Episode 8 - Paula Day - Group v Team Coaching

Transcript

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[upbeat music] Welcome to another Coaching Loop podcast. Hello, Nick, how are you? I'm great, Alan. Fantastic. I've g- I've got to share with you, and I know you don't let me do this generally, you may edit it out, but you don't like me saying good morning or good afternoon,'cause it puts us in a place in time, is not good for the sequence of the podcast, but I've just been to my first festival, my first music festival, and it made me realise just how mired my music taste is in the past, in the '80s. Because a band came on called Faithless- Yep... and I said to somebody,"Who's this modern rubbish?"[laughing]- they've been going 20 years. Well, let's get- let's crack on. We've got a fantastic person coming in to speak to us today, Paula, Paula Day. Paula, I'm gonna let you introduce yourself, who you are, what you are, and, and a bit about you. And then I'll leave Nick to do the, the normal teacher recap that we do, and then we'll get into it. So Paula, welcome to Coaching Loop podcast. Fantastic to have you on board, and we're dialing into you from Singapore, which is super exciting, but you are the second overseas person we've had. Introduce yourself. Thank you. So, um, I'm delighted to be here. This is my first-ever podcast, so, um, if I stuff it up a little bit here and there, just bear with me. I live in Singapore. I've been here about 22 years. Um, I've lived in a few different countries. For the last sort of 25 years, I've worked in OD, organisational design development roles, uh, both as a, a, an individual contributor, as a manager, as a manager of managers, for quite a number of multinational companies based here in, in Singapore, and focused specifically on leadership development, people development as well, not just leaders, but people development. And that led me, um, into team development because a lot of the focus in the companies I've worked at was around the performance of teams. Um, and we all know that lovely phrase, high-performing teams. The question is really, what does it really mean, Um, and just as a little sideline, I do quite a lot of coaching as well, people all different levels. I'm mentoring a very young person in Hong Kong at the moment on a pro bono basis, trying to help him work his career out, with up to, you know, managers, directors, CEOs, and I absolutely love that individual conversation brings as well. So that's me in a nutshell. Thank you, Paula. So I'll ask you the standard three kind of teacher's recap of previous people's, uh, experiences. What inspired you, or who inspired you to get into that coaching? That's one of the questions, answer. What is your metaphor for coaching and are there any models that you, you know, follow or use that really help you or not? Ooh, do you want me to answer all three or just one? Totally up to you.[chuckles] So, um, I think, how did I get into coaching? I think it just kind of naturally happened from have, from the development side of having with people and trying to help them to, you know, find that light bulb switch for themselves. Um, I went and trained as a coach because I confident if I had the structure of a, a coach training with- within which to have those conversations, because the... You know, we all talk about holding the space, and very important to the individuals. Um, the second question, third question, models. I've forgotten the second one already.[chuckles] Third question on models. I actually use an awful lot of frameworks, um, because I find in a lot of my coaching that it's not just asking questions. People are looking for ideas, and so I use different frameworks within which to encourage people to think about themselves and their own, own development. Um, so the drama triangle, for example, if you're familiar with the drama triangle, I use that quite often when people are getting stuck in certain relationships within their work environment, to try what roles are they playing, what roles do they need to play. So I could sit here and talk all the podcast about models but, uh, the, you know... I do use them, and I use them judiciously, um, in my coaching conversations, second question you asked. [chuckles] You haven't. I think you partly answered it, for how you got inspired to come to coaching, talking about helping people find their own light bulb switch. Yes. Yeah. Maybe that is a, a, an indication of the kind of metaphor that describes you as a coach. I, I think that is it. I get the most pleasure out, going, "Oh, my goodness, now I see what I need to do. Now I finally find a way forward." Yep, absolutely. Okay, I'm going to take that. Thank you.[chuckles] You're welcome. I'm the light bulb switch for you. I, I have to stop Alan with all his He has one every single meeting we ever have, and the most recent one was a bucket with grains of sand and rocks in it, and I'm not quite sure whether I'm the or a rock, but I might be a grain of sand.[laughing] So let's, let's dive into- The light bulb could well be that it's on a dimmer switch. You can dial it up and dial it down. Ooh, that's... Sorry, see, see where my brain goes. Don't apologise. I love it. I'm, I'm feeling a bit... Okay, we're, we're going off down a rabbit hole now-[chuckles]... but yeah, um, I like that. I'm gonna take that away incorporate that. There we go. So you, you talked about high-performance teams, and I both work in as well, because we, we, we both, uh, do teamwork as well as one-to-one coaching. Can you just kind of share some of the challenges of that as a coach and, uh, and some of the opportunities? And if there's anything that you've just touched on in terms of-... the way you use your models and, and frameworks, if any of those particularly work in a coaching or team scenario, a bit about them. If it's okay with you, I'm just gonna take a little bit of a step how I, I got into what we call team coaching, work, the, the language of team coaching didn't and it