The Power of Coaching To Improve Your Safety Leadership Skills

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Clifford Morgan, an organizational psychologist and leadership expert with over 15 years of service in the Royal Australian Air Force.

Clifford is passionate about enhancing performance and the fulfillment of leadership potential, and in this engaging interview, he focuses on how safety professionals can use coaching to become more influential in the workplace.

He starts by exploring what leadership is and explains the difference between three different approaches - directing, coaching and mentoring. Cliff then highlights the two primary leadership responsibilities. Safety performance is obviously crucial, but safety leadership capability development is also a critical longer-term consideration.

Clifford shares multiple ways EHS professionals can use coaching to influence others in the workplace. Strategic questioning - allowing people to come up with their own suggestions - can help co-workers adopt safety initiatives or improve their wellbeing and also encourage leaders to take more responsibility for safety in their areas.

You’ll learn specific coaching techniques to help get colleagues on board with your initiatives and understand the main challenges facing today’s safety leaders.

And if you love coffee, you’ll be delighted to find out why it is such a powerful tool in the workplace!

♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest. I'm your host for "Safety Labs by Slice," the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership, empathy, influence, trust, rapport, in other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff.

♪ [music] ♪ Hi there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." What's the difference between leading and coaching? What challenges are leaders facing today? What skills should a coaching leader focus on developing?

And what does this all have to do with occupational health and safety? To help us explore this, I'll be talking to the author of "The Coaching Leader: Essential Skills to Enhance Your Leadership and Develop Your People Every Day." Clifford Morgan is an organizational psychologist and leadership expert with over 15 years of service in the Royal Australian Air Force.

He's trained hundreds of leaders, both in uniform and out, to use coaching skills to develop people and lead more effectively. Clifford has coached CEOs, military commanders, government executives, and business and community leaders across a variety of industries. His services include team development, leadership coaching, workplace performance coaching, and facilitating organizational development solutions.

He holds a master's degree in organizational psychology from the University of Queensland, and Cliff's passionate commitment to leadership coaching has inspired leaders and teams across Australia to work more creatively and effectively. Clifford joins us from Brisbane, Australia. Welcome.

- [Clifford] Thank you for having me on. Mary, it's great to be here this morning.

- Yeah. I'm laughing, folks, because it's morning for him, afternoon for me.

- That's right, yes.

- So, let's start with some definitions. In the book, you make some distinctions between leading, coaching, directing, mentoring, all of which I think a lot of people use interchangeably. So, how do you define those and how do they relate to one another?

- Yeah, certainly. So, first of all I guess starting with the the big word, right? Leadership. And there are thousands of different definitions of what leadership is. And ultimately from my perspective, they all kind of boil down to some different version of it's influencing a group of people to achieve a common goal.

And so this kind of the influencing people is really what leadership is, right? John Maxwell, probably the most succinct definition that I've heard of that's leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less. And so when we start pulling out some of the differences between leaders, it's really the mechanisms that they use to actually influence people.

We have the kind of traditional, you know, more directive style of influence, which is because I am the leader and the position that I hold and the experience that I have, I'm going to tell you what to do, right? You know, based on the authority that I have, the experience and all that sort of stuff, I either know what the best thing is because higher up the organization have told me, or based on my experience, I know what the best thing in order to achieve the common goal is.

So, I'm going to tell you what to do. And that's the more directive style of leadership. And then kind of on the other end of the spectrum, we use...or I talk about particularly in the book rank kind of coaching. It's really asking questions and it's taking people on a journey to help them realize what the best solution is, or the best way to achieve the goal, and getting them to come up with those answers.

And so it's all about asking strategic questions. So, coaching itself, if you want a definition is really that. It's asking strategic questions that allow the individual being coached to identify solutions or ways forward to overcome challenges themselves, right?

And over time, as they get taken through that process enough, you know, ultimately the end game is that they self-coach and they can take themselves through that same process. And so the other common definition that's often thrown in the mix there, Mary, is mentoring. And, you know, often coaching and mentoring is used interchangeably, you know, in whatever kind of context.

And really difference between mentoring and coaching, a mentor, you go to a mentor for their advice. You go to leverage their experience in a particular area or field in order to, you know, figure out what your next move is.

And so if you think about what some of the things mentors might say is like, my advice is, based on my experience, I recommend that you do this. When I was in a similar experience, this is how I dealt with it. And so it's all based on their experience. A coach, hello, in a pure coaching context, the coach is simply asking questions.

They're not sharing their experience at all. And they're helping the individual to leverage their own experience to come up with the solution or the answer to whatever we're talking about. And so that's really empowering in many ways to the individual leader when they're coaching because it means that they're not under kind of all this pressure to have all the answers.

And, you know, if they are encountering something for the first time, they don't have experience in that area. And that, you know, the people they're leading are looking to them for the answers. It's not like, well, I don't have experience, so therefore I'm failing as a leader, right? You can simply ask questions to find the answers.

