Cathy: Hi, I’m Cathy Boeckmann, partner at Kenning Associates. Welcome to this episode of Knowing Kenning, our podcast that focuses on leadership and learning in the business context. I’m co-hosting today with my colleague Thom.

Thom: Hi everyone, Thom Shaw here.

Cathy: We are talking about communications-focused coaching, but before we dive in, I think it’s worth giving a little bit of backstory on why this topic is so near and dear to both of us. So, Thom, you and I met many years ago when we were both communications professionals at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company in Atlanta.

And in that role, we were focused on helping McKinsey’s consultants and partners build their effectiveness as communicators in all sorts of ways, as writers, as presenters, as interpersonal collaborators, as team and client leaders. It was really, for me anyway, a laboratory for learning about how to help businesspeople communicate better. And I would say it turned both of us into communications coaches.

Thom: That’s right, Cathy. In a role designed to help solve the communications challenges that went with the business problems that McKinsey would get asked to help address, a big element was building up skills among the consultants, the partners, but I would add the client executives as well. Across a range of issues, I think we found ourselves helping in one or another of several ways. Sometimes it was to explain a technique or an approach and help somebody else implement it. Sometimes it was that we would model an approach for people. And in other cases, we would just ask good questions.

Cathy: Yeah, so flash forward to today, we are now both partners at Kenning Associates with probably 15, maybe even more, years of experience as executive coaches with our own clients. And I think the interesting thing to note here is that, at Kenning, we define communications coaching as a separate type of coaching within the broader category of executive coaching.

You know, if someone were to go to our website and look at our services, you’d notice that these two types of coaching, communications coaching and leadership coaching, are listed as separate services. I don’t think everybody makes that distinction, but we do, and you know, I think we should explain ourselves. Thom, what’s your take on why we do this?

Thom: Cathy, there’s a lot of overlap with executive coaching. We have to say that. But we like the clarity that it brings to label a coaching engagement as communications focused.

Many things are, of course, the same, including having well-defined goals, having a cadence of one-on-one meetings, and a trajectory designed to help the coachee think differently about what they do, and along the way learn about themselves and about some of their current approaches to operating in their environment.

What makes it different is the subset of pain points that a coachee is looking for help with and the types of goals that the coaching addresses. It can be especially powerful as a career accelerator for people because it unlocks a specific sticking point that can be holding some folks back

Cathy: Yeah, I like that phrase, career accelerator. This isn’t a kind of coaching that somebody might always need through their whole career, but at a particular moment, if something communications-focused is holding them back, I like how you put that, this really can be an intervention that can move somebody forward substantially.

All right, let’s get specific about pain points, because I think it’s the nature of the pain point that somebody is experiencing that might inspire them to seek out this kind of coaching or suggest it for a colleague. So how would you describe the pain points?

Thom: As we think about pain points, let’s figure out who’s experiencing the pain. It’s important to distinguish that. Is it the individual themselves and the frustrations they might have with not seeing the results that they’re looking for or have been expecting or hoping for? Or is it the executives around them, that this person is interacting with?

Often there’s an awareness gap. We think we’re doing the right thing when we’re sharing information. We’ve assembled it, we’ve put it together, we’ve packaged it the way we think we should package it, and yet other people are not finding it as helpful as we hoped that they would find it. It’s not as productive somehow, as we hoped it would be.

For people we interact with, there could be many pain points, but let’s look at three general patterns.

One, a leader sharing too much information that obscures the important issues or decisions. We sometimes see this in individuals with deep roots in a special expertise or a highly technical field.

Two, someone lacking what we might call senior presence, or gravitas. Somehow they need something more to be ready for a promotion or a new role. It might be a colleague who isn’t engaging as a presenter or connecting well with their audience. So there’s something about the way they’re interacting.

And then third, a leader showing up in interpersonal interactions in ways that are ineffective for reaching the goal that they have for themselves or that interaction with others. Sometimes this pattern gets labeled as a matter of collaboration or an opportunity to improve people leadership, something like that.

