Coaching for Leaders - Talent Management | Leaders
Empower People to Solve Problems, with Monica Chartier
[MUSIC] Hi, Dave Stohoviak here, host of Coaching for Leaders. You know, we've talked a lot over the years about coaching skills on this podcast. And a lot of us have heard someone tell us that we need to be more coach like in how we lead. But to what end? Sure, it's great to be coach like, but what does that actually do? That's why I'm bringing you this conversation with Monica Chartier, one of our Academy alums and now one of our Coaching for Leaders fellows. She shares what came out of her recent focus on working to be more coach like. Here's my chat with her. Today, I have Monica Chartier with us. She is one of the alums of the Coaching for Leaders Academy and is also one of our Coaching for Leaders fellows. She's been selected to not only serve as a leader within our community, but also to give back to many of our Academy members who are working with us today. Hello, Monica, good to talk to you. Wonderful to talk with you, Dave. Let's start with perhaps framing a bit about your work professionally in your role. Could you tell me a bit about that? Absolutely. I am a group product manager for the globally commerce shopping experience at Dell Technologies. And I've been with Dell for about seven years now. Very good. And you have a pretty large team of direct reports, right? I do. Yes, I have 13 direct reports right now spread around the globe. That's a lot. The big team. Yeah. When you started the Academy, I know you were trying to work on some skills to really get better as a leader. When you applied, what is it that you were hoping to get from this experience? Yeah, so one of the key areas that I wanted to focus on was being a more coach-like leader with my team. I had been a manager for about a year when I applied, and I saw some of the strengths and challenges of working with a global team that big of how directly could I observe their day-to-day work, what kind of substance I was getting out of my one-on-one conversations with them. And so with the Academy, I really wanted to hone my coaching practices and being able to scale the impact that I could have on my team. When you were thinking about being a coach-like leader, what did that look like to you as far as what you wanted to get from it? Yeah, yeah. At first, clearly, I wasn't entirely sure, right? I've heard a lot in different forums of advice, recommendations, and I knew that was a practice that I wanted to adopt. And the episode with Michael Bongay, senior, on the coaching habit made a really big impression on me. And I really took that to heart and really wanted to understand, having listened to the episode, how can I best apply that and continue implementing and learning and adapting how I use them? One of the things that we do in the Academy is really spend some time with each person and zero in on what is important for each leader. And that's a little different for each person. And Monica, as you mentioned, being a coach-like leader is a popular one. It's one of many. It's the focus area, one of the three focus areas you decided to zero in on, right? That's right. And as you identify that as a key focus area, what did you decide to do with it as far as the actual actions and behaviors? Because a big part of doing this is how do we shift our behaviors to get better? Precisely, yes. So what I ended up doing with my action plan was actually going home and shaping in a large part by the conversations that I had with the Academy with you and with my cohort members. So what I ended up doing was I took a two-step approach. One, I wanted to put as much of the pre-work, the kind of status updates, the things that could be communicated asynchronously, and really not eat into the precious 30 minutes that I have each of my team members each week into an offline format. So I created a template, a one-on-one template of read-ahead, call-outs, and basically just mentioned the crafting, where they could send me status updates and help hone the conversation that we could get to have in our one-on-ones. So I could really jump in as much as possible to connecting with them, hearing about how they're doing, and really getting into the heart of the conversations. That was the first part. The second part, once I established that template, was really implementing the coaching questions in my one-on-ones with the team. I copied the list of questions from Michael Bongay-Singer's work at the top of my notes before I manage all of my tracking with my team. And so during the one-on-one conversations, as I'm taking my notes, the coaching questions are right there at the top of the screen in front of me. And so I'm referencing the act of worth and choosing which ones to kind of thread into the conversation, rather. One of the things that we do in the academy is we try to decide what's the action that each person takes to move forward on their commitment, in your case being more of a coach like leader, and you decided to not only put in that template, but also to have the questions there. What led you to that action? Because it is a little different for everyone, and why did you decide there? Yeah, for me, I wanted it in a location that was very relevant, or it was an additional step to think, "Okay, right, in this conversation, I'm practicing being more of a coach like leader, that I could just start my one-on-ones. It was handy. It was there, and as I'm starting to kind of take notes and catch up on my own actions, I can very naturally just pick up on it and thread it into the conversation." As you started doing that consistently over 60 days, because that's the time frame we often choose to start a