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Reflections on a coaching life
Nature of modern warfare is changing rapidly. Whether it's deterrence, peacekeeping, or active combat, service personnel need more than ever to be adaptable, insightful, skillful, and able to recover quickly from setbacks. Thank you for joining me again as I speak to a fellow traveler in life and the world of coaching, Doctor Chris Mackall. Chris is a highly experienced coach with a deep business background, and I discuss with Chris his coaching work with senior officers in the British Army. I learned about their career paths, their expertise, and their responsibilities to their troops, their troops' families, civilian support staff, and when deployed to the wider communities where they're situated.
Geoff:Recorded in May 2025, we explore the challenges of modern military leadership from motivation to adaptability to responding to failure. And we explore two approaches Chris uses for his work, a personality profiler and a model for use in teams focusing on trust, constructive conflict, commitment, and accountability. We conclude with reflections on what this work with the British military has given to Chris and how his work and wider life is shaped by his Christian faith.
Chris:So welcome to this podcast. My guest today is doctor Chris Mackel. We met in, I think it was 2018 on a project exploring how coaching could help graduates find their career direction or whatever other direction they were exploring at the time. At some point in this program, I needed a place to stay for back to back working days, and Chris offered to house me. And since neither of us knew each other at the time, it was a brave decision for him.
Chris:Now, as well as being a great host, raconteur, fine chef, and a man of accumulated and applied wisdom, I discovered that Chris is also a committee Christian, which all made for many rich and varied evening conversations. Amongst his other skills, Chris is a DISC practitioner personality profile, which we will uncover shortly. Now, Chris kindly shared with me some of his, profile information. And according to that, Chris is amongst other things, outgoing, adventurous, likes the stimulus of new experiences, and enjoys connecting with others. So Chris, I guess this is your lucky day.
Chris:Indeed. Well, good to meet you, Geoff. Online.
Chris:Indeed so. So can you just tell us a little bit, about yourself? Where where are you, and how did you get there?
Chris:Well, currently, I'm in Edinburgh. The reason I came to Edinburgh all those years ago when I was just leaving grammar school in York was that I was going climbing. So I can still remember my mother's horror struck face when on the day I was going up to Edinburgh for the first time to come to university, had my rucksack packed with my climbing rope on top of it. And she said to me, why is that packed with your climbing rope to go to university? And I said, why do you think I'm going to university?
Chris:So if Edinburgh's been to Edinburgh, you'll realize that Edinburgh has lots of cliffs around it and mountains and things quite close by. This was the big attraction of coming to Edinburgh. So this is why I came. I didn't even know where the university was when I came. I've been accepted.
Chris:I'd never been to the university. I can remember getting on the bus the first morning from my digs. And I thought, to me, university is a bit was a bit like school. And I said, well, could you put me I'm going to university. And then the driver said, well, which part?
Chris:And I'm after a bit by that. So I sort of said, well, there's not a central bit. And and I got off of the central bit and then found my way to the jobber department. So that was my start in university and my reason for coming to Edinburgh in the first place.
Chris:And you spent quite a bit of time in Scotland as part of your career history, apparently, according to Linkedin.
Chris:Been in Edinburgh ever since, really, apart from a brief sojourn in in Manchester of six years.
Chris:Right. Okay.
Chris:Two places, really. Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Aberdeen, ten years. Edinburgh, the rest minus six years for a time in Manchester.
Chris:Thinking about your career history, you've done various things. You've lectured at university, you've been
Geoff:a senior executive, you've run several companies.
Chris:Is there a particular career highlight that kind of sums you up?
Chris:I've enjoyed every single part of it. That's not quite true. I love being in university. I love interacting with students. I worked with quite a number of postgraduate students, and I love that interchange in small groups and so on of discussing issues.
Chris:My time, I was head hunted out of that into a large corporate, and that was a very educational experience in terms of corporate culture, the culture of that particular corporate body, which was a very large business, one of the leading market leaders in its particular field in The UK, and the culture of it was almost like might say civil war. The enemies were inside the tent, not outside the tent. And I was with them for four years. Some of that was not particularly enjoyable, but it was very educational in terms of my understanding or increasing my understanding of interactions between people and how that can be very toxic as well as very beneficial. And then after that, I then started my own business consultancy.
