Ep.36 – Why Leadership Coaching Works. Guest Lisa Sansom.

Listeners, you’ve probably heard me say…”this conversation was fun, inviting you to listen. But today with Lisa Sansom, I swear we thread elements of all the episodes that have preceded this one into this one conversation.

Lisa is a professional certified coach with the ICF and has been for a long time. She has an MBA.

She has a master’s in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, which is where we spend most of our time talking about that thread between coaching with that layer of positive psychology on it.

If you lead people, if you aspire to be a leader, if you are at all curious about the value of coaching and what high performance leadership means with a positive view that will actually change your life.

personally, as well as professionally. Honestly, this is the conversation. I was introduced to Lisa by episode 22’s Eileen Schaeffer.

Episode 22 was the number one listened to episode in all of 2022. So I think we have two friends competing for the title here in 2023.

With no further ado, the balance and the layering and the correlations between positive psychology and executive coaching, Lisa Sansom.

Enjoy.

@14:11 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

Lisa Sansom, welcome to Leading with Curiosity.

@14:19 – Lisa Sansom

Great. Thank you.

@14:21 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

Thanks so much for inviting me on. We’re going to talk about positive psychology, coaching, leadership development today. As you are, one of the first Canadian graduates of the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology program from the University of Pennsylvania, it seems like a great place to start to just give our listeners an overview.

@14:43 – Lisa Sansom

Like, what are we talking about today when we use the words positive psychology? Yeah. When people think about psychology, what we might call psychology as usual, you might think about all the things that are wrong with you or with other people.

A movement I think? illnesses, personality disorders, childhood traumas, things like that. And psychology has done a really good job of helping people figure out what was wrong with them in the past and how they can get better and get to a place of functioning.

I work in human resources as well. In human resources, we hear that about one in four to one in five adults are going to have some sort of mental illness in their life.

I saw a recent stat that put that up to even one in two. Maybe that comes out of the pandemic.

So that’s really important is really important that psychology has this. But when you flip that statistic, that means like half to three quarters of us are not going to deal with mental illness in our lives.

And what do psychology have to do for those people? The answer was until recently, until about 20, 25 years ago, not that much, really.

The psychology was very focused on the negative. experiences of living. And so along comes Martin Seligman. And he says, we need a psychology of strengths.

We need a psychology that appreciates what is a life well lived. What are positive relationships? What do we mean by great workplaces?

And how do we learn more about them? And so for people who are doing well in the low positives, like you think about a negative 10 to plus 10 kind of number spectrum.

If you’re sitting in sort of that like zero to three range, well, you’re not in the negatives. So psychology as usual doesn’t really have a lot for you, but you’re not thriving or flourishing in the seven eight or nine either.

And so this field of positive psychology can help people get from doing okay or good to really thriving and flourishing and being able to do that more often.

And typically the way that it does that is by studying. It’s a research based field by studying people who are thriving and flirting.

flourishing, positive organizations, positive individuals, positive relationships, whatever it is and saying what are the key ingredients of that and now can we take that and teach it and bring it into other individuals relationships organizations as these positive interventions to help them grow and thrive and flourish and it’s all coming out of the research basis.

So in a rather big nutshell, that’s what we mean by positive psychology. What is it that makes life worth living?

What’s the scientific basis behind that? And the implied part is how can we use that to help more people flourish more of the time?

@17:46 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

You are also a PCC professional certified coach with the ICF and you were a coach before you did the masters.

So let’s layer that directly onto coaching now. And if we could in the leadership space for the sake of leading with curiosity here.

So yeah, what do you want to share about? the correlation.

@18:02 – Lisa Sansom

Yeah, well, coaching is why I got into the positive psychology masters, because when I did my coach training and we’re going back, she’s almost 20 years now.

It was a while ago. There wasn’t a lot of scientific basis behind why coaching works. And I was very curious about this, like, what are the key ingredients of coaching and how do I know that what I’m doing works?

