Explaining the kind of Coaching I practice can be very frustrating.

I believe the label ‘Solution-Focus’ does not help – but it is what we have.

So let me be clear: “solution-focused” (as opposed to “problem-focused”) does not mean we are problem-phobic, as Insoo Kim Berg herself said; it does not mean we wear rose-tinted glasses and we live in a Polyanna world.

It simply means we adhere to the empirical finding that analyzing problems does not make a difference when trying to solve people-problems, e.g. managing a difficult employee or making a behavioral change (as opposed to “mechanical” or “medical” problems, i.e. fixing the car or healing an infection).

Finding out why you act out some behaviors again and again can be very interesting – yet it does not help you change those behaviors.

Analyzing why your co-worker is so obnoxious can be very interesting – yet it does not bring you any closer to a solution of the problem you have when you work with her.

As a professional, of course you can engage in those conversations – while interesting, though, those conversations are not essential to help clients move forward. You can safely skip them without affecting the outcome, and with the added benefit of saving time.

OK, so the “solution-focused” methodology allows practitioners to cut to the chase and do only what is necessary to catalyze a successful outcome for clients. That is why in Solution-Focus the number of coaching sessions needed is typically 2, the number of therapy sessions needed is usually no more than 4. Again, it is no magic. It is economy of effort. Brief by definition.

So why don’t we drop the label “Solution-Focus” and just use “Brief-Coaching”?

That is what I often do. However, as soon as the conversation with a prospect gets started, you kind of need to qualify the word “brief”.

That is because, unfortunately, other approaches in therapy got to that word first: but they use it to convey a very different meaning.

For example, “Brief Psychodynamic Therapy” is  ”typically considered to be no more than 25 sessions (Bauer and Kobos, 1987). In the same page on the NIH website we read that “Crits-Christoph and Barber included models allowing up to 40 sessions.” (!!!)

When Psychodynamic Therapists talk about “Brief” they mean something of a different order of magnitude than what Solution-Focused Brief Therapists mean (40 vs. 4).

So we practice and teach “Brief Coaching”. But we often need to qualify it: “Solution-Focused Brief Coaching“.

Be Bold, Be Brief, Be Gone – Major Megan Malia-Leilani McClung, USMC

Tags: Brief, brief coaching, economy of effort, Insoo Kim Berg, Megan McClung, psychodynamic therapy, solution focused brief therapy, Solution-Focused Brief Coaching, what is essential

Project Oxygen was the code-name given to a bold new plan by Google in early 2009.

Was it a new search algorithm? Or a fancy speech-to-text app? Or some other tech wonder?

None of the above.

It was something much more ambitious: it was a quest to find what makes the perfect manager.

After months of exhaustive data-mining and observations (hey, after all they are Google, analytics is their job!) they came out with a list of 8 Good Behaviors that characterized their best and most effective managers.

Here it is:

I know! Not exactly the dramatic insights you would expect, right?

But being data-generated, this list is gold.

As a whole, it reads as a very Solution Focused approach to management.

It is the ranking of these behaviors that is very interesting.

The key skill to be a successful manager in Google? to Be a Good Coach!

So learning how to become a Coach is important. Very important.

Score one for Coaching.

But we can dig deeper. Take a look at what it means to be a “good coach”:

1 – provide specific, constructive feedback, balancing the negative and the positive
2 – have regular one-on-ones, presenting solutions to problems tailored to your employee’s strength

Now the question is: how do you do that? It is easier said than done!

I would argue that Solution-Focus is the best way to carry out those desired behaviors.

More specifically:

1 – Solution-Focus’ main tool is feedback; no advice is given.  It is constructive feedback, since in Solution Focus we give only positive feedback. By only making comments on what works and not dwelling on what does not work, Solution-Focused Coaching offers an elegant solution to the problem of balancing positive with negative, avoiding all the pitfalls of negative feedback.
2 – in a recent post, I said coaching is the Art of Conversation: so having regular one-on-ones should be no problem to a manager trained in Solution-Focused Coaching.  Solution-Focused Coaches do not “present” solutions. They do something even better. They are trained to elicit clients’ (in this case employees’) specific solutions, which are naturally and of necessity built on the employees’ unique strengths! Which is perfectly in line with the next key skill listed, empowering your team.