Chris:And that's really where I've been engaged ever since. Initially, we did lots of consultancy with, within the European union, because that that was where I'd been working as an academic. So we carried that on. We were we worked a lot with grant negotiation with EU grants, helping to create jobs here, science parks, and all sorts of business centers throughout The United Kingdom. And also I went back and taught an MBA program for a time, a part time and also built up quite a big staff team.
Chris:So I began to coach and develop people inside my own business because many of the people I recruited were relatively early in their professional careers. So it was great to work with these young people and help them develop their professional careers. And we had one character, for example, that went all the way through and got his MBA whilst he was working with me. So it was that kind of encouraging of people and coaching of people in their career development, people who work for me. That may have been what sort of excited my interest in coaching as a way of working with people.
Chris:What does coaching mean to you?
Chris:Well, coaching was a transition. When we first started EuroAccess, it was EuroAccess Business Consultancy. It was a consultancy. In other words, we went into people's businesses, analyzed it, and we gave them solutions. You know, we were writing the textbook, you might say for them to work from or not work from where they didn't choose to do so, but we were providing the solutions.
Chris:As a business, as a, as a coach, whether it's a personal coach or a business coach, I help people understand what they really, really want in a particular situation, how they can be more effective as a person in a particular situation, help them understand why they find certain situations or people more difficult to handle and how they can moderate their behavior and improve their emotional, what I would call emotional intelligence. You know, that is ways of dealing in a much more effective way with particular people or particular situations. And this is where I found that DiSC became very powerful, a very powerful tool when I discovered it ten or so years ago.
Chris:Many different situations where you've coached, and you particularly wanted to have some time to reflect about your experience of coaching in the British Armed Forces. So we know a good leaves aside their presupposition before they take on a new role, but on the basis that we can't leave aside a presupposition till we've got one in the first place, what ideas had you developed about leadership in the military before you saw it from the inside?
Chris:Their leadership is firsthand positional. In other words, you salute me because you I've got more stars than you've got, and I salute him or her because he or she's got more stars than I've got. It's the positional thing. Seniority and stars of stripes are gained by competence, by experience, and by longevity in the, in the role, you know, you're moving upwards and forwards. And there is a clear command structure because of, because of the legal requirements of the army or the police force.
Chris:There has to be this legal structure or this traditional structure to create a chain of command. You know, who, who is responsible for this body as it passes down through the chain? Who is giving the orders? Cause some of the orders can be life changing. So you need to know who is legally responsible.
Chris:There, there has to be that positional structure in the organization. But what I also have come to realize from the army is that these are all highly professional, men and women, but the most effective amongst them are people who've learned to understand who they are, who've come to understand how they react to situations, but also have come to understand how they can get the best out of their team, whether that's a regiment, brigade, battalion, or it's a smaller unit, how they get the best out of that team using something other than the fact that they are more senior to this team. It's in a word, it's a personal, it's relational. The two things here are positional. I am a colonel or a major or a general or a captain or whatever I am.
Chris:That's my position, but my leadership at its most effective is relational. People follow me because they want to follow me, not because they have to, do have to follow me because that's what the law says, but also they want to follow me.
Chris:So when we're thinking about how the, we're thinking about the culture of the armed forces, so part of that you say is shaped by a hierarchical structure, which is there for a very good reason to enable things to function. Then there's this dimension about the actual culture of the armed forces, the unique environment it is living there. And sometimes the difficulties that service personnel have when they transition out of the forces, because they'll say things like, well, you know, in the forces, you literally have to make life and death decisions. Most people who are in civilian life don't do that, some do, but most don't. And it's a supportive environment, which is unique.
Chris:People rely on each other in a very unique way. Some people describe being in the army as like it's being in their family. What did you pick up about the kind of culture and environment you were working in and what challenges did that present to you as a coach working in that environment?
Chris:I wouldn't regard myself as being truly in environment. I'm just looking into the environment. The people I'm coaching with can be anywhere in The United Kingdom or internationally based. I sometimes even don't know quite where they are. So most of my working is done online through things like teams with these people.
Chris:But you're quite right. That is the units that they're working with are very close knit. Army is very keen on having good cultures in the battalions and units. The army do a chemistry analysis fairly regularly, checking on all sorts of different aspects of how it's working. I mean, from the news, will gather that sometimes there are things that are not right, but I just, I think that that that is a function of being human beings in any organization.
