David was a product director in a leading UK bank. Valued for his intellect and technical capability, he wore his career ambition openly and was frustrated at having been passed over for promotion several times because of his awkward and sometime abrasive inter-personal style. The focus of the coaching was to help him develop a more collaborative and effective way of being with his colleagues.
David,
As I mused on Friday’s session over the weekend, one impression repeatedly returned to my awareness. This was the contrast between your description of how things are for you in situations where you feel ‘I am supposed to have the answer’ and my experience of your being open, relaxed, inclusive and warm with me. I wonder whether blurring the distinction between the two may turn out to be a central theme of our discussions.
There might be several things going on for you in moments when you feel you are supposed to have the answer. You would be on your mettle as you are being tested and, for most of us, that triggers an inward focus, concentration on the intellectual challenge at hand and hence a bias of attention away from our audience. I could imagine that unconsciously you slip into a self-reliant mode because an interpretation of the expectation is that you and you alone have to come up with the answer. Also, other people’s input would not be welcome as giving it space risks derailing the thread of your response or even of losing the floor. Should any of these be taking place in you then each could contribute to people perceiving you as insular, closed to input and in presentational mode.
I also find I should like to talk with you more about the idea which I rather brutally summarise as ‘feeling safe enough to admit that you don’t know the answer’. A first observation is that the more senior you get the less do issues lend themselves to ‘an answer’. Given the interconnectedness of all things it is unsatisfactory to conclude on the basis of an isolated aspect of an issue. The implication is that the senior management domain is one in which the emphasis is less on knowing the answer than on the heuristic, the quality and process of the search.
This links with the opportunity to shift an aspect of your perception of yourself. I expect that through life your skills have enabled you to excel at the formal tests and exams you have been set. Such serial success can, quite reasonably, result in a self-image of someone who ‘gets things right’ or ‘knows the answer’ yet, in the senior management domain, that self-image will be found wanting. However, those same skills underpin the quality and process of the search and, for them to be progressively redeployed, requires an initial acknowledgement that some of these problems do not admit of ‘just knowing the answer’. Orienting yourself for the next twenty or so years of senior management may require you to relax your grip on the need to know the answer in favour of the need for a thorough and effective search process. Your excellence at the first qualifies you to take on the second but, although the skills have much in common, they may need a gentle reorientation.
I link this to your observation of the language and behaviour adopted by some of your senior colleagues when they adopt a faux-humble stance presumably with the intent of both eliciting input and encouraging consensus. If, for example, your CRO simply stated his bald concerns over capital adequacy then he risks short-circuiting a process whose benefits could include surfacing information he doesn’t have, securing alignment and support from significant colleagues, testing and sharpening his own views in the light of other people’s experience and perspectives. Your reaction to the surface language that it is all an act suggests that your way of doing this may need to be rather crisper and more direct however, I expect that won’t change the underlying structure.
David, that feels like enough for now. I know I have said nothing about the section of the conversation to do with your team dynamics but it strikes me that you know where you are going with the upcoming away-day and I have nothing to add to the things we noted on Friday.
I am not looking for you to respond to this note although I am of course happy to clarify or amplify should that be helpful. Between now and our next meeting I encourage you to do no more than notice what happens in terms of these topics. Don’t try to change anything, simply observe how you are and what passes in you during these moments.
I look forward to hearing about your experience when we meet on the 23rd.
With best regards,
Simon
