Saturday, October 15, 2011

How to carve practice space out of existing performance space

You can create a space for practice by ensuring psychological safety on your team and by using the coaching process created by Denis Kinlaw in Coaching for Commitment.

Psychological safety: Develop mutual trust whereby you are all willing to be vulnerable to each other because you assume the others have positive intentions. Your team will trust you when you are authentic, consistent, competent, and principled.

Coaching process: Instead of solving problems for your employees, invite them into a discussion of discovery. Purposefully use your conversations with employees as practice spaces -- encourage them to share what they know that you don't, build on their ideas to make the most of what you both know, and focus on gaining insights rather than on immediate end results.

When your employees know that there are times they can talk out their ideas with you and you will make both the time and the mental energy available to focus on what they have to say, when their words have influence over what happens at work, and when it's okay for them to test theories, raise concerns, stretch for higher goals, make mistakes, and attempt new skills, they gain new and useful competencies. These competencies give them the confidence to stretch for even higher goals, building ever greater competency -- a self-perpetuating upward performance spiral.

When you create a space for practice at work, you enable employees to reach their fullest potential.

No comments:

Post a Comment