Introduction: Coaching Gives You Power and Velocity in Reaching Your Goals
This book is intended to empower you in creating an extraordinary future for yourself and your organization.
In sports and in the performing arts, the coach is as much a fact of life as the players or the fans. In fact, it would be inconceivable to think of any top athlete or performing artist reaching their goals and aspirations without a coach or teacher. The coach is not merely the general manager of the team (orchestra), but has a powerful and distinct role of bringing out the best in people so they can perform at much higher levels. It is no wonder then that after a symphony orchestra gives a great performance, the grateful crowd often rises to its feet shouting with applause-"Maestro, Maestro, Maestro."
If coaching is such an integral part of sports and the performing arts, it is hard to understand why in business coaching is the exception rather than the rule. What makes this lack of coaching even more curious is that the average chief executive officer, executive vice president, or even vice president, for that matter, is in the position to have much more economic impact on their organization than the average sports star or musician. Think about it. The successful performance of a leader like Jack Welch, Sam Walton, Scott McNealy, or an average executive could result in tens of billions of dollars of shareholder value, whereas the successful performance of "franchise players" like Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, or a Tiger Woods may have a bottom-line impact that is only tiny fraction of that.
Since writing Masterful Coaching in 1995 and the subsequent book, Masterful Coaching Fieldbook, we have been working hard to create a new cultural clearing for coaching in organizations. We began to do this by distinguishing the five myths of executive coaching, redefining what coaching is and is not (see Chapter one) and attempting to map the territory for this growing field. It's our belief that this work has been at least somewhat successful, for today according to BusinessWeek at least one third of all Fortune 500 CEOs have coaches. These coaches have, in many cases, produced "remarkable results" with respect to both the leader's business and leadership challenges.
Today the best companies-General Electric, Home Depot, and Merck-have one thing in common; they recognize that extraordinary leadership is required to meet extraordinary business results. "Leadership isn't just one of the issues that CEO's need to address," says, GE's Welch, "it is perhaps the whole issue."1 What then is the best way to develop leaders? Executive education from the ivory tower universities is often thought to be much like a college survey class taught by "entertaining professors," providing good information, but having little impact on people's leadership ability. Most three-day training programs deliver too much too soon, or too little too late.
There is an increasing recognition that coaching is the most powerful and fastest way to develop leaders because it is a vision-based, business-connected, results-driven, real time process. Thus, the desire for executive coaches and coaching is spreading to all levels of organizations. This is what in part led us to write Masterful Coaching Fieldbook, which focuses on coaching as a master discipline that all managers need to take up as a practice. It's the difference between three sessions at the golf driving range or ski slope, and someone like Tiger Woods working with Butch Harmon over the course of a year. Harmon walked every fairway and green with Woods each time he went out, morning and night to give him feedback and make corrections.
We want to make clear that we mean something powerful and distinct by the term "Masterful Coaching," which we will use frequently in this book. It is not only a brand name for us but represents a particular paradigm of coaching that sets our work apart from the maddening crowd in this growing field. The paradigm that we operate from is that coaching takes places in the domain of accomplishment, not therapy. We believe that this paradigm represents the future of coaching and is different from how coaching and counseling has been practiced in the past within organizations-and is still practiced today by many practitioners. Furthermore, we can prove that this paradigm gets results. According to our carefully documented research at Masterful Coaching:
· 95% of our clients report a quantum leap in their leadership effectiveness validated by regular and rigorous 360° feedback,
· 90% of our clients bring about a significant change within eighteen months-game changing strategies, business process revolutions, transforming the climate,
· 85% of our clients report a twenty to sixty percent increase in bottom-line business results within a twelve month period,
· 80% of our clients report much higher levels of collaboration and teamwork, as well as a dramatic shift in corporate culture, and
· 70% of our clients receive one or more executive level promotions over a twelve to eighteen month contract.
It is our intention that you get some of these same results from Your Masterful Coach in a Book.
Masterful Coaching Can Transform Who You Are as a Leader
In writing Masterful Coaching and Masterful Coaching Fieldbook, we not only wanted to create a new cultural clearing but also to change the way people think about the role of a coach. We asked ourselves: Is a coach someone who impacts your character, your vision and values (ethics) or is a coach someone that just has a methodology made up of tools and technique to impact people's performance? This question became especially important in light of the scandals at Enron, World Com, Tyco, and others.
