Do you think of yourself as a coach?

When I ask this question, almost every single hand goes up. But what does that really mean? Do we have a process? Or do we confuse sharing our little bits of wisdom with coaching?

To be an effective coach, you must combine process with intention. Today I will focus on intention. You must first decide that coaching is what you truly intend to do. And you must also decide whether you intend to coach someone on the process or method, or coach them on the solution.

So that we can be more specific, imagine a situation where you spot a trip hazard in a work area. It not only shouldn’t be there, it should have been caught by someone in the area.

Coaching the solution

Starting with coaching the solution, it is when you care specifically about what final conclusion they arrive at. Take the example of the trip hazard; if you were focused on coaching the solution, as the other person is proposing a solution you would inquire into the robustness and quality of that solution.

For example, if they said they would just remind people to be careful, you would probably start to question how robust they feel that is, what happens when new people are introduced to the area, or how people might remember that when they are focused on other things. You would be coaching them towards a better outcome than telling people to be careful.

I’ve been in and out of a stand-up desk as I’ve changed offices or moved, but I’ve been an advocate for a long-time. Many people I know use one, including

• my former mentor when I was at MIT
• my financial manager
• Kevin Meyer of Superfactory, who’s be a very strong advocate

I’ve been through several solutions, including a stack of books propping up my laptop on a window well and a cheap stand-up desk in my Michigan office at the Lean Learning Center. I’ve finally gotten my permanent Pennsylvania office solution in place, pictured here.

You won’t find this one any store; it was a gift from my parents and was fabricated from my great-grandfather’s refurbished old toolbox. I’ve paired that up with a large screen so I’m never straining my eyes or bending my neck, a Cricket laptop stand, and an ergo mat to make it easier on my bad knees [see affiliate links at the bottom of this post]. But even if you can’t have mine, I am a strong advocate of getting one for yourself. Here are the benefits I’ve found for myself:

• Less back pain
• Improved focus
• More energy
• More mobile

There are several posts out there summarizing the benefits, so if you’re interested in more, I suggest you check some of them out:

• The Benefits of a Stand-Up Desk
• Top 10 Reasons to Buy a Stand-Up Desk (from a vendor)
• The Stand Up Desk
• The Many Benefits of Standing at Your Desk (from Harvard)
• Try a Stand-Up Desk at Work
• Are Standing Desks Healthier than Sitting?

Have any of you gone this direction? How have you found the experience?

Happy Labor Day. We’ll take a week off with our First Steps videos and take this slight detour instead.

While I’ve been blogging for many years, this blog is a little over 1 year old. I’ve been thinking about how I might change some of my approaches to sharing, but would really like your input. This is a very quick survey . If you could take the 60 seconds it should take to complete it, I would be thankful.

How to improve your ability to work up in the organizational chart

I’m sure many of you in organizations of every shape and size see the need and opportunity to coach up. But coaching your boss, or other leaders beyond that, can be a tricky business. Despite it being one of the most substantial areas of leverage for a change agent, it is also a grossly underdeveloped skill. The efforts I see from many are not only not moving the organization forward, they are often working against the goals. You cannot become a true change agent until you develop this capability. But do it wrong, and you’ll just be a pain, a source of frustration, and counterproductive to your own cause.

There are several gaps to close to be capable of coaching up. Here are a few that I have observed frequently. I will focus them primarily on coaching your immediate boss, but the lessons really apply to any upward coaching and influence.

1. Attitude and orientation: your boss isn’t the enemy

This is often not how we espouse our feelings, yet the observed behaviors would indicate otherwise. You’re trying to coach up. If you look at how your boss is behaving with distain, lack of respect, or worse, then those attitudes will come through in your coaching. You’re not that good of an actor to hide it.

2. Bosses have bosses

You want your boss to turn left, but his boss is telling him to turn right. Can you hold it against him? I’m sure it depends on the severity, but we have to keep in mind that bosses do have constraints – policy, direction, bosses.

And what’s more, if your boss was directed to do something against their will, they are not going to air their dirty laundry to their directs – at least not if they’re worth their salt. You may not really have the opportunity to know that their degrees of freedom have been reduced. You just need to know that this might be the case.

The more you know about your boss’s constraints, the more you can support them.

