Using Stories of Success to Unlock Potential and Performance, Rob Hatch

Guest post by Rob Hatch, who is a business coach and author of Success Frames: Why Learning From Success Is The Key To Understanding What Motivates And Inspires Us

Companies are beginning to understand the value of hiring individuals who are neurodivergent. Studies have demonstrated that teams with neurodivergent members are more productive.

Enabling neurodivergent individuals to contribute their best work may require a shift. This starts with focusing on the strengths of every individual. 

Of course, there are many excellent tools for assessing strengths. However, the stories of our past success hold the greatest potential to reveal who we are at our very best. 

Discover what works.

Contrary to popular belief, failure is not the great teacher we’ve made it out to be. New research has shown that we don’t learn as much from failure as we might think. Success, particularly when it’s our own, is far more instructive.

At best, failure tells us what not to do. Rarely does it show us the way forward. Moreover, it doesn’t give us something upon which to build. One reason failure fails us is because it threatens our ego. As such, we don’t enjoy revisiting what went wrong. 

Success, on the other hand, is motivating. Success teaches us what works. Sometimes, we feel it in our bones when we get something right. When we can see our progress, we are encouraged to continue. When we stack up wins, we learn how to replicate our success. A strengths-based approach to management and supervision is core to becoming more inclusive. In many ways, this resembles an approach more commonly found in coaching. 

A Coaching Mindset: Extracting the lessons from success.

As a coach, one of my goals is to understand who you are when you are at your best. We all have stories that reveal who we are and how we do our best work. This is true of everyone. Working with neurodivergent individuals, it is often critical to identify and leverage. You have a method. You have a way of approaching challenges and solving problems. You have a plan for how you work best. 

You are so good at it that you may not even realize how you do what you do. After all, it’s just…what you do. 

But there’s power in reflecting on how, in naming the steps of your process, and the choices you made to accomplish something. The goal is to build a framework that you can use to support you whenever you approach a new challenge.

Look at something in your past you completed successfully. Think of a project, big or small, a task, a sales call, or how you resolved a challenging customer service complaint. 

Here are some questions to consider.

What were the steps you took? Name them. 

What did you do or say?

Why did you make that choice?

Why do you think it worked?

What did you do next? 

What was the result?

Was it what you expected?

And then what happened?

What did you do or say next?

Why did you choose to do that?

This isn’t a formula. These questions don’t need to be asked in the order I laid them out. It’s also not an exhaustive list. Use the questions that work for the situation. 

Each question is meant to anchor you in your actions and decisions. This is where we start to extract the lessons of our success. It helps us see our methods, discover what works for us, and build a framework for approaching new challenges based on what works.

Managers and supervisors can use the same questions to uncover these stories and understand them. They should endeavor to help the people they support to identify what works for them. And set the conditions for everyone to be successful, regardless of their diagnosis.

Rob Hatch is a business coach and author of Success Frames: Why Learning From Success Is The Key To Understanding What Motivates And Inspires Us, which is out now, published by Practical Inspiration Publishing, priced at £24.99.

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