was always around high-performing teams. So it- for me, in the corporate journey, it started off with, I need my team to be performing better. I need them to be a high-performing team. As a, as a, an OD practitioner, part of what we would be asked to do is to come in and work with a team to look at- Yeah... how are they interacting? What are the things that they need to be doing slightly better as a team? Um, and so a lot of that actually started as facilitation, because what most leaders in the corporate space ask for is a workshop. And as you both probably know, they want a workshop that's short and sweet and fits into their two-day offsite,[chuckles] along with all the other doing. And the challenge I encountered as I into that space is we can create an amazing one-hour, two-hour, three-hour experience for those people in the room, but it's not sustainable as a team. There might be some wonderful nuggets take away with them, but the ability for that team to, to journey with that experience, um, is very limited if you do a kind of one and done in a short period of time. And, and I think that's highlighting the difference between high performance and high performing. The high performance of a team might be individuals or, as you say, little nuggets or peop- little peop- or people evolving little areas, whereas high performing is a group of people coming together and increasing their level as a group. So you've really highlighted a, a, an important point, Alan, which is, when is a team a team, and when is it a group, and what is the difference? And you can Google it. There's lots and lots of materials out there on the difference between a group and a team. And the very, you know, and, uh, to really differentiate very simply between them, group... In a group, individuals tend to have their own individual goals. Um, they might have a common purpose, but they have their own individual goals, their, their interdependence is less. Whereas in a team, they generally are coming together because they have a common goal that they all need to work together towards. So a really good analogy would be if we're having a potluck supper, that's a group activity 'cause everybody brings their own individual food. Whereas if we're going to cook a meal together, we have to work together, and everybody has an individual job that contributes to the overall meal that we're producing. So one of the challenges in performance is, are we expecting performance from a group when we're expect- when we think it should really be a team? Do we always really need a team if we're looking for the performance? You know, that, that comes back to how do we define So one of the things I did find is that we're not very good at defining when we need a group and why a group is beneficial versus when we need a team, and why that's beneficial in that particular situation. And do you think teams and groups are needed for different things? So it, it might be even a timescale, put a group together to go get a project across the line in the next six months, and then you can go disperse again and take a few things away. But we need a team to do a, a, a longer five, six years' worth of work to achieve a vision or contribute to a bigger vision, knowing that we'll have people going out and people coming in and, uh, assuming slightly different roles or embedding their personalities within that team, that makes the whole and the collective better, whatever better is for that team. So that could be one way to think about group versus team. Uh, to me, it's a little more complicated in terms of definition and what it does do, which leads us into that whole concept of, you know, coaching a, a team- Yep... is we need to have a conversation around this group of people coming together in service of? Why are we here, and what are we trying to achieve, and how do we then go about achieving it? The upside of a group is very often you can get a lot more creativity, because in a group, you- you're then embracing the differences and the different ideas, and people feeling tied to the norms of the common goal of a team. So one of the most important things of time, would a group approach be more beneficial versus a team approach? And, and then how do we define and clarify that so we're all very clear that this is a group activity versus a team? And that leads us into the thinking, then, well, what is it that we need to make this work? And so, you know, there's huge amounts of work out there, um, on the research of what makes a team, if we talk about a team, and it's horribly complicated. And I know this because in twenty twenty, I was working, um, at a company called VMware, anymore. It got bought by Broadcom. And of course, it was the COVID year, and a lot of the work that we were doing face to face just dialled down, and people were trying to come to terms with, "How do I work remotely?" And so there was a little bit of extra OD space, and I started to research high... You know, research the research on high-performing And I was really fortunate I had, you know, the, the permission to do manager in Palo Alto.... And what I wanted to do was really understand what's common across all of this research, what's common across the definition of what's needed to be a high-performing team. And it took me about three months to trawl all the different research, things like, um, Google's Aristotle, Project Aristotle, um, the Atlassian Playbook, Sandy Pentland's MIT work, which is absolutely fascinating. Gartner, you know, all of the consultants out there. There's just swaths of it, and everyone is slightly different.