I made some notes and shared it back with Neel. They were patterns that I had observed about commonality in his thoughts and actions during as he relived each of those success stories. Neel was silent for 10 minutes as he read through my notes. It was an A-Ha moment for him and the awareness made him smile unconsciously. He had realized about the positive connotation each such moment had made to him. Without me prompting him any further, Neel started opening up and asking me ‘Why did I not realize this before?’
Miraculously Neel wanted to go back to the first phase of coaching and discuss about goal setting. It was already our fourth session. My questions to him were:
- If you were to live your life FULLY what is the first change that you would like to make?
- What specific areas of your life would be positively impacted by your change?
- How could you make this goal more specific or measurable?
- What is the support you require to achieve this goal?
Once we had re-established our rapport, Neel began attending the biweekly sessions with a lot more commitment. Neel articulated a statement based on some underlying beliefs that he had been holding deep within. “I want to be a good leader who understands his people better and help foster innovation without imposing too many controls on my team.”
This was a defining statement for Neel since it set the direction to the way forward. He realized that his style of leadership did have a confining impact on his team member’s productivity especially in the R&D team. One of the core values in Ajay’s organization was ‘Fostering Innovation’ and most leaders promoted this value rather fiercely. With Neel’s style of wanting to be in the knowhow of everything including mundane operational things, the team felt that they were losing out on the freedom to experiment and take risks in trying something new. Indeed an ironic state especially for an R&D team.
The 3600 feedback taken from Neel’s team was quite an eye opener for him. Initially he was defensive and went into a denial mode rejecting all the comments posted in the report (even the positive comments). So to ease him from this state, I gave him a short questionnaire and asked him to rate himself on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being least likely and 5 being most likely) with regard to the following dimensions related to his perception.
- Competitiveness
- Social Responsibility
- Stakeholder Orientation
- Change Orientation
- Teamwork
- Fun at Work
- Responsibility & Accountability
- Building Trust
- Learning Environment
- Results Orientation
- Respect for Individual
- Entrepreneurship