More Courses From The Bank: What Coaching Isn't

I did the two-day course on coaching that's part of The Bank's Leadership course recently. Coaching is about having someone else monitor your technique, spot where it could be improved and work with you to improve it. Part of that is helping you maintain the state of mind you need to be in to perform well, but coaching isn't therapy. Nor is it training, which is either about learning skills and knowledge that you don't have or practicing certain moves so that they become second nature. Coaching is about improving what you're already doing pretty well. Or not, if you attended the course. Which was based on the techniques used by soi-disant life coaches, and especially the GROW acronym: clarifying Goals, what the Reality of the situation is, looking at the Options you have and then working out what you Will do to get started. This isn't coaching. It's planning.

The closest we came to getting specific instructions about doing anything was through a role-play. My actress was a middle-aged lady regulatory risk wonk with little confidence and less presence (good acting) who needed some more money and was thinking about promotion to grades where knowledge is nothing and confident bullshit is everything. In the real world, I would never have accepted her request to use my newly-acquired coaching skills, and even if I did, I would have done exactly what I did in the role-play, which was shut the relationship down politely once I realised what kind of person she was. I can't have people like that in my life. I was supposed to have asked questions (I did, just ones that were rather too much to the point) and done a lot of supportive reflective listening. In the second, my colleague had a boisterous but effective team leader who was going to take a step up to working with senior managers and he was slightly concerned that she might make the wrong impression on the upper muckamucks. What he was supposed to have done was ask questions that invited her to reflect on her behaviour: "how do you think senior management might interpret you being late to meetings?" That sort of thing.

Discussing the role-play afterwards, I explained that if anyone but especially my line manager started using those "how do you think" questions on me, I would assume it was Quiz Time and I was being set up. That is not, I said, how you talk to adults, but to children, and the kids don't like it much either. I would have simply checked with my boisterous project manager something like this: "that bit where you're late for meetings? You know you can't do that with senior management, right?" Which I could do in real life because both my project manager and I would know what I was referring to. And which would constitute coaching as ordinarily understood - a quick, on-the-fly technical check.

But not as understood by people who do Life Coaching to supplement their incomes as freelance external trainers. Uh-huh. They need to use the GROW (or any other) acronym because it provides a repeatable structure to their life coaching sessions, which are with people with whom they don't have a history nor a common work culture and can't have the shorthand conversations that you can bet Roger Federer had with Severin Luthi.

Does it matter? Yes. Coaching is one thing and it should not be confused with advising, or training or planning, or helping, or rescuing, or bailing-out-of-the-shit, or discussing-a-problem, or giving a one-to-one, or therapy or appraising or any of those other things it got confused with during the two days. Each one takes place in different circumstances, with different relationships and uses different techniques to achieve different aims. Lumping them all together and calling it "coaching" is just sloppy. It misses the chance to get some serious, specific, useful content over.

Did I take anything away from the course that was useful? Not really. It's aimed at the very people who won't do it: the manipulative managers for whom "performance management" is what you do when you need to get rid of people, and "coaching" is what you do when you've told someone that what they've been doing is wrong and you're very disappointed in them.

Every one of the trainers so far has mentioned Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I'm sure I skimmed it in a bookshop once and put it back because it was too new-age for me. I'm starting to think I need to read it, not because it might tell me something, but because it's the Enemy's Bible.

In Praise of Billie Ray Martin

Many years ago I poked my head round the door of some Saturday morning TV. There was a band. In less than a chorus I was converted by the singer's soulful, strong, edgy voice. That was Electribe 101. Here's their classic Talking With Myself...



No sooner had I bought the CD than they vanished. It was a while before I found out the that wonderful  singer, Billie Ray Martin, was still working. Here's a stone classic, Space Oasis, from her debut album Deadline For My Memories.



I love the overtones, inflections, variations, passion and colour of her voice: take some time to listen. There's an interview with her as well...

Employment Market Opportunists Number 7: The Career Advisors

Refresh your CV on Monster and you get things like this in your mailbox. The details have not been changed to spare the guilty...

Dear Seven Dials

Your CV has been reviewed online and generated some interest with one of our Senior Consultants at our London offices.