[chuckles] So what I did, without AI,'cause we didn't have an [laughing] AI tool then to use, was really look at what was common. And the things that came out that were common across high performers in a, what they defined as a team environment, but I think this could apply in a group as well, was, um, number one was communication, the type and way that we communicate, um, as a, as a group of people. The second one was, um, purpose and goals, having common purpose, and then having very clear goals. Identity and brand as a team. Who are we as a team? How do we describe ourselves? What are our, um, what are the expectations of the people, clients, and how do we manage that as a team? Roles and responsibilities within the team. And then the fifth one was what I called ways of working practices, and that links back into how often are we coming together as a team? How do we share information? How do we challenge each other? How do we make decisions? How do we support each other, even though we've got roles and responsibilities? What are the practices that we would put in place and agree to commit to as a team that then reinforce everything that we're trying to do? With that, you then find... You then have to have quite a lot conversations to work all of that out, because you can't have just one of those five. You need all five. That's what the research really showed me. And I guess actually- So--it's been that facilitator- Yeah... person/coach that can facilitate those questions and coach those solutions or answers moving forward. Absolutely. And, you know, the, this, this then gets you into the challenge between facilitation and, and coaching. How do you educate the team on all of this? Can you just step right straight into do a little bit of anchoring of the theory or the frameworks or the models, as we talked about earlier, Nick, so comfortable with those as tools, um, and as, as lenses through which to then look at themselves as a team? And that's what I found actually you You needed- you couldn't jump straight into a pure You needed to have some common understanding and facilitate that common understanding. Co-creating it was the most important thing. So purpose, for example, team purpose is a very common one that I've done a huge amount of work with teams on. He- helping them understand what a purpose is versus a mission statement [chuckles] versus a, a vision statement, for example, is a very common area that we need to unpack. Getting comfortable with the leader on how that purpose can be defined, can it be fully co-created by the team, versus does the leader have some ideas that they want embedded in that purpose, the language of it, where it sits relative to everything else that go- that's going on in the organisation. Once you've identified the process of that, then you can sit down, do the work to create a draft purpose, and then you can have a coaching conversation with the team to then think about, "How do we really commit to this? Why wouldn't we commit to this? Where would we use it? How is this going to help us? What would stop us from really feeling like this is our, our common purpose as a whole team?" So I hope that answers a little bit of the, the, the question for you, Alan. Uh, oh, absolutely, Paula, thank you. And so thank you that you've replaced AI to do all[chuckles] Well, I've made copious notes, and they, they, they do really resonate with me as a, as a facilitator, coaching groups or in- with individuals. But I've got a question for you. This sounds very complex, and the one-and-done phrase you used hang on to that. I love that, one and done. This doesn't suit one and done at all, does it? Uh, it's- No... it's the opposite. Uh, and to try to get buy-in from clients to invest the proper time in this, as you've described, is, the, for the coaching industry, isn't it? What I, what I'm really interested to hear is, communication, identity, and, you know, what do, what do we want as our goals for our group, our team, we can see that translate across in a one-to-one coaching, uh, scenario, very similar, we? But what are the complications with facilitating workshops where you've got to get a group of people to be vulnerable, to be open, to share their personalities, and break down some of that hierarchy?'Cause you may have bosses and direct reports in the same room. Often is the case, isn't it? How do you do that as a facilitator, as a coach, to make the conversations and their communication really effective, really on point, so that you can get to that deeper thinking on, what do we want? Yeah, that is a, a fantastic question. So a couple of things. One is, I was very fortunate to find leaders in organisations I worked in who were willing to embrace the concept of a journey as opposed to a, a, a single event. So you had to find the leaders [chuckles] willing to commit to this. The other thing then was to, to make sure that they understood that your job was to facilitate some-... process education, um, and some knowledge education to then coach, um, some conversations with the team, but in the process of doing that, to encourage the team to own it themselves. And this kind of links a little bit into systemic team coaching approach that Peter Hawkins, um, talks about. He, he differentiates between just a team coaching versus a systemic team coaching. Um, and systemic team coaching is very much around looking at the in which the team is operating and making sure then that they're looking at how they are at, within the system in which they work. So- And I, and I think on top of that- Yeah... as well is, is, um, systemic constellations of how they influence each other as well, whether they're moving towards someone, away from someone, and how that then influences dynamics of everybody else within that, that ecosystem, to use your word. And I love ecosystems, and I love it as a framework in terms of micro, meso, and macro. I, I'm fascinated by that dynamic and that dynamic shift or that constellation and that constellation shift because of one decision or one person's decision or, or someone leaving and someone coming in, and how it affects that, that whole constellation. It, it's absolutely true. And in fact, the thing is, I, I often quote, um, when I'm doing this work with teams, a, a quote from Andy Grove, Andrew Grove, who was the CEO of Intel, and he wrote a book called Only the Survive, um, which... And I'm going to read it to you.