And I would have lovely mentors who would say things like, well, Lisa, use your coaching intuition. And that would send me into a panic because my first thought is I’m a brand new coach.

I don’t have coaching intuition and I don’t want to mess up somebody else’s life. So I wanted the scientific foundation of why does coaching work?

And so that’s what I got through the masters. And I now teach coaching from a basis of positive psychology.

And I use that with a lot of my clients who are leaders. And what we do is we take a look at a whole bunch of positive psychology.

So some of the people listening to this will be familiar with strengths. Maybe they’ve done Gallup strengths or via strengths.

Those have both come out of this positive psychology tradition. And so when you know your strengths as a leader, your coach can help you leverage those strengths more often to be a better leader and to have a more positive impact on the people around you.

Positive psychology also has a lot to say about how we set goals. So I imagine a lot of people are familiar with smart goals, but there’s more to just goal-setting and goal-getting than setting a smart goal.

You need pathways. You need agency. You need self-efficacy. You need self-determination. And this all comes out of positive psychology as well.

And then how do you motivate other people? A lot of my leadership clients, they’re, you know, they’re doing okay, but they want to motivate and grow people around them.

And how do they do that? So we take a look at things like implementation in 10. and self-determination theory about how do people get intrinsically motivated.

So this research comes really nicely into coaching, especially in the leadership space, because now as a coach, I have all this research to draw on, so I can ask my clients questions to learn more about what’s working and what’s not working, and how do we do more and get more of what is working.

And sometimes there are some really good positive psychology frameworks and models and research that come into those conversations as well.

@20:32 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

Wow, this is so helpful for me already. You and I connected through episode 22’s Eileen Schafer CEO of Silicon Valley Change, executive coaching where the coaching team that you do some work with all has this background in positive psychology.

Is that my understanding, right?

@20:56 – Lisa Sansom

Yeah, I think if they don’t all do through that particular master’s program, certainly the. vast majority do and everyone else has studied up on it.

It is core to the work that Silicon Valley Change Executive Coaching does.

@21:09 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

And so going just a little bit further, when you engage with a leader then, it’s influencing the questions you ask and it’s really about leveraging strengths and getting people from good to great and also helping those leaders inspire others to do the same.

@21:26 – Lisa Sansom

Yeah.

@21:29 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

Where do you think your journey in coaching would have been without it?

@21:32 – Lisa Sansom

I don’t think I would have stayed in coaching. I think I would have felt like coaching was kind of fluffy and ineffectual.

And I think I would have gotten bored with it. But having this rich research background and having the fortune, the absolute privilege to be a part of this very early on, I was in the fifth class of the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program.

It started the first class graduated. It started the fourth class, but it started the fourth class. 2006 I graduated in 2010 and so in the 13 years since then I have seen this field explode The research is exciting.

It has kept me engaged in the field of coaching. So personally that’s been a big impact on me and My clients seem to be doing better out of it as well So just today I had a conversation with someone where we were inquiring into her strengths And how can she use her strengths to go into what is going to be undeniably a very difficult conversation and She felt better going into that conversation remembering that she had strengths to draw on I would not have had that language without positive psychology behind me I would not have even known to ask that without the field of positive psychology I’m putting on the spot here a little bit, but can you think of yet another moment where?

@22:54 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

Where a leader has has that paradigm shift of this approach from? maybe always looking at what’s wrong about an issue, but yeah, I don’t want to put words in your mouth here, but yeah, go ahead.

@23:07 – Lisa Sansom

Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe I can take this into a journey that I’m on right now with my doctoral research, because two years ago I started doing a doctoral program, and my area of interest is positive feedback in the workplace.

And one of the many paths that I came to this through was with a coaching client that I was working with.

She happened to be in healthcare, and she was trying to motivate people on her team, and we all know what healthcare is like.

You know, very stressful, constantly cash-strapped, constantly resource-constrained, and so important. You know, so, so important. And she was having a difficult time leading in this environment.