Chris:Some human beings are not good for the team, whether that's a football team or an army unit. You know, there are some people who are toxic and seek to use their position in a way that's not good for the overall culture. But but the people I've worked with and enjoyed working with have been very committed to creating good cultures, creating effective teams, and the way that modern warfare is shaping now, and we can see it played out in in Ukraine, the days of mass armies, like we saw, for example, recently commemorated with with the invasion of Europe on D day, that kind of army working is difficult to envisage anymore for all sorts of technological reasons. It would be impossible to amass that kind of force without it being discovered because of the surveillance that's available and everything else now. So the fighting is now moving much more, obviously, as we see in Ukraine into small unit type warfare where the ability of individual soldiers or small groups of soldiers to act in what the army would call mission control, that is they know the overall strategy, but this small group is responsible for their part of it and will adapt how they respond according to the situation as it evolves.
Chris:The modern leader in the army is trying to create that capacity within the within their battalion, whether it's an infantry battalion or or or as an intelligence battalion, whatever the purpose of the of the regiment is. That's what they're trying to create this capacity for soldier personnel to be able to look at a situation and to evaluate and to act appropriately.
Chris:We've talked there that the culture showing the leadership challenge and the fact that modern warfare is changing very, very rapidly. And so you're working with people who want to become the most effective possible leaders in that kind of context. Chris, when I looked up, when I looked up British Armed Forces on a search engine, it said that there were, there were 12 ranks of officer. So of the 12 ranks of officers, sort of which, dimension were you working in? So typically, what kind of officers are you working with?
Chris:Well, I'm I'm working, well, working almost solely really at the moment anyway, with people who've reached the rank of lieutenant colonel. So these are people who typically have spent probably a minimum of twenty years, as many as twenty five to thirty years in the army. They've started out usually from from Sandhurst and gone through the the the the initial training as an officer at Sandhurst. And then they've progressed their career through that then moved into specialist units like infantry or tanks or whatever, that they've moved into intelligence, and their career has progressed. And they initially have been in charge of a small group of staff personnel, and then they've had various rotating out of that into various staff jobs.
Chris:In other words, that's assisting some more senior officer in their role, providing information and analysis and direction orders and so on. And their career progression has been at times commanding. So they've moved to, to become what they call a company commander. That's sort of rank of major at which, which, at which point they will have been in charge of between a 100 and a 130 personnel. Now they've arrived at this position where they are in command of either a regiment or a battalion so that they're now in command of or leading somewhere between 300 and say 800 personnel.
Chris:It varies significantly, but they will also have under their direct command civil servants and possibly non military personnel who are providing some kind of support role. So, and then of course they also have an allied responsibility for families because, you know, married personnel bring with them their families. And on occasions, these families may be back in The UK while they're on deployment somewhere else in the world. So there is then this, this tension between, you know, the one partner being somewhere in the world, service and the family back home. As the commanding officer, you're not directly handling the detail, but it all these books stop with you.
Chris:So if there is an issue, it will feed its way through the system, through the welfare officers, through the chaplaincy or whatever, ultimately to you, you know, as being the person in charge.
Chris:You're working with your men or women in military capacity. You have civilians who are providing support. You've got to think about the family aspect. Presumably also, if you've deployed, you've got responsibilities in terms of liaison relationships with whichever cultural country you happen to be in as well.
Chris:Exactly. And, or it can be a different role. I mean, one of the people I coached was on the United nations role for six months. So that person was reacting with United Nations personnel Cause the, you know, the British, it was a part of a British regiment, but this detachment were acting under the control of United Nations. There would be a superior officer who was also wearing, know, wearing the blue, blue beret that they wear or blue helmet.
Chris:So in the sense that they cease to be answerable to the United Kingdom, British army, they're answerable to the United Nations for a period of time. Usually it's a peacekeeping role that they're doing. If you're a peacekeeping role, it means there's tension. So you've got two opposing sides who don't agree with each other, and the United Nations sitting in the middle trying to keep them apart or trying to maintain a steady, balanced relationship as much as you can in that kind of situation along this line. And, course, that's that's been debated as to what might happen in Ukraine.
Chris:If the the fighting stops, there will become a line, which which is a disputed line.
Chris:So the demanding complex multifaceted. You've been asked as part of a team to be provide some support to the armed forces. What what were you being asked to do in broad terms?
