I’m coming to the end of my project here in Hong Kong at a financial services company and have been loving all the time I’ve been spending coaching my team.
Whereas most projects are set up such that there is a team of consultants and one full time client resource dedicated to the project, this client provided 7 “analysts” with skills on par with junior consultants.
As it relates to this post, there are two key impacts of this set-up:
- The analysts have not been hired under the requirements of, and through the training generally given to our firm’s consultants
- The analysts have vastly more knowledge of the client’s (their employer’s) business than any of our consultants would ever have
What I’ve really enjoyed in this set-up is coaching this team to harness their knowledge of the business, but at the same time really think beyond the sacred old ways that are holding it back.
Today I worked with one of them to set up a strategy to gather some specific information:
- What mix of activities does an average employee encounter on any given day?
- How much time does it take to complete each variety of activity?
- What barriers does an employee encounter that prevents him from focusing solely on their primary responsibilities
- What expectations are communicated to an employee by their manager throughout the day
- How explicit is the manager in controlling the priority / sequence / quality / details of an employee’s work
You get the point.
To gather this information, the analyst sat smack in the center of 3 of the employees in question and took an inventory of everything that happened.
I checked in on him throughout the day and asked for any highlights or interesting information that he had gathered. He provided a concise summary each time. Then at the end of the day we met in the project office to outline how the summary would look. At first it caught me off guard when he was at a loss for words when asked to list the top three highlights of the day.
Quickly I realized that he had a great story – the ones we discussed when I checked in on him throughout the day – he was just struggling to format them into highlights.
We spent the next 30 minutes or so talking about how to mold the nitty-gritty details of what he observed into a few punchy points and one recommendation. We reverted to the question that was asked first thing in the morning that led to the observation in the first place, then talked about how his observations related.
I was content leaving for the evening after he had developed his own summary and recommendation with only some pointed questioning.
This project, more than others, has made me aware of the what I really enjoy about this job – coaching others.
I think tonight I’ll go back to a few classic Manager Tools podcasts on Coaching to see how I can improve.
