Week of 2022-02-14
Adult development and coaching expectations
A couple of us were chatting about coaching. It was such an amazing generative conversation that I kept walking around, thinking about it over the weekend. As a result, this somewhat late insight materialized, a remix of the Adult Development Theory (see my primer to get your bearings) and the expectations people might have around leadership coaching. This story hops along the stages of adult development (using Bill Torbert’s nomenclature here) and offers my guesses of how I might perceive coaching with the mindset of that stage.
With the Opportunist mindset, any sort of leadership coaching will likely appear as a hook to exploit or a threat that someone might exploit me. Any engagement will have this “let’s see if we can hack this to do my bidding” quality to it. For example, I might use it a bit to see if this would help me secure some advantage, such as attaching myself to a figure who I might perceive as powerful. Any genuine engagement for the purpose of coaching is unlikely. I engage to exploit.
With the next, Diplomat mindset, the deep attachment to shame of failure will hamper any active engagement. If I am asked something, I am petrified to answer in the wrong way. However, I would crave passive learning. I will glom on to anything that looks like advice and wise words, and I would be very happy to react to these words with “likes” and “thumbs up,” even if I don’t fully understand them. With this mindset, coaching software is primarily a way to procure approval and ensure that I am part of the “in-crowd” of those who learn from these really smart people who are clearly authorities on leadership. I engage to belong.
Further down the rabbit hole, the Experts mindset presents the same fear of failure, but now it is bolstered by my expertise. This configuration is least receptive to coaching. “Why would I want a coach? That’s for noobs. I already learned everything there is to know.” By the way, in my primer, I portrayed this developmental stage as transitional, as something that we experience on our way to the next stage. Since then, I’ve changed my mind. Expert is a very stable configuration. With fear of failure on one side and considerable wisdom on the other, it is often a lifelong trap of perpetual, agonizing slow-boil of misery and dissatisfaction with life. When inhabiting the Expert mindset, I am unlikely to hear feedback and will resist the nudges to even try coaching. I don’t engage.
The Achiever mindset turns this attitude upside down. The craving for coaching comes roaring back. I want to tussle with you and I know that every time I do, I will learn something that will take me closer to finally achieving the maximum level of effectiveness. I demand coaching advice. I set the schedule, come prepared with topics at hand, and ready to dig deep. I might even be hard to keep up with, and I might even fire my coach if they can’t. I want to have the latest and greatest in coaching strategies. Don’t give me any of that “how to win friends and influence people” stuff. I engage to get results.
Eventually, the hard-charging Achiever mindset gives way to something different. Somewhere, somehow, the realization emerges that the “maximum level” is not only unattainable, but also absurd as a notion. There’s a bit more shift in the attitude toward coaching. I still see it as valuable, but I am realizing that coaching is a nearly moment-to-moment activity. Everyone has so much to teach me. Every interaction is a coaching moment. I still talk to my coaches, and look forward to our conversations, but they no longer have that edge of Achiever angst. We talk to uncover insights hiding in the nuance, to play the hacky sack of ideas, with deep respect for each other’s experiences. I engage to generate.
Whew, that was fun to type out. I am realizing now how I loosely traced the same outlines Jennifer Garvey Berger drew in her seminal Changing on the Job. So if you’re interested in diving deeper into this particular ocean of ideas, that’s where I would direct you next.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2022/02/12/adult-development-and-coaching-expectations/
Radical Candor as fallback notch locator
Have you ever experienced this really fun moment when a few of concepts you already knew suddenly came together as something new and completely different when revisited? This just happened when I was looking at Kim Scott’s Radical Candor framework. Putting it next to the ideas of the Adult Development Theory, I realized that it might be a rather useful tool to locate my fallback notch.
I already mentioned fallback a few times in my writing. It’s this phenomenon when we, despite our best efforts, show up as developmentally earlier versions of selves. A concept that’s been really useful in my own self-work was a notion of the fallback notch, a hint at which I first found in Lisa Laskow Lahey and Robert Kegan’s Immunity To Change. The fallback notch is the habitual stance I take when I am experiencing the effect of fallback. The notchiness part of it is that it happens kind of automatically, like a hard-learned, yet almost-forgotten habit, a Schelling point for a disoriented mind. When fallback triggers, that’s the hill where I tend to regroup. I’d found that this notch is context-specific, but rather useful to name when reorienting. “What, what’s happening? <notch locating happens> Ah, I am currently in a Diplomat mindset… Hmm… I wonder what led me here?” Let’s see if we can use Radical Candor as a compass to help with reorienting.
