Coaching a New Director on Stakeholder Engagement

For mangers moving to a new level in the organization it can be difficult and confusing to know what is expected of you at this new level. A number of these new expectations are explicit and can be readily learned by conventional training techniques while others are more implicit and are less easy to know and even harder to learn. This is where coaching can be a major asset. A new director was having difficulty within the organization with his peers. He was often caught surprized by their negative view of him and his department and by their accusation that he and his team had failed these stakeholders in some way that was unclear to him.

As mangers move up the organization focus changes from expert based skills to decision making ability. There are three broad skills necessary for effective organizational decision making; collaborative capacity, contextual thinking and the ability to understand and deal with complexity. Collaborative capacity is often an area that is underdeveloped as it is difficult to train by standard methods. This new director needed to build new muscles in the area of perspective taking, what are other departments needing from my department, what are the other departments challenges and focuses and how do they believe I am to play a role in that fulfillment. As well he needed to improve his ability to actively seek perspectives from multiple points not only the stakeholders directly involved but also other less obvious stakeholders, such as in the community, the company systems, the board of directors and the individual employees. Once perspectives have been taken and sought the ability to coordinative these perspectives into coherent action plans and communications is where skill dealing with complexity is necessary. During coaching the director learned to actively seek multiple perspectives, he learned to be able to take perspectives of others and then depending on identified context use various models to help design the best actions for the outcomes desired. This was done by planning and executing new actions and then actively reflecting on the success or failure of these actions.