Coaching & the hard questions
by Charlotte Murray
Juliann and I have now been job-sharing the role of Director of Care, Health and Wellbeing at South Yorkshire Housing Association for three months. We both agree it’s going really well, but as with any relationship, to ensure solid foundations we’ve had to invest in time together, focus on communication, be honest and really understand how we both tick.
During these first few months, two key things stand out over everything else as enablers, helping us to accelerate our relationship:
- Firstly, we held a co-design day — for just the two of us — the agenda for which is below
- Secondly, we had a session with an external coach who asked us all the ‘tough’ questions that it’s impossible (or just toe-curlingly awkward) to ask and answer without some outside intervention.
1) Co-design your job share
Co-design is central to our approach at South Yorkshire Housing Association when designing services with our customers and partners. Sometimes we don’t always afford ourselves the luxury of using the approach when thinking about how we work ourselves. I’m really glad that we did for the job-share. We enlisted the help of Tim at Sheffield Design School to help us pull together an agenda and format. I’ve included the agenda below and links to relevant templates for people us use if they want to replicate some or all of what we did.
Activities to help co-design the job-share partnership
Getting to know each other
1: User manual of me
Based on this blog post by Cassie Robinson — the user manual of me is brilliant for getting to know people and to enable you to work as a team. I’d recommend taking some time before meeting to fill out the template and share the user manuals with each other, then and talking through when you meet.
2: Needs & concerns
Understanding each other’s needs and concerns was a valuable exercise for us to do together to help us both understand what we needed the role to be for each of us and importantly, what we needed it not to be. Take a look at this simple guide.
Creating a shared vision for our job share partnership
3: Creating a set of values / principles
The groups we created in the needs and concerns activity gave us a set of themes to help us develop a set of values and principles that we now use to guide the decisions we make and build trust. Here’s a short guide.
4: Creating a shared vision statement
We then looked at the question: ‘What does good look like in 6, 12, 18 months?’. It’s hard to draft things like this together, so we brainstormed a skeleton outline which one of us then drafted after the meeting and the other reviewed it.
6: Making decisions on some practical stuff
Having agreed the big strategic issues, we then spent some time looking at practical ways to work together effectively, including agreeing allocation of line management and stakeholder relationships. We also looked at operational ways of working such as agreeing whether to have a shared inbox.
It won’t always to be possible to agree this in a single session; we identified timeframes and a plan for agreeing some of these decisions.
After the co-design session, we knew a lot about each other. It really helped us to understand our strengths, areas for growth, preferences, likes and dislikes. It was some of the small stuff that has been the most helpful. Things like that I like regular breaks and can’t work over lunch effectively without breaking for food whereas Juliann is quite happy to push through. I like a cold office; Juliann feels the cold and likes a warm office. Juliann hates being late for things and I have a real issue with mess. Small but important stuff as it turns out!
2) Coaching — ask the tough questions
Following the co-design day, we had a short coaching session with an external facilitator. The brief we gave her was to challenge us on the things she thought we might have missed in the co-design day or on things that leapt out to her from our strengths finder and insight results as potential issues in the future. What’s the stuff that we aren’t going to ask or say to each other without a nudge?
Below are the questions that she asked us. We didn’t have these questions in advance.
- How will you each manage feelings of competition?
- What will irritate you about the other?
- How might we offend or hurt each other?
- How will you manage disagreements?
- How will you make demands of each other?
I’m not going to lie, someone asking you what you think is going to irritate you about your job-share partner in front of them — a month in — and then you having to answer in front of that person, did feel a little brutal at the time. On reflection though, addressing questions like this head on and not having time to rehearse or soften your answers has been incredibly helpful. We came out of the coaching session at a different level.
Time well spent?
The coaching session was an hour and a half, and the co-design day was 10–4. So, almost 8 hours in total plus some preparation time. When writing this blog, I wonder if to some people, what I describe above might feel luxurious or indulgent for two busy execs — but on reflection, the time invested upfront has really paid off and has fast tracked our relationship, significantly reducing friction and accelerating how efficiently and effectively we are working together by months (maybe even years).
In summary, whether you’re job-sharing or starting a new role and seeking to understand how to work with your colleagues, we can’t recommend enough investing time in getting to know each other in the ways described above: it pays off.
