HARASSED HARRY

In this newsletter ...

People often ask for concrete examples of how coaching works. So in this issue of the newsletter, we've described a typical client - Harassed Harry - and how he got his working life back on track with a little bit of help from his coach.

Harry is a partner in a legal firm. He signed up for coaching because he felt he was constantly fire fighting at work, dealing with urgent demands and interruptions. Although he was still doing a good job, Harry knew he could be more productive and in control if only he knew how!

Harry is not real for reasons of confidentiality - but he shares his challenges with many real people.

Harry's working life

Harry enjoyed his work but sometimes felt he was flitting from one thing to another, never having time to settle in to anything. He had a huge amount of interruptions from clients, his trainee, his secretary and other members of staff.

Harry often had a nagging sense that maybe what he was doing at any time wasn't the best thing to be doing, so he felt anxious and couldn't fully concentrate. He had a constant gnawing sense of anxiety about all the other things he had to do.

Harry found it difficult to manage his trainee Stressed Stewart, who seemed to get demoralised when Harry corrected his work.

Despite working very hard and spending long hours at the office, Harry was struggling to meet his firm's billing targets.

Finally, Harry knew he should keep more up to date with case law and put aside time to learn new skills and develop himself, but somehow he never had the time.

What did Harry want instead?

Harry said he wanted:

• "To be on top of things"
• "To leave work earlier"
• "To be more productive"
• "To manage people better"

Clarify Goals

Harry's goals were a bit vague, so we made them more specific:

1. Leave the office by 6.30pm at least three nights a week.

2. Meet his firm's billing targets.

3. Receive improved feedback on his management style in the next round of appraisals.

We talked about why meeting these goals was important for Harry and what he would do with his extra time away from work.

Harry became quite excited thinking about the time he would spend with this family and he had a clear vision of walking his dog in the woods on summer evenings. He knew this would make him more energetic and effective at work too.

Break Goals into achievable chunks

Although the above goals are quite specific, they are still outcome goals rather than learning or process goals, and it is not yet clear what Harry needs to do to meet them.

One of the main reasons people don't achieve their goals is that they don't break them down into things they can actually do right now.

The first thing we did was to identify some specific, simple actions Harry could take towards meeting his goals.

If he was to increase his charging and spend less time at work, Harry needed to get much more efficient, and some of his initial actions were:

• Turn email audio alert off and just check his emails once per hour at most.
• Only reply to an email immediately if this would take less than 2 minutes.
• Do a weekly review on Monday morning and schedule time for long or difficult tasks.
• Brainstorm all the important non-client things he needed to do and get them down on paper and out of his head.
• Ask his secretary to bring his post to him at set times instead of ad hoc, thus massively reducing interruptions.
• Divert his calls to his secretary for 3 hours each day, to allow time for concentrated, chargeable work.
• Read the Templeton Finn article on how to give feedback.

Harry committed himself to doing these actions, which were all things he knew how to do and which didn't require much thought or time.

Despite the relative simplicity of the actions, Harry freely admitted that if we hadn't put his second coaching session in the diary, he probably wouldn't have got around to doing them because of other pressures. But the prospect of admitting he'd not kept his commitments prevented him from backing out of the agreement.

The above initial actions made a big difference to Harry and by the second session he was already feeling more relaxed and productive.

Overcome Obstacles

There are always some obstacles to achieving goals, or you'd have achieved them already!

For Harry, most of his difficulties boiled down to three main obstacles:

1. Communication skills

Despite his good intentions, Harry was struggling to manage people well because he'd never been taught how to give good feedback. The partner who'd trained Harry thought you just ignored people until they made a mistake.

We taught Harry a very simple and effective way to give feedback. Once he learnt this, he found he was able to suggest improvements to Stressed Stewart's work without demoralising Stewart, who began to perform better and use his initiative much more. This freed up a lot of Harry's time.

Harry also learnt some basic NLP communication skills so his clients understood him better and he began receiving more high quality referrals which helped him to meet his firm's billing targets.

2. Confidence

Harry was very confident in his technical abilities but had difficulty saying No to people and not jumping immediately to their demands.

We worked on his confidence, and he found this also made it easier for him to charge what his work was worth.

3.Strategies for time management

In common with most people, Harry didn't have a particularly effective system for managing his non client work and was retaining too much information in his head.

This was creating anxiety and making it difficult for him to concentrate. Once he put in place an improved system, he was much better able to focus on the matter in hand.

Review progress and celebrate successes

By taking simple but effective steps each month, Harry found he was starting to work much more efficiently, and was able to leave work by 6.30 and still meet his billing targets.

After an invigorating walk with his Labrador in the evening, Harry also slept better and found it easier to get up in the morning.

In our coaching sessions, we broke Harry's big, daunting goals down into simple actions that he could do before his next session. In this way Harry made steady and consistent progress, and within six sessions, he had met all his goals. Harry's comment at our final session was: "You know I think I'm finding work truly satisfying for the first time in years."