Promoting Dialogue: Strategies Leader Coaches Can Employ

1. Practice being more emotionally expressive, revealing what they feel, value and care about, and evidencing their desire to know others in the same way. (being authentic is probably the single most important thing a leader coach can do to encourage dialogue)
2. Acknowledge their mistakes. This is a big step for some leader coaches, but is invaluable to fostering a feeling of safety and permission to risk in others
3. Acknowledge the diversity of people, opinions, skills and experience and make explicit the value of differences to the organization’s success
4. Be extremely visible and have many one to one conversations with people. People are highly unlikely to fully express themselves with people they do not know and trust. Senior managers are often the least known and trusted because they tend to be so isolated from others in the organization, and this is reinforced by the traditional vertical organizational "structures"
5. Clarify the ultimate purpose or goal of the team’s discussion and why the input of all participants is central to the overall outcome
6. Determine what each individual wants to give and to get from the process
7. Acknowledge each individual’s unique skills, experience and perspective
8. Make the ground rules for communication explicit. Typical among them are :

• Adopt a learning attitude
• Be willing to listen and be influenced
• Fully express feelings, thoughts, opinions, then invite input
• Demonstrate respect for the feelings, thoughts, opinions of others
• Embrace consensus as preferable to individual "wins"
• Be willing to explore and test areas of disagreement to find common ground
• Develop shared understanding of key vocabulary

9. Establish the expectation that conflict and disagreement are natural occurrences and are essential elements in the building of new mental frames; and, ensure that focus, direction and forward movement are maintained to prevent conflict from immobilizing the group

10. Provide a structure for the examination and testing of points of disagreement, and build new shared understanding by surfacing and re-framing people’s beliefs and assumptions

Ten Principles which Define Organizational Shared Vision

1. Is developed in collaborative conversations
2. Results from new learning accessible only by the group as a whole
3. Involves the creation of new shared language
4. Celebrates the natural diversity within the group
5. Involves a search for the unconventional
6. Builds upon a driving force or principle
7. Is rooted in passion and possibility
8. Involves deepening awareness of self and others
9. Increases trust
10. Evolves both individuals and the organization

Coaching Teams for Breakthrough Results

Much behavior in organizations is based on linear thinking – a vision of the future that is an extension of today’s processes (more, bigger, faster). Organizational members utilize existing knowledge and skills.

Breakthrough thinking occurs when a future is envisioned that bears no resemblance to the current reality. Organizational members are completely shifted and require new knowledge and skills.

Leader coaches coach teams to achieve breakthrough results when they:

• Ask penetrating questions about what would be possible if all constraints were removed and current assumptions were set aside

• Set outrageous, "impossible", non-negotiable goals, without losing credibility

• Encourage experimentation with fresh approaches which lead to the creation of new "success formulas"

• Endorse and reward early successes as a way to build momentum for breakthroughs to occur

• Recruit the maverick, the gifted, and the overachiever

• Under-emphasize what the competition is doing. Thinking about the competition leads to linear thinking

• Remove organizational obstacles to moving projects forward and getting things done

• Create work environments which encourage casual communication and networking