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KCS Coaching Program
Coaching is a critical aspect of a successful KCS program and a coach development program is an essential component of Adopting in Waves. Consortium Member companies have demonstrated a strong, direct correlation between the amount of time spent coaching and the benefits realized from KCS. An effective coaching program is a necessary investment.
Coaching is critical: the benefits gained with KCS are proportional to the investment made by the organization in coaching.
The goal of the Coach is to increase the competencies of others, not to showcase their own skills or expertise on a subject. The Coach is:
"A trusted role model advisor, wise person, friend, Mensch, steward, or guide - a person who works with emerging human and organizational forces to tap new energy and purpose, to shape new visions and plans, and to generate desired results. A coach is someone trained and devoted to guiding others into increased competence, commitment, and confidence."
- Frederic Hudson
The responsibilities of the KCS Coach include:
- Acting as a change agent by promoting understanding of the intent and benefits of KCS
- Promoting understanding and adherence to the content standard (Content Standard Checklist)
- Promoting understanding and adherence to the Solve Loop processes (Process Adherence Review)
- Helping knowledge workers assess the quality of articles and adherence to the process
- Providing feedback to the knowledge workers and, when appropriate, to management
- Establishing rapport and meeting regularly with the knowledge workers they are coaching
- Attending regular KCS Coach meetings
- Providing recommendations to the KCS Council to improve the workflow and the content standard
The KCS coaching program introduces these responsibilities and techniques for selecting the right people. It also includes providing the coaches with the tools and techniques to enable coaching success.
The coaching program includes:
- Organizational Network Analysis tools to select the right coaches
- KCS Coach Development Workshop
- On-going support of coaches
Once you have identified people with the characteristics of a good coach, the next step is to be sure they have the time and tools needed to be an effective coach. Enabling time to coach inevitably creates a significant challenge for management, as the organization is rarely going to add additional resources to cover the coaching activities and the KCS learning curve for the knowledge workers. If the team understands the benefits they will realize with KCS, and they are excited about doing KCS, they will often figure out a way to support the coaching activity.
A powerful message from leadership about the importance of KCS and their commitment to its success is relaxing service level expectations for 6-8 weeks while the team learns KCS. (Interestingly, we seldom see the service levels actually drop).
Coaching during the Adopt in Waves phase should take 25- 50% of a coach’s time, so a coach should be responsible for five to eight people who are working towards KCS proficiency. When the knowledge workers are consistently following the workflow and creating quality articles, the coaching time will decrease. The goal is for the KCS Coach to develop others' KCS competencies so knowledge workers are searching, reusing, improving and, if it doesn't exist, creating articles with very little assistance from their coach.
Selecting the Right Coaches
Selecting the right coaches is a critical component. KCS Coaches need to have strong interpersonal skills and an excellent understanding of the KCS Practices. It is important to select coaches who are respected and trusted by their peers, and who are interested in helping others be successful. They do not have to be subject matter experts or technical leads. In fact, as a general rule, subject matter experts often do not have the influence skills or interaction style required to be an effective coach. There are some exceptions, but organizations who have simply defaulted to having their subject matter experts take on the role of KCS Coach without assessing their level of influence and interpersonal skills have not been successful.
Effective coaching relies on:
- A thorough understanding of the KCS Practices
- Ability to articulate the why we are doing KCS and what's in it for the knowledge worker
- Understanding of support processes and tools
- The coaching skills (and ability to handle objections) described in the KCS Coach Reference Guide
- Excellent communication skills, particularly in the following areas:
- Listening skills, seek to understand
- Explaining and describing concepts
- Providing feedback
- Influencing to generate results
- Mindfulness of feelings
- Demonstrated ability to:
- Manage time effectively
- Identify coaching moments - use data and measures to help others become more proficient
- Communicate with management appropriately
- Demonstrated commitment to the success of team members
Selecting the wrong Coaches can lead to the following symptoms:
- Inconsistent participation among groups or geographies
- KCS articles that are not findable
- Duplicate articles
- Bottlenecks getting articles published
- Poor quality articles
- A great start to a KCS deployment, followed by a downturn in activity
During Wave I, certain individuals will demonstrate the characteristics of a good coach. The Wave I participants who naturally evolve into the role of helping others should be considered for KCS Coach positions.