Chris:Well, I'm not offering a mentoring support because I I've never been in a position of responsibility in the armed forces. The journey for these commanding officers starts with doing a DISC evaluation. So that tells us or tells them who they are in DISC terms.
Chris:So the intervention I understand it certainly involves coaching, personality profile, and you've got a key behaviors model, which you might mention. DiSC is obviously very important, certainly at the beginning of the process, and then it provides you information you work with. So what is this personality profile? What look does like? What does it tell you about people?
Chris:Imagine this on the radio. When you see on paper, DISC is a circle. It is a circle split into four quadrants. So imagine a vertical line on this imaginary circle. To the left of that line, DISC says that the person is more sceptical, more task focused to the right of that vertical line.
Chris:Disc talks about a person being more warm and accepting more people focused. That we use is as an online version developed from the work of a guy called Marshall back in the nineties. Marshall's an interesting character in the sense he's known for three things. He did develop DISC in a, in a sort of paper form. He did, or was one of the people in America working on the, the lie detector.
Chris:And he also wrote the Wonder Woman magazines. Wonder Woman was he wanted to show the power and the abilities that women have. That was that was why he wrote it, apparently. Anyway, back to disc. So so Wiley, the big publishing company, have taken that early work, put it online and developed quite a very sophisticated system based on algorithms.
Chris:And the way the system works is that they, they ask you a question and they give you four options that it, and what you're asked to do is to pick the option that's most like you. Some options may be very clear. You can say, yeah, they ask you this question. Are you, are you so and so? And the answer is obviously yes.
Chris:If, if it is not so clear as yes, they ask you to give the nearest option to you. And, and it's a whole series of questions and you're meant to not outthink them. You're meant to just answer it online and go through it as quickly as possible, giving, you know, your first responses. But what you don't realize is, is that the algorithms are working below the surface and that, that they're they're detecting things about you that, that you should say are subtle or underlying how you normally. So in other words, you have a main DiSC style as they call it, which emerges, but you also have other, what disc calls unexpected items.
Chris:Right? So let me go back to the diagram in the air again. Having done this evaluation, what you'll find is that you will sit in the disc circle either to the left or right of the vertical line to the left, skeptical questioning, wanting to know why, asking why more often. To the right, you're warm and accepting and you pull him off people focused. To the left, you're more task focused.
Chris:And then if you take the horizontal line across the middle of the circle, the horizontal one, above that line talks about you being extrovert. By that, it means is that, you know, that that you you you are energized by being in a company, whether you're leading that company or whether you're just a member of that company, it's your interactions with people that that in a sense energize you. Below the line, you tend to be more introspective, more reflective. And of course by introspection, they don't mean that you're some kind of guy who locked himself in a, in a cupboard. They mean that, that, that in terms of gratification and self energizing and so on doing the job well is usually sufficient motivation for you getting something done.
Chris:So then the disc circle splits based around these general directions. The disc circle, as I say, splits into four quadrants. You've got the D, which is they call it, it's colored green and it's a top left hand segment. That's a more directive type person. You've got the I to the right of that, which is a more warm and influencing person, you know, more outward going, very people focused, the, the sort of the life and soul of the party.
Chris:You've got the S type person who, who is tends to be more supportive, more cautious. And then you've got the C type person, the bottom left hand corner, which is yellow. That person is very conscientious, very detail driven, very careful about their evaluation of things and so on. What I found from these soldiers is the following. And I've now coached about almost 80 commanding officers.
Chris:I found, first of all, that there is no predominant segment of the disc circle that you could say that army officers are drawn from. You'll find successful commanding officers of the lieutenant colonel rank in any of these segments. I have found that. There is a slight predominance for them to be to the left, The vertical line slightly to the left, which means that they tend to be task orientated, you know, and skeptical, not a bad thing. Because remember in terms of DiSC terms, there is no preferred position.
Chris:It's who you are. And it's how you use that. So if you take a disc, a person say who is a D that is that they are assertive. They are very good at taking direction and taking control and moving things. They are very task orientated.
Chris:They want to achieve goals and driven that sense. Those are all good energy, energizing and effective leadership qualities. But if that person doesn't have emotional intelligence, there is a risk that they become assertive, aggressive. They become deterministic. They're seen as someone who won't take any of the, any opinion from around about him and so on or her.