I believe that Solution-Focused Coaching not only meets the behavioral challenge set by Google, but exceeds those requirements.

The “Be a Good Coach” in this list can be read as “Be a Solution-Focused Coach“!

Click >>> here <<< to learn how to become a Solution-Focused Brief Coach with a ICF (International Coach Federation) ACTP (Accredited Coaching Training Program).

Thanks to Coert Visser who originally posted about Google’s Project Oxygen >>> here <<<

Tags: 8 key behaviors to be a good manager, ACTP, Become a Solution Focused Coach, Becoming a successful manager, brief coaching, building on strengths, Google, Manager as Coach, Project Oxygen, research, Solution Focused, Solution Focused Brief Coach training

Since I am taking a short vacation, I will not be posting again in 2 weeks (my usual interval between posts) but in 4 weeks. To compensate for it, here is an extra-long post. Enjoy!

I am going to contrast and compare two different books: Dan Ariely’s latest, The Upside of Irrationality; and Daniel Pink’s  Drive.

Both books are terrific. They read very well. They are very engaging. The authors make an extra effort to illustrate their concepts in the simplest and most understandable way. They both use metaphors that are clear and effective in their power to explain. Not only these two books are a pleasure to read – they are also very informative.

Ariely’s book is sort of a sequel to his hugely successful Predictably Irrational: the Hidden Forces that Shape our Behavior. However in The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely’s takes a more compassionate stance towards the bias that make us irrational decision makers, a.k.a. humans. In keeping with this softer perspective, the book shines with many personal stories that are going to touch the reader. And it is no accident that the focus of this book is not “the consumers’” behavior but how people behave at work and in their own personal life. So we have 5 chapters about “how we defy logic at work”, and another 5 about “how we defy logic at home”.

Dan Pink’ s Drive feeds on the work of Ariely and many others on the science of motivation. Pink is a master in making the insights gained by recent research  understandable and readily usable by managers and businessmen. Drive is a call for a general and comprehensive rethinking of the ways in which we organize what we do.  Pink’s metaphor of assumptions that societies have about human behavior as being their operating system is brilliant and enlightening in and of itself! Moreover, the second part of the book is a treasure trove of practical advice - simple strategies to implement the ideas illustrated in Drive.
Continue reading…

Tags: book review, brief coaching, coaching, Dan Ariely, Daniel Pink, Drive, epistemology, marketing, motivation, psychological bias, science, The Upside of Irrationality, training

Solutionsurfers PURE Brief Coach Training, Module 2, Basel, May 17-19

Tags: Basel, brief coaching, Jesper Hankovszky Christiansen, Peter Szabo, solutionsurfers, training

The point is, 99% of what you do in life I classify as laundry. It’s stuff that has to be done, but you don’t do it better than anybody else, and it’s not worth that much. Once in a while, though, you do something that changes your life dramatically. You decide to get married, you have a baby – or, if you’re an investor, you buy a stock that goes up twentyfold. So these rare events tend to dominate things. (Ralph Wanger in an interview in Money Magazine; as quoted by Keith E. Stanovich in his latest book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought.)

This is an excellent point.

I would qualify it by adding a little distinction:

• - 99% of the decisions me make are laundry (in the sense explained above); 1% are the real deal – 20 or 30 decisions that shape our life
• - 80% or more (my arbitrary estimate) of what we do is “laundry” – stuff that we have to do, activities in which we are no better than the average; but 10% or more of what we do is based on our unique skills, it is something that we do better than average – we can make this 10% or more of our activities either deliberate practice that leads us to excel in what we do that is “us”, or actual doing that makes a difference in the world.

And this is where coaching comes into play.