Cathy: Yeah. That last word lands with me a little bit, that “people leadership” phrase. I think that in many ways, how we communicate has to do with how our message is received, but also how inspired people are to follow us as a leader.

All right, so nicely done. I think those three archetypes you described cover a lot of the ground that we cover for this type of coaching.

I think it’s always helpful to bring things to life with examples. So I was thinking we could share some examples from our coaching work that will illustrate each of these three examples. I’m going to start with one that I think matches the somebody-sharing-too-much-information pattern.

To set this up, I was coaching a finance leader at a startup. She was a seasoned finance professional, but she was a first-time CFO. As we started talking as part of this coaching, it became clear that board meetings were unevenly successful for her. Sometimes she would lead a good discussion at the board level, and sometimes things did not go as well. One of the goals for our coaching was that she wanted more control over these meetings and more consistency, and I thought that was a great goal for communications-focused coaching.

So here’s what we did. First of all, I said, “Can I please take a look at the materials, the actual decks that you prepare for these board meetings?” So she brought one up and walked me through the latest deck that she had used with the board. We noticed together that for each slide that she had created, the titles were not focused on the “so what.” The titles were just topics. things like “Revenue in Q3 versus Q2.” And when you give a slide a title like that, you’re emphasizing what the information is, but you’re not emphasizing what the information means. You’re not providing your audience with the takeaway, the story, or the message that the numbers imply.

And so as a result, as we, talked through this a bit more, we realized that what was happening in these meetings is that board members were deriving their own so whats, and too much of the meeting was around debating what the facts even meant, that resulted in my coachee trying to continually redirect the conversation to what she wanted to focus on.

So we decided the solution might be as simple as just making her slides differently and coming into these meetings with the messages already identified and clearly stated in her titles, what I would call a message title. The important thing we decided was, more than just having a message, was to have the message be assessments: Are things getting better? Are things getting worse? Are these numbers a problem? Are they not a problem? And, therefore, show up not just with a set of facts to discuss, but with a point of view on those facts.

So she tried it. She just made her deck slightly differently, and she got instant results. The very next meeting was much more focused, more productive. She got good feedback from the CEO. And, you know, maybe not every board meeting is easy, but certainly she had more control over what they were talking about, and everybody felt like the discussions were more focused and productive.

Thom: That sounds like a great result. I’ve done similar work and it’s exciting to see how a shift like that can have a really big impact on the nature of the conversation in the room. I would add that bringing a message, a point of view about a situation, whatever it is, not just makes for a better conversation, but it really helps the individual kind of show up as a collaborator and a helpful part of the decision-making process, being a thought partner really to the other decision-makers in the room. So it changes one’s stance quite a bit to go from sharing information to sharing a point of view.

Cathy: Yeah, I agree. And I think she already thought of herself that way, but she just wasn’t setting herself up in these meetings to show up that way in that moment.

Thom: Shall I share a case that might fit our second, archetype a little bit?

Cathy: Yeah, absolutely.

Thom: So in our second paradigm, we’re thinking about where presentation style is an important consideration for the impact that an individual has.

I was working with a leader in the risk group for an organization, for the company. He was very experienced and really expert in his role, personable, well-liked, and viewed very much as a candidate for a senior role, for the chief risk role. And yet something in his approach to his communications, particularly presentations to the senior team and board members, left some audience members with the view that he wasn’t quite ready, that he wasn’t ready for the promotion, that he wasn’t senior enough or seasoned enough for that role.

So his goal in the coaching engagement was to refine his presentation style and build in a little bit more senior presence. In this case, working together over several conversations, we started first with laying some groundwork around, what are his issues and what are some of the opportunities that he has. We did some of this by looking initially at research on where the impression comes that an audience takes away from someone’s presentation. Is it the actual words and content? Is it from the body language and the things the audience members see? Or is it really from the voice and all the impressions that a voice makes? With that foundation, I shared observations right from those first conversations with him about what I was noticing.

