3D Juggling 498: Seesaws

If you would prefer to read Juggling in your Facebook news stream, here's the link to Like Us!  We've had a number of emails from people with Year 12/13 children who are interested in the Personal Statement Workshop but can't make the date.  Yes - we do 1-1s.  And if you can get a critical mass together, talk to us about running a workshop in your area.

Claire writes: "I was training a group last week. Their mandate is to spend two hours with individuals helping them to review their work:  Guided self-appraisal you might call it.  They were great... yet the reviewers were talking on far too much of the responsibility for the conversation. The centre of gravity was resting with the person asking the questions and not the person there to review their work.

Conversations are like seesaws. We have all probably had experience of talking to people who take over, dominate, make everything about themselves.  We're left in the air, wondering what it's all about.  Yet 1-1s can often feel like that, too.  We go to a review or appraisal or 1-1 with things we want to explore, and the person who is there to assist us takes the journey off in their own direction, tries hard to ask questions, gets us to retell things we already know, or tells us their own story.

Seesaws work well when there is balance between the people on them - and a shared sense of responsibility for the ride.  This is around content AND style AND even the order in which you discuss things.  A productive conversation is much more than reporting back.  It has allowed things to be seen and understood in different ways.  So some helpful questions when we are facilitating conversations include:

• What do you want to talk about?
• What do they want to talk about?
• And what do you each want to be different by the end of this conversation?
• How will you know you have got there?
• How will we work together today?
• Where shall we start?
• Where are we now?
• We agreed to x. Have we got where we need to be?

Slightly tweaked, some of these are also great questions for conversations around new business.  Where does the centre of gravity need to be in your next work conversation?"

If you want to find out how we can help you develop these skills in your team, call us and we can arrange to have a coffee.

Discuss this week's juggling at http://www.3dcoaching.blogspot.com/


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3D Juggling 488: Handle with care

Su writes: "In recent days a 'media storm' has grown around a particular Facebook group supporting a man described in various quarters as a murderer and a victim of the prison service. 

Few posters on this group were actually supportive of the actions of the man. In fact, what was happening on the site was that people were excited to be engaged in an online conversation which was in real time having an impact on the media. As Andrew McNeil reported to the audience of 'This Week' that the Facebook site was getting more and more interest, this was immediately commented on with pleasure by one of the posters. Whatever the moral argument for whether the site should have been created or kept live, what was happening on it was different to how it was being reported.

The media was accurate in reporting the number of supporters on the site – but the detail behind the numbers told a different story. As a result great generalisations were posited by newspapers and politicians declaring what this indicated about our “broken” society.

The quantitative data said one thing: the qualitative another. The statistics were easy to report and re-report without interaction with the data behind it – eg what was really being said. The evidence was easy, the reporting lazy. Assumptions were made and held up as fact.

As managers we have to be careful with how we deal with data when appraising our staff.  Is the evidence we have reliable and valid? Does it need further investigation in order to make an assumption of what this means about our team member’s performance? It is too easy to take one piece of data about a team member and without challenging this, use it as evidence of fact.
Questions we can ask are:

•    is this one example of behaviour indicative of typical behaviour?
•    why did this happen? is there background data that needs to be investigated?

In order to be fair about the performance of members of our team, handle data with care."


Love this? If you need some help in your organisation to change your approach to appraisal, come out for a cup of coffee with us to talk about how we can help you.  We'll pay!

© 2010 3D Coaching Ltd
May be distributed freely.  Please retain contact details: www.3dcoaching.com and send a copy/ link to info@3dcoaching.com

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