So he says: 19:57

"Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. A corporation is a living organism. It has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change, focus has to change, values have to change. The sum total of these changes is transformation." I anchor always around the fact that we can't sit still as a team because the environment that we're operating in is changing, and we, the team, are changing. As we... You know, and so how do you cope with that as a team? Well, one of the things is communication. So when you talked about the interactions within an ecosystem, I'd encourage you to go and have a look at the work of Sandy Pentland from the MIT Multimedia Lab. Um, he also runs, uh, um, his own, uh, research company called Human Dynamics. He did some amazing work on how do you measure,[chuckles] you're gonna love this, So teams are often measured by their KPIs. How much have you sold? How much have you saved? You know, what's the productivity level? What's the efficiency level? But what Sandy Pentland had said was,"That's not actually measuring the team. All that's doing is measuring the output, and that output could be because of three out of the seven members of the team." So he designed wearable tech, and this, you know, he's doing this back in twenty ten, two thousand and nine. Wearable tech that monitors the tone of your voice, not the words, but the tone, the volume, um, how often you're speaking, and it also, um, when there was a lot of face... You know, worked in face-to-face, body, which way were you turning when you were talking to somebody. Used that data to plot the interactions, communication interactions between the teams, and found that the teams that had the highest cross-interactions within their ecosystem had the highest output as a team and were more engaged and more energized. And they used this to, to find teams, what he called teams within a team. So where there was a team where maybe only three of the people were having those, you know, what we call those little side cliques, that that was having a negative impact on the communication with the rest of the team. And when you can show that, you can then say to the team: that? How do you fix it?" Um, he also found, I think it was at a call center in a bank, that when the informal conversations are even more important than the formal conversations, so that social interaction that we have, ideally face-to-face, um, and of course, this was two thousand and nine, long before COVID, but that when people got together and got to know each other better and had those little side conversations, productivity went up. And so one of the things that the call center did was they put all their coffee breaks on at exactly the same time, which was unheard of for a call center, and then there was nobody on the lines. But their productivity rates went up significantly after they started doing that because of the fact that people each other, and they were sharing information, and his tech to track all of that. Absolutely fascinating. So that len- leads us into, so how can we emulate that when we, we haven't got the tech to measure it? And how do we then continue to measure productivity and output of a team? Because to your earlier question, Nick, buy-in from a leader to do the work and to... for the team to do the work when they're so busy with everything else? So there are companies out there. I worked with a company called RallyBright, R-A-L-L-Y-B-R-I-G-H-T. I'll give them a little plug. Um, amazing company in the US, very small, and they built platform where you can basically get the team to answer questions, and it measures the resilience of the team and the engagement of the team, and you can pulse the team on a regular basis. So I've worked with leaders who've done this over a two-year period. You can then look at-... where are the scores going up? Where are they going down? What's shifting?'Cause there's forty-five measures, forty-five questions, something's always going to be at the bottom. But you can now look at that data in real time to what is happening in the team. Have we had a change of people? Have we had a change of portfolio? Have we had, um, more transformation happening within the organization? How is it affecting the outcomes? And you can then use that data to have a conversation with the team around, what do you as a team need to be doing What do you want to focus on? What difference would it make better score on that particular question? So that type of platform has been very helpful for, um, leaders who want metrics and data, and because I've worked in a lot of tech always interested in, in the data. It doesn't solve all the problem, it just gives you some lovely data, um, on which to then be able to have a neutral, psychologically safe conversation with the team around what might not be working as a team, and you can link it to results as well. And we definitely saw a shift. Also, going back to the coaching and facilitation, it's very rare that you can almost quantify change through coaching or facilitation or, you know, as, as, as you said, in terms of one and done. You can have an impact in the very, very short term, but, but change and development and evolvement is, is a different cat of fish. But if you're able to do those quantitative data analysis over a period to time B, to time C, to time D, there is this quantifiable shift rather than a, a subjective, "Well, we know it's better, but we can't