Case Study – Nourse Leadership Strategies

Go to the Source: Underperforming Teams and Leader Behavior

Assessing the Team

I began the engagement by collecting data from Susan, interviews with team members, the organizational engagement survey, and a written survey of team functioning. Some of the themes from my assessment included:

Susan confessed she was afraid to confront Barbara since she had so much tenure and strong alliances with senior leaders across the organization. She feared facing Barbara would cause her to quit, leaving Susan in a precarious situation with key division stakeholders.

Team members observed that they were generally okay except for their interactions with Barbara because of her unwillingness to collaborate and her defensive personality.

Team interviews and the engagement survey revealed that Susan experienced substantial negative impacts on her credibility and reputation since her team members wondered why she was not addressing the issue with Barbara.

The team’s culture was largely top-down, command-and-control oriented, providing relatively few opportunities for the team to provide input to influence key division priorities or raise challenging issues to Susan.

The team survey revealed that the team’s overall effectiveness was mediocre at best, and members struggled with conflict, either avoiding it or criticizing each other behind their backs.

Working with Barbara

I began by coaching Barbara to explore the assessment findings, especially the impacts of her top-down approach and the team impacts of her reluctance to confront Susan’s challenging behavior. We explored the shifts that would have to happen in her style to enable a genuinely high-performance, collaborative team. I challenged Barbara’s ungrounded assumptions that addressing Susan’s behavioral issues would immediately cause her to resign. In our coaching sessions, I assumed the role of Susan and invited her to practice delivering feedback to me so she could develop mastery in this skill. We continued this process until she felt ready to engage Barbara and address issues for the team.

Working with the Leadership Team

My work with the whole team began with a half-day retreat to debrief the assessment data, formulate a team vision and ground rules, and identify aspects of the team dynamic that needed improvement. We then conducted ongoing team coaching sessions every 3-4 weeks to continue the work that started in the retreat that included practical actions team members would take between sessions. I also coached Barbara after each session, inviting her to reflect on the team’s interactions and her behavior.

We explored several team issues: trust, communication, collaboration, alignment, and conflict. Each session consisted of an educational segment and a team-led discussion of a business issue, enabling me to observe team dynamics and share real-time observations. In one session, we used a conflict styles assessment to surface patterns for each team member on their strengths and weaknesses in navigating conflict. After several months, Barbara developed the courage to let go of her micro-managing tendencies and let the team meet with me separately to enable their capacity to self-manage and speak honestly with each other.

Outcomes

Before concluding the six-month engagement, I readministered the team survey to determine any perceived changes in team functioning. Among the most significant positive shifts:

43% improvement in their ability to surface and navigate conflict

26% improvement in their ability to trust and rely on each other

23% improvement in alignment among team members

These outcomes align with author Patrick Lencioni’s work on team effectiveness, which suggests how trust among team members and the ability to surface and resolve conflict contribute to team alignment. I also noticed significant shifts among team members in their ability to surface challenging issues, respectfully pushing back on Barbara, and function more autonomously. Barbara was much more relaxed and engaging with the team, enabling the team to respond in kind.

Rarely is the cause of an underperforming team simply a result of the team members. The leadership team plays an integral role in influencing team behavior. Thus, successful team coaching engagements must include attention to the team leader as well as the interactions of the members.

# # # # #

Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience coaching healthcare leaders and teams to help them succeed. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or kevin@nourseleadership.com

Case Study: Evolution of a Newly Promoted Leader

Successful executive coaches draw upon evidence-based theories to achieve tangible results for their clients. One helpful framework recognizes how leaders evolve according to predictable stages. Consider the case of a newly promoted leader who nearly derailed and how leadership stage theory informed our coaching approach.

Susan is a newly promoted healthcare leader to her role in revenue reporting with four staff members. As a new manager, she felt overwhelmed trying to learn all she needed to know about her role, manage her team, and respond to her boss’s demands. In her role only a couple of months, Susan damaged many key relationships because of her overly assertive communication style. Her manager, the CFO, voiced his desire for her to delegate more downward to join his strategic planning meetings with the CEO. Susan started to doubt the wisdom of taking the promotion and feels exhausted as she works most weekends trying to learn more about the technical aspects of her direct reports roles.

Overview of Stage Theory

Numerous theories explain the process of how one becomes an effective change leader. Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs developed an agility framework that explores leader evolution based on developmental stages. This type of model provides a valuable roadmap for executive coaches support the growth of their clients based on predictable stages of development. As leaders evolve through these stages, they are better able to lead increasingly complex change initiatives successfully.

The five stages include expert, achiever, catalyst, co-creator, and synergist.

Expert level managers focus on the subject-matter competence and solo efforts to get things done. As a result, they are generally capable of leading simple change projects. Approximately 45% of managers are functioning at this level.

Achiever-level managers are attuned to strategic views of their role and organization, as well as producing results. Research suggests that 35% of managers function at this level.

Catalyst-level managers can build capacity by developing and empowering people, building innovative organizational cultures, and adaptive communication capabilities. Approximately 5% of managers function at this level.

Co-creators are skilled at building shared purpose, collaborative relationships, and service to others. Researchers estimate that only 4% of managers function at this level.

Synergists embrace a holistic perspective that integrates their life purpose with their vocation. Only 1% of managers reach this stage of development. Synergists are capable of navigating the most complex types of organizational change and transformation.

Susan as an Expert Stage Manager

Through initial conversations with Susan it became apparent she was functioning at the expert stage of leader development. Susan experienced limits to her ability to lead change projects – mostly incremental process improvements. These limitations stem from her limited ability to think strategically, over-reliance on her capabilities versus leveraging others’ talents, and limited self-awareness.

Coaching Approach with Susan

As her executive coach, I began with a 360-degree assessment to help Susan understand how others perceived her. We then created a development plan and met with her manager to align on coaching’s successful outcomes. Our goal was to help Susan begin advancing toward the next stage of development: Synergist.

My approach to working with Susan included:

Enhancing self-awareness, including her assumptions, self-beliefs, emotional triggers, and unproductive patterns.
Reframing what it means to be a leader from subject-matter expert to building relationships with others and leveraging their talents to augment her weaknesses.
Building her skills in learning how to enlist and engage her stakeholders instead of overusing assertive advocacy skills and talking at them.
Adopting a broader view of her role to examine interdependencies with peers and the organization’s broader direction, including strategic priorities that could influence her focus.
Leveraging her talent better by explaining her expectations, providing feedback, and helping team members step up more so she could delegate more.

Coaching Outcomes

After working with Susan for six months, she achieved some notable improvements:

She became more aware of her emotional triggers and learned to avoid reacting at the moment, helping improve trust with others.
Focusing her efforts more on creating successful outcomes instead of overemphasizing her technical expertise.
Developing trusting relationships with her peers and building greater alignment, enabling her to break down silos that limited her department’s effectiveness.
More successful outcomes from change projects she was managing since she leveraged others’ talent and skills to augment her capabilities.

Stage theory is a valuable way for executive coaches to support leader growth by defining critical developmental milestones on the journey to the top. These frameworks can be a big difference in helping new managers accelerate their growth and impact as highly effective leaders.

# # # # #
Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience developing transformational change leaders in healthcare and other sectors. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or info@nourseleadership.com.