One of the adjustments we experimented with quickly was speaking pace. This was an individual who was absolutely prone to bringing his youthful energy to his presentations, and what we found is that if he slowed down a little bit, chose his words a little more carefully as opposed to throwing as many words against the topic as he might be initially inclined, he was able to shift his kind of presentation persona a little bit and come across as a bit more senior.

Now, we were working on video, we were working remotely, and so we were focused more on the impact he was having in video conferences. One related adjustment was to use his standing desk for these presentations to move from a sitting posture to a standing posture, because that helped him feel a bit more grounded and have a bit more energy in his posture and approach. Making some small adjustments like that, that we could observe and have conversations about, led to, I think, meaningful change in a relatively short amount of time.

Part of what made this work very productive was that this individual was very motivated, highly receptive to feedback, and willing to experiment. So we were able to work in real time. Often with presentation style, questions, we’ll do a recording with an individual and then review the recording together to look at what they notice and what I notice and compare notes. Sometimes that means, oh, you can do and redo and get immediate opportunities to begin building muscles differently for a slightly different approach, and they can hear the change when they make it.

Over several more sessions, we made some other adjustments. And I think it’s important for anyone doing this, to have a certain amount of patience with themselves, because changing behaviors, changing behavioral habits takes time and repetition. And so it’s good to experiment, it’s good to make adjustments and see how productive they are, but also be a little bit patient with the incremental change that you’re making.

Cathy: It sounds like that engagement was just the right kind of support for this person at the right time, and that small adjustments had a really big effect. Slowing down the pace, having a little more emphasis on body language was enough to help this person share their great content in a way that felt like it was hitting the right type of leadership note for this audience.

I’ll say I have used video recording in my coaching too. When you’re doing communications coaching, it is so helpful to show somebody what they look like from the outside in. Nobody enjoys the experience exactly, right? None of us enjoy being recorded or watching the recording, but it’s invaluable to get that almost third-party experience of looking at yourself, and it also helps you see the progress, I think.

All right. Our third paradigm here was the person who shows up in interpersonal situations in a way that’s holding them back from their goals. I thought I would jump in with an example.

In this case, I was working with a C-level executive at a tech company, and she was looking for ways to engage more productively with her team. I think she had gotten some formal feedback that there were things her team wasn’t happy with. In particular, she was getting feedback about her communication style, that it just wasn’t working for them.

So to get started on this coaching work, I recommended a 360 report. And Thom, I know this is something you use also in coaching. But when we say 360, what we really mean is investigating a bit as a coach with the people who are giving the feedback to figure out what’s working for this person that they should keep and what isn’t working, so they can think about what goals they want to set for changing.

I did short interviews, maybe 30 minutes, with eight or so people, in this executive’s organization. I talked to her boss, I talked to some of her peers, and I talked to some of her direct reports. And then I synthesized the themes from these interviews into a narrative report, and I tried to document her communication strengths, which in this case included things like talking about their product with great conviction, winning over customers, and communicating with their colleagues in a peer-like, non-hierarchical way that they really appreciated But the report also focused on the communications pain points that I was hearing in these interviews, and those really boiled down to the fact that she was giving unstructured feedback that people felt was hard to deal with. She wasn’t really clarifying her expectations when she asked people to do tasks, and they felt like she wasn’t establishing clear priorities. All the things on their to-do list, she wasn’t helping them decide what was important and what wasn’t.

In the course of the coaching conversations that followed her reading and absorbing this report, we started exploring the story behind this style. If you show up as a leader with a particular style, you can usually go back and figure out why you’re showing up that way, why that style makes sense to you, where it comes from. And she noted that she had spent most of her career in settings where she was highly autonomous, where she was expected to figure things out for herself, and she was very comfortable working that way. She realized that she was operating as if everybody wanted that kind of environment, and she was assuming that if she were more directive and specific with her team, that would be unwelcome and demotivating.

