Craig's Story
I had a situation today at work where I had the opportunity to coach an employee through a difficult situation. He is filling in as the chief of staff whilst my editor is away on holidays. He is in a situation where he is unsure of his authority with staff and yet had to deal with a staff situation. He had confronted a staff member bout an email exchange and the discussion had become heated resulting in the staff member making accusations of aggressive behavior toward him.
I was debriefing the situation with him and was able to apply some of the learning from this unit. Firstly I was able to ask some questions to uncover some of his strengths and weaknesses around the competency area of people management. (Drucker) I was able to uncover that he had limited training with how to deal with people other then to confront them in a direct manner. I asked some questions around his personality and was able to uncover that he was more introverted than extroverted and discussions with people were not his preferred area but that he was keen to learn. (Eysenck)
In the beginning of the discussion he was quit defensive (Argris) I created a case study and we talked through preferred outcomes. He became very open in the discussion showing positive reasoning and in the end began to question his own approach and how he had contributed to the problem in the first place (double loop learning- Argris)
In the end we were able to identify a growth area for him to work on, he experienced genuine self discovery around some areas that were previously hidden to him (England) He asked for some guidance with how he could understand others and I handed him the Holland article to read
Yesterday I was rereading all of the work we had done on self management and was thinking about how it would make me a better business leader. Today I ended the day seeing how easy some of this learning is to apply to an every day situation
