Coaching

In the Harvard Business School 2015 winter term, Frances Frei, UPS Foundation Professor of Service Management at HBS, and Amy Schulman, Senior Lecturer in Technology and Operations Management, also at HBS, taught a new course “Why You Should Care:  Creating the Conditions for Excellence” to a group with equal numbers of law and management students.  The purpose of the course was to help the business and law students help each other define and achieve their own interpretations of success.

Today’s Tuesday Reading is a short video Emotional Intelligence in Tough Conversations from the Harvard Business School’s “The Management Tip” series.  The presenter is Susan David, CEO, Evidence Based Psychology and Codirector, Institute of Coaching, McLean Hospital.  David is also co-author of Emotional Agility, which appeared in the November 2013 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

Today’s Tuesday Reading, Asking Questions, is an essay written by Diane Weller, shortly after the April Tuesday Reading series on asking questions.  Diane is a member of the Information Technology Services Staff at the Pennsylvania State University and is an alumnus of the MOR Leaders Program.

Two weeks ago I began a series of Tuesday Readings focusing on feedback.  In the first reading, I suggested that feedback was the sharing of information between co-workers about the impact of their behavior on the team’s results, its processes, and/or its relationships.  This past week I focused on giving feedback and suggested six simple, one-word questions –

1  What?               What was the behavior that you observed?

2  Who?                Who was involved?

Last week we began a series of Tuesday Readings on the subject of feedback:  Feedback in the workplace is the sharing of information between co-workers about the impact that their behavior is having on the team’s results, its processes, and/or its relationships.  It can be positive in the form of affirmation of specific good work a co-worker is doing.  Or, it can be in the form of correction needed in specific aspects of the work being done.

“We all live in the world with only the vaguest notion of our impact, and sometimes that matters.  Clearly, when we’re effective or helpful, we ought to know it.  And when our actions are working against us or others, we ought to know that too.  Given how most of us put our heads down and barrel through, sometimes it falls on another person to let us in on what everyone else knows and we probably don’t.  So, feedback is a good thing, when it is done right.  …  Make it specific, behavioral, non-judgmental, and about things people can control.”                                       

Today’s Tuesday Reading, More About Questions, continues our discussion from the past two weeks.  As we’ve noted there, being able to ask good, well-formed questions is as important to a leader as being able to listen well.  Today, we’ll focus on crafting our questions, on asking questions, and finally on those terrible questions we should avoid.

The issue of employee engagement has surfaced in several ways over the past few weeks – what is it?, why is it important?, should I be concerned about my team’s engagement?, how would I improve it?, what could/should a team member do to increase his/her engagement?, etc.  This issue and these questions have led to this and the next two Tuesday Readings.

The Tuesday Reading today is 7 Ways You’re Unconsciously Undermining Yourself.  The essay was written by Gwen Moran for FastCompany.com.  Moran writes about business, money and assorted other topics for leading publications and web sites.  She is co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Business Plans.

Ten years ago today, the first workshop of the first MOR IT Leaders Program, held at the University of Chicago, came to an end.  Beth Hayes, Penn State participant in that first cycle, has written of that time: