80:20 Performance Solutions Ltd

An Exercise in Self Awareness for a Frustrated Executive

Use of the LAB Profile and iWAM to generate a motivational profile to expand an executive's self awareness and consequently behavioural flexibility.

The Situation

Situation in a Nutshell: Claire is a Director of a family owned SME business to business service company and has ambitious plans to grow the business. With responsibility for developing new business and managing Service Level Agreements Claire has a significant financial incentive to succeed. She does not see eye to eye with the Managing Director on certain specific issues and feels that her contributions are not adequately recognised and rewarded. She feels stymied by the MD’s polarised view of how certain things should be done.

Behavioural Symptoms: Claire seems to recognise the source of her frustrations but seems unable to demonstrate the requisite behavioural flexibility to achieve the changes that she wants.

She is also focussed heavily on what the other people involved think and how she can get them to agree with her on what is most important.

Desired Coaching Outcomes: To get a better sense of where her own behavioural traits come from and to look at how she can improve her sense of satisfaction in work.

Coaching Considerations: Claire gets frustrated by specific aspects of her interactions with the MD, but is confident that in the bigger scheme of their relationship they get along well.

After her Free Consultation she has asked for a motivational profile, these can be used to identify strong motivational traits which can sometimes result in poor behavioural flexibility.

Applications and Outcomes

Coaching Format: The online iWAM profiling tool was used to generate an initial profile in the general context of work. In a face to face meeting the stronger patterns in this profile were elicited conversationally using the LAB Profile tool. It became apparent that there were a number of correlations between the points of conflict with the MD and the strongest patterns on her profile.

Behavioural flexibility is often critical to influencing other people, the ability to vary one’s own behaviour to accommodate other people’s needs. Improving Claire’s ability to influence more effortlessly and without conflict rested with recognising where she lacks flexibility – the strongest of her motivational and working traits from the LAB Profile and iWAM tools.

A number of very simple and very quick exercises that Claire could practise to sensitise herself to when she needed to exhibit greater behavioural flexibility were introduced.

Duration: Online Exercise + Face to Face Session of 3 Hours + additional telephone support agreed as required.

Results: Claire reported that the Self Awareness generated from the profiling exercise put the conflicts into perspective and equipped her with a much greater degree of self awareness. This self awareness made it easier to spot when she was being stubborn and her actions were sabotaging her larger ambitions. This recognition re-introduced behavioural choice points which in turn made her more effective in dealing with communication issues.