Our curiosity about this question was based on the type of human beings we were running into in many global one-thousand corporations. Certainly almost all were to some degree charismatic, highly intelligent, and ambitious-to say the least. Yet we could almost divide those people in leadership positions we met into two separate and distinct groups that on the surface were very much the same, but were in fact, such a world apart as to be almost incomparable.
The first group was made up of people who were not leaders at all, but rather power wielders who sought power for its own sake and used it to achieve their own purposes and goals without making any difference. Such "pseudo" leaders tend to demonstrate power over their followers and treat them like pawns in their game. The second kind of leader we ran across were more empowering leaders who saw power as a vehicle for testing their mettle in making a difference and who empowered their followers in reaching goals that would meet both their own and their follower's needs.
An example of the first might be the leader who claws his way to the top through endless wheeling and dealing and who when gets there pulls off a big merger that allows him to pocket a cool twenty million in cash, while not creating any new value for anyone. This is more of the transactional leader.
An example of the second is the leader who comes up with a game-changing idea that revolutionizes their industry while impacting shareholder value and providing a great place to work. We call this kind of leader a transformational leader.
At Masterful Coaching we came to the clear conclusion based on who we are and our commitment to help leaders make a difference in the world that coaching can never be values neutral. It's our belief that one of the most important things we can do is to impact a leader's vision and values. A Masterful Coach empowers people by standing committed to their greatness and by calling forth the highest and best in them. We believe that each individual, whether they show up today as a "genuine leader" or "power wielder," wants to make a difference, wants to have an impact, and wants to be effective. Our work is to call this forth in each person we work with.
Masterful Coaching is a Powerful Force in Bringing about Significant Organization Change
One of the things we have discovered is that an executive and coach relationship, carried out in light of the Masterful Coaching paradigm may be one of the most powerful forces for change within an organization yet discovered. I have seen the executive and coach relationship lead to game-changing strategies that transform an industry forever, create business process revolutions, and powerful shifts in corporate culture.
This relationship of executive and coach, when it's powerful, goes way beyond sports analogies or music metaphors where the coach or conductor is always in the leadership role and the players are always in the role of the follower. Leadership in a powerful coaching relationship is a presence, but the actors in the role may change with the executive being the leader or follower. It may be the executive or the coach who initiates a game-changing idea and who first speaks it so as to enroll the other, or who is the prime moving force in catalyzing action. The coach may play an active role in articulating an idea or a more passive role of drawing out the executive.
The executive and coach relationship may begin as a dependency with the leader being dependent on the coach to transform him or her into a leader through their words of wisdom and feedback. Yet over time, the relationship often transforms into interdependency with the executive and coach thinking and working together to make a difference that would never otherwise occur.
The executive and coach each bring something to the table that is powerful and unique in the service of a higher purpose or goal. The coach brings their mastery of what it takes for leaders to make a difference in the world to the table, as well as their mastery in producing breakthroughs in results and breakthroughs for people. The executive brings to the table his mastery of the political art of getting to a powerful position in the organization, along with a proven track record of results, and is therefore poised to initiate significant change. The executive has also mastered the dynamics of his particular industry, knows what the key levers are that drive the business, and how to work them. It is the synergistic blending of these that results in a force to be reckoned with.
It is the relationship of the executive and coach that will often determine whether the leader formulates an ordinary or extraordinary future in the first place. It is the relationship of the executive and the coach that will determine whether a leader remains good or makes the good to great shift. It is the relationship of the executive and coach that will determine whether or not the leader sources their vision, and thereby mobilizes people to initiate profound change, or whether people get stuck in creeping incrementalism. And it is the relationship of the coach and the executive that will determine whether people are able to rise above disappointments and upsets and return to themselves, to their commitment, and to action.
Masterful Coaching Gives Greater Power and Velocity to Reaching Goals
It is our observation that a Masterful Coach can make it possible for an individual to gain much greater power and velocity in reaching their goals. This power comes from: 1) the coach's ability to inspire people to take a stand that a difference can be made in the first place, 2) empowering people to formulate breakthrough goals and concrete plans that go beyond conventional wisdom, 3) providing meaningful feedback that rips the blinders off and allows people to see themselves as others see them, and 4) providing people new openings for action when they are stuck or ineffective.