And what it also allows leaders to do really effectively is lead people in roles that they haven't been in themselves. And so, you know, for me as a coach and a leader, I've coached and read Air Force fastest pilots. I've never sat in a cockpit of a plane.

I've coached lawyers and I've never stepped into a court of law. I've coached medical doctors and, obviously, I don't have a medical degree. So, you know, the skillset of being able to ask strategic and effective questions to draw out the answers in others allows you a greater agility and versatility as a leader to lead in a broader kind of context.

So, leadership is the overarching kind of banner. In terms of the mechanisms of influence, at one end, we've got very directive side of things telling people what to do. On the other end, it's much more is the coaching approach. We're asking them questions to help them figure out what they want to do. And in that middle kind of piece is the mentoring side of things. And what I say is the coaching skills, wherever you need to sit along that spectrum can enhance the way that you do those things.

So, you know, a colleague of mine, Air Commodore Ian Scott, has this great quote where he says coaching...so good mentors will use coaching skills, but a good coach will never mentor. And so he's kind of taking that as a mentor, you can leverage your experience and you can use coaching skills to help people make the most of that experience.

But a good coach if they are pure coaching will never kind of jump in and give advice. So, that hopefully should clarify sort of where things sit for your listeners.

- Yeah. I have a spectrum in my mind's eye now of between sort of the directive on one end, the coaching on the other, and the mentorship sort of in between. So, if that's accurate, then excellent answer because I understood.

- Yes. That's accurate.

- So, you talk about leaders having a primary and a secondary level of responsibility. Can you explain to our listeners what you mean by that?

- Yeah, certainly. So, in the book, I use the analogy of a captain and a first officer, an airline pilot. So, I've got a grandfather, two uncles, three cousins, and a brother who are all pilots. So flying is in the blood. And I didn't end up flying, but I ended up with the Air Force for 17 years. So, being around aviation is, you know, key to our family, I guess.

But in that scenario in that example, we talk about the captain being the leader of the aircrew. He has a primary responsibility. And in that case, it's to get the aircraft and the passengers from point A to point B safely. And he can choose to do that in two very different way.

He can take full responsibility for that and take full control of everything that happens to ensure that that responsibility is carried out to the best. And that means he flies the plane and he lands it, and he does everything to make sure it's done right and safe.

But when I talk to my brother, who's the first officer, about the differences between a good captain and a great captain, he says the great ones always try and empower the first officers as much as possible. They'll sit back and allow the first officers do as much flying as possible so that they get the experience that they need to become future captains for the airline.

And in that way, those captains, yes, they're taking overall responsibility for getting the aircraft and the passengers from point A to point B, but they're also taking responsibility for developing the captain's capability within the organization, within the airline. And so they are contributing to this pipeline of future captains that can come and, you know, fly aircraft and lead aircrew and whatnot.

And that's true in any organization in the end contest. If you're a leader, yes, you have a kind of a primary role of influencing people to achieve a common goal to drive performance from the teams and the people that you lead, but at the same time, you also have this responsibility to develop the future capability within the organization, to create this pipeline of leaders so that as the organization kind of grows or as you move on as a leader, you've got someone who is ready to step up and fill your shoes or meet the requirements of the organization.

So, I talk about the two primary responsibilities, you know, one being performance, but two being the organizational capability development and/or the leadership capability development has been really important from a leadership perspective. And if I'm honest, you know, my perspective is that if you are looking to ensure the sustainability of the organization and achieve high performance over the long-term, it's actually the leadership development that needs to be really the focus, I guess, or have a really intentional focus because performance can go up and down and that's dependent on a whole lot of external factors and that sort of thing.

But you can always invest into people, you can always develop leaders, and the more that you do that, the greater leadership capability at every level in the organization. If you've got every level of the organization driving performance, not just some leaders up the top but everybody else following, then the performance over the long term is always going to be...

- So, that kind of overlays really nicely with the idea of directive versus coaching, right? In directive leadership, as you talked about, you are meeting that primary responsibility, but with coaching, you are also educating in a sense or...

- Very much so.

- ...enabling someone to educate themselves is maybe a little more accurate.

- Yeah. Yeah, 100%.

- So, how do you think leadership and coaching development are most relevant, I'm sure they're relevant in many ways, but most relevant to health and safety professionals.

- Yeah, certainly. So, in many different ways, but let's just pull out a few of them. So, when I think about health and safety professionals, you know, I'm not...as you know, I have led health and safety professionals.

I've encouraged them. I've worked alongside them in a number of different projects and initiatives in different organizations and contexts. And for me, I guess there's two main ways, right? And that kind of comes with the organizational safety initiatives, the project or whatever kind of the organizational system type thing that health and safety professionals are involved in and trying to get up within the organization.

And then the other one is kind of the more one-on-one individual type thing. And so going to the organizational one, you've often got to get people on board with those initiatives, right? And you've got to...you say, okay, cool, here's the initiative. This is what we're going to do. We're going to roll this out.