3. Care about their success more than yours

Ask yourself, why do you want your boss to do something differently…it is for their glory, or yours?

If you want to be effective in coaching up, then it has to be done with the objective of helping them be successful. If you are trying to influence their behavior, it will be much more sustainable adopted if it is connected to their own reasons and benefit. If the behavior you want to them to adopt doesn’t help them to be more successful, then you really have to question why you are doing it.

4. Engage them in the problem statement

It is much easier to get people to buy-in to a solution if they already buy-in to the problem statement. Focus your energies first on understanding a problem statement that your boss already has a commitment to. With a problem statement in hand, it is a smaller move to show them how a new behavior might help with their problem than it is to convince them of a new problem.

5. Find a surrogate

Sometimes, just sometimes, we’re not the right person to do the coaching. Maybe it’s just a personality match issue or maybe it’s some unresolved baggage. Either way, if we care about the outcome more than our ego, then sometimes we need to step aside and find someone else to do the coaching or influencing.

Each Monday we are releasing small ideas that require only 15 minutes of effort to try, but they can still serve as your first steps on the lean journey. The First Steps Video Series is meant to make it easier to begin the journey – get some improvement, and some learning, and then take another step. If you can’t find 15 minutes to try something new, then the problem is you…and you don’t want to be the problem, do you?

This week, we talk about how counterproductive it can be to start the day in your inbox. Instead, start with a priority task. Even if you delay getting to your inbox by 15 minutes, it will set the right tone for the day. Learn more by watching this short video:

If you can’t view the video, try this link.

So many things can distract us from what the core of our work is all about. Email is often a distraction, but there are so many more – Facebook and Twitter, consuming news whether on the internet or TV, politics inside your industry or company, promotion and self-promotion, and the list goes on.

Too often, the other “stuff” drowns out the real work that has purpose and meaning. It’s the real work that we get paid for, that inspires us, that inspires others.

Artist Hugh MacLeod recently posted this on Twitter which caught my eye:

His drawing table is his core – it’s what pays off for him. Every else is just other stuff.

What’s your core? What do you do that really, truly delivers value? What really gets you excited about the work?

And just as importantly, what’s keeping you from doing that work?

Want to check out some of the latest lean thinking from Mark Graban at LeanBlog.org, Jon Miller at Gemba Panta Rei, Kevin Meyer and Bill Waddell at Evolving Excellence , John Hunter at Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog , Matthew May at In Pursuit of Elegance , and Ron Pereira at Lean Six Sigma Academy, and perhaps even a few thoughts from yours truly?

Lean Daily, which is a collaboration between this group of lean pundits, has a new iPhone app. It brings the blog feeds from all of the lean bloggers listed above, including myself, into one application on your iPhone. We are offering this application for free, and you can get it at the iTunes store or by following the links from the Lean Daily website. Personally, I am not an iPhone user so I’ll have to see it in use from one of you.

You can also find a wide range of lean bloggers, including those involved in this project, at the Lean Blog Aggregator at The Lean Library. This website is in the middle of a major functional upgrade which I also hope to announce here shortly.

Entrepreneurs and small business owners are all in search of a big return on their investment. How best to maximize my ROI? Many investing are looking for the big-R, the giant market. Where is there billions of dollars of opportunity? Surely, with billions on the table, we can grab a slice of it. There are many huge markets available – cell phones, automobiles, healthcare. But just because it’s big doesn’t mean it’s the best market to go after.

Earlier this week I wrote about the fallacy of focusing just on the big return in Increase ROI by Focusing on I, not R.

When it comes to your strategic choices, sometimes this means focusing on a niche, but one where you can dominate and master. Some examples:

The healthcare industry is huge, and getting bigger continuously. You could open a hospital, yet many small hospitals are closing and many more still are unprofitable.

But there are plenty of smaller niches, large in their own right, but not as large as the industry as a whole. Nurse Next Door is a great example – a franchise that is quickly becoming a dominant force in the home healthcare slice. It has embraced lean in how it functions, and with strong processes adding to its franchise model, it can build a brand that people can trust.

Some of you know that I am a principal in Cobra Motorcycle. Cobra is focused on youth off-road race motorcycles and ATVs. That’s a small slice of a large market. There are no aspirations of knocking off Honda, who makes everything with a motor from a car to a generator. But go to a national youth race, and Cobra will be the most dominant brand at the starting line, and because of the product performance, own the podium. That’s what focus can bring.

