Coaching for Growth

“We need to talk.” 

For many of us, these words provoke an immediate reaction.  We may feel our bodies tense, our stomachs drop, our heart rates increase.  That’s because these words rarely precede a pleasant conversation.  Usually they mean there’s an issue. 

When issues are identified at work, the desired outcome is change.  Change, or growth conversations, though, are hard to have.  It can be hard to hear that someone is genuinely interested in your growth when – in the same conversation – corrective action is occurring. Is there a way to do both? An article from the Harvard Business Review gives some insight.  In How to Give Tough Feedback that Helps People Grow, author Monique Valcour offers some good suggestions.

As part of the article, Valcour describes two feedback sessions—one that didn’t go well, and one that did.  The one that did go well started by acknowledging what it must be like for that person to be sitting in an office with an official representative of the company as part of a corrective action.  That simple act of normalizing the emotion and acknowledging that the situation was hard mitigates and disrupts the defensiveness that may be swirling around the room.  It also begins to build trust.  Once trust is built, it’s easier to have a true conversation about growth—even in a formal setting and even when performance issues need to be documented. 

The other interesting aspect of the successful feedback session was that the focus was on how the person could have responded in the moment versus how they did respond.  It’s a gentle, effective approach if what is sought is growth rather than punishment.  It encourages accountability and fosters real commitment to change, which is the goal of most hard conversations.