And I can’t remember the ins and outs of our conversation. This was several years ago, but she did land on this idea of she wanted to affirm people on her team.

more often. And she had noticed that most of her conversations with her team members were catching them doing things wrong.

And it’s sort of that management by exception in that transformational leadership model. And so she would pop in and say, Oh, you’re doing something wrong, fix it and then leave.

And managers need to do that occasionally, like you can’t ignore what’s going wrong. But she had really become aware that this is mostly what she was doing.

And it was draining her and it was draining the team and it was wrecking relationships. So what she decided to do was catch other people doing things right.

And she had a very unique way. She was going to do this. She was going to take five pennies and put them in her right jacket pocket.

And every time she caught somebody doing things right, she was going to take one penny and move it to her left jacket pocket.

And by the end of the day, the goal was all five pennies have moved. And this was her very concrete action plan that she was going to do.

And. Some days she would put her hands in her pocket at 2.30 and realize she hadn’t moved a single penny.

And so this increased her self awareness. It increased her motivation. It made her get out of her office more often because she had to be out there catching other people doing things right.

It helped her to hone her skills of observation. And we know that when we reinforce the positive, that’s what we get.

That’s what grows. And so this again comes out of this field of positive psychology. Now at the time I didn’t have the research to substantiate what she was doing.

And what I had seen growing in other areas with other clients and in my own personal life as a parent and all sorts of things.

But there was this notion of something special and magical and motivational happens when you provide positive feedback to other people.

And so the science is now starting to catch up with that and say, yeah, there’s a real benefit to providing positive feedback and a lot of data.

A lot of leaders, you know, total paradigm chef, like, wow, I can give someone just positive feedback. I don’t have to do the sandwich.

I don’t have to do like, here’s the good and here’s the bad. I can motivate people in certain directions to grow and develop with positive feedback, like mind blown.

And I have seen that really change leadership styles and approaches. And they craft not only better outcomes for themselves and their teams, but also better relationships and they’re creating better cultures and better places to work just by making these small little changes.

@26:37 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

We find what we seek, don’t we?

@26:39 – Lisa Sansom

We do. We really, really do. Like think about the times when you bought yourself a new car and you’re driving around in your fancy little Ford Fiesta or whatever it is.

And all of a sudden everybody else has a Ford Fiesta, right? Like when you start looking for it, you see it everywhere.

And it does. It changes relationships. and it changes outcomes. And the clients that I’ve worked on with who have tried this, they have said it’s changed them as well.

They’re less stressed, they’re less anxious. They start to change their brains. I’m no neuroscientist, but there is some evidence saying that it actually starts to rewire your brain in much the same way that gratitude journals or appreciation exercises do, that you start to see the positive more because you’re looking for it more.

And that can have really important psychological and even physiological impacts.

@27:39 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

Coaching as we know it with the ICF isn’t even that old either, a summer of 25, 30 years. You’ve been coaching now for about a decade and a half, it appears.

And also in the early days of this program, and your journey you’ve said today has shifted from, it was feeling a bit fluffy in the beginning and now the…

This applied positive psychology has kept you in it. And now you’re doing a doctorate in it. So I can see your arc for so many leaders, this idea of receiving coaching, even in the five years I’ve been in it is shifting.

It’s, you don’t play tennis without a coach. You’re not a professional, anything in the arts and athlete space without a coach.

Yeah, there’s this block. What does it do? What’s it gonna do to me? Could you tell us a bit more about the research and the science and what you’re finding and learning about the impacts of coaching and positive psychology?

@28:47 – Lisa Sansom

Yeah, and kudos to organizations like the International Coaching Federation and the Institute of Coaching out of Harvard that are doing deep dives into the coaching research in the research research.

British Psychological Society, they have a chapter that is doing study of coaching psychology. So we are seeing more and more results come out in terms of what it is that actually works in coaching.

So if a leader enters into coaching, you’re right, they might say like, what is this going to do for me?

