Catalyst Consulting’s Coaching Workshop: Coaching can improve your Six Sigma results!

During this three-hour workshop held at the Six Sigma Summit, London in April 2007, we heard how and when you can use coaching to support your Six Sigma deployments and projects. We also discovered how to become more aware of the opportunities to build and apply coaching skills.

Throughout the workshop, professional coach Susan Kuepfer—previously a Six Sigma Deployment Champion with Caterpillar—demonstrated her expertise in executive coaching.

The objectives for attending the workshop, as stated by the participants were:

• How to explain clearly what makes a Six Sigma project;
• How to motivate people to use Six Sigma tools;
• How to obtain the necessary skills to coach people through projects;
• How to help people understand DfSS; and
• How to implement a coaching network in an organisation.

After a benchmarking session, we discussed our most important Six Sigma deployment issues and challenges. Our list contained the following points:

• the business support (buy-in);
• the involvement of your team and how to gain their commitment;
• the lack of proactive participation in actively championing projects;
• certification is seen as an aim in itself rather than a tool to get results;
• the difficulties with effective mentoring and implementation resource issues;
• choosing the wrong projects; and
• poor project completion rate and resistance to change.

Coaching is an empowering leadership process that uses an ’Asking Mode‘ versus a ’Telling Mode‘ as a means of helping people achieve results and attain goals. Telling involves being directive: you are telling someone what to do and how to do it based upon what you believe the solution should be. Telling can sometimes disempower others because it takes away their opportunity to problem-solve and learn. By contrast, coaching employs the skill of asking the right questions, in the right way, at the right time. Asking/Coaching assumes the person probably has the answers already, and by asking questions the coach guides that person to discover those answers and to develop his or her own solutions and action steps.

The advantages of Telling are that you use your own knowledge and skills, and it can be useful in a crisis situation. Telling is also appropriate for relatively unimportant tasks that need to be done quickly or situations that require no knowledge transfer.

The benefits of Asking/Coaching are that the coach does not necessarily need to be the expert or use his or her own knowledge and skills, because the coach is not solving the problem for the coachee. Coaching integrates the perspective and strengths of the coachee as well as his or her (sometimes hidden) issues; it also increases the buy-in commitment because people are more likely to follow through on something in which they have a more active role. The coach may brainstorm possible solutions or share knowledge with the coachee but will generally try to avoid directing the coachee as to which solution to choose. By asking instead of telling, the coach is helping to build skills for the coachee’s future development; the ‘coachee’ has to do the thinking and therefore can take ownership of his or her development and solutions.

Effective change can only be established if you have a great solution and acceptance of the solution. A deployment leader with coaching skills can listen, guide and help obtain better solutions and acceptance, both at the strategic deployment level and at the individual project and process levels. Master Black Belts also can benefit greatly from improving their use of a coaching leadership style as they coach Black Belts on project success. Of course, effective leadership uses a mix of styles—including coaching—to achieve successful results. The key is to know which one to use when.

The focus of this workshop was to learn to adopt a coaching style and how to use it to improve Six Sigma results.

By doing this, you create a relationship that accelerates great performance, identifies purpose, and supports carrying out and achieving that purpose. You want your team or organisation to implement Six Sigma well, and through asking questions and truly effective listening you can guarantee a respectful curiosity and have positive intent, and ultimately get better solutions and acceptance of solutions.

In Six Sigma, coaching is just as important for teams as for individuals. With coaching, people have the ability and courage to find their own solutions, both on their own and when working as part of a team. Team coaching can also help members learn how to effectively resolve conflicts between colleagues so that the project can move forward and stay on track.

Susan taught us that the coaching conversation is a process of 5 steps. Firstly, you establish a focus, the current reality; then, you discover possibilities; next, plan the necessary action followed by determining how best to remove any barriers to taking that action; and lastly, you do a recap. Each of these steps can be accomplished by asking the right questions. For example, to establish a focus, start by asking people what they really want.

Before starting coaching, It is important that you ask yourself if you are the right person to coach the individual or team as having or building a trusting relationship is essential.

Individual reflection is also important : “What am I thinking while someone else is talking? Do I ask questions in a neutral way, with positive intent, or am I interrogating or asking with an agenda? What do I do if I do not like the answers?”

A coaching approach to leadership is about asking great questions. During a role play, using one of the attendee's initial objectives/issues, we learned how to use ‘great questions’ in a Six Sigma environment.

So what makes a question a great question? A great question needs to be open and neutral. It is exploratory, often beginning with ‘what’ or ‘how’ (‘what needs to happen next?’), versus a more judgmental ‘why’ (“why would you want to do that?’); and it needs to be empowering rather than advising/’telling’ (‘what do you think you should do?’). A great question invites answers of more than one word. It offers a way to explore thinking and leaves time for thoughtful response from the coachee; the coach doesn’t jump in to fill the silence. You build the relationship by listening and questioning (but not interrogating) people; you have to recognise skills and knowledge. We received a very useful list of questions that will improve our coaching skills considerably.

At the end of the workshop we made a diagram of ‘where would using the coaching style most benefit your Six Sigma deployment?’ By doing this exercise, we discovered the performance gaps where coaching can improve Six Sigma and therefore overall business results.

The Catalyst workshop was well-facilitated by Susan Kuepfer, and an excellent experience on how to use coaching to get better results from Six Sigma initiatives.

If you would like to know more about coaching or how to sign up for a workshop, please contact Elizabeth Wilkinson, Admin & Logistics Co-ordinator, ew@catalystconsulting.co.uk or Susan Kuepfer, Associate Partner, SK@catalystconsulting.eu .

Catalyst Coaching has scheduled a two-day Coaching Clinic on the 4th and 5th September 2007.
For more information, please view www.catalystconsulting.co.uk

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