Chris:Low emotional intelligence characteristics. Army officers can be anywhere in this circle, but what I've also found is that they all have somewhere between six and twelve, what DISC is calling unexpected items. So for example, if I'm a commanding officer who is a S, it means that I naturally want to collaborate. I'm very supportive, very caring, but you also find that this person, and I think this is why they've been successful as army officers can also be very quizzical, very critical, very sceptic when they need to be. They can also take quite decisive action because sometimes, you know, you can have a nice collegiate discussion, but if you're under fire from somewhere, or there is an emergency of some kind, you need somebody to take charge and to give clear orders so that they have the capacity to stretch into this D sector, what is more a D type behavior there.
Chris:Or the C type person usually wants to evaluate and look at all the factors and so on and so forth. But again, it, it, you know, as they famously say, no plan survives contact with the enemy. So you may have a detailed plan in your head or, or being given out to your troops, but once you engage with the enemy or with an unknown situation, that plan may need to change. These C type people who are successful army leaders have the capacity to quickly vary their plan and, and, you know, vary the orders and so on. So it's, so it's this flexibility that's what's commonly called it to me, emotional intelligence.
Chris:So before you've had your first conversation with an officer, they've had their DISC assessment. Yes. They've seen this picture. I'll put a link in the show notes to DISC if people want to see what one looks like. They will have some kind of expectation of what is then going to happen when they come and talk to you.
Chris:And you will have some impression of what this person is like before you get hold of them. Now, I know some coaches think that when they look at a profile, they'll think that this is a window into a man or woman's soul, whereas others take it more as this is a potential guide that will give me some insights basis for conversation. In terms of the value and the quality of insight that you get from DiSC, how does that shape your thinking when you're working with your client?
Chris:I've been doing this for four years now. And over that period of time, I believe that my understanding has increased tremendously. Right? It's been a learning curve, realizing the power of DiSC, but also being able to be interact with these individuals because they've all been successful in their career path, but they're all had a different career path. They've all ended up as a, as, as a lieutenant colonel.
Chris:Some of them not in the position that they want to be in, in the sense that, you know, an opportunity has come up for them, which they've got to seize, because this, this is the moment in the, in their professional life in the army, and they have to seize this opportunity, but it may not be the opportunity that they really wanted. You know, it, it may have been not the regiment or the battalion or the specialty or whatever it is that they really, really wanted. They've got to deal with that. Sometimes some of them have taken over a situation which is not being good, and they've had to try and they've had to work to improve that culture, that situation. So there's all sorts of things going on here.
Chris:So it's by listening to what they're telling me and then looking at their DISC profile and then helping them understand how they can use who they are. Because they're obviously got very high levels of competence because the army will keep on checking and balancing and evaluating their levels of competence. But it's, it's being able to use that competence and experience in a particular context with a particular battalion or unit that they've been given command of.
Chris:Every, every organization or community has its own language. It has its own shorthand. It has its own way of talking about sometimes we'll use the same language to talk about the same thing. So you've used the words emotional intelligence quite a lot. Is that a phrase which is used in the army, or is it a concept that they understand, or do they have that as an idea but talk about it in a different way?
Chris:I can't we only talk about the bits that I've come across really. For some of them, this is the new way of looking at it, but it's also very clear that that within the armed forces, there is a growing realization of these importance of this, what people would call emotional intelligence. I mean, there was a documentary on on the BBC channel, I think, about the Marines, And part of the training there was in emotional intelligence. You you could say that when you were commanding five or 600 personnel and they were acting as a cohesive, directed unit in some grand battle plan, all you expected of them that was they was that they would follow, follow orders. Now you may still be in command of five, six hundred personnel, but they will pretend to be work working at the moment and possibly in the future as well in much smaller units.
Chris:So understanding how they work and how they're motivated and how they will work when you're not particularly present with them and so on is very important. Motivating them to act in ways that are appropriate for the situation when you've got no direct line of sight on them is a challenge. I think it's only possible through enhanced emotional intelligence, both from the, from the person doing the leading and, and also down through the ranks. From my experiences, the army is now recognizing this. And this is, for example, why this coaching program was introduced four years ago for this level and why the army is talking.
Chris:I mean, I believe, I don't know whether they're actually implementing it. They're actually talking of implementing coaching earlier in the chain of command.
