it but does not know how to make others feel the right way to do it. He does not feel credible or legitimate to transmit his approach because he is a victim of his internal image (he is not a hierarchical person, he is a “knowledgeable” person but neither in the field of Marketing nor in the field of R&D – he is the Director of Innovations). As a result, he must find another more “acceptable” and more “tactical” approach to guide marketing managers and get them to change their group animation method, in the presence of rather opposing or rather “torn” actors.
- He must do his “unraveling” exercise in his own way, to construct a coaching exercise based on the questioning technique:
- What is the path I take to get to this result? What is the process I use to lead my meetings? What method? What approach?
- He writes it by hand to facilitate “awareness”
- He reformulates these good practices in the form of questions likely to guide the colleague or collaborator he must coach.
- He observes what happens next, the results of his coaching posture and the awakening of consciousness that this produces in the other.
- It measures the progress of the collective and the changes in posture of each individual, their ability to work better together, their desire to better understand the constraints of each individual and ultimately, the business results, translated into precise indicators.
In conclusion:
Don’t we also tend to take on an expert posture in our professional activity? Our mind is then on autopilot. And we are convinced that we are doing the right thing. But when it comes to working in teams of experts, where the ego of the “knowledgeable” finds a platform for development and expansion, it is good at this stage that someone can take on this “meta” role in order to create the conditions for listening and collective empathy, in a context dominated by the search for performance and competition.
Through this experience, my client agreed to open up to other possibilities, by calling on his “business coach”, to broaden his own field of consciousness, to discover a talent as a facilitator coach within himself, while creating the conditions for a collaborative dialogue.
And you, have you had this experience?