Another approach that has proven to be successful in identifying coach candidates is a technique called Organizational Network Analysis (ONA, also known as Social Network Analysis). ONA exposes the trust network within the organization or team. ONA is a mathematical analysis and visual representation of relationships, flows, and influence between people. Data for the ONA is collected through a simple survey and run through an ONA tool. The output is a map that identifies the trusted, influential individuals who have the characteristics of a good coach. The results are often surprising! The organization chart or reporting structure so often used in organizations does not reflect who is influencing change in the organization. Corporate anthropologist Karen Stephenson says it best:
"You have to discover the world of connections buried underneath the traditional hierarchy. Knowing who trusts whom is as important as knowing who reports to whom. Ignore this hidden structure and your quality team players will jump ship, mentors will abandon their charges, institutional memory will vanish, and glad-handing schmucks will weasel their way into power.”
Organizational Network Analysis
Organizational Network Analysis is a mathematical and visual analysis of relations, flows, and influences between people, groups, and organizations. The nodes in the network represent people and the lines represent connections through various social behaviors. ONA input data can be gathered through surveys, behaviors or analysis of electronic communications (social media, email, etc.). The Consortium Members have had success collecting data through the use of surveys.
Sample Survey Questions to Select Coaches:
- I would be more effective in my job if I could interact more with this person(s): __________.
- Whom do you go to for technical advice or problem solving?
- Whom do you go to for non-technical advice; process or policy information or general issues?
- Whom do you go to explore new ideas?
- Whom do you trust to keep your best interests in mind?
- If you don't know who to go to.... whom do you contact to find out? (who knows who knows?)
Upon the completion of the survey the nodes (or people selected in the survey) are input into the ONA tool. The output of a tool in a relationship map and several measures, including:
DEGREE CENTRALITY - Number of connections a node has, more is not necessarily better, we want to connect the otherwise unconnected
BETWEENNESS - Connection between groups (broker), high degrees on betweenness could indicate single points of failure
NETWORK CENTRALIZATION - Less centralized networks have no single points of failure
NETWORK REACH - These measures have proven effective not only to select Coaches but also to find who knows what faster, or to find connectors when companies are merging, built innovation teams and learning communities and to support partners and alliance
The ONA map provides important insight into who the influencers are in the organization. However the map alone is not sufficient. We find the highest level of success in identifying coach candidates is a combination of the ONA map and management judgment. The ONA map is an important compliment to management's view of the organization or team.
In addition to providing information about who might make a good KCS Coach, visualizing an organizations' trust network can also be used to identify collaborators in the organization, to validate coach selections that have already been made, and to diagnose the cause of inconsistent KCS results. For assistance in designing and running an Organizational Network Analysis, see KCS Aligned Service providers.
KCS Coach Workshop
Influencing others to change their behavior requires skills beyond that of the typical knowledge worker. Once the coaches are identified, they participate in a KCS Coach Workshop. This workshop focuses on strengthening influence skills, understanding reports and tools available, and the process of coaching. It was developed by Dr. Beth Haggett, and is offered as a KCS Aligned service by several KCS Certified Trainers.
By using the Content Standard Checklist and PAR assessments, KCS Coaches provide feedback to the knowledge workers to promote the use, improvement, and creation of well-structured, useable articles. There is additional information about the KCS Coach program in the KCS v6 Practices Guide.
The KCS Coach Workshop is a two to three day session with the following goals:
- Acquire an awareness of the influence skills needed to effectively coach
- Provide an opportunity to practice influence skills and assess individual strengths and growth opportunities
- Understanding the tools, techniques, and process for coaching
- Commit to working together as a team
- Appreciate the responsibility of being a coach in helping coachees achieve their goals with respect to KCS
- Create excitement about the opportunity to be a coach
Coaching for Coaches
The coaches need to establish regular communications as a coaching team and should have weekly or biweekly meetings to discuss issues and to calibrate their interpretation and use of the Content Standard Checklist and PAR and the KCS Roles and Competency list.
Some organizations have sustained and improved the coaching program by having a lead coach. Others have used the Coach Workshop facilitator or the KCS Program Manager to follow up periodically with the organization’s coaches to reinforce the skills from the workshop and to discuss challenges and implement strategies.
Supporting Coaches
There are a handful of resources you can develop, specific to your organization, that make a coach’s job much easier!
- Objection handling toolkit (see
- How to interpret reports: here’s the data you have at your disposal - here’s what it means, and here’s how to use it.
- KCS Coach Playbook: guidance around onboarding a new coachee, your first coach/coachee check in, talking about the Content Standard Checklist, ongoing meeting prep & facilitation & reminders
- A place to save/access coaching session notes for coach/coachees. These should only be viewable by the coach and the coachee.
- Recurring Coach Calibration Meetings, and a place to save/access recordings of them (at that meeting: celebrate wins, discuss challenges/answer questions, Content Standard Checklist group review for calibration)