And if people aren't on board, then you just hit resistance the entire time. That's really hard to achieve anything that you are trying to with that initiative. So, from a coaching perspective, again, it's asking strategic questions. Now, one of the things that I'm passionate about is I'm not trying to create a bunch of executive coaching. So, I'm trying to create or equip a bunch of leaders who have coaching skills to use.

Now, in this kind of context, you know, a health and safety leader would be potentially, if they're using coaching skills, asking questions to get people to think about, you know, what is this initiative trying to achieve? What are the second, third, fourth order effects of what things they're doing?

How are the changes that are going to be...going to result from this initiative going to benefit whoever you are talking to, whether that's a group or whatnot? And, you know, what are some of the consequences of not changing, right? You know, so often we focus on here's what we are doing, and here's what we're moving towards, and let's go and chase this.

And that's a very much a pull motivation strategy or, you know, it's a moving towards, but, you know, in terms of the emotional drivers of action and motivation, fear is a really big one, right? And some people are more driven by fear. And we don't want to lead by fear. We don't want to rule by fear. But there are times when it can be a really effective lever to use to influence people.

And so having a discussion around, hey, if you don't jump on board with this initiative, what are going to be the consequences? And just asking questions to tease that out. And actually, you are not telling them anything. You are not saying, hey, if you do this, this is the consequence, and you're hitting it with a stick.

You're just sitting there and go, "Hey, you know, what happens to you if everybody moves that way and you're stuff back here and you haven't jumped on board this initiative. What are the consequences of that kind of thing?" And getting them to kind of tell you and pull that out can actually be a really powerful strategy to create action and get them to jump on board.

- Yeah. I was going to say people don't like change and that's maybe a good way just to get them to think about the bigger pictures. Like, I know this is uncomfortable. For whatever reason that is change and we don't like change. However, let's think about, you know, the pain of not changing will one day be greater.

- Yeah. When I start talking about the psychology of change, be it people fear what they don't know in all this uncertainty, so we are trying to give them as much certainty as they can. And what I always say is that we want to minimize the threat and maximize the reward. So, you know, people feel like the threat or the sense of loss that they're going to go through with the change is minimal whereas, you know, what they're going to gain is higher.

And, you know, for the majority of people, that's an effective way to go about it. However, if you are encountering people who are really resistant and they're stuck and they're not budging and they're not doing, that's when I say we potentially dial up the fear-based stuff and the threat. And again, it's not threatening them, but it's just getting them...it's asking them questions so that they actually consider what those consequences are because most people don't.

They just go, I'm not going to change. I'm not going to...and, you know, I'll be fine. But they don't actually stop and consider what are the second or third, fourth order of effects of the decisions that they make. And so really what coaching is, is trying to get people to think in a different way from a different perspective.

And so, you know, that's just the context of how you're getting them to think in a different perspective. The other kind of way that I mentioned... Sorry, were you going to say something, Mary?

- No, I'd like you to finish this and then I'll get back to it.

- Okay. Cool. So, I was just going to say the other way, you know, from a health and safety perspective is the one-on-one interaction. It's not necessarily related to organizational initiatives, but it's one-on-one. And that that can...you know, the two most common kind of scenarios that I've dealt with in this space is one where, you know, other leaders or people in the organization are not willing to take responsibility for some of the safety risks and things in their world.

That's health and safety's job. And so, again, you know, a really good safety leader who's got coaching skills in their leadership tool kit can then approach that and go, okay, cool. So, just run me through this. It might be whose area does this risk fall in?

Ultimately, who's responsible for this particular area? You know, what do you think is part of your responsibility? You're asking them all these questions, again, getting them to think. And if you're able to say, well, ultimately, I'm the leader of this particular area. And, you know, I'm actually responsible for what goes on in this particular area and with this particular team and therefore, ultimately kind of I realize that the risk now lives with me.

Then what you can do is actually facilitate a sense of ownership in the leaders that you're talking with around some of the safety risks. And therefore, you know, they're taking action on them, which results in better health and safety outcomes, but it's also a reduction in workload on the safety leader, which is always a big benefit.

The other one is around some of the more well-being-type scenarios. And just coaching people and getting people to think about, well, hey, what does, you know, good well-being look like for you as an individual? Because that is quite...it differs from individual to individual.

What, you know, refreshes somebody, helps them to recover from work and boost them up and that sort of thing, you know, for me is going to be very different for you. And often people will come and they might confide in the safety leader and say, "Hey, I'm actually having a really hard time here."

And the safety leader doesn't have to have all the answers because that could be...you know, that that's my job as a psychologist. It's not their job. You know, it's just a matter of having some skills or questions to ask and say, "Hey, well, you know, what have you done in the past when things has been really stressful that have made you feel better and be able to cope with stress more? You know, how could you do some more of those things, you know, in the current season? You know, what would you need to put in place in order to be able to, you know, engage in those activities a little bit more?"

