Thursday, November 30, 2017

What Too Many Leaders Get Wrong with Coaching Kata

By Elizabeth Carrington
November 14, 2017

Kata. It's a wonderful practice that gives us a scientific method for hitting our goals and building a robust lean culture. Yet LEI faculty Beth Carrington has seen too many leaders make a critical mistake that can undermine their Kata efforts at the roots. Today she shares that mistake and how we can avoid it.

Let’s start from the ground up. What is the role of coaching in Kata?

The idea of the Coaching Kata is to help embed a very specific and desired way of thinking and acting that a Learner habitualizes through frequent, intentional and course corrected practice. The desired ways of thinking and acting are built on the scientific method, where a learner experiments to learn how to recognize and overcome obstacles on their way to achieving goals beyond their threshold of knowledge. This scientific approach builds an innovative approach to achieving goals as opposed to an implementation approach. Think of doing quick-cycle PDCA: laying out an experiment, then comparing our prediction with what actually happened and then learning from that moment before continuing on with a next PDCA cycle.

So the role of the Coaching Kata is to teach this scientific approach through structured - short but frequent - coaching sessions. The Coaching Kata teaches the thought pattern (mental model) where a learner experiments to learn how to recognize and overcome obstacles on their way to achieving goals beyond their threshold of knowledge. The Coaching Kata is structured sessions between a Coach and a Learner that follows a very defined pattern, repeated frequently (as close to daily as possible) and gives the Coach an opportunity to give course correction feedback to their Learner.

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