Are you staying in your lane?

A coaching mindset helps company directors be clear about their “swim lane”.

Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership (IECL) alumnus, Terence Kwan studied IECL’s Level 1 Organisational Coaching Certification immediately after completing his Australian Institute of Company Directors company director course and while he says it was challenging to back one up right after the other, it gave him the opportunity to clearly see how similar (and how complementary) the coaching mindset is to the ideal mindset of a company director.??

As IECL’s Director of Coach Education, I interviewed Terence to understand how these roles overlap, and why - in both roles -? it’s so important to be clear about staying in your “swim lane.” Here's a slightly edited transcript of our recent chat.

Mandy Geddes:? You did the two courses in quick succession, Terence, what was that experience like for you?

Terence Kwan: There's a really strong overlap in my mind in terms of the mindset between coach and director so I felt like it was synergistic development with exponential growth that set that mindset for me. I quite naturally fall into that mindset now, whereas before those two courses it took a real effort to make myself think in that mindset. Now I can fall into and out of an executive mindset or out of a “doer” mindset.? The two courses really worked nicely together.

MG: How do the two mindsets overlap?

TK: The overlap really is this overall approach and philosophy of curiosity, which underpins both to an enormous degree. In terms of coaching, it's really curiosity about the entire system, the full landscape, for the coaching counterpart. And about how they view the world and their relationships and their place in the structure that they're in and what holds them back and what interferes with them.??

In the director sphere, It's a curiosity about how the company really works, how the culture of the company is set and how it trickles down to all of its employees. It’s about how you effectively make sure that you balance the strategy and the risk.?

The other strong overlap I think between the two mindsets is that both need to have a real conscious awareness of the information asymmetry that you're dealing with as either a coach or as a director. The coach clearly can never fully understand the context or the full set of options. It's very similar for a company director because you're not in the day-to-day weeds of managing a company. You cannot understand all of the nuanced dynamics of how the company works so you must get your understanding as a reflection from the management team.?

And so we have the importance of the relationship that you build, either as a coach or as a director. It is only through the trust and the empathy and the ability to properly communicate that the relationship derives its effectiveness.? Whether it’s the counterpart or the company and management team, the objectives only differ because the entity or the person is different, and therefore the objectives of the entity or the person are different.?

So, for a board, you've got to think about the purpose and the mission of the company and how that drives strategy and the amount of risk that you're willing to take, but then there are also legal and statutory requirements. So, you've got to think about solvency and you've got to think about making sure that staff get paid appropriately and that they're awarded their superannuation and that you're not having issues with workplace health and safety.?

So there are mandatory legislated things that you have to think about which are less a concern for coaching. What you're looking for there is being able to help an individual and an organisation achieve the overlapping goals that those people and entities have. That's in many ways more of an open playing field in terms of how you can uplift performance, because that overlap between the organisational goals and the individual's goals can be as small or as large as the culture and the individual? see it. ?It can be massive or it can be very tight…it just depends on the situation. And I think one of the benefits of a coach is actually to expand that overlap as well, to allow people to see a different perspective…

MG:? Absolutely.? How could the qualities of a coach be helpful to a company director??

TK: So again, I actually think curiosity is the most important characteristic. Directors have this cliche around “noses in, fingers out” which means you are understanding what's going on but not doing the doing, which is very much aligned with the “ask, don’t tell” mantra for coaching.? I think good coaches have a really clear view of their “swim lane” and their role and responsibility in the coach:counterpart relationship. A thoughtful coach will set that up in the coach agreement at the start, and then will reinforce it every time they see their counterpart. That's exactly the same with the director.?

The company director should also have a clear “swim lane” and a clear set of roles and responsibilities that they don't easily stray from. Where you have a lack of clarity around that set of roles and responsibilities is where you get friction, where you get unhappiness, where you get a source of interference, that's not positive. Just being able to stay in your own swim lane is very useful for both coach and director.? If you swim outside of your lane then you’re blocking people or you’re interfering; it's that sort of thing you really want to avoid. In the case of both coaches and directors, those lane ropes are not like physical tangible things. They're things that you decide together with the counterpart. You have to actively decide what your role is when you step into the pool, you actually have to be conscious of it because no one else will set it up for you in the coach:counterpart relationship, or in the director company relationship.?

MG: Yes, you have to set it up, which is what we would call contracting in coaching. “This is your role. This is what I will do in my role, and what you can expect from me, plus what I will expect from you.”

TK: And also this is what I request of you. For example, in both of my board roles I am constantly making it clear that I am expecting feedback on my performance as a director. Because I want to improve, ?but I also want to get an early sense if I'm either straying outside of my roles and responsibilities or not fulfilling them, so that I can fix it.?

MG: I don't want to be fishing for a promotion here, but it feels like you're recommending that company directors should learn to coach?

TK: I think the skill set is very aligned and so I think the company director course gives you this really strong umbrella structure to understand all of your responsibilities and understand all of the thinking processes that happen in your own head in dealing with the board and with the management team. You then have a structure and a sense of what you need to accomplish and how you can accomplish it.?

“I think what coaching does is give you a really practical and tangible methodology for actually making it work.? So there is a different sort of granularity: this is how you actually interact with somebody.”

Yesterday, I spoke to the executive director of one of my management teams, and I was very conscious about taking on a coaching mindset when I was speaking with him which is aligned, but slightly different again, when I meet him in the boardroom. It's a different orientation and it's a different methodology, but they're aligned, but I was very conscious yesterday of putting my coaching hat on because that was the impact that I wanted to have and that was called for in the relationship.?

?I think that the two are very complementary and I think it's a very strong and powerful set of skills once combined. I know I personally appreciate having extended my learning in both areas.

MG: What's it like for you to step into coaching when you're coaching other company directors or C-suite people, knowing what you know from the company director point of view?

TK: I really do try and put that all aside when I'm in coaching mode and I'm in the coaching mindset, and I think part of it is just having the awareness. It's all situational.? If I do find the situation where I think that talking about a shared experience or a matching experience I don't just cross the swim lane without asking, right? So it's just having the awareness to say, “look, I'm actually thinking it might be useful to shift my role here… is it okay if I move out of coach role and into mentor, or out of coach role and into trainer? Because this is where I think we could go, but you're the person who's going to tell me whether that's okay or not and I'll just abide by that.”

So again, it's all about coming back to this clarity of role and then making sure that you only cross the swim lane when someone has invited you to do that and where there's full permission and an understanding of what that implies and entails. The only problem is when it's blurry, and you have inadvertently done it!?

MG: Yes, that’s something we try very hard to avoid in coaching!

TK:? I think that's a very useful philosophy to take forward. The quality of the relationship is super important…keeping the importance of the human relationship front of mind guides the entire quality of the relationship that you build. With those human relationships I’m making sure that I am consciously in a relational space that's conducive for either coaching or directorship conversations, because it’s all about people. The quality of the relationship drives the fulsomeness with which people relate their experience. If you don't have that sense of safety, of empathy and that sense of contact, then you can never get the best outcome for your counterpart or for the company. The culture of the relationship is super important.

MG: Yes, absolutely. And I think you build that culture through your coaching. It's that “crucible” that you build through staying in your role and not surprising people …

TK: Yeah! “Hey, how about you do it this way?”; that sort of conversation, interestingly, in the director role would be offensive to management. “You can't tell me what to do, you're not in the trenches. Why are you talking about your experiences? They’re 10 years old, not current.”? You can destroy the quality of your relationship by suddenly switching lanes.

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