Chris:Now I know we can only talk in very general terms about coaching interventions. Because obviously we preserve the confidentiality of our clients and the organizations we work with, but in broad terms, what's the difference you think you've been able to make to the people you've worked with?
Chris:Well, the feedback I've had has very positive. These are men and women under a lot of pressure, a lot of time pressure. So when they take the time to respond to to your coaching session by saying how much they've benefited from it, giving you feedback on how it's helped them improve, how they interact with with their team and so on and so forth. I mean, on one occasion, I was invited to go and run a workshop on leadership with a particular battalion in Scotland and also to deal with this question of failure. Because, you know, in normal coaching parlance and so on, we talk about learning through failure.
Chris:Well, in some ways, in a, in a military context is not a good idea, really. It has to mark you out as a very bad loser. In fact, the American general, four star general McChrystal remarked in his book on leadership that he found that he was a senior American leader in because in because he was America was was tended to be overall command in Afghanistan and Iraq, remarked on the fact that the army leaders, military leaders, he found were more afraid more frightened of failure than they were of enemy action. And it, the army structure, the army career is very heavily reported on. You know, you don't want on your record failures, but of course what we are trying to encourage people, the armed units now is, is, is to learn to respond flexibly.
Chris:If you go back to the days of Waterloo and so on, where, where, where, and you still see to this, to some extent in, in, in the, the ceremonial battalions that we see around Buckingham Palace and so on this capacity, and you will see it on, you know, on Trooping the Colors, this capacity of doing quite intricate drills. They're they're all drills that originally came from the battlefield when when, you know, you had to wheel 500 men and get the change formation or to take up formation very quickly in a precise way so they could direct their fire at the enemy. That kind of mass fire from individual muskets is a bygone thing. You're trying to create, you still have that ceremonial precision, but you're now trying to create soldiers who can respond in a much more individual and evaluated way as either an individual or as a small unit.
Chris:You talked earlier about learning four years on this, learning for yourself. As a coach, what would you say that having worked with this group has given?
Chris:Well, great appreciation of these men and women who, you know, are our defense and, and, you know, becoming, shall we say much more immediately appropriate or needed given given the political context in Europe as we see it evolving at the moment. This this this level of leadership is so critical and recognized as such within the army. This rank of , Lieutenant Colonel, and particularly there's there's two, the other thing about these people is that they are in command of this unit, in regiment, wherever it is, they're in this unique role for two, two and a half years. And then they'll move on to some other, to a staff job of some kind. Hopefully for them, their career will progress towards being a full colonel or being towards a brigadier, major general, and so on.
Chris:But it's a very narrow pyramid as you get further up. These men and women in their leadership role are vital to the effectiveness of our armed forces, and and it's a it's a vital two two and a half years of contribution that they have before they move on. Many of them will describe it as the best job in the world, this, this particular unique two, two and a half years that they will have. So, because of the direct contact they have with so many personnel, once they go above this level, once they say they become a brigade brigadier, they will interact with maybe 20 or 30 lieutenant colonels. That's what they will interact with.
Chris:They won't interact with this same massive personnel that the lieutenant colonel does. So so the quality and effectiveness of these people in terms of building, you know, developing that that their team is so vital to our defense. You know, in the last since over the last we've to the possibility of of there being a European war again, which I think people thought was gone. You know, the war came down within Berlin, and the old Soviet block broke up, and no one could conceive of really a European war again, but that is now coming onto the horizon.
Chris:Chris, can we go just think about something else? Obviously, on these, podcast, I like to talk a bit about my own motivations as a coach, particularly, my experience being a Christian. For yourself, what's the relationship between you? What's attracted you about coaching as a way of working, but also your your Christian faith? I mean, how do those those things work together?
Chris:Right.
Chris:Well, whether I was running a business consultancy, I, I mean, I don't really do that anymore now. Doing the coaching or fulfilling some role in the church. To me that there are three key things about that. One is your character that, that you are a person of integrity, of trustworthiness, truthfulness, humility. And these are all to me, characteristics, which should inform how you behave in any situation, a work situation, lesser situation, a family situation, or a church situation that this should inform how you respond and behave.