But I think pretty early on in these conversations, she could see that the environment that she had developed this style in was really different from the environment where she was operating now, and she could see that these assumptions she was making about her team were clearly unfounded. I invited her to take the alternative perspective. To see this from the point of view of somebody who wanted their manager to be more directive and help them structure things a little better, and she was pretty easily able to empathize with that point of view.

In addition to that, we talked a little bit about the definitions of what it means to be a manager versus a leader. We talked about how a good manager adds value by helping their team deliver results, that the manager is really there to remove the barriers, to create the foundation that they need, and that leaders probably do a lot of that too, but specifically leaders point the way. They say, “That’s where we’re trying to get to,” and they don’t do as much work to figure out how people are going to get there.

So she then took steps to rebalance her communication to better address both of those things, both the what, the leadership vision, where they were trying to get to, and the how, that manager-style direction about helping them break the problems down and figure out how to tackle them. In the short run, I would say as a result of this coaching, her direct reports felt that they were getting more help. In the long run, though, this executive who I was coaching, she developed greater self-awareness around what she likes, and this helped shape her career. In her next career move, she decided she wanted more leadership and less management because that suited her style better, and so she was able to have more clarity about where she was going

Thom: That’s a great outcome. That’s a really, multi-level outcome, I’m guessing it was also achieved in part because your coachee was really committed, and engaged in the process with you.

Cathy: Yeah, that’s an important element to mention here. We come into these engagements with a certain amount of expertise and a plan of attack and ideas for how we’re going to work. But as for all things in life, you get out of the experience what you put in, and a committed, engaged coachee will always benefit more. People who take a lot of notes, people who show up for their coaching engagements with ideas for what they want to talk about, this is what we call engagement, and it’s really important.

Thom, given that you’re bringing this up, what do you think are some of the factors that might help a coachee get the maximum benefit from this kind of coaching?

Thom: I think the first would be being ready to make changes, not being overly attached to doing something the way that it’s always been done. There’s a readiness to try things differently. And with that is a fair dose of curiosity and a willingness to look at the patterns and see what they might mean and what might be behind the patterns. So there’s that readiness.

A second factor here would be the ability to meet regularly, one-on-one, a readiness to have, sustained focused conversations, and protecting that time in your calendar because sustained focus is really important for continuity and for building momentum for change.

A third factor I think is the willingness to bring real tasks and challenges into the conversation, into the coaching cadence. Like scheduling a meeting with the coach before an important presentation or before an upcoming meeting or important conversation so that you’re fully prepared, and then having the perspective or having the presence to record observations and debrief on those observations with the coach afterward to debrief on the experience and think through what worked and what further adjustments might be something to experiment with.

The final component here would be remembering that building new skills as an adult requires really an important willingness to experiment. Ideally we can find some relatively low-risk situations in which to experiment with these new approaches, with these new ways to communicate, with these new interpersonal habits. It’s important to observe how those adjustments go and really bring the data, if you will, back to the coaching conversation so that you can reflect on it together and then go through that cycle again.

So those are the factors that I would call out.

Cathy: Yeah, I completely agree, and I really do want to underscore those last couple points you made. Communications coaching can be so practical. If you focus with your coach on real tasks and real challenges in your calendar, and you use your coach as a sounding board and a thought partner for preparing and for debriefing, then you know exactly how this coaching is helping you, and the learning is practical, and the progress is tangible.

Thom: I agree, Cathy. It can be a point of really huge leverage.

So here we are. we’ve covered what communication coaching is, what it looks like, and what makes it work. How should we wrap this up?

Cathy: I guess I’d just like to add that as coaches, we are always looking for our next great client. If anything we’ve talked about today resonates with you, someone listening today, for yourself or for a valued colleague, please get in touch.

Thom: We’d love to hear from you. You can find us on our website kenningassociates.com

Cathy: Thom, that was fun. Thanks for talking with me today.

Thom: It was a pleasure, Cathy.