Pretty much every leadership model that’s out there starts with self-awareness. If you don’t know yourself, it’s going to be really hard to grow as a leader from there.

And coaching helps with self-awareness. So it helps you understand better who you are, how you show up, the difference between your intent and your impact helps you define your leadership philosophy and your values.

Coaching is really good for that. So it starts with that self-awareness piece. And then a lot of leadership models get into kind of that dyadic piece.

How do I interact with other people one on one? And coaching will help you explore that. It’ll help you explore the quality of the conversation.

conversations that you’re having, what do you bring into it? How your mindset, for example, can impact your behavior and by behavior, I mean the things that you do, but also the words that you say and how you say it.

If you come into a conversation with a learning and curious mindset, your tone is going to be different than if you come into the same conversation with a selling and telling mindset.

They’re both perfectly fine. I’m not saying one is bad and one is good, but I am saying choose. Right?

Be choiceful about what is most likely to help you in any given situation. And that gets back to the self-awareness piece so coaching can help you with that.

And then most leaders are thinking about their team. And how do I grow my team? How do I motivate my team?

How do I help my team attain objectives? My background also is in business. I have an MBA that I did about 23, 24 some years ago now.

And so bringing the business side. into it and recognizing that coaching in a business is different. And that leaders do have vested interest in the outcome and performance of the individuals and their team.

And so coaching can help with that. How do you get results from other people? Because one of the jobs of a leader is to get work done through others.

And that’s hard. So coaching can help you figure out how to be the best leader and how to grow and motivate an entire team.

So not just one to one, but how to scale that. And another organizational reality I would say is the networking.

And it’s that kind of political maneuvering which people know happens. Some people don’t like to talk about it, but it really is important to craft relationships and the more you move up in an organization, the more important that networking and those relationships are.

As you move up in an organization, in most organizations with most of my clients, they leave the day to day hands on.

doing of the work behind and they move into more of the strategic relationship building. And coaching can help with that.

How are you showing up? How do you map your network? I also have a background in change management, so I’m really big into stakeholder mapping and stakeholder assessing and how do you lead through change.

And there’s a lot of research that goes into that, positive psychology intersects with that. And coaching can really help leaders get closer to whatever their goals are on all these different levels.

That’s why I would also say it’s important to know the coach that you’re working with and to know yourself and your goals for coaching and make sure there’s a good mesh, there’s a good congruence that’s happening there.

But yeah, I mean, you can hear, I can talk about this forever, I really believe in the power of coaching to work with that one leader so they can have so many positive ripple impacts on themselves and the people around them.

And that translates into their personal lives as well, because when… you get talking with a coach, you can bring anything into that coaching space.

So I would say that’s a lot of what leaders are going to get out of engaging with a coach.

@33:10 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

I’m going to bottle up this last answer to my question and reduce it down to my marketing pitch. That was so incredible.

That was all of the compelling reasons why coaching matters so much for a leader. Holy smokes. That was so well said.

And to hear all your backgrounds, what an educated woman and how applied this all is in the real world, I think there’s a listener nodding their head.

@33:46 – Lisa Sansom

Well, if I can add in one other thing, please, the one thing I hear from a lot of the leaders that I work with is they enjoy that hour once a week or once every two weeks to just sit back and reflect.

@33:57 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

It’s a gift for them to have that time that they…

@34:01 – Lisa Sansom

they don’t get in the day-to-day busyness and all the constant time demands. So that, you know, they get to take a breath.

@34:07 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

I had a client this morning who said, I typically just get to chat about leadership stuff with my husband while someone’s throwing a piece of toast at me and somebody else is, you know, asking me to help them with their hair before we get out the door on time.

And the intent was literally to book our time together at the start of the day to have exactly that, to think through these biggest challenges in a space that works before they go off and get pulled in directions by others.

Yeah, exactly. You touched on something there where leaders have that bias. So there’s two things. There’s a leader receiving executive coaching and then there’s a whole other thing of a leader learning to be more curious and take a coach approach to leadership in their business that they have a vested interest in.