Chris:And also then it reflects back into your purpose. Why are you doing this? Your self promotion or your career development is not the most necessarily most important thing in life. I mean, times I've made choices where I've in Edinburgh, you know, rather than going following, say, an academic career development for for a variety of reasons, partly family reasons, but also because of my commitment to particularly Christian Outdoor Centre at that time. These things influence how you work, how things work out or your priorities or what motivates you.
Chris:And also your focus. I suppose looking back throughout my professional career, going back back to my initial ten years as a full time academic, it was the interest in people and seeing people develop, in this case, undergraduates and recent post graduates, seeing their careers and their personalities develop their interests in particular academic areas of economics, marketing, in my case, that kind of thing, European policy, seeing how their interests in that developed and learning from them as well. Cause I think an important part of, of a person's character in terms of ensuring that they continue to develop. So I think if you think, gosh, you know, I've done my degree and that's it, then that, that, that, that, is going to limit you. I think if you see that the, that the, the degree is, it really is you passing go.
Chris:And then what sustains you for the next however many decades is curiosity. Why did I react in that way? Why did this person react in that way? Why do I find this particular situation stressful? That situation energizes me.
Chris:Understanding those factors, it goes a long way to being resilient and being effective. Sometimes with the, with these army leaders, we talk about the difference between reacting and responding. Someone when we're driving and someone cuts us up, the reaction is to it's possible to hit the horn. It's maybe just to do some kind of gestures. It may be to become very angry.
Chris:That that's the reaction. The response is, is what is appropriate in this situation. And, know, being angry, cursing them, waving your fist at them, doesn't really achieve anything. It might aggravate the situation. It does not really achieve anything.
Chris:They say it takes your focus off. I'm now in a situation that may be risky because of what somebody's done in their car. And how can I best navigate this? And that may not be taking my hand off the wheel to wave at them or whatever. It's, it's a response, not a reaction.
Chris:All things we see other people doing, we would never do ourselves, would we pray?
Chris:No. Absolutely not. To me, try and communicate to people what I'm thinking or what, commissioning myself, what I'm thinking. If I can reduce it down to these simple examples, and then you can see yourself doing the simple example in real life and you think, I understood that. That was not good.
Chris:So what can I do different next time? But again, asking out either ourselves questions or asking the other person questions is a very effective way of learning. Those terms saying to me that that was terrible. Well, you know, ask them, well, what could you do next time? You were since surprised by the outcome here.
Chris:What kind of outcome were you expecting in this situation? Begin to begin to get them to explore what they could do different next time to get a different response or a better response in the situation? Or why does that, I mean, to me, how I sum up disc is we tend to think of other people as being difficult and some people are difficult, but disc tells you that other people are maybe just being different. For example, my disc profile is DI and it's quite nearly outside because again, with internal disc measurement, the nearer you are to the circumference of the circle, the more extreme or the more accentuated extreme, but not a good word. The more accentuated that characteristic is.
Chris:So I'm DI, which means I'm near the top of the vertical. Well, I am near the top of the vertical line. I could be anywhere on that vertical line, but I'm near the top. I'm sitting just on the left hand side, the D side, but I've also got strong I type influence characteristics as well. Now, which means that I am highly self motivated, highly energized, tend to see solutions quickly.
Chris:They might not be the right solution, but I will see a solution quickly. I can tend to be able to vocalize quickly, articulate what I think is the problem or what I think is the solution or what we should do and so on and so forth. That's who I am. Now learning to use that personality effectively means I've got to understand that or ask myself, am I crowding other people out? Cause you've got an S type person.
Chris:They may be very concerned about the situation. They may be concerned about how it's going to affect other people and so on and so forth. But unless I give them the space to vocalize that or that in the group discussion, I'm not going to hear what they think about it. Not going to learn from what they think about it. Or I've got somebody who has more C's, so they're interested in the detail of a situation.
Chris:Again, if I don't listen to what, if they're in my team, can, I can learn a lot from them in terms of me, instead of me running off in a particular direction, if we have time to gather the thoughts of the group and come to a considered opinion, direction of agreement of a plan, then that's a much more effective way of going about it than me domineering the group? Because for two reasons, one, I am not the sole font of all knowledge or truthfulness or solutions. There are other solutions in the room. We should consider them. And secondly, if I'm developing my team, then I've got to give them the space to develop and to learn.