And you can see those questions. You don't have to be a psychologist to ask them, and, you know, you are actually not telling them anything. And so, you know, one, you can't get done for giving advice around something that's not your area of expertise, but two, you are actually genuinely helping that individual in front of you to figure out what they need to do in order to, you know, maintain their well-being and perform in the workplace and all of that.

Yeah. So, when it comes to health and safety, it's generally those two things. It's asking strategic questions to get on board with initiatives and that it's the individual, you know, asking questions to help foster ownership and responsibility, but also kind of, you know, work through some of those more delicate well-being type scenarios, I guess.

- Yeah. What I was thinking actually was on the individual level, I hear from a lot of health and safety people that it's challenging, it can be difficult, but it's crucial, absolutely crucial to get people on the frontline, whatever that looks like, to talk to you about risks because they're the ones who are going to see the risks.

And so it was just sort of occurring to me that having this skill of asking questions and developing trust is a good way to get people comfortable with coming to you and saying, you know, I noticed that this piece of equipment isn't working quite as well as it should or whatever risk that they see.

Yeah. So I was thinking those skills would be helpful in that scenario.

- Yeah, 100%. And if you are consistent in using them, what actually happens is people...really you're asking strategic questions to get people to come up with the answers, so they're going to have insight, right? When people have a flash of insight, you know, one of those penny drop moments, and things like that, they actually get a flash spike of dopamine in their head, which is, you know, what we associate with feeling good.

And if you are kind of consistently asking these questions or consistently kind of having insights whenever they speak to you, they're actually going to walk away saying, I actually feel really good about that. And that means there's going to be a level of connection there that's going to foster this trust, right? It creates from a psychological perspective a halo bias, right? Every time I interact with you, then I feel good about it.

So therefore, every time I interact with you, I'm going to interpret that in a written positive way. Whether or not, you know, it could be interpreted multiple ways but choose to interpret that in a positive way because I feel good every time that I'm with you. And that's, you know, very much kind of it underpins the building of trust in a lot of ways, you know, crucially in those scenarios.

- Okay. So, let's now zoom out a little bit. And I'm sure the audience, you know, will be hearing all this stuff we'll be talking about leaders, but, of course, we're talking about safety leaders. But as it's wider than that and it affects others, then we'll just be talking in terms of leaders. So, my next question is, what are the main challenges that leaders in today's workplace are facing?

- Yeah. So, there are so many, right? It's a tough time to lead.

- You can pick a few.

- That's right. It is a tough time to lead. Two big ones that I'll pull out, right? One is that a lot of people haven't...they don't know what good looks like. You know, they've never seen a really great leader who coaches and develops their people, as well as builds performance. And so they don't necessarily have an idea in their mind of what they're trying to emulate, or, you know, they don't necessarily have a great role model.

They might see people, you know, on social media or, you know, know of people who are great leaders, but they probably haven't actually been led by them. And so they haven't been close to them to see how do they actually run a meeting? How do they have a difficult conversation? How do they, you know, use coaching skills in the small moments to, you know, lay the foundation to be able to use this in the big moments and all that sort of thing?

And so in many ways, they know they should be developing people, but they don't necessarily know what they're trying to do and achieve, right? So that's probably one big challenge for a lot of leaders today. The other big one that I get all the time, and it is a reality, it's that I don't have time to coach.

You know, yeah, that's right. I mean, we are so busy. We are so connected out to do this [inaudible]. And they just kind of keep growing, the calendars grow. How do we find the time to coach? And one of the reasons why leaders rely on telling their people what to do is that it's quick, it's easy, and we get the solution that we want.

You know, there's kind of three keys. But every time we tell people what to do and we give them a solution, they go away and implement, then it all goes well and that's awesome, but what happens next time they encounter a problem? They go to the source of their last solution, which is you the leader. And so you become the bottleneck in the organization because everybody is coming to you.

Essentially, we've trained our people to be passive problem presenters, where they just, I've got a problem. Here it is presented to you. And so, therefore, we become the bottleneck and we have even less time than what we had originally. And so, you know, coaching does take a little bit of an investment in terms of time.

But I always ask myself this question, and it comes from when I was listening...I was, sorry, sitting down having coffee with a leader that I had in my, you know, early years. And he had a massive capacity.

He carried so many different portfolios. And I said, "How do you do it all? You know, how do you have such a big capacity?" And he said, "I'm constantly asking myself this question. What do I need to do today in order to give me more time in six weeks or six months?" And he said, so often what I need to do today is going to be inconvenient, but I know that the payoff is going to be in the long-term.

If I invest the time today, and it might be that, hey, I've got to, you know, spend...it might be 15 minutes, it might be half an hour more than I would, if I was going to just give someone a direction. And it might take a little bit more time at the front end, but tell you what? At the back end, it gives you so much more time back because essentially you've developed the capability.

They're more proactive. They've got more initiative. They've got more understanding and ability to do things more independently, so they go on and run with it. And what ends up happening is that people start solving their own problems before you even hear about it. And so I always challenge...you know, people say, I don't have time.