new behavior, what happened as you went through that process over a course of weeks and into a couple of months? Yeah. So after really socializing the templates with the team, helping them adopt it and understand what it meant, and putting the questions at the top of my notes, I started practicing in each and every one-on-one, I started practicing with my different team members, and at first it was kind of awkward thinking organically, "How do I bring this up in the conversation? Do I just open the conversation in this way?" So in the abstract, it maybe felt a lot more natural than it was when I first got to them. I worked through that fairly quickly. I'd say I really gravitated towards two or three of the questions that I felt that kind of became a muscle, a little bit of muscle memory that I could build in and started being something that my team anticipated from me in those conversations, and over time, I began to hear more problem solving from my team. I began to hear them thinking through some of the challenges, thinking through, "How can I think about this differently or is there another experience in my past where I've encountered a similar situation? How did I solve it then and how might I use some of those learnings to solve it now?" And so I started to hear them actually troubleshooting some of their own challenges in the conversation, which was just a huge win and take away from me, right, as I'm trying to leverage the bandwidth that I have to be most impactful for them and turn into something that they can then implement and use their own benefit going forward. So from that experience, I just encourage, if you are considering or have any inkling of increasing your practice of coaching with your team members, consider how you might help them solve some of their own problems and see how they can even scale to give us a bigger problem in their own. And with the team of 13, you can't be involved. And as we talk about on the podcast so much, we all shouldn't be involved in every single thing that's happening. We're there ideally as developing talent, coaching, providing the support that we all try to practice well. As you saw people doing this more for themselves and actually taking action to problem solve and be more proactive, what did that mean as far as the team results, the things you're tracking? How did that show up? Yeah. It showed up in a couple of different ways. The work that my product managers do is very collaborative. They're really at the heart of bringing together big initiatives and multiple work streams together to make them a reality. And so I started seeing them solve more problems on their own, whether it was getting information they needed from certain stakeholders or a technical issue that just kept coming up and this was tough for the team to work through and hurting the velocity of the team and thinking differently on how do we troubleshoot, how do we hold those conversations. And a lot of them ended up being conversations and ended up being like, hey, help me understand your role. Help me understand what are the challenges that you're working through and how can I best position myself to help you solve your problems so that the challenges we're getting socialized a lot earlier when the trust was built and it didn't run into as many escalations when it had to be leadership comes in, let's troubleshoot, let's have a really big meeting together right where there's a lot of pressure, but they could just bypass a lot of that by having those conversations early. You know, I often ask people what they've changed their minds on and the podcast part of going through an experience like this in the academy is also all of us changing our minds on our behaviors and how we approach leadership as you think back on this experience and shifting your behavior. What if anything, did you change your mind on? Yeah, something I changed my mind on over the course of practicing these coaching questions was how do I approach different team members with different strengths and opportunity areas. For whatever reason, my mind made the assumption that it would be exactly the same working with all 13 of my people and of course, in practice, it was not the same. There were some who responded very quickly to it, he really thrived on it. There were others that I had to build more trust with or I had to get a little bit deeper into the conversation, but it's even adapting my own style to meet each of them where they are. Monica, thank you so much for sharing your story with us of your experience in the academy. I'm so grateful for the privilege to support you. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Becoming more coach like is a great intention in and of itself, but what really makes it worth it is what it does for others. In Monica's case, people problem solving more on their own, fewer escalations. Yeah, that's great for results and it's also great for people's careers. They develop skills and confidence that will help them move forward. Maybe I've had someone suggest to you that you should be more coach like or you find yourself in the weeds on everything or maybe like Monica, you've got a heart to really help people grow in their careers. Fear at a transition point like that right now. I hope you'll consider applying to the Coaching for Leaders Academy before Friday, September 13th. Details and the application are at coachingforleaders.com/academy. Get over there before the end of the day on the 13th to be considered. And we've made a few updates since we last opened the academy. So check those out as well, everything's at coachingforleaders.com/academy. Thanks for listening in and I hope this finds your day going great. [BLANK_AUDIO]