Watching the Game | Etsko Schuitema

This idea of watching the game is a key feature of our care and growth leadership approach. It’s rooted in this idea that the leader’s job is not to achieve a result through people, but his job is to achieve people through results. And we use this coaching metaphor to make sense of that.

A coach doesn’t use the player as his means to get a job done and achieve a result. He actually uses the result as his means to enable the player. Now, if the coach is going to do that, the coach cannot do that job of enabling the player if the coach doesn’t watch what’s happening on the field.

You can’t coach a game you’re not watching. So what does that mean practically? In the first instance, you need to be sensitive to the difference between what people are getting and what people are giving. And you need to understand that anything that relates to an outcome or a result is really concerned with what people get.

And contribution or what people give is really where the game gets played. So you can imagine then that the effect, the result, is what’s on the scoreboard. And what the player actually gives or does is their contribution.

That’s what’s happening on the field. So if you’re going to be coaching somebody, what you want to give attention to is where the game is being played. That’s what you need to be watching.

What this means in terms of Eisenhower’s time management model, (this thing is variously described as either the Eisenhower time management model or the Covey time management model), is that if you consider all the things you could conceivably spend time on, you can plot them on the basis of two axes. You can first of all give time to things that are important, or you can give attention and time to things that aren’t important. And you can then further give attention to things that are urgent, and then you can give attention to things that aren’t urgent.

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Most leaders in organizations spend their time in this first quadrant, which is really all concerned with deadline and result-focused activities. In fact, spending time in these activities is considered to be virtuous. This is really where most leaders actually spend their time and give attention to.

The next quadrant which the model describes is what we call quadrant three activities, and these are activities that are urgent but not important, so that it deals with things like interruptions or telephone calls, things that make an urgent demand to your attention but aren’t particularly important in their own right.

The next quadrant would be described as quadrant four, time wasters. These are, things like computer games  or anything that you do to kind of pass the time. The quadrant left is called quadrant two activities, and these are activities that are really concerned with building process rather than focusing on outcome. Covey’s got a very nice way of explaining the nature of these activities.

He does it by way of metaphor, he calls them sharpening the saw activities. He says imagine you’re walking through a forest and you come across a woodcutter who’s trying to cut down a tree with a really blunt saw and he’s not succeeding. You go up to the woodcutter and you say to him ‘please stop for a moment and sharpen the saw’, and in great irritation the person rounds on you and says ‘can’t you see I’m busy!’. In other words, he’s so busy on pursuing the result, the outcome that he’s trying to achieve, that he doesn’t give any attention to the sharpening of the saw to his own process.

These quadrant two activities are by definition activities where you give attention to process. These are also deeply empowering activities because they’re clearly things that sit in your own hands. If you’re watching the game, this is what you should be watching. This is where you should be, what you should be giving attention to.

You should be giving attention to the unique contribution which people are doing, and in leadership positions this would be the care and growth of subordinates. This is giving attention to process over outcome. This mean by definition you are primarily not looking at the final result or at balanced score card measures, because all of these are outcomes. Even shorter term of measures like 90-day deliverables are outcomes, they aren’t process.

What you need to be giving attention to is the person’s performance against the standard of what’s required of them in the activity that they’re doing. That is the game that you’re trying to watch, that’s the game the leader’s trying to watch. Let us look what that means in terms of the role played by a worker and a supervisor.

The worker’s result are the outcome of what he gets from doing his job. His own contribution would be the tasks that he does, that’s the game he’s playing in order to achieve those results. Now if the overseer were to be watching the worker’s game, he couldn’t be making a convincing call as to whether the worker’s actually doing what’s required of him by only looking at the scoreboard, he’d actually have to give attention to the worker’s tasks. In other words, the athlete’s playing of the game, what’s happening on the field.

This is still clear when you’re dealing with somebody whose job it is to do a job and a person who has an overseeing job with regard to the person who’s doing the job. But what if we’re looking at the overseer themselves. Let us assume the overseer reports to a boss. Clearly the overseer also has a set of results, but the overseer’s own contribution, what sits in his own hands, is to do certain tasks to standard and to give the subordinate the means, the ability and the accountability to do what’s required of them.

