Self-Coaching to Create Value for Others

When I coach others, I often lead with the question, “What do you want?” If you don’t know what you want, others will likely define your goals for you—and not always in your favor. Knowing what you want is not easy or fixed. Determining your wants requires relentless reflection on your values, skills, passions, and opportunities. But once defined, your wants becomes the “certainty ” in a world of uncertainty and provides the personal courage to take risks and innovate.

Last week, I had the privilege of attending an exceptional one-day summit with over 500 participants on “creating value through human capability .” Throughout the day, I was engaged in presenting, facilitating, and learning. I was to offer the concluding master class at the end of a delightful summit. As I listened and took notes during the day, I identified over 40 initiatives that the HR and business leader audience could pursue, each presented with insight and passion by remarkable colleagues.

About an hour before my concluding remarks, I self-coached by asking myself, “What do I want to accomplish in the closing master class?” I realized that my primary desire was that each of the participants who had invested their precious time in this event could leave with something of value that they would readily use. Thinking from the perspective of the participants, I felt a little overwhelmed with so much information from the day that I (and they) might not be sure what to do with it all.

I decided to try to deliver in my closing comments what I wanted at that time, to share a message that would be meaningful and memorable for each participant. Prior to the day, I had prepared 50 slides(ahem!) to do so but felt that they might only further overwhelm participants. I wanted to leave a simple but insightful message that would create value for them.

Knowing what I wanted, I quickly summarized my learnings from the day into five concepts: value creation, integration / human capability, innovation, prioritization, and personalization. I used these words to model and review my learning from the day and to inform their learning by asking participants to reflect on five questions (see figure 1) as I did my presentation.

This last-minute reframing of my final remarks was risky and made me nervous. I knew how to present my 50 prepared slides, with composed ideas, examples, and tools. But I realized that what I wanted was not just to give a polished presentation of my material but to have an impact on what participants might glean from their experience at this day-long summit.

I self-coached myself to change my presentation and deliver what I wanted most for participants. I did not deliver my master class remarks with perfect timing or the eloquence of a prepared oration, but I did focus on the value created for others.

Self-Coaching Learning and Tips?

From this personal experience, let me suggest five tips to help business and HR leaders practice self-coaching.

1.?? Continually ask what you want. The primary self-coaching question, “What do I want?” is not a one-time or single situation query. Sometimes the answer to this question reflects long-term and timeless values, aspirations, and identity. At other times, answers are timely depending on the situation. My desire for my presentation was based on my value of creating value for others; the specific action was adapting my remarks to create value for participants.

2.? Think of the impact of what you want may have on what others may want. Your wants based on your values have more impact when they create value for others. As you self-coach and clarify your wants, think about how those wants may be perceived by others and how your actions to achieve them will affect others. Unless your wants add value to others, they remain narcissistic self-interests and will likely fade. By linking your wants to others’ values, your actions are reinforced and sustained. In my case, I wanted participants to leave the summit with insights and actions that would help them be more effective. Thinking about what participants might be experiencing from the day-long workshop help me adjust my final comments accordingly.

3.? Be prepared with expansive thinking. Probing what you want requires the ability to adapt to the answer. Sometimes, leaders play management jeopardy. They start with an answer, then they try to discover the right question. This answer-first logic limits options. Self-coaching through preparation requires having an array of options that might be pursued depending on what is wanted. A range of options comes from having broad experience and expertise to be able to respond to what you want. To adapt my presentation, I drew on many other experiences when I had given presentations where some worked and some did not. I could quickly reflect on what might work best in this particular situation, and I had the courage to adapt and move forward instead of giving my pre-prepared class.

4.??Simplify without being simplistic. Sometimes we have so many personal and other wants that being simple and focused is difficult (like the 40 initiatives I identified throughout the one-day session). Filtering requires prioritizing by focusing attention on wants and actions that will have the most impact and will most likely be accomplished. Asking the essentialist question , “What is the most important thing that I can do now to make progress?” helps simplify and prioritize. I wanted to create a simple and impactful message for my master class, so I focused on five memorable concepts that participants could use to prioritize actions from their experiences of day-long session. My five concepts and reflection questions gave participants a simple diagnostic to prioritize what mattered most to each of them (personalization being the last idea and question).

5.? Risk, act, learn, and risk some more. Knowing what you want and its impact on others, as well as being prepared with simple solutions, enables you to take a risk, act, learn, and risk again. Successfully changing for good is seldom linear (point A to point B), and self-coaching progress more likely occurs with willingness to take a risk, to act quickly, succeed or fail (or a combination of both), to learn from what works and does not, and to risk again. In my case, the opportunity to have an impact far outweighed the risk of a poor presentation, so I acted, learned from my experience, and will risk again in the future.

Self-Coaching is an On-Going Process

Coaches help other people make progress. Self-coaching enables oneself to progress, springboarding from knowing what you want and then making it happen.

How do you self-coach?

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Dave Ulrich?is the Rensis Likert Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and a partner at The RBL Group , a consulting firm focused on helping organizations and leaders deliver value.