Covering both investigations and coaching, Raeda Consulting offers various workshops and training to help leaders undertake investigations and coach their people to have better conversations in the workplace.
Workshop options
Leaders
In all cases it is critical for the senior leaders to understand the language, intent and approach of your chosen investigation methodology. To this end, I offer two choices. For the most senior managers (C-Suite) a two hour session is sufficient. For those who may lead investigations and for those whose job is to review and approve investigations, a three or four workshop is useful. These both cover:
- The ‘Why’ of an investigation – To learn, rather than to prevent recurrence.
- The investigation model, what it is, why it looks like it does and where it came from.
- The steps of the investigation process.
- Interview compared to taking statements.
- The role of the leader in the investigation process.
- Current investigation report quality review, with examples from your business.
Facilitators
For those who wish to learn how to facilitate a workplace incident investigation, the best option is for a full two-day workshop. This highly interactive workshop covers the above in more detail and during the two days, each participant will get to practice their facilitation skills as the team builds an investigation through all steps from initial data gathering to lessons-to-be learnt and what should go into a simple report.
Investigation training
Simple Timeline and 5-whys Investigation Guide
A simple Timeline and 5-whys investigation is designed for low to medium level workplace incidents – those that reasonably could not have easily caused a fatality. The steps of this level of investigation are:
Step 1 – Immediate Actions – Early Interview and Scene Security
Step 2 – Investigation Planning and Investigation Scope Setting
Step 3 – Data Collection – Information Gathering
Step 4 – Data Organization – Timelines and 5-Whys
Step 5 – Creating Actions that are SMART and Sustainable, including lessons to-be learnt.
Step 6 – Reporting
The approach is in alignment with the concepts of Work-as-Done, Work-as-Normal and Work-as-Written during the development of the timeline. If you are not familiar with this approach, I recommend that you look through the ‘Timeline and Five Whys Investigation Guide’ at the download button below.
Facilitating ICAM (Incident Cause Analysis Method)
The ICAM is undertaken in more depth than the simple time line and five whys with the addition of the ICAM step itself:
Step 1 – Immediate Actions – Early Interview and Scene Security
Step 2 – Investigation Planning and Investigation Scope Setting
Step 3 – Data Collection – Information Gathering
Step 4 – Data Organization – Timelines and 5-Whys
Step 5 – ICAM
Step 6 – Creating Actions that are SMART and Sustainable, including lessons to-be learnt
Step 7 – Reporting
Facilitating Learning Studies
This is a new approach to understanding incidents and what we can learn from them. It combines the conventional data gathering and time line including Work-as-Done, Work-as-Normal and Work-as-Written during the development of the timeline. Instead of then doing a five whys, it deviates to explore contributors to the gaps identified and explores what can learnt directly from the various contributors to the incident. It is a very simple, yet powerful approach for simple incidents and complex incidents alike.
Coaching training
Coaching and using a coach style in leadership and management is a wonderful way of making a profound and positive difference in helping people bring out the best in themselves. We use a commonly used coaching approach utilising the GROW model. It can be used in a pure coaching environment, as well as in the leadership and management space.
Raeda offers workshops along both direct coaching, as well as coach-the-coach work. I much prefer the coach-the-coach work as it builds sustainable coaching within your organization. In both cases, an initial ‘what is coaching anyway’ workshop is essential.
Extract from Essentials of Safety
The mistake leaders often make is assuming leaders know how to coach. This is not always true. Leaders are often good mentors, good teachers, good answerers, and instruction givers, but not all are naturally good at coaching. We need to help leaders understand what coaching is and how to do it effectively. When businesses are interested in helping leaders become good coaches, they often start by bringing an external consultant in once a year or so and have them coach the leaders directly. This approach can absolutely make a difference, quite often one that lasts a reasonable time. But it is not a sustainable solution. If, on the other hand, you were to bring in a coach and had them develop, mentor, and coach your leaders to be great coaches for their teams, you can end up with a sustainable and on-tap resource within your business that can make a huge difference over the longer term. It is a bit like the old saying ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’. I have seen so many leaders become much more effective in all areas of their work once they understand the impact they can have as a coach in addition to their impact as a leader and a manager.
