Coaching and management – part 2 “If you are in a hole, stop digging!”

Based on reactions and feedback the most popular topics are either personal stories or the combination of coaching and management. So let me continue that.

Have you heard of the book “We’re going on a bear hunt”? The first time I saw it in Dutch in the Netherlands, I did not really get the point, then the kids brought it in a form of a song from school in the UK, and here I finally realised how genius the book is.

It tells a simple story of kids who want to catch a bear, and on the way must overcome all sorts of obstacles. So they “have to get through it” having their goal in mind. When they reach the goal, it turns out that they don’t want to pursue it anymore, and that’s a learning: goals can change when we get new inputs and analyse the data. It’s a perfect coaching process: setting and adjusting the goals, figuring out the goal that drives motivation, and how to get there.

If we apply it to management and let’s say career situations: sometimes it may happen that someone has an idea in mind that becomes so strong that this idea crosses out all realistic reflections. If someone gets desperate on getting something it might lead to very inefficient behaviours and ways of getting the desired result, and often would push them further away from the desired state.

From a manager’s perspective it can be approached with a coaching style, but that usually works only when a person is still willing to reflect and think broader; or it has to move to more of a top-down approach of guiding towards the required behaviours. In the second approach it reminds me a phrase that an MBA professor used to say: “if you are in a hole, stop digging”. So the goal of the manager is to get this message through in the first place, and then there might be an opportunity to move to the coaching approach.

As we are all grown-ups in the workplace and should be in charge of our own behaviours and careers, it is important to look around from time to time and cross check with the facts and reality: if you want a different result, it probably makes sense to do something differently too.