When a Masterful Coach comes into your life, you don't just know it because you have a meeting with them next Monday morning. You can feel it because the power of the coaching is not just a bunch of guiding ideas, tips, and techniques laid on the table, but rather more felt like a visceral, tangible, palpable force. It is the real world experience of being empowered, not being given a mere theory or academic exercise. We like to call this power P4 (P cubed): 1) the power to take your leadership game to the next level; 2) the power to reach your business goals that would otherwise be difficult or impossible; 3) the power to reinvent your organization and yourself at the same time; and 4) the power to get that next big promotion you have been waiting for. Diagram I.1 illustrates "P Cubed."
[Insert diagram I.1: The Power of a Coach "P4"]
The experience of working with a Masterful Coach for a year or so is one where you literally feel that the power you have to reach your goals and aspirations has been supercharged, and it shows up in the results. We have observed that after six months of working with a Masterful Coach there often is a visible and dramatic change in the way people show up as leaders. At the same time, soaring business goals that looked difficult or impossible begin to move within reach. And on top of this, suddenly there are new openings for possibility and action with respect to your most ambitious career goals that just didn't exist before.
Masterful Coaching Can Make You a Grand Master on the Corporate Chessboard
It was said of Lorenzo Medici, grand master of the Florentine Renaissance Italy that he would sit down to dinner at his court with one hundred agendas and get up from dinner with each of these agendas accomplished. Medici was a great chess player.
The dictionary defines chess as a brilliant but aggressive game of strategy in which one tries to defeat one's opponent. When I (or others) play chess, we are often not very brilliant at all and, in fact, Michel's twelve year old young son, Etienne, could easily clean the board with us in just a few powerful moves.
The reason is because we tend to see the board as a dangerous place where queens, rooks, and bishops moving diagonally or horizontally across the chessboard can pick us off at will, and thus we tend to make one move at a time. One of the things we like about chess is that a mere pawn can be transformed into a king, and so we tend to push pawns across the board, hoping to make progress and paying scant attention to anything else.
Now the difference between "pawn pushers" and grand masters is that grand masters see the board from many different angles. They have the strategic brilliance to play on what would be three or four different chess boards at the same time with multiple goals and objectives. They take into account not just the individual pieces but also the complexity of their interaction, their changing possibilities and constraints. They grasp the games evolving structure, anticipating possibilities to advance, searching for dangerous variables in the wide array of forces, grasping the mysteries and contingencies of the game.
When we are talking about "human chess," a game where people try to exercise power in pursuit of what motivates them (or others), we enter the field of leadership. Yet the typical leader is much more like a pawn pusher than a grandmaster. Instead of simultaneously pursuing multiple strategies such as their leadership, business, and career goals all at the same time, they tend to make one move at a time across the board. They often don't see the whole board at all, the complex array of philosophical, political, market forces at play in their organizations or how to manage them with skill, artistry, and perfect timing to get where they are going.
What a Masterful Coach does is to interact with you in such a way that transforms you from a pawn pusher to a grandmaster or masterful leader. The coach is in the powerful position of getting you to "step back" from the battle and heat of the action and see the whole board or to play three to four different boards at once. The coach works with you to discover and express your personal and organizational aspirations, as well as craft a master strategy to start from and a whole range of contingencies.
This takes into account who you need to be and what you need to do to be successful at any given time in the all too imperfect human world of today's organization. The coach helps you ponder the "smart move" to make at any given time in a constantly evolving situation-paying heed to your job mandate, the political chess board, your follower's needs, your customer's preferences, the competition, and financial outcomes.
Our Intention in Your Masterful Coach in a Book
As we have indicated at Masterful Coaching, we have coached hundreds of executives from global one thousand firms over the past decade or so. These powerful and profound partnerships involve standing in the future people want to create and calling that forth through action. This work involves standing shoulder-to-shoulder with leaders on a practical, down-to-earth, day-in, day-out basis where we call forth new ways of being and new openings for possibility and action.
We have discovered that coaching people to reach their leadership and business goals in their business with colleagues amid change and complexity is not as straightforward as it might appear. It often brings to the surface bothersome issues and problems that must be dealt with. We address these issues in the course of coaching conversations where we act as thinking partners who brainstorm new ideas, question what people take for granted, and initiate experimental action. All in all, this process rapidly accelerates people's development.