The first – and most significant – leap of faith I invite you to take is the mapping of the quadrants to developmental stages. Using Bill Torbert’s classification, and our intuition, we can kind of see that Manipulative Insincerity loosely maps to the Opportunist mindset and Ruinous Empathy to Diplomat. Those two are fairly straightforward. The cunning trickery and unscrupulous antics of the Opportunist appear to be perfectly captured by the words “manipulative” and “insincerity.” Similarly, the Diplomat’s warmth and keen desire for getting along are well-described by “ruinous” and “empathy.” The other two quadrants need a bit more cajoling. The ornery obstinance of recognizing, yet unwilling to accept others’ perspectives of the Expert often manifests as Obnoxious Aggression. I’d found this notch particularly present when, in a subject in which I view myself an expert, someone comes in to ask questions that could potentially buckle the idea’s entire foundation. “How dare they! They must be corrected! <rising irritation leading to self-righteous condescending rants>” Finally, the Radical Candor quadrant is the zenith of the framework, representing the relative flexibility of the Achiever to consider and absorb multiple perspectives, yet keep the eye on the prize of their own objectives.
With the quadrants mapped, we can now use the full depth of the Radical Candor framework as our fulcrum for self-developmental purposes. The idea of mapping our interactions and situation into quadrants, described by Kim in her book, can serve as a clustering tool, helping us spot the particular fallback notches we find ourselves in. Further, we can use the quadrants to find our way back from the notch. Knowing that I am in the Ruinous Empathy quadrant helps me see that I fell all the way back to the Diplomat mindset, and getting out of that notch might start with reminding myself that I do indeed know what I am doing (regaining the Expert ground) while still staying connected to empathy and compassion of the upper quadrants.
Another thing that stood out for me: the Radical Candor framework appears to be Achiever-situated. It presumes that its practitioners are themselves at least at the Achiever developmental stage. It is useful for those who recognize that they temporarily fell back into behaviors they understand as detrimental to their path forward. This probably means that the framework quadrants will look weird to folks at the earlier stages. If I am stuck in the Expert trap, the Radical Candor quadrant will feel like a weird tautology. “Of course I care, that’s why I need to yell at them and shake some sense into them!” Things will look even more bleak if I am just now adopting the Diplomat mindset. The Radical Candor will look like a scary regression into the conflict-ridden Opportunist land. “Oh come on now, we just figured out how to get along. Why are we trying to mess things up again?” And of course, for the Opportunist, the whole story will seem like an elaborate ruse, a corporate prank to trick me into being more gullible and obedient.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2022/02/13/radical-candor-as-fallback-notch-locator/
Tension in Shared Mental Model Space
This just occurred to me today, so I am writing this down while it’s fresh.When I talk about the shared mental model space (SMMS), I usually picture it as something like a bunch of circles, one for each individual within a group, and these circles are touching a larger circle that represents the mental models that are shared by all members of the group. It’s not the most accurate diagram, but it will work for this thought experiment. As I was reflecting on the desired properties of a SMMS, I realized that there’s a tension at play.
On one hand, I want my organization’s SMMS to be large enough to allow us to understand each other, to be “on the same page” so to say. At the same time, I am recognizing that an SMMS that perfectly encloses all of the individuals’ mental models is both impossible and undesirable. It is impossible, because in trying to achieve perfect closure, we encounter the paradox of understanding: since everyone’s internal mental model also includes the enclosed models themselves, we rapidly descend into the hall-of-mirrors situation. It is undesirable, because a team where all of the opinions are known and completely understood is only facing inward. There is no new information coming in. So there appears to be a sort of polarity in the size of the shared mental model space – and a tension it embodies.
A SMMS can both work for and against the organization. As it grows, the organization becomes more blind to the externalities. A cult enforces the suffocating breadth of SMMS among its members, since that’s what makes it impervious to change. As SMMS shrinks, the organization stops being an organization. If the diversity of perspectives is high, but there’s no way to share them, we no longer have a team. It’s just a bunch of people milling around.
The weird thing about polarities is that the sweet spot in the middle is elusive. Sitting right in the middle of the tension, it’s more likely to be periodically passed by the team — “OMG, this was amazing! Wait, where did it go?” — rather than having the team settle down in it. Even more annoyingly, diminishing the SMMS decreases the chances of reestablishing it — and large SMMS makes introducing new perspectives impossible. Both extremes are “sticky,” which means once an organization moves past some threshold, only a severe external perturbation can dislodge the state of its SMMS.
So it appears that it really matters how we decide to establish this space where our mental models are shared, and how we garden this space. The thing that becomes more and more evident to me is that if we do so in an unexamined way, we are unlikely to have a sustainable, resilient organization.