Reflective Coaching

“It’s all about the relationship!” How often have we heard or uttered this ourselves? Whether our business is counseling, sales, law or any profession dealing directly with clients, we understand that the crux of business is the relationship between the employee (attorney, therapist, sales rep or other) and that client. That relationship needs to be built on trust in which they listen to their clients’ needs and respond by helping them visualize and then attain a workable solution.

The same should be true with the relationship between managers and staff. As managers, however, we too often focus on numbers, outcomes and verdicts (the product) over the relationship (the process) in our supervisory relationships. We practice “do as I say, not as I do” management style. If we really believe that relationship earns the results, then we must model that desired relationship in our interaction with the staff we manage.

Traditional product-focused coaching zeros in on tangible, imposed objectives: land this sale, win this trail, change this behavior, meet this quota. Product-focused coaching maintains the status quo and often supresses challenge and questioning. On the reverse, challenge and questioning is where Reflective Coaching comes alive. Reflective Coaching requires that the manager and employee take an investigative approach toward growth. Managers are curious about the process their employee used in an event, what the employee was thinking and feeling during the event and then analyzing how new realizations can be applied to the next event. Unlike traditional performance coaching, Reflective Coaching provides a continuous feedback loop between the individual and the manager. The manager inquires and listens more, talks less. By building this relationship, change is not only an improvement of the status quo, they are truly transformation.

Unplug Stress

6 Easy Ways to Reduce Stress, is a good article that describes simple ways to decrease your workplace stress. What I found interesting is that nearly all of them could be boiled down into one word: disconnect. Step away from emails and techology at least once a day. Hand over parts of your workload that is unreasonable. Turn off the news. Don't worry about what you can't control (traffic or other people). Walk away (figuratively and literally) from stressed people. Every example is a form of walking away.

It is true that we cannot turn our backs on whatever happens to be difficult in our life. We cannot live our lives in a bubble...but, we can certainly visit one every now and then. We all need a protective barrier. Just like pollution wearing away ozone, however, exposure to negative emotions (ours or others') wears our protective barrier down. Stepping away, even for a brief time, allows us a chance to refortify.

The good news is, even a little change to our rountine can help a lot. I challenge each of you to try to do just one of these 6 things for one week. Come back next Monday and tell me how you feel.

My Thoughts Exactly

As someone who works every day to protect children from child abuse and neglect, I struggled to express what I felt about the case and verdict against Casey Anthony. A blog post, Saving Everyone's Baby, put to words what I feel about our society's sporadic response to child abuse:

"If we carry on one more day about how outraged and angry we are about the jury verdict, about all the vengeful thoughts we have against Casey Anthony, about how God is going to bring down justice on the killer and on and on and on…………we are part of why this child is gone and we lose one more day to save children like her. And if you do not know, you need to research and know and understand one thing: There are thousands of Caylees in this country right now."

You see, I couldn't help but imagine how awesome it would be if the throngs of people milling around outside of the court room, instead, show up to places like Children, Youth and Family Services or other non-profits working to prevent child abuse and care for victims. I imagine what it would be like if the signs they carried condemning Casey Anthony instead read: "How Can I Help?" I imagine how great it would be if reporters were to do stories on the volunteers, social workers and therapists saving children and families every day and, thereby, encouraging more to do the same.

Because we DO need help. We need parent mentors, we need foster families, we need adults who are stewards of children, we need advocates for law and policy that protect children, we need volunteers who will read a book to a child, take a walk with a teenager or listen to a parent who is at her breaking point.

Hold your signs and shake your fists if you must. I understand that we all need to release the emotions of anger and helplessness. However, I am here to tell you that once you are ready to put your signs down, we need you. There is a lot of work to be done.

For information and resources on how you can help, visit Prevent Child Abuse America by clicking on the picture below:

Go Home Early!

I know that's what you wanted to hear on a Friday and I aim to please. We've all heard the adage work smarter not harder; as it turns out, there is truth to it...sort of. Perhaps the better adage should be 'work smarter AND harder, but in less time', but that is not quite as catchy. A study done by Dr. K. Anders Ericcson, published in the Psychological Review and recently recounted in the Business Insider, found that working intensly for short amounts of time produces more results than drudging along for an 8 hour day.

