Executive Career Coaching

This has been a week in which middle-class unemployment has been prominent. The problem faces those who have just graduated to those who have been in senior manager and Director positions for many years.

There are now 29% more applicants for graduate vacancies than there were in 2008; half of the country's leading employers believe they will hire the same number next year as they did this year (despite the numbers of graduates increasing) and a quarter suggest they will hire fewer. Top employers have recruited only 72% of the target graduate intake they estimated at the start of the year.

Increasing numbers of people in senior management and Director level jobs have also been hit by the recession and, since the nature of unemployment is that it lags behind the economy, even when things do pick up, unemployment will continue to rise for many months.

It is not all gloom and doom. A client manager called this week for a friendly ear to listen to a job offer and help him work through the questions he might ask of himself.

These scenarios - unemployment amongst executives and potential high-fliers and challenging job opportunities for some share a common thread; the need for an impartial listener who can help work through the issues and types of questions that need to be addressed of both self and opportunities.

One of the areas of coaching we undertake is role transition coaching, where we (www.stephenhuntleyassociates.com) help people with the challenges they will face when entering a new role.

When people are promoted to new positions or are going for a new job they need to clarify for themselves as much as they can about the new territory; they need to know what they will have to do to perform effectively and, what level of higher-order thinking they will need to pursue. These three areas (context, interactions and intellect) will give people the information they need to (a) ask the right type of questions during the selection process and (b) make an informed decision.

Being aware of your attitude to ambiguity and the degree to which you reflect, as a part of learning, tells you something about yourself vis-a-vis the potential role, as will a measure of your prefence for structure and planning. Surprising then that so many candidates do not have a measure of themselves in this respect. In part, an explanation too of why so many apply for inappropriate roles and cannot understand why they may have been rejected or (if they were successful) why the job did not work out as anticipated.

If you would like to know more about what we offer in our coaching, contact stephenhuntley@consultant.com or visit www.stephenhuntleyassociates.com for information on the work we do and the clients we have worked with.

Anger Management

I was reminded this week of how angry people are: threats to employment and housing; insufficient money; not enough time; no hope; injustice; fear; dependence; overbearing parents and unruly children and many more factors are making people angry.

As managers we have to deal with anger and no more so than when we work with colleagues who are fearful of losing their jobs (as many are currently) or who feel victimised or who feel they have suffered an injustice. Even those spared from redundancy are angry - the survivor syndrome referred to by Noer in Healing the Wounds (Jossey-Bass, 1993). Noer suggested survivors of redundancy feel depressed and have a sense of guilt, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment and stress.

These are powerful emotions and as managers we have to help our colleagues cope with this anger. The first thing is, who really wants to talk about their anger when they are angry? If a manager and managed person were to try and work through anger a plan might help, such as:
SPADAIR

1. Share views of the issue or problem (it is important NOT to bring personalities into this so focus on the PROBLEM)
2. Perception - yours and theirs, to be made clear
3. Agree what the problem (cause of the anger) is
4. Develop potential solutions
5. Agree a workable solution
6. Implement the solution
7. Review progress within a short time

We have to recognise that you often cannot remove the things or people that make you angry but that you can only learn to control your reactions. Our anger can be plotted on a scale from mild irritation at on end to rage at the other but plotting anger like this may not be helpful and may in fact only make us more angry. What we need are techniques that allow us to keep our anger under control or at bay.

We could try relaxing - how many of us really know how? How many of us know how to breathe deeply rather than breathing high in the chest? How many of us know how to use the power of imagery to help us relax? How many of us would be helped by exercise such as yoga? Or perhaps we have to work on changing the way we think about issues - I recognise this one for myself! I can become angry at things and my anger might be manifest by harsh words or overly dramatic reactions but my girlfriend seems to have the ability to put things into context and ask questions such as, "Did anyone die as a result?" and I have a moment where (despite myself) I find I am smiling inside and less angry. Putting things into context like this and changing the way we see things (cognitive restructuring) can help.

You may be able to avoid some stressful situations that lead to anger. For example, one commute I used to do took me through heavy south-London traffic every night until I realised there was a longer though much more scenic and peaceful route through a royal park. I avoided the stress of the commute by replacing it with a more enjoyable ride home.

In the extreme, perhaps managers need to recognise they too need help and the colleague might be better advised seeking help from a person trained in counselling for the workplace. Sometimes, dealing with the situations that might otherwise leave us angry, in a more effective way, can be helped by specific training such as assertiveness skills or interpersonal skills.

If you find a colleague (or even yourself) demonstrating rage or using sarcasm or wanting to throw things around or use emotional language to hurt others or provoke arguments or tension - possibly you need to learn to control your anger too?

More on Listening

Following last week's blog I was asked to give some simple tips on what a good listener would do and the skills that need to be developed to demonstrate empathy.

I indicated previously that if we are asked to listen but do not reflect on the message or think about the communication we will not learn anything of the subject being discussed. Active listening has three basic steps:

• Hear
• Understand
• Judge.

We hear what the speaker has to say; we understand in our own way (we each have a 'schema' or a view of the world that helps us understand in our own way); we judge whether the communication makes sense to us.

Want to be a good listener? Try this:

1. give the speaker your full attention
2. focus on the subject
3. let the speaker finish
   
4. finish listening before you start speaking
5. ask yourself, "what were the main ideas?"
6. ask questions to clarify your understanding

Want to develop skills that will help you with empathy? Try this:

• ACKNOWLEDGE the speaker - this can be something simple like maintaining eye contact - you might try and show them you realise they are there.
• PARAPHRASE - respond by repeating part of the communication in your words - not like a drone or a parrot but to indicate you are listening.
  
• REFLECT/CHECK - reflect back to the speaker either the content you heard or your feeling about it - your understanding may not be what they intend so it's a good idea to clarify this early in the communication.
  
• INTERPRET - a cautious 'guess' of the feeling or meaning attached to the communication by the speaker - you are not psychoanalysing the speaker or stating without question what the situation IS - you are attempting to get on the same wavelength as the speaker so your 'interpretation' is tentative
  
• SUMMARISE - bring all the meaning and feeling together and help to focus understanding
• PROBE - careful! This is not an interrogation - what you can aim to do here is use supportive questioning to clarify and get more information.
• SUPPORT - when the speaker reveales their feelings it might help to demonstrate you care about their feelings or at least recognise them and understand they have them.
• BE QUIET - try not to interrupt - we can aim to give the speaker the space to talk and the time to think without pushing them on/without requiring them to move to our speed.

Perhaps it would be better to illustrate what a poor listener might do? Let me leave you this week with five tips to being a poor listener - practice them regularly! They might give you a better picture of what a good listener could do.

1. talk, talk and continue to talk, so the speaker cannot fully or adequately explain
2. when not talking, spend your time thinking about the next set of questions you might ask
3. interupt as much as possible and do so by being rude and loud
4. look away, do not maintain eye contact, sigh, scratch yourself, looked bored, show no interest
5. do not ask questions that clarify your understanding but rather, ask questions that threaten the speaker and put them on edge

When would you like to begin practicing these attributes?

I accept no liability for anything that might happen to you as a result of applying these 'techniques'!