tell you why," or, "We know it- it's really helping us, but I can't really put my finger on it, what, what it is." So yeah, that's a lovely, lovely way of kind of measuring that. And, uh, uh, Nick asked a question earlier as well basically enable people in a team to be vulnerable, to be able to have some of those conversations that you then need to have as a result of being able to look at data, like the running bright data, where, you know what? We're not doing this very well as a team. How do we get comfortable to talk about that without pointing fingers, for example, or without feeling like, you know, I, I'm going to have to share stuff share? And so part of the work that I would do, Nick, uh, would be... And this often comes back to, if we're coaching a team, do we coach the leaders separately conversation with the leader around their role? Are they in the team or on the team in certain situations? Um, but one of the things was always to encourage the leader to be the first person to be vulnerable in a room. Um, and so one of the processes that I did use, one of the frameworks that I used, um, was the River of Life leadership story, um, where a leader basically draws, and this is done very deliberately, but they draw the story of their life, where the beds of the river are showing the key decision points across their whole life, not just work, that they had to make. And they talk about how difficult it might have been to make that decision and what they had to do, um, to be able to make the decision the person that they are today. And you will find very quickly the leaders who are comfortable to do that, and the ones who are really uncomfortable to do that. But I have observed, um, through practical experience, that if the leader leaves with that and then the team follow, and they don't do it all at once because terribly bored of the stories by the end of the day, um, but they take- they build it in as one of their ways of that over time, everybody shares a story through their life. Um, that broke down an awful lot of those barriers and, and debunked a lot of assumptions about other people, and especially here in Asia, that layer of culture sitting on top, and we often interpret the way that people are, um, from our own cultural lens and forget about it's actually coming from their cultural lens. I will say I've seen grown men cry in a room as a result of doing this activity with each other, where they, they suddenly realized,"I never knew you like I know you now as a result of you sharing this, this story." So I'm just using that, Nick, as one example, and I know there's lots of other team exercises or facilitated interventions that you can do to help break down that vulnerability. The second thing is to then encourage them to co-create, and this is where you really coach them as a, as a group, to co-create a set of values and behaviors, or really behaviors, I would say, not so much underpinned by values, but a set of concrete behaviors psychological safety, lack of judgment, sharing, um, within that team, so that that becomes part of their team norms, and they commit to it. The most important thing is that they discuss it and share it. Um, and if you coach them as a coach, and this is a really good example for a team coaching intervention, to really challenge, you know, what's being said in the room, challenge the biases or some of the norms that are coming out and, and also unpack some of the cultural That can be incredibly powerful because when they've co-created it as a team and they've committed to it, it then becomes much easier for them, for example, to call each other out, so, or, or to disagree with each other. So if you think about some of the team, basic team behaviors-... um, that people don't want to step into, either culturally or just personally, they're nervous about, mm, you know, that kind of work can really help them break that barrier. I think also within that, something that I've been professing a l- a little bit more and more is calling in. As much as we call out, we give permission to call in. So if someone is exhibiting those those values or whatever, it's also safe to call them in, which is... And Nick and I, as two, two British people, it's easier for Br- I find it's easier for British people to call people out than it is to call them in, if that makes sense. And I know, going back to the cultural thing, cultures around the world that, that will find it easier to call people in when they do something well or over the over- overly well, then they shouldn't have done should have, uh, gone, rather than just calling people out. Yeah. I, I, I totally agree with you, and, and celebration. So, you know, um, are we celebrating our, our achievements? Are we celebrating the individuals in the team, um, as part of, again, that, that ways of working practices? What are we doing on a regular basis? Not just, "Oh, it's the end of the year, we need to celebrate the end of the year," but how do we regularly find a way to comfortably, without overdoing it? [chuckles] Um, so I love that. I love that call it in, um, as the counterbalance to, you know, to calling it out. Paula, we met, uh, at the EMCC conference, and, uh, part of that work we did was to try some walking coaching in the outside. And, you know, I'm quite experienced with this, and I really enjoyed the session I did with my, my buddy. And during that walk, she said, "You know, Nick, what, you know, what is your, what is your kind of