Why is this? Many of us (myself included) work at a desk all day from 9-5, but Facebook or an email account stays minimized in the bottom of  our computer screens. The temptation is simply too great not to check that new notification or most recent email that comes through. While technology is often to blame, so is our temptation to eavesdrop on that hallway conversation or swing by the bathroom one more time. In what I am sure is only the most rigorous of scientific studies, I read somewhere that the average worker spends more time in the bathroom than on vacation. That's either sad, incorrect or we have a nation of people needing to see a gastroenterologist. Regardless of what pulled us away, our concentration is then broken and it takes us another minute or two to regain our focus and peak performance. Not only have we lost time, we have lost quality of work as well.

Dr. Ericcson's research followed violin students and compared the "best students" with the "good students". What he found was that the best students set a specific goal to complete during practice and then take longer breaks (or even quit for the day). This is also true with successful authors, many of whom write in the morning hours, finish before lunch and spend the rest of the day in leisure. Not too shabby. If you are thinking that you are neither a concert violinist nor John Grisham, follow some of these tips to apply the theory into your work day:

• Don't check your email. Not right away at least. Choose a time in late morning or just after lunch to check your email and respond to critical ones. Which leads me to my next tip...
• Know which emails are critical. Responding to the Evite for your co-worker's barbeque invitation is not critical. Responding to an invitation to conduct a training for a client is critical.
• Choose what project you are going to work on and then clear your desk of anything else.
• Give yourself a specific goal of what you want to complete and then give yourself a break. For a short project, your goal might be to finish completely; for a longer project, your goal might be to give it one, concentrated hour of your time.
• When you are done, stop.

So, right after you finish reading this blogpost, get to work and enjoy your Friday a few hours earlier!

Corporate Social Responsibility: Not Just About Being Mr. Nice Guy

Bleeding heart. Tree hugger. Do-gooder. Idealist. These are not the phrases often associated with those sitting in the C Suite. What those in the C Suite are realizing, however, is that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is no longer an option; it is a necessity. CSR might include green initiatives in the workplace or larger funding for global issues like the fight against human trafficking. Whatever the issue, it is about more than simply creating "good press"; indeed it is correlated to employee performance and the company's bottom line.
Towers Watson conducted a study on the global workforce and discovered that issues related to CSR is the third most important factor in employee engagement and the sixth most important driver when it comes to attracting new talent.
When senior management is visibly involved in the issue, employees are even more responsive. They tend to have more positive attitudes and they act more quickly to resolve customer concerns. People want to work hard for companies they believe work hard for them and their communities.
What is your company doing to promote corporate social responsibility? Are you able to say that your CSR efforts are having the impact you desire? If the answer is no or you are not sure, then your bottom line and the greater good might be suffering.

Contact Renee Branson, MA, NCC for ways to increase your company's CSR visibility.
720-220-1152
renee_branson@hotmail.com

Leaving a Bad Day Behind

I've always said that stress is sticky. Without concerted effort, it has the tendency to stay with us throughout the day even when we leave the situation that caused our stress. This is what causes us to go home and kick the dog or yell at our loved ones. A short and sweet article put out by the Harvard Business Review gives you three short tips for leaving work at work.

1. Clear your mind. Sit back in your chair and breath deeply. Think about what matters to you outside of work: family, friends, activities or hobbies.
2. Do something easy. My favorite easy end of the day task is to clean off my desk. No, don't dive into a major reorganization! Simply stack papers that had been spread out, put the pens back in the cup holder and the stapler back in the drawer. Make sure there is empty space on your desk. If there is something that I know needs my attention (perhaps even the cause of that day's stress) I put it on the top of my stack, ready for tomorrow. For you, it might be to respond to a few simple emails or other routine task. This also has the added benefit of starting your day off right tomorrow by leaving behind an organized space.
3. Get up and leave. Once you have finished that last job, stand up, grab your bag and walk out the door. Don't chat, linger or check email "one last time." Go. Home.

Whoa, Nelly!

Step away from your phone before you make that angry call. Do not push the send button on that email that YOU WROTE IN ALL CAPS. Hold on before you storm someone's office. I can almost guarantee: You. Will. Regret. It.

Why? As if it weren't bad enough that the nasty stress hormone cortisol can make us overweight, sickly and forgetful, it also appears as though it also makes us make bad decisions. If you think back to my last article , we know that cortisol makes some parts of our body's function slow down (digestion, memory, immune system). Cortisol also flips the switch from our rational, parasympathetic nervous system to our more lizard-brained sympathetic nervous system. This simply means that we have a hair-trigger response to perceived threat (real or not). We become myopic and primal. The best advice, most simple advice I've heard on how to circumvent this knee-jerk reaction to calling someone a Jerk is this: Whatever you feel compelled to do, don't.