Leadership Coaching, Building Trust, and More with Chris Orson
- Sydney Lego
- Aug 8, 2024
- 5 min read
May 8th, 2022
Q: Can you tell me a little bit more about leadership coaching?
A: Coaching we have discovered quite early is essential. There is little value in pushing tools and training sessions out to people if you don’t have an effective way of supporting teams going through change. There is a lot of interest, but people don’t know how to make it all work. So, the coaching component read its head early on. The coaching framework he has pulled together results from learning our way through that. So the leadership coaching is a partnership with an external coaching accreditation association. Essentially what we are doing is developing a massive cohort of senior leaders and leaders (ex-co and ex-co minus one) who are accredited leaders and exec coaches. This is giving us two things. One is a network of people internally who know how to coach effectively and can act as our internal coach network. But it is also giving them coaching as a style for their own leadership. That leadership coaching is really important to us (HSBC).
We are seeing the results of that right now. There are certain tools and techniques that they teach you through the coaching process, like supervision and reflection. Which, actually, people are taking back into their teams now. I’ve seen some teams setting up routine supervision sessions and there has been some phenomenal feedback from that.
Some senior leaders and leaders think the transformation is for other people to do. So, it has been good to get our leaders involved and engaged on that journey. I think getting the leader coaches partnered with the agile coaches has been very important as well. The leader coaches are not branded as agile coaches, it is just a thing we want in our organisation in general. However, there is messaging in the coaching about agility, but it is not branded in that way. Hopefully, the leadership coaches will connect with the agile coaches as being the owners of the knowledge around what agility really means.
Q: Almost everyone I talk to runs into significant failure because of the degree of literacy of the executive leadership in agility practices. Especially, when an executive group, owner, or leader leaves that was driving agility, and new leaders come in that may not be. Is your coaching leadership program helping to ensure that that level of leadership is consistent among leaders and that there is top-down support?
A: A little bit of a confession. I almost denied taking this role for that very reason. I am passionate about this because I see what we’re doing and I see the benefit of it. So, I was really worried about that sponsorship. What I didn’t want to do was get involved in a vanity project or something that was seen as a luxury item by the budgeting organisation. But, what drove me to the job was that I saw that sponsorship, not just from the COO, but from his boss and his boss. That was really important because if you can get people in the right mindset, even if they are using different words, and they are thinking in the right ways you know you have something you can hook into.
But, we have to be careful not to overuse jargon. It can’t be a theoretical thing, but it must be a landed thing. A common piece of feedback I get when I do town hall speeches is that it “sounds great, but can I see it?” We have quite a few case studies, but a lot of these things are a slow burn, and getting your executive leadership team to understand that is the most important thing.
I have had some quite frustrating conversations where we talk about moving to value streams and leaders think that means they can take 10% out of their budget next year. Well, it doesn’t actually mean that. It means a whole host of other things, but yes you should be able to get to a point where you are more efficient in the way you use your team, which means you may be able to take some costs out. So, we are still fighting that.
But, your point is bang on and I am not going to claim that we have solved it. But, I do think that sponsorship from the COO, his boss, and other key people on the ex-co has been absolutely fundamental.
Q: You talked about how you changed successful people and the importance of trust with those people. Is there a linkage between the level of trust and how much those successful people engage?
A: Yes. That was sort of a big surprise for me. If I had to write down a list of people that I thought were on the bus and I wanted to help me drive the program, that list might look very different to the people that are actually driving the bus for me right now across the organisation. I realised that I was wrong. It taught me to trust people first, and I probably didn't do that before. I had a very preconceived view of what people were capable of. That wasn't necessarily based on any fair evidence. It really challenged me actually, and I remember having that challenging moment where I sat there thinking that I got that really wrong. And I wondered what else I got wrong. It was really liberating.
The incentive structure needs to do the same process and go through it, which is a really hard thing for us to do. Particularly in financial services, there is an engrained process. You are not just fighting your team or even your business or organisation, you are fighting the market at a certain point. That is where your talent competitors are, which is a big nut to crack. In certain ways, we have to try to figure out the best with what we have got in that space, but the trust is within our gif, we can do that.
Q: Can you tell me about the journey of discovering that, of all the metrics, lead time was the most pivotal?
A: I think lead time was pivotal for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was because we started off looking at lead time from a change delivery point of view. And that is where a lot of the pressure comes in and there is a perception from the business that we take too long and cost too much. So, that lead time was naturally floating to the top.
Also from a business point of view, our revenue is driven by onboarding new clients. So, lead time is extremely important because it can be long. It could be months or years in fact for us to finish a program. So, lead time becomes a metric that the business really cares about and is really relevant for the team.
Now if you go to other parts of the organisation it might be a different metric that floats the boat in that way. But, ultimately lead time has become our proxy for just about everything. Do you want to improve client satisfaction? Improve lead time. Do you want to improve employee engagement? Lower your lead time. Do you want to improve your business performance? Lower your lead time. So, that has become the holy grail for us. Which is brilliant because it is a metric we can all get behind. If you can break it all down you can look at your flow time, your lead time, and your flow efficiency, which is all stuff that sits underneath it and that is where you get the insight.