I would be most grateful if you could call me on 077224 30666 to discuss your requirements alternatively email mmcbride@active-career.co.uk at your earliest convenience with a view to scheduling an appointment.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,
Melissa McBride
Active Career Management Ltd
133 Houndsditch
London
EC3A 7BX
M: 07722 430666
F: 020 3402 6160
E: mmcbride@active-career.co.uk
W:www.active-career.co.uk

Active Career Transition is a real company. What they provide is career counselling, outsourcing and HR advisory services. They aren't employment agencies and they don't know where the jobs are. They make the majority of their money from companies, mostly from outsourcing assignments, and the rest from charging individual job-seekers for career counselling. Way back in the 90's I went along to a company like them and heard what was so obviously a rehearsed sales spiel, complete with a little ceremony in which the "senior consultant" signed a form "accepting" me as a suitable person to be a client. I can't remember what they charged, but I think there was mention of a career development grant, which was a £5,000 loan from the Government for suitable purposes, which that firm was obviously providing. Can you spell "bottom feeder"?

No, I'm not being harsh. Don't get me started on the whole career-change thing (actually, I will, but not now). The reason you know it doesn't work is that you have never met anyone who speaks highly of them, or indeed at all about them. If it did work, the guys doing the advising - all mysteriously former "senior managers" in name companies who have decided that A Freelancer's Life Is The Life For Them - would have proper jobs with real companies instead of trying to flog you the psychometric testing. (The psychometric testing is always extra.)

How Not To Write A Job Description

Can you spot the give-away verb in this genuine blurb? You do not want to know where I found this, or how much of the company you, the taxpayer, own.

"This suite of programmes and events delivers relevant content and practical tools along with extensive networking and knowledge sharing opportunities. Development is aligned to the Leadership Diamond which focuses on ‘Judgement’, ‘Drive’, ‘Influence’ and ’Execution’ and encapsulates our Values. Our Executive Development approach aims to build on your existing talents and leadership capabilities enabling you to:

· Inspire confidence, restore trust, create followership
· Be a role model for our Vision and Values
· Deliver our strategic agenda around cost, customer leadership and capital efficiency
· Navigate the scale and complexity of our new business
· Be expert in risk management and compliance"

The answer is below, but you'll have to highlight the rest of the page.

That’s right “restore” trust. Not “maintain” or “deepen” or even why would you need to do anything about trust because why would it be an issue? But “restore”. Because it’s shot.

The Moral Trolley Problem - The Actual Answer

The obits column of the FT this Saturday tells me that the British philosopher Phillippa Foot died recently. She invented the "trolley problem", which goes something like this: you are standing by a set of points on a railway line and a runaway trolley is coming towards you. If it continues, it will kill five people who are trapped on the line. You can however pull the lever to work the points and divert it to the other line, where it will kill one person trapped on the line and then stop. What do you do?

Most people say they would pull the lever. You can have an argument about it and the point is, there is no right answer, what matter is the discussion in which you make explicit your moral principles. Well, maybe not. Here's a version: we're at war, you're in the army, the Five are enemy soldiers and the One is a member of your platoon. That's not even a decision. Your duty is clear. Here's another version: the One is your thirteen year-old sister and the Five are paedophiles who have been stalking her recently. I don't think that's a decision at all either. Here's another version: the Five are a bunch of bullies who have been making your son's life at school hell and the One is his best friend. Odd how that level has suddenly rusted in place isn't it? Here's another one: the One is a surgeon who is the only person who can do a life-saving operation on your wife, the Five are the medical staff who told her that there was nothing wrong with her and she should stop wasting NHS time. Okay, that lever's still rusty, but you're going to have a conscience about it. Finally, try this: the Five are blameless Philosophy professors and the One is... another blameless philosophy professor. Okay, we're back where we started.

Justice is properly blind. Morality isn't, but a lot of moral philosophers treat it as if it should be. In the trolley problem, it's not supposed to matter who the people are, but from those examples, it's clear it does matter. When Western Liberals are doing their best formal moral philosophy, they stipulate that all lives are equal and pretend that there are no evil people. When Western Liberals are making real decisions, it matters who the parties are.

Of course it does. The whole point of having relationships, agreements and understandings with people is so that you have a priority with each other. Family come first. Military colleagues after family, when on active service. Then friends and after that business associates and neighbours you trust and like. Drug dealers, child molesters, wife-beaters, serial killers and other such low-lives aren't even on the scale. They don't get any breaks. Until you're sitting in a jury, when the rules say they get treated as innocent until you're convinced otherwise. Because that's a legal process and the Law is blind.

But that's not what's wrong with trolley-ology. To explain what is, I'll give you the correct answer to the original problem. Which is this: "I would immediately pull some of the debris at the side of the railway line across the track and de-rail the trolley, thus saving everyone's lives."