metaphor for who you are as a coach?" And I said, "Well, I want people to..." And I looked at the wood, and I said, "To see the tree for the woods, to get that perspective." And she asked a really interesting question. She said, "What do you think is the tree that you see that other people don't because the light is hitting it?" And that's a really interesting question and a really nice way of looking at metaphor. The question to you is that as a coach, you want people to find their own light switch and switch their light bulbs on. But in a group, that's highly complicated because can be so diverse, can't they? And they can be so inaccurate or, or grounded or confused. We've all worked with teams where sometimes you worry because one of them seems to pick up on, uh, an insight they think they've had, and you worry that it might be going in a direction that isn't healthy for the group. And I, I can recall a senior leader once saying, our weakness, our weakness, boss, you've got all the skills and all the preferences. We should just be doing what you say, but you've got all the key preferences."[chuckles] And I thought, "No, no, no, no, no. Please, no, this is not what we want." So how do you help people switch their light bulbs, find their light switches in a way that works for a group, without diluting down other people's insights and their perspectives and, and lots of trees having light landing on them in a wood, and people not seeing the trees and just keep seeing the wood? You know what, I, I, and, and I love that, that question that she asked you because it's, it's a really good way to remind ourselves that, um, perspectives are different, um, based on where we are, what our experiences are. So a couple of things come to mind. Um, one is, is behaviorally. So I have a, a very, very favorite saying that I use in team environments as well as individual environments, which is, "My intention is my reality. My behavior is your reality." And it... When we put that up, so I, you know, sometimes in a, a team coaching environment, if I'm noticing that there's a little bit of, you know, kind of body language or somebody is responding unconsciously to something that's been said, I will put this up. I'll sort of just go, you know-- And, and one of the beautiful things about being a coach is that you can hit, you know, pause. We're gonna have a little pause here just to give us a little bit of a framework around manage what's just been said, and you can put whatever it is that you're using up. So that's one that I used. The other thing I often encourage people to think about is the, um, what assumptions are we making? And, you know, the, the, the spiral down into what's true and what's not true. Um, and there's lots of different models for that, but I basically will often ask people to remember that it's okay to, to say, "So in that particular description, what do we know is true? What's a fact, and then what are we potentially making up, unintentionally making up?" And when you put it in a way where people understand it's normal, it's the way our brains work, so there's a little bit of linking back to the work, you know, all of this is normal, by the way. I think that's really important. It, it's not intentional, brains work. It might be language. So unpacking that with people and framing a con- a conversation that they can then continue to have with each other can often help with that. Um, the other thing is to, um, and I do another exercise where I, I encourage them to build a practice where everybody gets to give one piece of feedback on what's just been said. Only one. Um, I have,[chuckles] I have these talking sticks in the room, um, and I have these... You, you're going to laugh, um, everybody laughs, but then they want to steal them from me. I have those glitter sticks, where they're probably about twelve inches long, plastic, hard plastic with gel inside, but little glittery stars.... and color, like a little bit of color. And when you turn it, I've, I've, um, I've timed it, I think it's about 55 seconds. And I say to people, "Right, your turn. We're gonna take turns to speak. Everybody gets 55 seconds. Pass it along once you've finished." Um, so either you give one piece of feedback, literally one piece of feedback, and the person says,"Thank you very much," the person being feedback's a gift, so you appreciate it. You don't have to act on it in the moment. So there's different techniques that you can use to encourage people to speak up more or to challenge each other. And I love to also introduce the concept of debate. So I have actually taught teams how to debate, because they often feel like, "Oh, we're going to have an argument culturally, that can feel very uncomfortable. But if we are comfortable with the idea of a debate as a safe process in which to share differing opinions and challenge each other, but challenging each other factually, [chuckles] um, that can often help as well. So those are just a few ideas, Nick, and it really will depend on the maturity of the team, where they are on in their journey when you're in the room with them. Sometimes you can just give them a little reminder and step back and let them do the work. Sometimes you need to reframe in the to make it safe. But I think as a coach, you have to be really comfortable to, to call it out if nobody in the room is calling it out, to do that reset. I think that is part of your job as a coach. When we coach one-on-one, sometimes we have to reset our clients. If they're going off on a tangent, to the conversation they asked to have. Or if they're going down into context too much, and it's, it's not taking them anywhere, you, you often have to pull them back. So I would use that same approach in a team coaching environment. Thank you, Paula. Really, really, really useful. And what, what resonates there with me is, uh, the kind of deep-seated need to respect on a journey, because it isn't a, a one and done. And to, to do what, to do what you're describing sounds so, so lovely in terms of, of res- actually respecting them as people, voice, giving them the space, the safe space, to be able to explore things that they collectively need to do together. But you k- you, you k- you kind of explained what one of my

