What process coaching is teaching the students at UChicago’s Booth School
There’s no substitute for real workplace experience, which is why I’m pleased to be teaching in the Management Lab at Chicago Booth this quarter. It’s a great class, an intense deep-dive into the world of consulting for MBA students — and a few lucky students whose work relates to the project. This time around we have a psychological anthropologist and a physicist. The objective of the course is two-fold: to deliver a great product for the client and to facilitate the students’ learning about how to work in a team and manage a client relationship.
Each team gets two coaches — a “content coach” who has expertise in the problem area and a “process coach” who knows how to build high-performance teams. That’s me. So what does a process coach do? My job is to accelerate the development of the team — both the individual members and the team as a whole. They only have ten weeks to complete their project, so they have to hit the ground running. I observe their behavior right from the start. Who speaks and who is silent? Who pays attention and who is drifting off or “multi-tasking?” Who volunteers and who sits back and waits for others to do the work?
It’s fascinating how quickly leaders start to emerge. There is usually an organizer who starts to structure the work. There are the meeting leaders who are skilled at facilitating a conversation, managing time, and getting through an agenda. There’s often the idea person, who is quiet and then comes up with breakthrough ideas that move the group’s thinking forward rapidly. There may be a social convener who organizes the fun activities which help to coalesce the group.
And at the same time, I can begin to see the disruptors, the people who derail and slow down the work. There may be a bully who tries to railroad his ideas through by intimidating others. There is often the “smartest guy in the room,” who thinks he has all the answers. There is the nay-sayer who shoots down others’ ideas but never takes the risk of offering up her own. Sometimes there’s the odd duck who never seems to catch on to where the conversation is going and keeps heading off on tangents that no one else understands. And there may be the person with the chip on his shoulder who just likes to pick a fight. Of course, all of these patterns can be seen in both men and women.
In the pressure cooker of a fast-paced, short-term project, my job is to help the team members rapidly identify their own and each other’s strengths in order to build on them. We aren’t building a team for the long term; we just have to create a great presentation for the client by the delivery date. Besides watching how the individuals on the team behave, I’m also listening for the group process. Is the team energized or lethargic? Are they unified or are there cliques? Are they communicating effectively or allowing important messages to go unsaid?
As part of the process coaching model, I often comment in the moment on what I see. I highlight and praise interactions that are especially effective, and I also confront behavior that is undermining the team or slowing it down. I may ask the team members to reflect on something that just happened. Sometimes I offer suggestions for how to structure a specific task or I provide some structured teaching on aspects of team performance.
In addition to the real-time feedback, we also ask the team members to provide written feedback to each other several times during the project. The two coaches meet with each student individually to review that feedback and help him or her identify strengths and development goals. And then we watch to see whether the students actually make progress on the goals they have set for themselves.
Process coaching is not just for the classroom. Coaches can provide similar insights to business leadership teams. We can help to repair broken teams and accelerate working teams to higher levels of creativity and productivity.
If you want to learn more about process coaching, please contact me at ggolden@gailgoldenconsulting.com.