Yeah. Yeah. What do you want to share about the impacts that this, that receiving coaching then has on leadership style?

@35:09 – Lisa Sansom

Yeah. I have taught a lot of managers and leaders how to have a coach approach and how to lean into curiosity.

And the kind of the tagline that I keep coming back to is instead of being certain, get curious. And if your job as a leader, one of the many jobs of a leader is to grow other leaders.

And I hear so many leaders say that they’re pulled in so many different directions. They’re having to pick up the slack from other people.

And if you’re able to put that time into developing and growing other people, then they’ll surprise and delight you in all sorts of amazing ways.

@35:47 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

And you won’t have to do their work.

@35:49 – Lisa Sansom

You’ll be able to do your own work and life will feel a little less frantic. And even asking just a couple of coaching questions can be really helpful to do that.

Most people that I work with have gotten promoted into management because they were good at doing their technical job.

Whatever that I see role was, they were good at it and they could do it well and they were reliable and they delivered results.

And so somebody somewhere said, hey, you would be a good manager, whether that’s through tapping them on the shoulder or they succeeded in some competition.

Well, then you have to let go of doing all that stuff. And that’s hard for managers to do because when someone comes knocking on your door and says, there’s a fire over here, what do I do?

You know, your inclination as a compassionate, knowledgeable, sensitive, empathetic human being is to give them an answer and hand them a fire extinguisher and run with them to go put out the fire.

But as you progress up in leadership, you can’t do that. You have too many people coming to you and people are making up fires so they can get some of your attention.

You’re going to get pulled in all these different directions. So if you’re able instead as a leader to take that breath and to ask them a few questions about it, like, tell me more.

What have you already tried? What would a successful outcome look like for you? What’s one step that would get you closer to that success?

I just ask a couple of questions because sometimes, I mean, sometimes somebody really does need a piece of information that only you hold.

But most of the time, you hire good people. They’re smart enough. They’re knowledgeable enough. They just need a little nudge and a leader asking a couple of curious coaching questions can send them off in their direction with a better action plan and less time for you.

And now you’ve grown and developed their self-efficacy, their agency, their feelings of confidence in themselves. And so I agree with you that teaching leaders and managers how to lean into your life.

that coach approach more often, it’s going to make them better leaders and managers and it raises the capacity of everybody else.

@38:09 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

I want to highlight what you said that I believe so strongly and one of our obligations as a leader is to grow future leaders.

@38:16 – Lisa Sansom

Yeah.

@38:17 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

So while we’re busy producing the thing, sell in the thing, creating the thing, whatever it is that the business does, it is also our obligation to grow future leaders.

And while you were talking ahead, this visual of someone gets it promotion and they pack up their entire office and all of their tasks and they put it in a backpack and they go to the new office where they’ve got their promotion and they unpack all of that stuff.

They’ve taken their old job with them. Yes. I think I heard you say when we move up into higher leadership, we essentially need to leave our old job behind, but many struggle with that and don’t realize it until they’re weighed down so heavily by those mistakes.

that they’ve made bring in their old job. I see your head nodding.

@39:04 – Lisa Sansom

Does that resonate with you? And then what I also hear, so first of all, now those leaders are overwhelmed and burning out because they brought their old backpack with them and look, there’s a bunch of backpacks in the new office that I’m inhabiting.

And then what I hear systemically is HR will come to me and say because I work at systemic organizational development levels as well, HR will come to me and say we need all of our managers to level up.

They’re all working a level or two below where they should be. And our leaders are not being strategic enough and our leaders are not being thoughtful and planful enough because our senior leaders are doing the work that’s a couple of levels below them.

And those people are doing the work that’s a couple levels below them. And so that’s what happens is the ripple effects when everyone takes that backpack of work with them.

When really what you should be doing is going through that backpack and saying okay, what’s gonna. stay in this old office for the next person to inherit this.

