That was the title of a recent Ted Talk I listened to that really resonated with me. The talk was from a surgeon explaining how to improve birth rates in third world countries using coaching. I found that he made very good points that are applicable to us as A/E/C marketing professionals, particularly on coaching to get great.
The presenter was Atul Gawande, surgeon, writer, and public health innovator, who explores how doctors can dramatically improve their practice using approaches as simple as a checklist – or coaching.
Click here to watch the full Ted Talk. I will warn you though there are sad and disturbing pictures. I listened to the audio version via the Ted Talk podcast.
Improve in the Face of Complexity – Or Don’t
First, the speaker spoke about the dire situation in a birth clinic in India. He explained how he witnessed the extreme form of how the people improved in the face of complexity –or don’t.
He goes onto explain specifics of the birth center with some very distributing facts. He shares the health providers know what to do (i.e. wash hands, put on clean gloves, etc.). They learned these items in textbooks as part of their training. However, in practice, these simplest things are not so simple because there are no new gloves, or the sink is on the other side of the building.
There’s an entire team of people skilled and coordinated to deliver the babies from nurses and doctors to the medical officer and supply clerk. They are all experienced professionals.
But against the complexities they were faced, they seem to reach their limits of getting better.
I see parallels to our industry. We have teams of experts from engineers and architects to project managers and principals. We have business developers and marketers. All of us have been technically trained at our craft and have experience.
So, have we reached our limits of getting better?
How do professionals get better at what they do?
How do we get great? Dr. Gawande presents two different approaches to getting better.
The first is probably the one we are most familiar with. It’s the traditional method in that you go to school, you study, you practice, you learn, you graduate, and then go out into the real world and make it on your own.
It’s not wrong and works for thousands of professionals.
I fit into this method. How about you?
The second is a contrasting view and takes its shape from sports. Every great (or even mediocre) athlete will tell you they can only get better with a coach.
He challenged himself to see if a coach would work for him.
He went on to tell a story about himself as a surgeon. He asked a former professor to come in and observe him perform surgeries. Dr. Gawande didn’t think that the former professor who observed would have much to say because the first surgery was great. However, his professor had an entire page with very detailed notes.
The biggest takeaway from his observer was “Just Small Things.”
It’s the Small Things That Matter
What are the small things in our business development efforts that we often miss or delay or forget to do? How do those small things add up to missed opportunities or not as good pursuit intelligence?
What small things do we miss in our proposal documents because someone missed an “internal” deadline or skipped a strategy session?
His observer noted very small things about his posture, lighting of the operating ward, etc. that all added to the outcome of the surgery.
He described what great coaches do.
What Great Coaches Provide
Great coaches are your external eyes and ears that provide you a more accurate picture of your reality.
They recognize the fundamentals.
They break down your actions down and then help you build them back up again.
We can understand how great coaches work for our favorite teams and athletes. Can this transfer to into our industry?
I think we should try to.
The problem with trying to make it on your own is that you don’t recognize the issues that are standing in your way. Or if you do, you don’t know how to fix them. Then along the way, you just stop improving.
To get you past this stall in performance, a coach is a great way to observe and provide actionable feedback.
Coaching for the Masses
So far, the coaching I described was one-on-one. Is there a way to scale or expand this to improve everyone? Sometimes our firms do this by creating policies or procedures or even checklists. I am known to devise a checklist or two. 😊
Dr. Gawande studied this approach as part of the World Health Organization. He provided one group of clinics with just the safe childbirth checklist. That was the control group.
The test group, another group of birth clinics, was given this checklist but also got visits from coaches. They trained doctors and nurses to become coaches. They were trained to observe the care and teach the healthcare providers in the clinics to build on their strengths and address their weaknesses. The coaching lasted four months and taper-off over eight months.
One such coaching skill was communication (something that is very key to our industry too). They had to teach nurses to speak up when the equipment was broken or supplies not in stock or when someone wasn’t washing their hands.
I see this in our industry too. There isn’t enough peer to peer accountability. We need to be brave when someone agrees to an assignment and then fails on delivering that assignment. We need to communicate these issues.
You can probably guess by now that the test group with the coaches saw improvement while the control group with no coaching saw no improvement over several years that the study was conducted. The coached group increased to greater than two-thirds of the safety practices being delivered.
It worked. They saw the improvement in quality. They saw it across a wide range of centers across India that suggests that coaching could be a new way to deliver training.
Thinking back to our industry, we have firms with many offices, service sectors, and remote employees combined with the need to constantly improve the quality of our proposals and projects. Should we adjust the way we approach training and either turn to or add a coaching component?
Executing on the Fundamentals
The coaching helped the clinics in India learn to execute on the fundamentals. I believe a coaching approach can help us better execute our jobs at finding pursuits, producing proposals, and then performing the work.
I have been fortunate to be able to work with a leadership coach at a previous firm. This specific purpose was to help our firm transition through a new executive leadership team. As I continue my marketing career in A/E/C I will be looking for a coach who can help me to continue to get better.
Your Turn
Have you or your firm used a coaching approach to improve your team? If so, comment below or email me directly. I would love to develop a list of coaches for our industry.
Also, be on the lookout for a special upcoming training program that will have coaching-type elements.