I know. I cheated. Where did I get the debris from? Ummmm, ever seen a real railway line near a set of points? There's always debris. But even that's not the point: I'm not supposed to put the problem in a real-world context. I'm supposed to take one or the other option - when neither is really acceptable. Whereas in the real world, there's almost always a third way, there's always some debris - and it's thinking of the other, pragmatic, options that characterises the leader (JFK and the Blockade option especially at 1:15) and the practical person.

So the discussion that the trolley example generates is not just theoretical - which can be a good thing - it's unrealistic, which is always a bad thing. Here's a real life example from a recent trolley article. "When NICE said yes to [the drug] Herceptin, for early breast cancer, one NHS trust closed its diabetic clinic to pay for it,” said Michael Rawlins, head of NICE. “These are rotten decisions to have to make.”

Well, except the Trust should have asked me. I would have told them to keep the Diabetes clinic open. When the first Herceptin request came along, the Trust should have said "we're sorry, but we don't have the money" and that the Trust is an administrator, not a judge of who is more deserving of medical treatment. She was welcome to try other Trusts who might have the cash. I suspect a number of Trusts did that and I bet it worked.

However, cancer drugs have an odd way of usurping others. This is because the drug companies - Genentech make Herceptin - sponsor charitable foundations who in turn help Mrs X (a photogenic teacher with a family to make you sigh "Aaahhh" when you see the photographs) to "gain her rights" to treatment. Once Mrs X turns up with a strangely effective publicity campaign and a lawyer, we're no longer talking about morality, but whether a corporation with a slick PR campaign gets to decide how our taxes get spent on healthcare.

That's what I mean when I say the Trolley problems are unrealistic. Real moral problems, if they can't be solved by reference to the relationships you have with the people, have to be solved by finding the "blockade option". Trolley problems assume we have to choose between two evils and then discover that we have a limited repetoire for doing so.

In The Upper Room - Sadler's Wells

Another trip to Sadler's Wells, this time to see the Birmingham Royal Ballet in a three-part programme with very long intervals (I didn't know about the long intervals). The first piece was Kenneth MacMillan's Concerto, which was pretty and pointless in that strange way that modern dance can be. The second was Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, which was fun and sexy. But I was still waiting to be amazed.

The third piece. Twyla Tharp's In The Upper Room. Music by Philip Glass. I'm wondering. This could be painful. It starts.

In three minutes, I'm entranced and it's clear we're in the presence of The Real Thing. The Birmingham dancers were fluid, loose-limbed and scattered around the beat, which gave the whole thing an informal feel - it's clearly notated to an inch of its life, but the dancers made it seem like they were making bits of it up. And I like that improvisatory feel.



The way the dancers seem to solidify as they come through the smoke is slightly magical and the finale will make you shout "Yeah!" If you've ever sat through an evening of rigorous modern dance, thinking "that's a really cool trick, and they are technically brilliant, but where's the fun?", here's your antidote.

Don't Play Interview Battleships

Your skills are there somewhere. Let's see...nope, nothing on A4: how is your department organised? Let's try B7: what do you do in your current job? Maybe H6: tell me about a time you had to respond to a client request quickly. And on it goes. A bunch of questions that make sense if you are already doing what they want you to do for them, but not otherwise.

They don't want to ask straight out if you can do X, Y and Z, because that makes it too easy for you to say Yes with whatever varying degree of truth is involved. To get round that they would have to give you a test, and of course no-one who works there would pass the test. If you did, the chances are you would realise you were working below your abilities in about, oh, a week. And they know that. Tests are fine for commodity code-cutters or people who have to know the official regulations around their jobs, but not for companies hiring non-cookie-cutter jobs.

So they shoot random questions at you and see if you mention any magic words. Recently I was so puzzled by one interviewer's repeated questioning about "what I did" at The Bank, that I eventually cam straight out and said "you want to know what I can do?" And then told him. He fired a quick test at me, which I passed (because I am actually that good). From then on the interview got back on track.

I vowed that the next time someone asked "what do you do at The Bank" I would say "not much of any real interest to you, or to me, which is why I want to work with you. What's interesting to you is that I've picked up skills in (insert relevant stuff here) and some experience of (insert more relevant stuff here). But how I use them at The Bank is more or less irrelevant to what I can do for you." Then go on to talk about their business and my understanding of it.