Improving team performance with Coaching Loops

[SimonMorris]

Practice makes perfect.... Coaching makes perfection quicker

We work in an industry obsessed with metrics and performance. Strange then that we don't currently have a standardised process for measuring and improving the performance of our most expensive resources - our people.

Whilst we strive to automate and design repeatable processes there is a big variable factor involved in guaranteeing a successful outcome.

The people involved in a process are inherently variable - We take time to train. We have good and bad days. We forget stuff. We perform well and badly in an entirely unpredictable and unmeasurable way.

To address this organisations have a few different methods to use. You might be familiar with:

1. Annual appraisals
2. Bi-annual appraisals
3. Regular performance meetings
4. Formal mentoring or coaching

I'm sure everyone reading this article has been subjected to the first method. The dreaded annual appraisal.

Speaking as someone who managed a large team in my previous organisation I can now reveal to my engineers - if you happen to be reading this - that I dreaded your annual appraisal more than you did.

They took forever to prepare. They made both you and I stressed and uncomfortable and I had to scratch around finding examples of your good and bad work to discuss with you.

You and I sat down in a quiet room and nervously reviewed work long since forgotten. I made sure to get an equal balance of great work to make you feel good as well as poor work that I wanted you to improve on.

Of course, you had an entire year to forget about that meeting and I really doubt you got much benefit from the experience.

The only thing worse than doing your annual appraisal would have been to make the experience bi-annual and double the pain involved.

Speaking to readers of the blog now - you might have worked for organisations that invested in formal mentoring or coaching. I hope this was valuable for you, as it was probably expensive for your employer. Too expensive to effectively coach every employee so only star-performers got the benefit.

Coaching Loops

I'd like to talk about concept known as Coaching Loops.

Coaching Loops are a method that allow you to provide regular feedback to your team members based on the work they do within ITSM processes.

The feedback given is fresh - there is no point giving feedback on a Change Request written months ago - and delivered in a timely fashion. In fact you should be giving feedback within 2 days of the work being done.

We'll be so prompt in providing feedback that we'll be providing feedback whilst the process is still being followed. Imagine raising a Change Request to make a change on the network and your request is forwarded to a coach before it reaches the CAB.

The coach would intercept your progression within the process and positively influence the outcome of the process. How is that compared to an annual appraisal where you are told your change request just wasn't good enough.

Who needs Coaching?

Well - who doesn't want to improve their performance? Coaching Loops are applicable to anyone involved in a process.

Coaching is especially useful when implementing new processes to help adoption and to ensure things are working correctly. You'd also want to provide coaching for people new to a process. If you have new Change Managers you might want to review their work whilst they settle into the role.

If you rapidly expand a team or hire new engineers Coaching Loops are an ideal way to measure their performance and help them become productive quickly.

Coaching within ITSM processes

ITSM processes are perfect for Coaching Loops. We have defined models for dealing with Incidents, implementing Changes and so on.

Here is a great example of where coaching loops can provide a huge amount of value. You are familiar with the idea of transferring an Incident from one engineer to another.

Perhaps the Servicedesk would log an issue and try to resolve before having to transfer to a Network team.

This moment within the process - the transfer of an Incident - is a critical moment for the overall success of the process. All of the work done by the Servicedesk engineer might be lost if the handover is of poor quality. The handover of an Incident introduces risk, delay, loss of focus and potentially rework.

Coaching Loops would definitely help here - lets monitor these occurrences and provide feedback on how well they are handled with a very short feedback loop.

Learn more about Coaching Loops

This blog post is a thinly veiled advertisement for my ServiceNow Knowledge 12 talk in New Orleans.

If you're attending #know12 please come along to my session Coaching Loops in ServiceNow on Tuesday 15th May.

I'll be talking about Coaching Loops in more detail and showing off our implementation.

If you are coming to the talk lets hook up on Twitter, and I'll see you in New Orleans

Follow @simo_morris
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