Even might Wal-Mart thought in this way. Where are there big markets to go after many customers for retail? New York, LA, Chicago…but this is not where they focused. They focused on small rural markets where they were the only game in town, and they dominated.

Whether in problem solving or strategy, often finding ways to maximize the return on your investment, in anything from dollars to your time, means that you find ways to go after small investments. Build on those small investments to make another one through learning, through success, one step at a time.

How does your organization approach strategy, going after the big R or truly maximizing your return? How do you approach it personally?

Everyone wants a good return on investment. It’s no way to run a business, as many lean thought leaders have written about. But whether calculated or just a mental impression, we want a high return on investment, or ROI.

But why does everyone only focus on the R?

When I see projects, problems, initiatives, and investments prioritized, the primary filter seems to be in looking for high return projects. IT departments are too busy with major initiatives to tweak and improve existing systems. Large capital equipment is being bought while the existing equipment is sitting idle. A new branch or store is opened rather than improving traffic at the existing one. People are focused on the high R, high return opportunities.

I believe we are looking in the wrong place.

I think if you want to increase your ROI, focus more on decreasing the I. This means the small opportunities, but the ones that can be gathered quickly and with little effort or little money. Now if you pride yourself on math, be careful. The argument back is that we need the dollars so we need the high return projects. Wrong.

10 projects that return $101 each is still greater than 1 project that returns $1000. And if the investment was less for those 10 projects, then the ROI is higher. It’s seems pretty straight forward. But…

It’s not a shiny as spending big bucks. It doesn’t make you feel important to work on small and rapid improvements. You may have to think harder, even if not work harder, to come up with 10 projects when 1 will do.

These are NOT good arguments for the high-R projects.

What’s the argument for focusing on low-I, high-ROI opportunities?

1. The risk is lower. If projects have a failure rate, which they do, the impact of one big failure is harder to avoid and work around than the small ones, even if there are more smaller failures. Consider driving down the road: low impact with a few little potholes, but a sinkhole becomes unavoidable.

2. The learning is faster. If you are trying to be a learning organization, then every time you turn the wheel of improvement, learning is generated. If you turn the wheel one big turn, you get less learning further down the road. If you turn it many small times, the learning becomes cumulative and benefits you must sooner.

3. The effort is more distributed. Often big-R projects involve very concentrated leadership and involvement. Many resources are involvement, but the decision making is often well controlled to minimize risk. When it is a focus on many small projects, that involvement and decision making is more distributed, taking better advantage of the resources you have.

How does your organization deal with maximizing ROI? Do they focus on the big-bucket high-R items, or truly look at ROI no matter how high or low the R?

This week in class (I’m running a session of Leading Lean at a client) I asked a question:

What’s better between focusing on your strengths or improving your weaknesses?

It’s one of those unanswerable questions designed to generate some dialogue and thought. What surprised me, although only a little, is that no one wanted to talk about their strengths and leveraging them. Everyone had very good and valid reasons to focus on improving their weaknesses. It is more natural and comfortable for people to focus on what’s broken and fix it, but I didn’t expect this to be the exclusive focus.

People put too little thought into their strengths and how they leverage them. We take them for granted. We think they are always going to be there and will naturally rise to the surface. But this isn’t the case. It requires thought and effort. Some questions to ask yourself:

1. What are my strengths?
2. Under what circumstances to they come to the surface?
3. Am I using those strengths in the right situations?
4. How can I leverage those strengths in more situations?
5. How can I improve my strengths even more?

Here’s a way to look at it. If you were a basketball point guard measuring 6 feet, 3 inches, you probably are not a great post-player. Should you work on improving your post-up ability which is a weakness? Or should you work on improving your 3-point shooting which is a strength? You would find yourself in many more situations where the 3-point shooting would come in helpful, and that is likely a place to focus.

If that’s too obvious for you, let me also use a business example. I am a good speaker and presenter. I have many opportunities to leverage that strength. I am weaker when it comes to many things, but let’s pick billing systems as an example. I could learn more about how to build world-class billing systems, but it is more likely that I will get more advantage from continuing to hone my presentation abilities.

Do you spend time identifying, honing, and leveraging your strengths? If so, what has been the result?