Yeah, I get it. It's really difficult, but how do you not have the time to coach if you think long-term? It's one of those things that if you make the investment today, you're going to reap the rewards down the track. And if you don't, then you're only going to have less time in the future.

And so it's a bit of a perspective shift and a mindset shift that's required, but very much a real problem. And I'm coaching a group of leaders at the moment, partnership [inaudible]. I'm like, don't try and turn every interaction into coaching interaction. Just try and make a little bit of progress every day.

If you're using coaching skills as part of a conversation and you're just prompting a little bit more thinking, and then giving the direction, then hey, you're still making progress, right? And that, I think, is a key thing for a lot of people that I work with and go through my program. They're trying to turn every interaction they have into a coaching interaction.

It's just not realistic, right? And so what I say is that you've got to teach, you've got to give direction. Try and dovetail that direction with a couple of coaching questions. So, ask a question, you know, at the front end, and it might be, hey, if I'm standing here...so let's say, you know, a safety leader is walking in and there's a particular risk or hazard that is in front of them and that needs to be dealt with straight away.

And so you might call over area manager or whoever it is in this context and say, "Hey, put yourself here in my shoes as a safety leader. What do you see right now?" And get them to stand out and then highlight what the hazard is. And you say, "Hey, what do you think needs to happen?"

All right. And you just get them to think about that. And then you go, okay, cool. What I need you to do is boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Give the direction, all right? And then at the end of that, you might go, "Hey, what do you think we need to do to make sure that this doesn't happen again?" And so you've dovetailed the direction with a couple of coaching questions.

You've encouraged them to start thinking critically about the situation and the hazard, the risk that's in front of them, and therefore, you know, you're fostering them thinking that way next time they encounter something of that nature. So, if you can...in that way, you're using coaching skills to enhance the way you give the direction.

And so that's often not necessarily a compromise, but you're still providing the quick direction that needs to happen, but you're doing it in a way that prompts their learning as well.

- Yeah. I think it's a little more realistic than being all one or all the other.

- Hundred percent. And that's what I said before. I'm a big believer we don't need to fill our companies full of executive coaches because every conversation would be drawn out, every conversation will be drawn about learning.

- Well, what do you think? What do you think?

- A hundred percent. We need leaders to lead and we need them to make decisions. We need them to give direction, but we need them also to temper that and do it in a way that develops people. Yeah. And ultimately, my big thing is if you can lead in a way that transforms your people that you lead into better versions of themselves, then they become...you know, better people means more high-performing employee, which means more high-performing teams and, you know, better companies, right?

But you know, kind of the altruistic side of that is that those better people go home and be better husbands, fathers, mothers, wives, and we've got better families and better communities as a result of that as well. And that's one of the reasons why I do what I do is because I've seen the destructive nature of poor leadership and I wage a war against the perpetuation of poor leadership, but I've seen the transformative amazing power of good leadership and I really want our good leaders to lead.

- Well, that's wonderful. And I wish you well in every ripple effect because it's true. Happy people at work are happy people at home and vice versa. You mentioned mindset just a few minutes ago. What role do mindset and skill set play in leadership development?

- Yeah. So really critical, right? And kind of mindset allows you to employ your skill set in the most effective way possible. Skillset obviously is what you do, the mechanics of coaching, which, you know, a lot of it is I talk about, you know, effective listening.

You've got to listen to, you know, what questions to ask. It's then how do I ask effective questions? What are the models that I might use to communicate, you know, sort of the concepts that I'm talking about or get people to do all of that? So, you can do all that really effectively, right? However, if your mindset is not supportive of that, then people don't pick that up, right?

There's going to be an inauthenticity there or an incongruency around the way that you're directing. So, if you don't actually...if you are using coaching techniques and strategies, but you actually don't believe that the individual in front of you is capable of, you know, achieving high performance or doing more, you don't believe in kind of the coaching methodology, then you're not going to...you know, it's going to come across in the way that you ask the coaching questions.

And so, therefore, it's not going to be effective. People are going to be like... And there's also a degree where you're not even going to start to coach if you don't have a mindset and a belief that, you know, coaching is effective. So, you know, I talk about a couple of key elements or the mindset of effective leadership...sorry, affecting coaching leadership, and one is a long-term focus.

And we've kind of spoken about the investment now brings the rewards tomorrow, and so that's kind of a foundational component of it. And another is the growth mindset. And, you know, some of the work that comes out of Carol Dweck over in the States is really powerful in that space in demonstrating if you believe that given...if you put in enough effort and intention and time, then you can actually develop your skills.

So, you can develop your capability, but also you can have an influence on the world around you is also very much part of that. The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset. And they're like, everything's fixed, it is what it is, and doesn't matter how much time, energy, and effort I put in, I'm not going to make a change. And so you can have a fixed mindset about a person, you can have a fixed mindset about a situation, you can fixed mindset about yourself, or you can have a growth mindset and say, hey, I understand that this is the current situation, or that's the current ability of that person.

