Our personal values tell us what’s important. They are inherent in every decision we make, they set the standards by which we live our lives, and we use our values to evaluate the decisions we’ve made. Therefore, a team without a clear set of values is a team that lacks the foundation for making decisions. If the vision of an organisation or team talks to the WHY, its values talk to the HOW. Both are essential for a team to become successful because they guide decisions, set the standards, and influence the right behaviours.

The Approach

After introductions the team performed a simple exercise to help them understand the importance of values. Engaging in a short reflection exercise helped them to get more in touch with themselves and their personal values. Using post-it notes the team was presented with a simple question to help them identify their own values. Each team member identified their top five personal values. Next the team was guided to create their personal hierarchy with the most important at the top. By determining each team members’ values first they began to recognise how their own values have influenced their own lives. It also provided an insight for other team members as to why others in their team make decisions differently.

We then developed the team values in a similar manner. We identified those things that were important to each team member individually when working as part of a team, which were then group together. These were then discussed as a group and voted on in terms of importance. Helping the team understand the hierarchy of their values is essential because it provides guidance whenever there is a values conflict.

Once we determined the core values, the team articulated what each value meant to them.

Lastly, the team determined the behaviours they would ‘see’ and what they would ‘not see’ with regard to each of the values. Each team member gave permission to the others to hold them to account; this ensures everyone adheres to the spirit of their new team values.

The team was then challenged to come up with ways to bring their new values to life.

To help Sarah create a new view of the experience I asked her what’s known as the miracle question. “Imagine you went to sleep at night and, while you were sleeping, a miracle occurred. Now, imagine waking up unaware that this miracle happened. What would you be doing differently?” I guided Sarah through her morning activities, her thoughts, the things she’d be noticing, and so on, all the way up to and beyond her dental appointment. The overall response was one of calm; it was just a normal day like any other. The purpose of this exercise was to reframe the experience ‘as if’ going to the dentist was not an issue and “loosened” her phobic response a little.

Next, through a gentle trance, I asked Sarah to remember the first time she experienced the fear of the dentist. Her answer surprised her when she said she was 2 years old. Regressing to that time all those years ago, but fully dissociated (outside looking in), she imagined herself way above the event looking down on top of it. I asked Sarah to imagine a time after that experience when she was safe and comfortable. We placed that image on a cinema screen in black and white and she imagined herself sitting in the audience looking up at the screen. Here I asked her to imagine floating up out of her body in the seat into the projection booth. This causes a double dissociation which will allow her to re-experience the event without experiencing the emotional intensity. From here Sarah went to a time before the incident and, from the safety of projection room looking down on herself in the audience watching the screen, ran through the whole experience in black and white. Next I asked her to white out the image and bring it back in full colour, to imagine floating back down into her body in the audience and then into the colour image. Now I asked Sarah to rewind the whole experience (while she was in it and in full colour) from the end to the beginning in about 2 seconds. We repeated that exercise a couple of times which ended up recoding how her brain accessed this experience.

Traumatic experiences shouldn’t prevent us from moving forward in life but should be used as an opportunity to learn from them and tap into our incredible resources that may be lying dormant within us. Therefore, when I asked Sarah what she needed to learn from this early event to enable her to let go of it completely she responded that she was physically bigger now and had a feeling of being more in control and so could communicate any discomfort she was experiencing.

Using these new learnings we moved back along her ‘timeline’ of events clearing up any related emotions caused by similar events wherein she discovered a new lesson; “I will never make another person feel that way”. Lastly we focused on clearing out the kinaesthetic (bodily) feeling (she felt sharp painful feeling in her chest) until she was completely at piece.

Emily is a banking professional and leads a team of about 17 people. Active and confident in many aspects of her life, in her spare time Emily is also studying part-time. Running team meetings and doing presentations was becoming particularly difficult for Emily and her anxiety was beginning to affect her performance and sense of self. As part of her work and her studies she is expected to deliver presentations which increased her sense of dread.

Emily’s goal was to feel more relaxed and comfortable when talking to groups of people and when giving presentations. We agreed to meet for one coaching session. During the coaching session we explored how Emily ‘did’ anxiety (it’s important to recognise that in most cases anxiety is something that is generated within us…we have a mental strategy that we run at certain times that leads us to feel this way.) When giving presentations Emily explained that she would imagine the faces of the people she was presenting to and start to think about how they were looking at her and judging her. She felt a rising sense of discomfort and worried that she would forget what she had to say leading to her audience judging her even more harshly. This is would lead to a destructive spiralling of her thoughts which caused a debilitating feeling of anxiety.