A coaching conversation while facing one of those non-laundry moments in life can make all the difference:

- coaching can make the difference between a good decision, i.e., a rational decision based on our long-term interest and a bad decision, i.e., an impulsive, knee-jerk reaction based on automatic patterns of thinking. Automatic patterns of thinking are good for the laundry moments of life, they might be dangerous in the “non-laundry” scenario where our evolutionary-determined instincts might lead us astray

- coaching can make the difference between focusing our best efforts on that 10 to 20% of our activities that allow us to have a real impact on the world or squandering our unique skills, talents and dreams.

The whole point of Stanovich’s book is that while IQ tests measure our algorithmic mind, sort of like our “mental horsepower”, they do not measure the abilities of the reflective mind, sort of like the driver’s skills of our mind – so even people with high IQ can fail in making the rational choice IF they are not cued first (i.e., if they reflective mind is not engaged and brought online).

What better way of engaging the reflective mind than having a conversation with a professional coach? One session is often all my clients need to figure out where to go and how to get there!

Are you tired of doing laundry yet?

Tags: algorithmic mind, brief coaching, Decision Making, deliberate practice, my clients, reflective mind, Solution Focused

A traditional approach to coaching and change (and “it’s common knowledge in the business world that change is very difficult. Managing change is hard work, creating change takes lots of effort, top management support is vital and yet elusive, and great care has to be taken to make sure it all doesn’t go horribly wrong” in the words of Mark McKergow)
vs.
a Brief Coaching, Solution-Focused approach to change (“it’s fast, effective, energizing, engaging, flexible, low cost…and somewhat counter-intuitive”, quoting Mark Mc Kergow again).

“Coaching relationships should be allowed to run their course regardless of how long this may take” – in Coaching That Counts, by Dianna Anderson and Merrill Anderson, p.252
vs.
“Successful coaching does not imperatively need to be arranged over a long period of time… In all three cases, only a single coaching session took place… As a Brief Coach, I see my contribution in enabling executives a usable start in the desired direction within a conversation… So coaching can be designed in a way to make further coaching superfluous“, Peter Szabó, Brief Coaching of Executives

“Finding 1: The Perceived Effectiveness of Coaching Increased with the Length of the Coaching Relationship. Those who were coached the longest (e.g., 18 or more hours) rated coaching the highest: 81% rated coaching as very effective, 17% as somewhat effective, and only 2% as not effective. On the other hand, those who were coached the shortest amount of time (e.g., up to 6 hours) rated coaching as less effective: 46% rated coaching as very effective, 40% as somewhat effective, and 14% rated coaching as not effective.” – in Coaching That Counts, by Dianna Anderson and Merrill Anderson, p.252
vs.
This resulted in the development of solution-focused brief counseling, a simple procedure which leads to
the rapid identification of sustainable and effective solutions. In concrete terms, this means that, by systematically refraining from counseling activities that are of little use, the time investment can be
reduced to an average of three meetings, each lasting 50 minutes. This form of counseling has
proved to be sustainable and effective, with a success rate of 86%, as shown by studies carried out
after 6 and 18 months. – Peter Szabó, in Introduction to Solution-Focused Brief Coaching.

I am not questioning the skills of coaches who use “traditional” coaching models.

They are doing an excellent job.

However, it takes them longer to get to the results that clients want, simply because they are using coaching protocols that require steps that are not essential to help clients change.
It is as if they were running a race with a heavy backpack: the weight of unproven assumptions about change weighting heavily on their backs, held back by the sheer amount of time required to engage in “change” activities (analysis, problem definition, finding weaknesses…) that are not necessary to help clients.
Solution-Focused Brief Coaching, on the other hand, is the art of asking only the few questions that can help make a difference for clients, and nothing else.

It is coaching in its purest form: brief, simple and effective.

And given the times, wouldn’t you want to get the results you seek in a singe one-hour session rather than in multiple sessions adding up to 18+ hours?

In the end, a few stats of my own for 2008:
- average number of sessions per client: 3
- percentage of coachees who say they are “very satisfied” one month after the last session: over 80%
- having effective coaching support at a fraction of the cost of traditional programs: in this economy, priceless!

Tags: anderson, brief coaching, Change, effectiveness, mark McKergow, Peter Szabo, savings, Solution Focused, traditional approaches