If I put in time, energy, and efforts, then I can make a difference. I might be able to change the environment. I might be able to change the situation. I might be able to influence people. And so, you know, there's no point kind of trying to take a coaching approach if you don't believe that that change is possible, right?

And so they're kind of the two foundational ones there. I talk about some others around, you know, believing that people have the ability within themselves to, you know, come up with the solutions and problems. Again, if you don't believe that that's the case, then, you know, why coach ultimately? So, and some other ones around going first.

You know, never ask people to do something they're not willing to do themselves. And so, you know, you should be kind of coaching yourself as much as coaching others and receive coaching yourself. Go and get coached I think is an important part because, you know, whenever I'm running the coaching leader program, or I'm training and equipping leaders to coach, part of that is coaching them.

And that's so that they actually understand what it's like to be coached so that they know because if they don't, then they're kind of asking all these really hard questions...

- Yeah. It sounds like an interrogation.

- Yeah. Yeah, 100%. And their people are just sitting going [vocalization] and then they come back and go, "This isn't working? I'm like, "Have you been on the other side of what you're doing to these people?" And so once they have that experience, that tempers the way that they ask the questions and the way that they use their coaching skills.

So, you know, that's an important aspect to the program as well.

- So, talk to me a little bit about goals. First of all, what do you think is the most or a very common mistake that people make when they're setting goals?

- Yeah. So I guess the biggest one is clarity and not getting specific and not getting clear enough. The number of times I'll sit down with a CEO or an executive and they'll talk to me about whatever the problem is, I'm like okay, cool, so in this situation, what is it you actually want? I just get this blank stare, right?

People say, oh, I want to do this. You know, I want to be fit. I want to be healthy. I want to have lots of money. Or, you know, I want this problem to go away in my business. You know, I just wish that, you know, everybody jump on board with this safety initiative. All well and good, but they're kind of like wishes, they're aspirations, they're not goals.

And so when you actually take the time to sit down and what is it that I actually want, let's get specific around what does the end state and the outcome look like. And what are the impacts of that? And once people get super clear on that, generally I find people can figure out what they need to do to get there.

But people don't spend the time to get clear around what it is they want to achieve in the first place, which is part of the reason why they struggle so much to achieve their goals and that sort of thing. So, getting super clear. I mean, in the book I talk about the smart goal process, which, you know, many of your listeners would know.

So, getting really specific, making sure it's measurable, making sure it's achievable, making sure it's realistic, and making sure it's got a timeframe. I've put two other piece on the end of that formula. And so I talk about being positively framed, so people move towards what they focus on. And so if you are focusing on stopping something, then it's kind of negatively framed.

It's the thing that you don't want to do, but if you are focused on the thing that you don't want to do, you're actually thinking about that thing you don't want to do, and you're probably more likely to actually move towards it, right? Whereas if you are focusing on what you do want to achieve, what you do want to do, then you are more likely to actually engage in that thing.

And the other one is a connection to purpose. You've got to kind of understand why do you do what you do? You know, I've got to...so again, a lot of leaders don't...they haven't taken the time to clearly articulate what their sense of purpose is as an individual leader. And so if they haven't articulated that, they can't kind of link their goals, right?

But so often the same with, you know, organizational initiatives and that sort of thing. It's, yes, we want to do this to achieve this outcome, but hey, let's take a moment. What's the purpose behind this? Are we really clear on why we are doing this? And again, if you haven't taken the time to get that clarity, then you can't leverage that clarity, you know, to really provide the motivation behind the goal or the initiative, the outcome that, you know, you're trying to achieve there.

So, yeah, I think that one of the biggest things for a lot of people is they just don't get super clear on what their goal is and why they want to achieve it. When people do, generally I find that, you know, they can figure out what they need to do to achieve it once they've got that level of clarity.

- Yeah. I think I've heard that before and along with the idea that, and if you don't have an idea how to do it, there's this thing called the internet. No matter what goal you have, there will be information that will help you get there because someone else will have done it.

- Yeah. And you know, so often people will come to me and we are talking through in a coaching session around, hey, I want to achieve this, but I've got no idea how to do it, right? And again, if I'm taking the coaching approach, I don't want to tell them what to do because that makes them rely on me or somebody else telling them how to achieve their goals. And so it's a matter of, okay, where could you find out?

Who could you speak to? You know, what processes could you go through in order to find out what you need? What do you need to learn and where could you learn that in order to achieve the goal? And so you're asking all these sorts of questions and, again, people just...it's well within their capability to do all that, they just haven't thought about it.

And so that coaching approach is getting them to take a step back and potentially to the side, viewing it from a slightly different perspective and saying, "Well, you know what? I could jump on the internet, watch some YouTube videos about that particular topic." You know, I know this particular person who's done that in the past, I probably could go and grab coffee with that, but they haven't actually thought about that because they're focused on the problem, right?

So, often a good friend of mine, Darryl Stubblefield, told me a long time ago, he told this concept of if you lock onto a problem, you lock out solutions. And so you need to unlock from what you are currently focused on so that you can open the doors, take the blinkers off, and then see all the possible solutions that are available to you.