As mentioned earlier anxiety is often caused by running a mental strategy that leads us to feel a certain way. I explained this to Emily and she could see how she was causing her anxiety but couldn’t see a way out of it. Armed with the information that Emily wanted to feel more confident we explored how she ran her ‘strategy’ for this. I knew that Emily could easily access this strategy because people who suffer from anxiety associate into their feelings very easily. This is a double-edge sword which can lead us to feeling, in Emily’s case, confidence or anxiety depending on how we interpret events and situations. Understanding how Emily ‘does’ confidence and how she ‘does’ anxiety we ran both of these strategies at the same time which caused her sense of anxiety to collapse in on itself…it in effect, it disappeared.

The next step was to set Emily up to succeed in the future and to be able to trigger her confidence strategy as and when she wanted. Having this ability is particularly useful for anyone at times when they step outside of their comfort zone! Once installed Emily now found that when she thought of events in the past that would have previously brought up a whole backlog of emotions, she was perfectly calm and could see herself performing easily and effortlessly.

How we interpret events and situations can have a large bearing on how we feel. Believing we will fail at something and that it would be disastrous for our career and reputation would cause anyone to feel anxious! However, if approaching new experiences, including meeting new people, as an opportunity for growth, for learning (because what else is failure really?), we are more likely to be more relaxed and positive about the situation. With this in mind I shared with Emily a strategy for capturing and effectively dealing with unwanted negative thoughts turning them into a more positive way of approaching situations.

Putting her newly learned strategies into practice Emily soon surprised herself at how comfortable she now was giving presentations, talking to groups of people, and even “talking up more in meetings which I never used to do!” She would often find herself in the middle of a presentation thinking to herself, “look at me…this is great!”

Three months later Emily contacted me again and shared that things have been progressing well and she had recently organised an event that would be attracting over 100 people. As she was the organiser she felt she needed to open the event and introduce the keynote speaker. Emily had never spoken to a group this large before and it was causing some of her old feelings of anxiety to surface. We decided that we would meet again for another coaching session and go a little deeper to understand where these feelings of anxiety originated from.

As we explored this Emily shared that she noticed she becomes more anxious when she is feeling under pressure, i.e. has a lot on and feels a sense of overwhelm. This occurs largely because Emily likes to please people and doesn’t often say no to requests. This is a problem when running a team of 17 people! Exploring this more we ran an exercise called Timeline Therapy and sought to identify when Emily first felt these feelings of needing to please others (this was connected to the fear/anxiety of not being accepted or rejection.) During this exercise Emily went far back into her past to when she very young. At this time Emily was in an accident which lead to three near-death experiences. She realised in an instant that she was carrying around her mother’s guilt from that event. This manifested itself in a need to be liked and to please other people. Once Emily recognised this it was like a weight was lifted off her shoulders and she couldn’t stop smiling. The feeling of guilt that she was carrying with her for so long lifted and with it, like a string of pearls, all the other emotions such as anxiety disappeared as well.

In Emily’s own words…

This organisation employs the Holacracy Model of management which organises individuals into Circles with approximately 7 members per Circle. The Circle Leads are responsible for providing leadership, line management, and mentoring to Circle Members who are often consulting on different client sites. Circle Leads themselves also consult on client sites and often head up an Educational Practice, which collectively, leaves them very time poor. There was evidence that, although the Circle Leads were highly technically skilled, they were looking for the right skills to get the best out of their team, to deal with difficult conversations, and to coach their teams to better results.

Through interviewing key members of the leadership team Setanta Consulting gained an understanding of the challenges their teams faced and the results they were after. It quickly became clear that the organisation wanted to provide more than just leadership skills for their teams, it wanted to provide participants with the skills to draw on their inner resources, to understand their motivations, to improve their communication skills and develop the resilience that is often necessary when working on challenging projects.

Using the organisation’s vision and values as a guide, we proposed a 10-week leadership coaching programme that consisted of 5 workshops targeting key areas of development and 10 one-on-one coaching sessions for each Circle Lead.

Developing leadership from the inside out is a core philosophy of Results Coaching and the first 5 weeks focused on laying the foundation of leadership within each of the participants. Because everyone has different strengths the one-on-one coaching sessions were individualised for each participant and concentrated on achieving their objectives for the coaching programme (both personal and professional.)

Building on the foundation achieved in the first part of the programme the remaining 5 weeks focused on core leadership skills such as:
– Developing a leadership philosophy
– Understanding vision and values
– Aligning the vision to strategy and strategy to operations for measurable results
– Creating high performance teams
– Coaching team members for better results

Coaching was a completely new experience for the vast majority of participants and the depth of understanding that was achieved through the one-on-one sessions surprised many. A “little scary at first” the participants embraced the approach quickly and started to experience immediate results. Through assignments that furthered the coaching, participants reported back on their achievements in dealing with situations they previously thought were outside of their skill-set.

