Chapter 1.
Welcome to Your Masterful Coach in a Book
Let's Create an Extraordinary Coaching Relationship
How you would you like to pick up Masterful Coaching's Your Masterful Coach in a Book, and wham!, find that championship level coaching you need to realize your highest career goals and aspirations-the knockout insights you need to collaborate or compete?
Imagine yourself fiercely engaged in "conversation" with Your Masterful Coach in a Book about how to deal with your most important business goals, your most pivotal decisions, your most critical actions.
Imagine the stories you would hear from Your Masterful Coach in a Book about extraordinary coaching conversations with leaders who have faced issues and problems just like yours, conversations that led to simple, powerful, but non-obvious solutions.
Imagine the eye opening insights, inspiring stories, and new openings for possibility and action that would be triggered in you as you listen (read) with your own commitments at stake…your own red-hot issues!
The Book's Purpose: Empowering You to Create an Extraordinary Future
The work we do at Masterful Coaching with executives in major global one-thousand corporations and government agencies lasts at least a year and sometimes cost as much as $100,000 or more. This cost and time commitment makes Masterful Coaching available for a privileged few. In a discussion with Susan William, executive editor at JosseyBass, we began to explore more deeply the notion of democratizing this work.
We had already begun this with the Masterful Coaching Fieldwork, based on a vision that every Fortune 500 leader begin to see themselves as a coach and have the methods to do so. Susan's notion was that the next step was to actually make real life coaching available, and the idea for Your Masterful Coach in a Book was born. If it were possible for someone to get even a fraction of the value from our yearlong coaching program for a dozen or so hours spent reading and the mere price of this volume, it would be an excellent investment to say the least.
The idea of democratizing coaching deeply resonated with us, as we are sincerely committed to making coaching, rather than traditional training and consulting, an idea whose time has come. Furthermore, over the last decade or so, we have done extensive executive coaching, and the insights that were emerging on a wide variety of topics were rapidly accumulating. We had in our grasp a substantial body of knowledge that could be transferred to others.
Yet we had to ask ourselves the same question you are probably asking yourself: Is it possible to create the kind of extraordinary coaching relationship that we have with leaders in face-to-face meetings and on the telephone/ e-mail in a book? Obviously, there are challenges, but every challenge creates an opportunity. Let's talk a bit here about what you will get, and what you won't get in Your Masterful Coach in a Book.
You won't get the monthly face-to-face coaching sessions where we stand in the extraordinary future you want to create and, acting as your thinking partner, ask you to design actions from that future. And you won't get the weekly tele-coaching calls where we challenge and support you in dealing with the emerging issues that unexpectedly have come up that could impact this year's bottom line.
Finally, you probably won't get an e-mail from us "noodging" you to make sure you are properly prepared so you show up as inspiring and empowering in your leadership speech to the troops, or a gentle reminder to spend enough time focusing on the actions you need to take this week to realize your vision rather than spending all your time putting out fires.
What you will get is us addressing you as if you were sitting across a mahogany table from us in a conference room, with a cup of coffee in hand. We would like you to think of us as your Masterful Coach as we tell you stories, give you examples, and ask you questions that will provide you with powerful lessons in personal and organizational change.
We wrote Your Masterful Coach in a Book with a commitment to provide you with the best and most useful insights resulting from years of coaching. In each chapter, we will share many of the golden nuggets that we have carefully captured from our coaching conversations with executives. We are speaking of the leadership lessons that are powerful, profound, practical and that apply to most people and, in this case, more specifically to you.
This is your opportunity to be a fly on the wall, a privileged observer to the hundreds of coaching conversations we have had with our clients over the years. We have gathered together in an accessible, straightforward manner some of the most bothersome issues and problems faced by the executives we have worked with as they strive to maintain a competitive edge in a changing world.
If you have ever felt frustrated in your attempts to demonstrate extraordinary leadership, or thwarted in producing extraordinary results in the very human and often imperfect environment of today's corporation, or caught in the conundrum of how to advance your career, you will find something of immense value for yourself here. All you need to do is read this book with a sincere commitment to reaching your goals and priorities together with a willingness to be coached.
We would like you to have the feeling that you are not just reading a book, but engaging in a powerful coaching conversation. Sometimes the conversation will be with us by way of us sharing our ideas, at other times it will be with yourself as you reflect in action. To be sure we will find ways to interject ourselves into your soliloquy.