And I think that's so often the case.

- Talk to me about coaching across different levels. So, by that I mean coaching up, coaching down, and I assume there's a sort of coaching laterally as well. How do you kind of define those and do they require different skills?

- Yeah. So, so often it doesn't necessarily require different skills, but it's how you employ those skills that changes, right? There's a different context. And so you've just got to employ the same skills in a slightly different way to match the context that you... So, when people think about coaching, they always just think about coaching down the people that you lead.

And that's natural, that's kind of... And for the majority of leaders, that's where they use coaching skills the most. But when we start talking about an organizational coaching culture, I guess, that's where, you know, I guess formal coaching occurs in terms of the one-on-one, but there's a whole lot of informal coaching that occurs.

And coaching skills are used as a support mechanism and a natural way of interacting, you know, sideways and upwards. I coach a lot of people around coaching up, coaching their leader, coaching their manager, and particularly if you've got a difficult manager or you've got one of those leaders who it's got to be their idea, right?

So often coaching skills are great in that context. And you know, one, it allows you to get absolute clarity and aligns yourself. And so, you know, you can come to your leader and say, "Hey, boss, you know, you gave me this particular task. I just want to get clear on a couple of things so I know I'm meeting your expectations and we're achieving what we need to."

So, the outcome of this particular...you know, having thought about it, the outcome of this particular task and thing that we're trying to achieve is whatever it is, is that right? You know, and then you might go, okay, cool. So, I've thought about the kind of context and reality that we're operating in at the moment and these are the major considerations that we need to take into account.

And then you might go, all right, so if that's the case, I've thought about these three different particular courses of action and I've thought about pros and cons, and this one is the best one and this is why, and this is what I'll do to start implementing. Does that align with your thinking?

All right. And so essentially, what you've done there is you've gone through the grow model, which is a coaching model that's outlined in the book, but you're kind of reflecting that back to your leader and you are giving them the opportunity to have input. You are not telling them what needs to be done, you are just asking their questions to draw some of that.

And at the end of that conversation, you're both 100% aligned on what you're going to be doing and achieving and how you're going to do that. So, you know, you can walk away with confidence that one, your leader will have confidence in you, and two, you can have confidence that they're going to be happy with kind of what you've delivered, right? And you have a whole lot of influence around that because you can highlight what you consider to be the most important considerations in, you know, that particular [inaudible].

And you can promote what you think the outcome should be. Because the reality is, yeah, unless your leader's pretty switched on, they probably haven't thought about what the end state and the outcomes are going to be, right? If they're like most leaders, they're so busy, they're going, okay, cool, we've got to do this.

We've got to give that to you. They haven't actually thought through everything. So, if you do that thinking first, you can shape their thinking when you reflect that back to them. And so using all these coaching skills to influence, to clarify, to align all that sort of stuff. And yeah, I've used that myself.

But, [inaudible] my people that I've coached, the executive side coach, they come back, oh, that's amazing. And I think that's particularly relevant to safety professionals because so many safety leaders will report into leaders who have come up from other disciplines. You know, their executives, they might hold the health and safety portfolio, but they're probably not health and safety person in many cases.

And so they may not prioritize the same considerations or hold the same set of priorities that career health and safety professionals will. And so you will have to kind of shape and influence in order to make sure the organization is prioritizing health and safety considerations.

And, you know, from my perspective, coaching skills [inaudible 00:48:40] to do that.

- It occurs to me too that it would be a really good way to pull out unspoken assumptions because we all have assumptions that we go by and we're not always aware that we're making assumptions until someone says, "Is there something I'm missing?" And you say, "Well, you're missing this particular thing." And, "Oh, well, why is that?" You know, it pulls out just some things we've assumed that maybe should be spoken even if they're correct, whether they're correct or not, right?

- Yeah. It's implicit/explicit. When you do that, it clarifies, understand everybody's on the same page, right? And so often if you are inferring intent or, you know, you're making assumptions, we know what happens when you make assumptions.

- Yeah. Yes, we do.

- Yeah.

- Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you so much. I have to move on towards the ending questions here, but this has been really interesting. But I have some more questions that I think are always interesting. I ask every guest these. So don't be scared.

- No.

- The first one I'll be calling it the University of Clifford. So, if you were to be tasked with training tomorrow's safety professionals, and then let's put aside all technical skills that they need to know, what kind of soft skill training would you give them?

I think coaching is a fairly obvious answer but is there anything within that, that you think would be particularly useful?

- I'm a massive believer in coaching, and I think coaching's going to help and enhance everything that you do. So putting that aside, I think two things. One is understanding people and as understanding, just getting a basic understanding of personalities, different personalities, and how to use and leverage those.

And the second one is just communication, presence and confidence and how do you communicate effectively and speak effectively. And while we're not expecting, you know, safety professionals to, you know, jump up on a stage and speak to their people, the ability to speak clearly and confidently when you are...that inspires confidence and competent or a perception of confidence and therefore, confidence in you.