was gonna be to you: 39:11

How do you make things bespoke, yet team bespoke? And I think you've done that, because by focusing on... And it resonates with me of the classrooms I worked for years, that setting out what the, uh, are at the start, and how it, it's non-judgmental, each other, and you, you give people, people the space and time. And we might pass a ball around a circle, but the idea of a glitter stick that's got 55 seconds with an adult is even better-[laughing]... because I can imagine that adults will be much more likely to 55 seconds than a, a child would, on, on average. So I, I think you've really, uh, helped me to understand your ways of and, and the ways of working that we can use i- in facilitation coaching. I'm, I'm gonna now start to... And I do this, I, I look at the clock and I start to bring things together, and self- I always do it selfishly, what have I learned from the podcast, and what will I take away as things that I've highlighted with my pink highlighter to go away and do some more reading I, um, I love your very, very humble phrase, and, uh, you, uh, you may not have chosen the words down straight away. Because you said,"I've observed through practice," and I love that phrase. It shows real humility. "I know something, I'm gonna share it with you, but actually I've observed it through practice." So I really like that phrase, you for sharing that with us. I, I, I don't like the one and done, so the fact that the idea of a journey, whether you're walking through trees or you're walking through rooms trying to a light switch, I, I, uh... That really resonates with me. I've got some reassurance that some of the things that me about at the moment, uh, with a str- strategic partner for AI, is, is right, at the right time, because some of the technology you're talking about to measure things that in the past haven't been very measurable, communication structures, for example- Mm-hmm... That's really encouraging, that there's gonna be tools out there all use to help our, our clients in this very complicated structure, you know, move forwards. Yeah, and I wanna get some of those glitter[laughing][laughing] That's your big takeaway from this, Nick? Oh- I've, I've still got the festival in my head, but you know what? It's in my head. Brilliant. So thank, thank you, Paula, really enjoyed that. I've, You're welcome. Most welcome. Paula, it's, it's, I, I... We're, we're gonna have to wrap this up, just because we're, we're trying to keep these relatively We will definitely have you back for a second, if not third, if not fourth, if you're willing to do that. Now you've got- Absolutely... Now you've broken the back of your[laughing] Um, and hopefully we made it quite okay for and, and, uh, easygoing, relatively speaking. But it's been fascinating, and I've, uh, I've taken four pages of notes [chuckles] out of this already. I just liked all of that around... I, I have a saying very similar, and I know there's certain people who'll be listening to this that will laugh when I say it, that there's no such thing as common sense. Because what's common sense to me else. Mm."My intention is my reality," I think kind of sums that up even in, in a nicer package than mine. So yeah, that's kind of what I'm gonna take away intention is my reality. And, and I think then combine that with the communication of explaining is, as much as what my biases influence my as well. So I think that's amazing, and I'd love to explore more with you at some point about coaching debate. I think that would be fascinating to explore as well. So yeah, there's, there's a couple of things hooked, and there's-[laughing]... a couple that will, that will get you back for a second series it again. Oh, it worked. [laughing] I, I, I wanna thank you. I mean, the, uh... We've kind of meandered our way through, um, what I think is actually quite a complex topic. Um, and when you asked me to come, I, I was like, "Where do we start?" I actually wrote it down,"Where to start?" Um, and you beautifully kicked it off by asking some questions. And I'm very conscious, we haven't talked a lot specifically about coaching of a team. Um, and that's intentional, because to me, there's a lot of other work that needs to happen around for the coaching to then be effective. As opposed to just diving in, team together." There's a lot more, um, behind the scenes that, that needs to be done. Um, so I hope that came across as we were talking. Very much. So let's wrap up. Paula, thank you so much. I, I knew you'd be a great guest, and I was right, so, well, yay to me. Thank you so much, Paula. I knew you'd be a great guest. [chuckles] Thank you so much. Most welcome.[upbeat music]