SCC involves three sets of activities.
1) Selecting growth areas that are important to the leader and the organization
2) Involving stakeholders while implementing change actions
3) Measuring leadership growth as perceived by stakeholders.
The coach & the leader collaborate in the implementation. The coach facilitates the entire coaching process. The coach is committed to unlimited coaching hours to guarantee measurable leadership growth.
Selecting Leadership Growth Area
The coach and the leader identify respondents best placed to give relevant feedback on what the leader can improve upon. The coach gets this feedback from structural assessments and behavioural interviews. The coach and the leader then assess the collated feedback and identify the 1-2 leadership growth areas that the leader can work upon. These areas need to be important not only to the leader but to the organization as well. The required buy-in from the leader’s boss ensures that the organization backs the coaching agenda. This set of activities is completed by the end of two months.
To explain the process better, let us say, that the leadership growth area for the leader is ‘collaborative decision-making’ where-in the leader will comprehensively involve others in decision-making.
Involving Stakeholders
Now, the leader and the coach move onto the next set of activities. First, they identify stakeholders (people most impacted by the leadership growth area) and get them on-board.
For the next ten months, each month, the leader in a monthly process first asks stakeholders for feedback on how he or she fared in collaborative decision-making last month & then asks for 2-3 suggestions to improve in the next month. The leader does this with each stakeholder in minimal time and within existing work routines.
The leader & the coach then meet for a monthly coaching session in which they review past months feedback, do their own review, and create the coming month’s action-plan. This is the real thick of action, the heart of the work involving the leader and the coach. They tackle all challenges that come in the way of success.
When this monthly action plan is finalized, the leader communicates the action-plan including the actions he or she is committed to in the coming month for better collaborative decision-making.
One critical point here.It is not the coach or the leader who will determine whether the leadership change has truly been sustained. It is the stakeholders. Keeping this in mind, the leader then walks the talk on leadership change in his on-the-job routines.
The fact of life is that people persist with their perceptions about other people. Subjective opinions are hard to change. The leader has to weigh in with consolidated and sustained improvement till the time there is success in changing the perception of the stakeholders! The monthly process is designed to ensure this rigorous discipline & conscientious application. Every month, the leader implements a modified action plan following the same steps outlined above.
Measuring Leadership Growth
In a year-long coaching engagement, there is a ‘Leadership Growth Progress Review’ after the fifth month and the eight month. In this online survey, stakeholders share their opinion on how the leadership change effort is coming along. Care is taken that survey results cannot be traced to their origin. These quarterly surveys are critical in monitoring whether the year-long change journey is on track.
We end with the Annual ‘Leadership Growth Progress Review’ where stakeholders give their final opinion on whether the leader has changed and then able to sustain it.
The process ends with the coach then helping the leader in strategizing how he or she can be the coach and use the same process for helping his or her team-members improve.