And if you are spruiking a...I shouldn't use the word spruiking, but if you are you know, trying to get people on board with a particular safety initiative and you are coming across as, you know, you're really nervous and you're not coming across as a competent professional, then they're not going to have faith in the initiative.

So, the ability to speak really clearly and confidently is a really important skill set for professionals in that context. And I think that the bridge between the two, understanding personality and communication, I talk about the underlying principle of influence is understand the priorities of the individual or the audience that you're speaking to, and then frame your request as a contribution to their priorities.

So that priority might be personality-based, it might be role-based, it might be values-based. But what's important to them if they understand what you are asking them to do is you're going to get them more of what's important to them, what they've already brought into, they'll buy into your request. And so, yeah, that's what I...those couple of areas.

- Okay. Great. And if you could go back in time to the beginning of your career. Is there a piece of advice that you would give young Clifford?

- Yeah. So, there's a couple. One I would say is buy more coffees is often the one. And, you know, yes, I love coffee and drinking too much is probably not good for you. However, it's an amazing...just having coffee with someone is amazing to, one, build your network so that you get to know a much broader range of people.

You get to learn from a much broader range of people. And the number of opportunities for you, you know, increase exponentially with every person that you have coffee, right? But the other thing is, it's a really great way to build connection and to build relationships, to build trust that we were speaking about before.

And I think that is absolutely critical for safety leaders within a large organizational context. They need to have some of those relationships. They need to get safety initiatives off the ground. They need to get individual executives to champion their initiative in order to get movement from, you know, know their teams and departments.

And so the more relationships they can build, connection that they can build with individual leaders throughout the organization, the more effective they are going to be at their role.

- Good. Yeah, you can always get decaf, remember that people if it's too much.

- If there's an Italian hot chocolate though we're having coffee, then I'll...

- Perfect. Perfect. So again, there's sort of an obvious answer to this question, which is how can our listeners learn more about the topics in our discussion today? So, of course, there's the book you've written.

- Yeah. So there's the book, which is always great.

- There's the book and we'll have it linked in the show notes. And yeah, we usually show a little picture of the cover, The Coaching Leader. But there are there other sort of books, or websites, or even concepts that you think would be a good thing for people to look up if they're interested in this sort of thing?

- Yeah, certainly. So, there is a wealth of information out there, right? So, a couple of other books that I think are, you know, some of my favorite. They're the books that I wish I had written. Have a look at Michael Bungay Stanier, right? So, he is an Australian who lives in Canada now who is one of the world's best coaches. So, he's written "The Coaching Habit," which is an amazing book.

Also "The Advice Trap," and I think his most recent one is, "How to Begin." But he is an amazing coach. He's an amazing educator. And some of his books are brilliant. Another great one if you are particularly interested around kind of coaching culture and getting coaching throughout your organization, it's a book called "Bring Out Your Best," and it's by Natalie Ashdown.

And actually, she was the one that taught me how to coach way back when, right? And so she's an amazing coach herself, but her book will bring out the best. Yes, it covers some coaching skills and that sort of thing, but the main focus is how do we build a coaching culture? How do we get coaching into the workplace?

And, you know, particularly if you're thinking about how do I apply coaching and developing capability and getting people, you know, using it to enhance safety initiatives and, you know, more systematically, I think that's a brilliant one. There's plenty of, you know, kind of short online courses and that sort of thing.

You might want to check out, you know, ICF is the International Coaching Federation. It's kind of like one of the global bodies. The other one that's really good is the Association for Coaching. I've been a member of both of those and, you know, there are some really good stuff out there training material-wise from them.

So yeah, check it out. There's plenty of stuff out there. What I would say with coaching is that it is an unregulated profession, so anyone can stick up their shingle tomorrow and say, I'm a coach and start coaching. So, if you are looking for a coach or you're looking for coach training, make sure that there's some sort of accreditation by some sort of body there rather than just getting anyone off the street.

- Yeah. Do your homework. And in that vein, where can our listeners find you on the web?

- Yeah. So, cliffordmorgan.com.au is the best place. I'm very active on LinkedIn as well. And so come and track me down, reach me out, connect, and say, you know, if you've got any questions, I'd love to be able to answer those. For any of those that are really interested, I'd love to give them a copy of a quick beginner's guide to having a coaching conversation.

So, if you go to the website, cliffordmorgan.com.au, you can download that one for free. And it will give you, you know, a coaching model, a whole bunch of questions, and a whole bunch of information around how to start. You can take that and start coaching straight away. You can give it to one of your team leaders and they can start going and coaching straightaway as well. So, yeah, I'd love to make that available for your listeners, Mary.

- Well, I'm afraid that's all the time we have for today. Thanks to our listeners for tuning in, and thanks so much for lending us your time, Cliff.

- Thank you very much for having me on. It's been great to speak to you.

- And my thanks to the "Safety Labs by Slice" team and bye for now. Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade. Find us at sliceproducts.com. Until next time, stay safe.