In some situations, you’ll get the behavior change you want just by giving people feedback, and that’s great. At other times, you’ll need a more formal approach to get change that lasts. This is where the GROW model can help you.
Developed by business coaches Graham Alexander, Alan Fine, and Sir John Whitmore, GROW stands for goal, reality, options, and will, and it’s particularly useful for motivating people to change. One
k k key feature is that it encourages people being coached to come up
with most of the answers themselves while being guided in the right direction by you, their manager. This helps them take ownership of the plan you arrive at, making it much more likely that they’ll do the work needed to deliver change.
1. Goal – Start by discussing the behavior that you want to change with your team member (SBI and similar approaches can help here – see #68), and get them to structure this change as a goal. Make sure that this goal is aligned with both the team’s objectives and your team member’s career develop- ment aspirations.
2. Reality – Ask them to describe the current reality and its consequences and fully explore the things that may be con- tributing to this situation, including any goal conflicts the person may be experiencing. As you do this, provide any information he or she may be missing so that you come to a common agreement on what reality is.
3. Options – Help your team member brainstorm options for achieving the goal. Encourage them to think widely, identify and consider how to overcome any obstacles along the way, and choose the best options to pursue. This gives them a plan that they can pursue.
4. Will – Ask your team member to commit to this plan. Agree on milestone dates by which specific actions need to be com- pleted, and agree on follow-up dates to review progress.
Tip
Conventional coaching theory says you should guide the pro- cess, but allow people to come to their own conclusions at each stage. This reflects the fact that many coaches don’t know the details of their clients’ lives.
As a manager, it’s your job to get people to show the right behaviors, and you often have a sharp insight into what’s
k k going on. This is where you need to make sure that they draw
the correct conclusions, set effective goals, and take the right actions.
Learn more about the GROW model, including exploring
questions you can ask and seeing an example: http://mnd.tools/69-1 Find out more about other coaching techniques: http://mnd.tools/69-2
k k
Chapter 13
Build a Great Team
In large companies today, a lot of work is done in teams. There are many types of teams – some have a clearly defined leader;
others are deliberately nonhierarchical – but the key defining feature is some sort of collective responsibility for outcomes.
In theory, a team should be able to achieve more than a random group of individuals because team members have complementary knowledge and skills. But in reality, teams often end up making poor decisions. Studies of famous political misjudgments (for example, the Bay of Pigs fiasco) and business blunders (such as Time Warner buy- ing America Online) have shown how easy it is for teams to make suboptimal decisions – for example, veering into groupthink or not giving enough voice to minority opinions.
Today, there is lots of research evidence for how to make teams effective. For example, a study at MIT highlighted such things as diversity of team members, equal contribution to discussion, and social skills. And a recent study at Google emphasized the impor- tance of a supportive team environment for producing high-quality outcomes (also called psychological safety).
But even though we know how to build a great team in theory, the challenge of doing it in practice is still considerable. You need to develop real skill as a manager to get the best from your team, and the purpose of this chapter is to suggest some practical ways of building that skill.
The first challenge is to formally define the team’s charter (#70) so that it is clear and meaningful to everyone. Ideally, this is done
k k at the point when the team is formed, but it is also useful to review
team charters periodically. Once they are up and running, you also need to brief your team clearly (#71), which means communicating effectively about what is happening in the rest of the organization and keeping the team updated on any problems. A related technique is building trust in your team (#72) so that people feel safe to share problems and try out new ideas – without fear of being criticized.
And at the heart of everything, there is a need for you to work on your personal relationships with team members so that they under- stand and trust you. We offer the Johari window as one technique for building openness and self-knowledge (#73).
We then provide some ideas for how to understand team-specific motivation (#74) so that you can be more effective at structuring the work they do to make it as satisfying and engaging as possi- ble. Finally, we look at where teamwork can go wrong by exploring Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team.