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Coaching Corner
Reading signals
As a leader, you face complex and intricate challenges every day. At times it can be hard to pinpoint or even articulate these challenges. But until you can fully address and resolve them, they have the potential to stall your professional and personal growth, your career, and your team’s success. This is where professional coaching comes in.
In our Coaching Corner series, we share real-world coaching cases that come from our work with leaders.
The challenge
Jerome is a senior manager at a multinational headquartered in France. The organization is both dynamic and highly results-oriented, which has led over time to a cultural orientation that favors a certain competitiveness between teams and individuals. This is something understood more than overtly expressed, and intradepartmental collaboration and entrepreneurial spirit are highly encouraged by the senior leadership team.
As the organization approaches the end of the financial year, several project statuses were shared at a senior management all-hands meeting. One initiative, involving the integration of a recently acquired supplier company, has begun to flounder for various reasons, and Jerome’s CEO asks for input and support from team leaders. Performance and results have been consistently strong with his team, and he feels that he has the bandwidth to contribute time and energy to get this project back on track.
Jerome sees an opportunity for intra-departmental collaboration that will be of broader benefit to the organization – but only if he can help get this project across the finish line before the end of the year. Jerome takes the initiative but is careful to communicate clearly and be as transparent as possible about the challenges of completing the project while articulating his clear enthusiasm for the work and trying to instill some much-needed positivity around getting it done successfully.
His colleagues are less proactive about getting involved but still offer friendly words and smiles of encouragement. Buoyed by the challenge and the support of his peers, Jerome does the impossible: he turns the beleaguered project around and delivers results that surpass expectations, all before the close of the fiscal year. His CEO is delighted, but instantly it becomes apparent that his colleagues are less than pleased.
Word gets back to Jerome that other senior managers in his department have been talking behind his back, describing him as a “political player.” Instead of being seen by his peers as a collaborator, Jerome has been cast as someone hungry for success and promotion; someone who simply wants to rise through the ranks and stand out from the crowd.
Demoralized and confused by his department’s response, Jerome decides to seek out the support of an executive coach to unpack what has happened and better understand the dynamics at play.
The coach helps him to see that his organization has a culture built on competition rather than collaboration, with bonuses awarded for individual – not shared – success.
The impact
Jerome’s coach invites him to do a little reflection. She asks him to articulate the current culture within his department: the spoken or unspoken norms and expectations that prevail. It comes to light that although Jerome has been sincere in his desire to assist and collaborate for the greater good, he hasn’t stopped to think about any hidden impediments to the very collaboration he was so keen to institute and drive: to read the signs and signals to avoid the potential cultural pitfalls.
Probed by his coach, Jerome comes to several realizations. First, he understands that instead of communicating with discretion, acknowledging the efforts of colleagues who had been working on the project, and showing some deference to other senior stakeholders, Jerome’s approach has been loud: about his enthusiasm, but also the challenges. He has been overly upbeat about success where a more muted and respectful approach might have been a better strategy. Pressed by the coach, Jerome then revisits the signals sent by his peers: words of encouragement were not always accompanied by positive body language and a friendly demeanor that on reflection seemed forced. Thinking about it, something now becomes clear to Jerome.
In talking volubly about its challenges, Jerome has also unintentionally signaled to colleagues that they don’t have what it takes to solve them.
The coach helps him to see that his organization has a culture built on competition rather than collaboration, with bonuses awarded for individual – not shared – success. In this culture, Jerome has signaled superior ability to others and failed to read the (often mixed) signals from colleagues who are at some level competing with him. He has (mis)interpreted their signals as support, which is at odds with the cultural context they share.
Armed with these insights, Jay decides to change. From now on, he will ensure that he always understands the organizational cultural context in which he operates. And he will listen more to any gut feeling or intuition about his peers and colleagues, as he purposefully reads and interprets the signs and signals they send.
Questions to ask yourself
- How good are you at reading signals? Have there been times in your leadership when you have been surprised by other people’s reactions to you or to your decisions?
- What do you do when you feel dissonance between words and actions, or when your gut tells you something is off?
- Are you sure that you always understand the organizational culture that you operate in? Does it welcome and reward collaboration more than competition?
In this series, we share real-world cases that come from our work with leaders. Read on to discover the specific challenges that face each of the leaders we have coached – and the insights that have helped them navigate their multifaceted challenges to find their own solutions. How might these insights and questions apply to you?
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