Gaining forensic insight into your performance

Every role in a business involves the execution of a series of tasks and activities that also need a degree of knowledge and understanding, which the person in the role must have, in order to be successful.

Few partners or associates have 100 per cent insight into what it takes for them to execute their responsibilities successfully. It is rare to hear of business roles being dissected into individual constituent parts, or into each essential component part, to be examined and understood in the same way that elite athletes, astronauts, or fighter pilots might. Individuals simply get on with the job as a whole, but does this ensure their performance is greater working this way than when knowing and understanding the sum of the various parts?

People who are consistently highly successful usually only need to make minor adjustments to increase their levels of excellence, or their competitive advantage. In order to know where to make those minor adjustments, to gain an improvement, they have a forensic awareness of what they do and how they do it. We need only look to the likes of British Cycling and their philosophy of 'marginal gains' for an example of high performers, women and men, making minor adjustments to their performance.

This philosophy or analysis-based approach has resulted in outstanding team-wide levels of achievement being consistently delivered over the past ten or so years in World and Olympic competitions. This is because the team knows exactly where to make those adjustments and why they are doing so, and what to expect of the performance of the 'whole' when only changing one of the 'parts'. Each team member has excellent self-awareness.

Learning and development teams' abilities in coaching can play a critical role in enabling individuals in law firms to gain this type of forensic insight into their performance. Coaching, in a law firm setting, is typically used to help an individual to determine how to achieve a desired goal or a specific objective, or to change behaviour for positive impact in the workplace. The context for the coaching will vary from working to achieve internal strategic outcomes, to enhancing external client relationships and many outcomes in-between.

Using coaching to increase the level of technical and behavioural self-awareness of an individual takes time and focus. Individuals need more than the average five or six coaching sessions budgeted for to unearth exactly where they already add value to their roles and where they can make changes quickly, or determine what will require more wholesale changes, which are much more difficult to achieve.

If a person makes too large a change to what they do - one which impacts too many components or 'parts' of their performance - their overall performance will drop until the change has been practiced and mastered. These relatively short periods of coaching will not always facilitate an increased level of awareness to the degree of comprehension necessary to understand the 'sum of the parts' of the person's performance. Coaching needs to become a routine activity over a longer period of time to achieve sustained improvements. Line managers' abilities to use core coaching techniques therefore becomes essential.

Coaching normally helps individuals achieve greater performance improvement than any other form of learning and development simply because it is designed to be 100 per cent about the person concerned. Attendance at lecture style or presentation style training sessions does little more than add new or refreshes existing information in people's knowledge-banks. Utilising this knowledge for business performance requires much more intensive effort so that the knowledge can be used and adapted for use on everyday activities if change or improved performance is the desired outcome of attending the lecture. People are rarely given the time or proactively encouraged to explore how best to use that additional knowledge.

Coaching demands time: time to train people in how to use coaching, time to develop coaching skills, time to be coached, and time to implement the agreed activities which are determined during a coaching conversation.

L&D teams can support line managers in developing fundamental questioning and listening techniques - the core skills of a good coach. Many members of L&D teams are themselves qualified coaches so provide a readily available in-house resource. If an in-house resource is not at hand, the L&D team can facilitate the selection and use of professional business or executive coaches. Using coaching needs specific and careful consideration so that the development need is clearly understood by the individual to be coached, their line manager and the person providing the coaching. Ignore the desired outcomes and the sessions become expensive discussions. Failure to implement the agreed actions results in coaching becoming as ineffective as a lecture in bringing about the desired change in performance.

Coaching is a development tool which can be used so much more by businesses than it is routinely at the moment. Firms which believe themselves to be 'time poor' would benefit from re-assessing their views of valuing the use of time for learning and development and dedicate the time truly required if they are to capitalise on the full potential that development, and coaching in particular, offers to seeing improvement in performance. Improved performance, changing the way someone works 'part' by 'part', for noticeable increase in value, will result in competitive advantage. Coaching is worth the investment.

By Sue Beavil, learning and organisational development manager, Slater & Gordon