I am sure many of you have seen several forms of coaching models over the years and thought that most of them are fine. Some are more complicated than others, but if you apply any coaching model that puts the player first (and makes that your intent during a coaching session), you will generally not go too far wrong. Having said that, as I mentioned above, I have a favourite. It is simple, powerful, beneficial, and really fun to use. It is what I currently use with many clients. I chose to align my coaching style to that described in Myles Downey’s work. It entails the understanding that coaching is neither teaching nor mentoring, and understanding that coaching is instead all about learning, growing, and raising awareness.
You can choose your own coaching method of course, but I believe that Downey’s explanations and examples provide excellent clarity and advice and are a great start to any excellence-in-coaching journey. As I am sure you are aware there are many elements to coaching and the one I want to share with you – as it is so powerful in practice – is a model called the GROW model and it works like this:
GOAL (The G in GROW) is about establishing what the desired outcome of the coaching conversation is all about. It is very much driven by the player with the coach prompting the player with a series of questions to help the player think about exactly what it is that they seek assistance with for the specific coaching session. It quite often is not the broad-brush initial statement that ends up being the goal of the session. The secret to a successful coaching session is in the questions the coach asks. These help to focus the player on a very specific topic for the goal of the coaching session.
REALITY (The R in GROW) is concerned with achieving the most accurate picture of the current state of play that it is possible to achieve. The reality part of the coaching session is always directly related to the goal of the session and it is here that the coach really helps the player see what the world looks and feels like for them. It is in this phase that the coach’s skills of listening to understand, following interest, generating understanding, and providing feedback and choice really come to the fore. During this stage, there should not be any analysis, no offering of bright ideas, no suggestions of ‘how I would do it is …’, and no jumping to conclusions.
OPTIONS (The O in GROW) is about what can be done – what is possible for the player to do. The intention here is to draw out a list of all that is possible without judgement or evaluation. Questions such as ‘Which of those would you like to pursue first?’ ‘So what could you do differently?’ ‘What else?’ ‘Anything else?’ ‘What else can you think of?’ are the food for the coach at this stage. The Options stage is usually directly related to an aspect of the Reality stage when the player has identified an element that is not quite how they would like it. For this reason, it is worth pointing out here that the GROW stages are not always linear. Sometimes, it helps to move backwards and forwards a bit between the phases as the conversation grows. With practice, it becomes more of a style of conversation than a rigorously applied process.
WRAP-UP (Or Will-do, the W in GROW) aims to select the most appropriate option from the Option stage of the coaching session and agree the next steps. In this phase, the coach’s intention is to gain commitment from the player for an action. Things like ‘So tell me, what, exactly, are you going to do?’ appear here. This is where one of the options becomes a reality that the player can take away and do. Coaching is for the purpose of improving performance, and so it must result in tangible ways of being or doing that change the view, approach, or actions of the player in order to be effective. This is an essential component and the player needs to get it and to commit to going away and doing it.
Coach-the-coach process
The way the Coach-the coach process works is that we identify the leaders who are required to coach their people. This is often for coaching in the area of helping people become the best they can be at Field Leadership in-the-field interactions with workers.
These identified leaders participate in a 4-hour workshop designed to help them understand the ‘Why’ of coaching and why being a good coach is actually going to make their lives easier. It then explores what coaching is and what it is not and they get to experiment coaching each other in a safe environment. Once this is done, we set up coaching sessions where I focus on coaching the leader, who is coaching a member of their team. Hence the term ‘Coach-the-coach’. All using the GROW model as described above. The outcome is a group of leaders within your business who know how to coach and are coached periodically by me in order to help them be the best they can be at coaching. This creates the sustainable bit as you get to have the coaching skill in-house after a short period of time and do not need to bring in an external coach as frequently.