So if the boss were to be watching the overseer’s game, what the boss would be trying to get insight into is whether the overseer is doing those things.

Similarly when we’re dealing with the boss. The boss also produces a result, her contribution to producing that result is to do some tasks herself and to care for the overseer, to give the overseer the means, the ability and the accountability to do what’s required of him. If the boss’s boss were to be watching her game, then the boss’s boss would be putting attention into finding out whether the boss is doing those things appropriately, namely doing her own tasks and giving means, ability and accountability to her subordinates.

So how would the boss do that? The first problem is how does the boss deal with this issue of window dressing? The problem in most organizations is that the more senior a leader is, the more subordinates down the line will seek to leave a good impression of the boss. It’s very difficult in a corporate context for a boss just to drop into a meeting under the assumption that people won’t notice that they’re there. The very fact that the boss is there affects how the game gets played.

So how does the boss understand or get insight into how the game is being played? He needs to be clear what would be visible on the floor, the footprints of the game being done well, if people are executing their task well. So if you’re in a manufacturing organization, what would you see on the floor if people were doing what was required of them. Similarly, if a mine manager walked into a workplace, what would be visible? If it was a banking example, what would be visible? What would the boss see that if people were doing what they were doing well and with a sense of commitment?

Acting as a coach, the leader also needs to be sensitive to the degree to which peers at any level are supportive of each other. So when the coach watches the game, what he should not just be looking at are the footprints on the floor, but evidence for how people are actually interacting on an ongoing basis, and also how people are being dealt with by their own leaders. Does the leader give the means, ability and accountability to the people who are doing the job?

Finally, the leader needs to do a leadership diagnostic on exceptions when they are observed. If the leader only deals with the exception, the thing that they see wrong on the floor, then what they would do is institute a control measure. The remediation of the problem won’t be empowering, it’ll probably be disabling. What the leader needs to do is work out what sits at every level between themselves and the exception, in order to work out what they should be doing with their immediate subordinate.

Watching the Game

The first thing you need to do is to be clear about the standard of whatever you’re going to observe. If, for example, it is a sales environment, what would you see on the floor if your customers were happy? If it’s a manufacturing environment, what would you see in terms of housekeeping, if this place was being well run? Decide on the focus, for example, safety, costs or quality. Be clear of what you would see on operation if the standard was met. And then once you’ve done that, see things as they are before you go in.

Clear your head of any clutter before you actually go into the workplace to observe the game. Try as much as possible to suspend your presumptions about what you’re likely to see. You can do a paper trash exercise before you go, and that basically means you write down anything that currently concerns you or worries you on a piece of paper. You write each worry on an individual piece of paper. Once you’ve got them all, you crumple up the papers and you throw them into a waste paper basket. You can also quieten your own internal dialogue by using one of the meditative techniques that we’ve explored in the person excellence content.

Once you’ve done that, you go to where the things are happening. You go to their area and don’t let ask them to come to yours. Often people think that coaching is something that happens in the boss’s office and is really concerned with the conversation between the boss and the subordinate. That’s not where most of coaching happens. Most of what happens under the rubric of coaching should happen where the person’s game is being played. In other words, you’ve got to get into your subordinate’s area and get first-hand understanding of what’s happening. Try not to be prejudiced when you go in. Ask why. Seek to understand and not to apportion blame.

Write down what you observe. Often you’ve forgotten the core of what you’ve noticed, or you certainly have forgotten the detail of what you noticed within a couple of days. The detail is very useful in a subsequent coaching conversation with the subordinate.

If your coachee is a leader, then at whatever level they are at, once you’ve understood an exception on a floor, you have to do a leadership diagnostic on whatever you observed that is either spectacularly below standard or spectacularly above standard. Finally, ask yourself what is what you’re seeing telling you about your coachee’s ability, rather than their accountability? Do understand that fundamentally watching the game is a subset of the whole coaching process, and you coach with the intent to cultivate ability.

When you’re looking at exceptions is you’re not trying to apportion blame or accountability. You’re trying to understand competency or ability issues. That’s the first port of call.

And only once you’ve had to dismiss ability as a problem, if you’re dealing with something that is below standard, would you then consider whether this is an accountability issue at all.