Perception and Influence
Coaching a glance between knowledge skills and behaviours
A wonderful reminder of the value of coaching both professionally and personally.
How can behaviours impact your value?
With a coaching client earlier this month, the question of the relationship between knowledge, skills and behaviours came up. These three domains are the classic way of viewing clinicians’ development.
The client is a successful healthcare professional, preparing for a transition to an elevated role they have spent years preparing for, at the same time as transitioning to a portfolio work plan with additional roles. The portfolio transition was a greater challenge as its preparation had been less formal.
Whilst exploring how lessons from one transition might inform and support the other, they made a remarkable observation about their perceived behaviours.
“Professional confidence is comprised of both clinical competence and experienced behaviours”
Unpicking this is worth taking some time over.
What is professional confidence?
The context of this coaching session was overcoming any sense of imposter (discussed in the previous blog here) how that sense manifested and how others experienced it.
The client spoke eloquently about their clinical credibility and competence. They went on to explore how their behaviours had previously undermined these hard-earned competencies, and that recent years’ development of performance had been around harnessing optimal behaviours to allow their clinical credibility to manifest.
An element of that manifestation was the perception of them by other members of the team.
It really is all about your audience
No matter how competent you are, your behaviours have to match. These are all of those micro as well as macro behaviours. Not just how your main behaviour manifests: calm, agitated or clear for example. Also, the micro behaviours - the looks, throw-away comments and body language.
Those around us, those we are communicating and performing with, are likely to be mostly focused on themselves at the moment. Folk are mostly in their own minds/space and relate to everyone else mostly through the heavily filtered form of themselves.
The significance of this is not immediately obvious - it’s actually good news.
Let go, just let go of yourself
The opportunity presented by our colleagues and team being mostly in their own minds is that we don’t need to be in ours.
This empowers us to be of service, to let go of ourselves and to be present for our teams and the task. Letting go in this way has two benefits - being detached to the right amount also improves our situational awareness, and reduces the risk of our biases kicking in. There is the added benefit of being detached allows us to use our superpower: listening deeply to what is being shared, not just filtering it for us.
Unexpectedness of coaching
Working with clients continues to be a real joy. By being of service to their development, exactly this detachment is possible. By exploring sessions with the goal of uncovering a new truth - be it an insight, a solution or even a revelatory innovation - such moments manifest.
As a coach, uncovering these new truths is the value that is added to the client. Just having a nice chat, and creating a safe space for them to explore their own narratives does not support progress and movement. Clients are universally seeking a change, there will be no change unless something new is uncovered or tried.
It is exactly this value of coaching that I recognise as a leader. Seeing this led me to seek out the development of coaching as a skill set. The value of unlocking new truths. What a privilege this is.