"Walk the Talk" or "Talk the Walk"?

By Charlie Lang, Founder, Partner & CXO Coach at Progress-U

Tim is a department head at the Hong Kong sourcing office of a large European retailer. His boss recommended Tim to get coached to be better prepared for a more senior position once it would become available.

During our first coaching session, I asked Tim if he agreed with the assessment of his boss that he would benefit from coaching to get ready for the next level. Tim responded: “Charlie, to be honest, I don’t think my boss really knows me. I think I do an excellent job and if I look at one of my former colleagues who got promoted about half a year ago – without wanting to sound arrogant – I think I’m much more ready than he was at that time.”

This scenario is quite common in coaching. HR or the line manager think that something is “wrong” with a certain manager and therefore should have coaching. But the manager to be coached thinks that they are wrong.

What can a coach do in such a situation?

Experienced coaches know that this is merely a question of perception and that their role here is to help the coachee in changing the perception of his boss. Perceptions get created through the visible behavior and communication of the coachee.

Consequently, I had to help Tim better understand how the current perception came about and how he would need to change his behavior to achieve the desired change in perception of his boss. Also, it was likely that Tim had some blind spots, means that he ‘didn’t know what he didn’t know’. Coaching can be very helpful to discover and address such blind spots.

I asked Tim to describe some key differences between himself and his recently promoted colleague. It seemed I pushed a button with this question. Tim got rather agitated and complained that his former colleague seemed to waste a lot of time chatting by the watercooler or in the corridor with all sorts of people while Tim was focusing on getting his tasks done.

Tim, in fact, found it unfair that his colleague got promoted instead of him because he felt that he was creating equally good results but he was more hard working than his colleague. So he felt that he was actually deserving the promotion rather than his colleague.

When I asked Tim what he thought is the reason his colleague was the one who got the promotion, he paused for a while. Then he said: “Well, it seems people like him more than me.” And quickly added, “But that shouldn’t be a determining factor, right?”

I agreed with Tim that this “shouldn’t be” a determining factor but apparently it was. I shared with him that it is actually quite common in most companies, that if given a choice, people promote people they like rather than those who they don’t like as much – provided that their performances are more or less similar.

Also, I asked Tim how it could be that his colleague’s performance was similar to his own even though he was considerably less hard working? Tim responded, “Thinking about it, other people in the company supported him more than they supported me, so I had to make it up with hard work.”

Tim realized that he had a choice on how to achieve results: through hard work alone, through better support from others or a combination of both which probably would help him achieve even better results.

Then I asked him about people’s perception of his previous colleague’s and his own performance. How did senior management rate each of them? Tim admitted that his colleague’s performance was rated considerably higher than his own even though the actual results were similar.

When asked for the reason, he realized that through the many informal conversations, other people in the organization knew much better his peer’s progress and success stories. Also, his former colleague would engage in subtle self-marketing, e.g. by sending out emails after each successful initiative to all those involved to thank them for their contribution. He would then cc the senior management on such emails. Also, every few months, he would write an article in the company magazine on anything interesting he experienced or was working on.

It became apparent to Tim that it is not only important to “walk the talk”, but also to “talk the walk,” i.e. to do good things and talk about them. Tim’s former colleague did exactly that in a rather smart way: he used informal conversations and sent thank you notes to those who helped him achieve major successes. He also kept the senior management in the loop - an elegant way to communicate success without bragging.