It is our intention in Your Masterful Coach in a Book to provide something here by way of stories, examples, metaphors that will make it possible for you, our reader, to have the same kind of accelerated development opportunity. The book is written with the following readers in mind, but it need not be limited to these:
· Executives in business, government, non profits, and education who want to build inspired, high performing organizations,
· Leaders who face issues and dilemmas where the solutions are not obvious and the answers are unknown,
· High flyers who want an edge or advantage in reaching their personal (organizational) aspirations or in meeting stretch goals, and
· Leadership development professionals who are looking for a better way to develop leaders.
We want to not only introduce you to a step-by-step process for reaching your goals and delivering on your plans, but also to reach you on a more profound level, and that is to inspire, empower, and enable you to deal with the bothersome issues and problems that will inevitably emerge as you move through the process. This book gathers together for the first time in an accessible, straightforward manner, some of the common conundrums faced by business leaders, like yourself, and the coaches that work with them. We know that you are committed to discovering the answers to these dilemmas and this is where we want to engage you. Some questions you might be faces with yourself:
· How do I get that next promotion to the Chief Executive or Vice President's office despite a negative conversation swirling around the corridors about me?
· How do I come up with new strategies (game changers) in a commodity based, copycat industry?
· How do I pull off a highly complex negotiation with joint venture partners after win/lose and win/win negotiations have both failed?
· How do I deal with a boss who bullies people without knocking heads or becoming passive and submissive?
· How to I focus more of my time on things that make a difference, less on the merely important or trivial?
Book Overview
In chapter one, we will map the territory of coaching and sets the stage for developing an extraordinary coaching relationship with you. Then the book is divided into four sections- your organization challenge, business challenge, leadership challenge, and career challenge-written with the intent to enable you to become a grand master of the corporate chessboard. In each section there are a number of short chapters that provide easily accessible insights on: 1) an issue or dilemma that leaders like yourself face; 2) our teachable point of view based on our work with leaders; and 3) a template for action-things to do, pitfalls to watch out for. The following is a brief description of each part.
Part One: Your Organization Challenge. This section will start out by making an important distinction for all leaders: the difference between being a transformational leader (real change maker) and a transactional leader (a deal maker). This distinction will set the stage for declaring an Impossible Future for your company and for sourcing an inspired, high performing organization that can deliver on it. In the ensuing chapters of this section, you will gain many insights, not the least of which is, to reinvent the organization, reinvent yourself first.
Part Two: Your Personal Business Challenge. In the opening section you will discover the difference between Creating the Business (CTB) with a strategy of pre-eminence and Running the Business (RTB) through the annual round of planning and budgeting and the daily grind of dealing with the incredible number of demands coming at you. The individual chapters in this section will coach you in setting breakthrough goals that are unpredictable and unprecedented versus setting the all too familiar predictable goals that follow precedent and conventional wisdom.
Part Three: Your Personal Leadership Challenge. The approach we use for leadership development in this book is as different from your typical Executive MBA stint or three-day training program as night and day. We don't start by trying to push a long list of leadership characteristics and traits on you. We start by asking you a question: How do you need to develop as a leader to realize your Impossible Future and your personal business challenge so as to create a pull? The chapters in this section will provide secrets from our coaching work that you can practically and immediately apply.
Part Four: Your Personal Career Challenge. If your career is stuck in the doldrums, this section will come as a breath of fresh air. It is designed to get you to see things differently and thereby empower you to act differently. For example, if you have spent your entire career "managing up" so as to look good and get ahead, it may be time to start focusing on the difference you can make. Conversely, if you have spent your whole career abhorring politics and managing down to get the job done, only to be bypassed by your colleagues trying to get up some ladder, it may be time to start managing up.
In conclusion, as we begin this journey with you, Your Masterful Coach in Book will not only provide some "great advice" on leadership issues in a book setting, but also we intend to actually engage you in a coaching relationship that will give you more power and velocity in reaching your goals and aspirations, whether that is to become CEO and transform your company, dynamically grow your business through a new good idea, or to reign in costs.
Our intent is not to lecture you, but to engage you in "extraordinary coaching conversations" that are intended to inspire and empower you. We want you to be able to pick up this book whenever you feel disappointed by a lack of results or stymied by an issue or dilemma and then put it down again feeling "uplifted" and empowered to be who you need to be in the matter, as well as see new openings for possibility and action.