Sometimes there are resourcing issues and constraints. I mean, businesses are busy places and maybe that old role isn’t going to get filled for another month or two.

And I understand all of that. But really, leaders need to be quite intentional about what this new role is calling them for.

And I would say also that’s why working with a coach can be great, is to help them make that adjustment and to change that mindset.

And to leverage their strengths to get into what are the demands and requirements of that new role. And what do they want to do with it?

Most leaders, when they move into a new role, they are really excited to be there. They want to do a fantastic, awesome job and knock the lights out.

@40:46 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

And then they’re dragged down by this big heavy backpack that they brought with them. Yeah, yeah. If we could go stay with growing future leaders for a moment and connect back to positive psychology.

So a leader has a coach. Third country. They learn the value of getting curious instead of being certain. They commit to growing the capacity of the leaders reporting to them.

Tell me about the positive psychological impacts of that approach on that direct report, on that leader that they are trying to now commit to developing.

@41:25 – Lisa Sansom

Yeah. There’s a wonderful theory in positive psychology. It actually predates positive psychology called self-determination theory. And Dan Pink wrote a big book called Drive About This, which is a fantastic book that many people may have read, or they may be familiar with self-determination theory.

But this comes out of the research of Ed D.C. and Richard Ryan. And like I said, it’s been around 40, 45 years, something like that.

And basically what it says is that people have basic psychological needs that need to be satisfied. in order for them to have well-being and to be intrinsically motivated.

And those are needs around competence, autonomy, and relationships. And so when a leader leans into curiosity and growing other leaders, they’re crafting a really important trusted relationship there.

So you’re helping to satisfy the relationship need of that direct report. By asking questions that allow your direct report to have choice around what it is that they’re doing and to come up with their own plans.

Like a leader might hold out, here’s the what we have to accomplish. But the how direct report, that’s up to you.

Make some good choices there. That increases their sense of agency. I have a choice in the matter and my actions make a difference.

So now we’re increasing the relationships, we’re increasing the agency. And when that works out, when we are able to promote the learning and development and growth and process that in real time with our direct reports, that lead to and

is also promoting their sense of competence or mastery, because they notice that they are growing and they’re getting better at something and they’re getting that positive feedback and reinforcement from their leader.

And this is all through the leader just kind of leaning in noticing strengths, asking a few curious coaching questions and letting their direct reports go and grow in these wonderful directions.

So the positive ripple effects and the upward spirals that you create around competence, autonomy and relatedness really affect growing those leaders.

@43:33 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

I mean, and now we’ve got this whole organization that’s flourishing and thriving. Wow. Yeah. Listen, we’re going to link to Dan Pink’s drive in the show notes because it really is foundational to a lot of the conversation we’ve been having today.

And we’re always trying to offer useful resources. I have this strong feeling, at least that our conversation today has linked threads through the 35

@44:01 – Lisa Sansom

episodes that have preceded you on leading with curiosity.

@44:04 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

And I am so glad that that Eileen connected us. Eileen, thank you if you’re listening. And I think people need to be able to learn more about what you’re doing and follow the great work that you’re putting out.

So to bring this to a wrap here, Lisa, where can people find you?

@44:26 – Lisa Sansom

Yeah, well, and thank you to Eileen. And thanks to you, Nate, this has been wonderful. Your questions have been great.

And I would say a model of coaching and leadership for everyone who’s listening. People can find me on LinkedIn, Lisa Sansom.

I’m in Ontario, Canada, if anyone’s curious about which Lisa Sansom, but mine has positive psychology all over it. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

@44:53 – Nate Leslie (nateleslie.ca)

My website is LVSconsulting.com. So people can also look there. The website is a little data. The website is a little data.

The website is a little data. at this point, it’s going to get renewed this year in 2023. So LinkedIn might be the best place to connect if anyone has any specific questions or wants to hear more or learn more resources.

I’m going to listen to this episode as soon as we get it done here, Lisa.

@45:16 – Lisa Sansom

Thank you so much for your time. It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you so much.