Over 90% of participants reported an increase in confidence and an understanding of their values and motivations enabling them to overcome situations that would have presented as a challenge in the past. “It’s been brilliant! The focus on values / needs is a unique way of understanding what leadership means. It’s something entirely personal and helps you understand who you are and why you do things, good for helping you always keep in check with these as well as being aware why others do things the way they do.”

A heavy focus of the programme was on practical skills that can be immediately applied to driving issues to achieve better outcomes for all parties. “Aside from the overall learnings that I got from the program Cillín has given me lots and lots of practical techniques that I find I am using in everyday situations – both in and out of work. I have raved about this program to others and am really keen to continue learning and using everything that I have been exposed to.”

Core to our philosophy of providing a high ROI for our clients we measure our success on lasting behavioural change which can be reflected in the feedback from the Practice Manager who also attended the programme, “I have had ongoing feedback from my colleagues who also went through Cillín’s course, and coaching. We all continue to reference the ideas and learnings we took from these sessions, and share them within our own teams. Awesome outcome!”

This coaching programme was delivered to all Circle Leads nationally in 2014 and 2015.

Adam was previously seen as a star performer and as the “go-to” guy for advice around technical challenges. Due to the organisations rapid expansion Adam’s line manager felt that Adam had lost his place in the company and was disengaged. The combined impact of this led to a decrease in productivity, damage to his brand as a professional, and a heightened number of situations that ended in unnecessary conflict. Adam felt he had no clear direction for where he wanted to take his career and needed to develop skills to get better outcomes for the teams in which he interacted.

Upon determining the key objectives that we would focus on for Adam we agreed on a six-session one-on-one coaching package to be held on a weekly basis. During the first coaching meeting with Adam we discussed the objectives in detail and Adam expressed his interest and openness in “giving the coaching a go”.

Firstly we focused on an exercise to help Adam tap into who he truly is, what his strengths are, and what is most important to him. Each coaching session ended with specific coaching assignments that furthered the coaching process. Adam took to the assignments with interest and enthusiasm which clearly indicated his buy-in to the process and his willingness to overcome anything that might be holding him back.

Once Adam had a deeper understanding of what is most import to him we continued to focus on his objectives. Using psychology as a backdrop for these discussions and drawing on specific examples from Adam’s own experience we analysed habitual thought practices and the concept of ‘why we do the things we do’. Understanding these concepts enabled Adam to analyse his own behaviours and to create ‘in-the-moment’ awareness of triggers that were leading to less than resourceful behaviours.  Now consciously aware of his hot-spots Adam was able to select from a range of options that, collectively, would lead to more positive outcomes.

With the foundation for change in place, we turned our attention to more concrete skills such as being mindful of the language we use, practicing effective listening, building rapport with others, and focusing on generating positive outcomes through gaining clarity and collaboration with all parties involved.

As Adam continued to experiment with new approaches to situations he reported more and more positive experiences with each passing week. During the post-coaching debrief it was felt that more observable evidence was needed to ensure Adam had gained all of the benefits of coaching. It was also felt that Adam could be more concrete in his career development plan which was a key coaching objective.

We agreed that an additional eight coaching sessions with a range of new objectives to build on previous successes would be beneficial.  Coaching resumed with Adam and he quickly capitalised on the feedback further enhancing his newly learned skills of communication, influencing, and rebuilding his brand. A key focus for this round of coaching was for Adam to clearly articulate his career development plan and, guided by a template, he quickly determined the areas he would like to focus on and his thoughts on how he might be able to achieve these.

Adam continued to show accelerated progress right through the coaching period and very quickly resumed his position as the “go-to” guy in his technical are of expertise. This was largely accomplished by Adam setting up lunch-time interest groups, proactively attending the project meetings across a range of product teams, and by writing a weekly ’wrap’ to key stakeholders highlighting the technical decisions made across a range of products and the wins he and the teams he was working with achieved.

With a growing interest in leadership we explored several leadership styles that Adam could employ to get better outcomes for himself, the teams he is working with, and for the company. Sharing many examples of overcoming challenging conversations and being able to influence others, to “let go”, and giving others the space to explore their own thinking his colleagues have remarked that “it’s great to have the old Adam back.”

Adam is back to performing at his previously high standard, is much happier in himself, and is now looking for team leadership opportunities within the organisation.