Chris:And if they're simply rules takers or decision takers, they never will learn and never will be in a position to be able to articulate a decision or to take effective action on their own. That's, that's the fact. And we run a program called Connect Four, which I call Connect Four because it's based around four effective behaviors. And the first of those is, is trust. That is not trust in terms of competence.
Chris:That is if I employ you as an accountant, I trust that you are competent as an accountant. But by trust, I mean that you're open with me. I trust that you will give me the bad news and the good news about the financial well-being of my business. So it's a vulnerability, it's ability to talk about this. Then, then what I call productive conflict.
Chris:And in fact, why they run up one of their evaluations on disc is about productive conflict, you know, because we all handle conflict differently. You know, a D type person with low emotional intelligence in a conflict situation may be raising their fists because this is conflict. I'm gonna get my way. And of course that then backs everybody else up and you might really get a truly conflict situation. But the but the capacity in a group to argue strongly for the best solution.
Chris:So you have to have an agreed goal or direction of travel for the group. What, what are we trying to achieve here? And then you've got to try and pair that conversation, that discussion down to what are the key factors that will deliver what we want to deliver. And in other words, we're trying to depersonalize and demotionalize and taking the any kind of legacy issues out of the whole thing so that we have an agreed objective and agreed goal that we're trying to achieve here. And then we're arguing about what is the best way of achieving it.
Chris:And of course, if you've got a room or a group group of people who are highly competent, highly professional, experienced, you'll get maybe get diverse opinions, but you've gotta be able to argue those out. And that argument may become quite strong, but it's a, it's a very powerful way of getting to the best solution.
Chris:So, so you've got, you've trusted conflicts, then you said there were two other factors.
Chris:Yes. Well, the, the, the third one is commitment. In other words, risk in groups, particularly if you've people who are sort of saying more on the S type, it is that they don't feel able to contribute or they're frightened to contribute or they don't see they think themselves rightly or wrongly, not each point in me contributing because they're gonna do what they're gonna do anyway. So I've got, if I say anything, it's gonna be ignored. So I'll just keep my head down.
Chris:And when the meeting finishes, I'll just go and do my own thing anyway. That's what I'm gonna do. So they are not committing. They're committing to keep quiet, but they're gonna go away and do their own thing afterwards. And in a sense that they're subverting authority by passive aggressive behavior.
Chris:So you want the capacity to argue about something very strongly based on trust that they're all going in the same direction. And then 100% commitment, you know, this is what we've agreed. It may not be what I wanted or what I thought was the best solution, but it is the group's decision. If you're leading the group, of course you may have to exert a casting vote. It's just a fact of life, but there is commitment.
Chris:Then finally there is accountability. In other words, I am held accountable for performing. And you might come to me and say, well, Chris, you said that you or your team, as part of this group effort will deliver the following. Why what's gone wrong? Why didn't you deliver that?
Chris:And of course that feeds back into the top bit, the trust bit, because if truth is, if trust is vulnerability, I may well have agreed on behalf of my team that we would do the following, but then something comes in to intervene that we hadn't foreseen that disrupts what we were gonna do. So you as leader need to know as soon as possible that we have a problem so that the plans can then be amended. If you don't know that something's gone wrong with my bit of the plan until the proverbial hits the fan, then you've got a problem. The whole group's got a problem. True.
Chris:Yeah. There is that trust is critical. Trust is critical. I think of trust is like money in the bank. You know, trust rates are very low.
Chris:It takes weeks, months, years to build up trust and you can just blow it in an instance. But to me, trust is one of the key fundamentals to building any organization and building any relationship. Once you destroy that trust, it's very difficult to rebuild.
Chris:Because we're getting towards the end of our time. Was there anything I didn't ask you that you wanted me to ask you about? And is there a final
Geoff:thought that you'd like to leave us all with?
Chris:To be a coach is an immensely privileged position to be in. I would describe myself as being a catalyst. What a catalyst does in a chemical reaction is the catalyst speeds up the reaction, but it's not part of the reaction and doesn't contaminate the reaction. That's how I think of coaching. It's helping people to get to where they want to get to sooner than they would have got there by themselves.
Chris:So it's helping them identifying what they really, really want in this situation, what steps do they need to take to get there, effectively taking their team with them if they've got a team sooner. And then it's a great privilege to be part of that process.
Geoff:Much to think about there. Thanks, Chris. Thank you to our listeners. And for now, goodbye and go well.