The problem with knowing
I spent most of my life being the person with the answers for a variety of reasons. I am now 51 and every year that goes by I am quite sure I ‘know’ less.
Sales, nursing in A & E, intensive care international air ambulances, building and scaling a business, mentoring and advisory, every role rewarded me for knowing. For being quick witted and being able to intuit the problem and start offering solutions. And I was good at it.
I started working with founders and entrepreneurs coaching and mentoring over eight years ago via the European Institute of Technology, NHS Clinical Entrepreneurs program and informally, I did what felt natural and what people ask for in a mentor. I walked in, listened for twenty minutes, identified the three things that were broken, and offered solutions to the issues and/or connections in my network who could help.
The most powerful thing I have learnt in a room full of smart, driven founders wasn’t having the sharpest insight. It was learning to shut up and ask a better question.
When you give someone your answer, they hold it loosely. It’s yours, not theirs and they may, or may not action it. But either way, it doesn’t land in the same place as something they discovered for themselves. It’s a discipline to balance advisory, strategy, mentorship and coaching approaches with commercial nouse. Only now, with maturity and genuine insight into what makes me tick do I feel truly expert in supporting others.
I don’t mean a coaching-school question designed to simply reflect back the problem. That methodology has its place for developing junior staff but astute business leaders want more than that, they want genuinely challenging ideas and insights. Coaching good leaders is a joy and a privilege, as an advisor to the business you can see the big picture and with the best psychometric tool, understand the dynamics, history and movement of the business itself. It is hard to not shift into solutions mode but that is the discipline. By offering insights and key observations you can shift peoples thinking and really challenge what value your service or product brings to the market and how you differentiate yourself. It shifts a conversation about tactics into one about value and strategy.
Psychometrics for individuals and teams
I am relentlessly curious about people. What makes them tick, what they are trying to achieve and why. In business, the qualities of the founder or team leader nearly always runs through the rest of the business or team like DNA. For me this is why a (good) psychometric tool is so useful and often forms the basis of my work.
The value that can be derived from a tool is dependent on two things, the quality of the tool and the experience of the operator. Many clients are more than a little bit sceptical with regards to value as they have been to the corporate workshop, got the report and then…..so what. Some will derive value or the report will initiate some insight from MBTI, DISC or others but if the process has been based around ‘away day filler’ mentality, probably not. The gold happens when the operator has taken time to understand both what the leader, founder or team is struggling with and the qualities and dynamics that are in the report in black and white. From there co-creation of solutions arise and transformation starts.
Penny drop moments are a wonderful thing and can unblock years of being stuck.
I will be writing about this in more detail but having seen most of the tools down the years and taken the time to understand their background can say that being introduced to Lumina Spark™ by Paul Freedman and then meeting Dr Stuart Deeson whose thesis the tool is based on and who runs the wildly successful Lumina Learning business has really opened my eyes to what is possible in terms of supporting founders, leaders and teams with psychometrics.
Back to where we started
I work with founders, leaders and teams, and the work I’m most proud of starts with an admission: I do not have the answers, you may not either. What I bring is the ability to ask questions you’re not asking yourselves or perhaps cannot see, pattern recognition, a realistic, practical and joyful approach to ‘real’ strategy and thinking differently (spoiler alert: it is not that complicated).
A question worth sitting with
If you’re a founder or senior leader reading this, here’s the question I’d leave you with: How helpful would it be to have an external support function, a means to truly understand your team and a trusted thinking partner to consider actions with?
I’m Lyndon Johnson, founder of Emergent Services. I work with founder-led businesses to build clarity, capability, and really help you move the dial. If that resonates, I’d welcome a conversation.