In continuing our discussion of what you will and won't get from Your Masterful Coach in a Book, there is a practical matter to consider. If Masterful Coaching is a discipline, than that discipline must not only include clear goals and priorities but friendly, frequent, informal communication between the coach and coachee. We've already mentioned our coaching includes monthly meetings and weekly phone calls, which generates the spirit of thinking and working together. This structure forces people to dedicate five percent of their time to stepping back from the front lines and the heat of the battle to gain a powerful new perspective that results in new openings for possibility and action going forward. It's our belief that this five percent pays tremendous dividends in terms of the other ninety-five percent of people's time.
We suspect that the five percent of the time that we believe you will have available to being coached by engaging in this book is in the early mornings in your office before the phone starts ringing, on your next plane trip, or evening in your hotel room after you have eaten and watched CNN or ESPN for the second time. You may want to give some thought to whether or not you want to schedule some regular time with Your Masterful Coaching in a Book, or with appropriate colleagues as thinking partners. You may also want to give some thought as to how you would like to use Your Masterful Coach in a Book. The book has been written so that you can read it from cover to cover, or read a section at a weekly coaching circle at work, or just pick up the book when you have a problem to find a golden nugget that you can run with.
However you choose to use the book, we will at all times come from a place in our writing were we support you in taking a stand for an extraordinary future and acting from that future. Further, we are committed to you being extraordinary. We will come from a place where we extend you an "A" (instead of a B, C, or D) as a leader and never diminish our listening for you. Our commitment is to call forth the highest and best in you at all times.
So let's get started. Sit back, grab a cup of coffee, and let's begin our coaching journey.
Mapping the Territory of Coaching: What Coaching Is and Is Not
One of the first things we do in our coaching with executives is to map the territory of coaching for them by talking about what coaching is and isn't, and that is exactly what we would like to do here. We mentioned earlier that part of the original purpose when we wrote Masterful Coaching was not only to share our experiences with executive coaching and provide the Masterful Coaching method, but also to create a new cultural clearing where people would be more open to coaching than they had been in the past.
This led to the development of something we call the Five Myths of Coaching. (See diagram 1.1) The idea of discussing these five myths is to break the grip of some old paradigms and establish a new paradigm by which leaders can assess what coaching is and what coaching isn't. It is also a way to assess the credibility of any coach you might be considering engaging, given that today almost anyone can call him or herself a coach. If your find that people are attempting to engage you in a coaching relationship and they are not operating from this paradigm, we advise you to run as fast as your feet can carry you. You may be getting something, but it's not coaching.
[Insert diagram 1.1: The Five Myths of Coaching: What Coaching Is and Is Not]
Let's look at each of the myths with an eye to getting grounded in what coaching is and is not.
1. Coaching is for winners, not losers. If you have enrolled yourself in Your Masterful Coach in a Book, the chances are that you are a winner rather than a washout. Why do we say that? We have observed over the years that the people who seek coaching are successful people, whereas the unsuccessful tend to avoid it like the plague. The people who invite us to work with them tend to be learning leaders with high goals and aspirations, who sense coaching can bring them leverage. These leaders have healthy egos and are thereby likely to enjoy having a thinking partner, show up as a request for coaching, and not only seek feedback but receive it in a non-defensive way. Those who are not successful tend to set lower goals for themselves (or none at all), have fragile egos, and thereby tend to avoid coaching and be dismissive of feedback.
2. Coaching is about creating extraordinary futures, not filling leadership gaps. People like Sam Walton, Bill Gates, and Jeff Besos developed as leaders because they had a dream that was burning a hole inside them, not because someone decided to "push" them to fill their leadership gaps with the right characteristics and traits. Our intent in this book is to work with you to create an extraordinary future for yourself and your own. This in turn will create the pull for you to develop as a leader. We ask: What is the future you truly desire for yourself and your organization? Next: How you need to transform as a leader to achieve it? Radically or incrementally? There is a big difference between declaring an extraordinary future and then declaring a gap that you need to expand to fill, and someone else laying a whole list of "shoulds" on you, like the "27 traits of a successful leader."
3. Coaching is about accomplishment, not therapy; Action, not psychology. Former President George Bush used to say that he liked advisors who could help him reach his goals and solve problems, not those who attempted to "couch" him. In this book, we are starting from the premise that you are "great" or have the potential to be, that you are probably "up to" something great, and you have come to Your Masterful Coach in a Book looking for leverage in being able to accomplish it. (This premise tends to evoke this in people.) We are not starting from the premise that you are a "small," petty lump of ailments and psychological problems and you have come to this book looking to get your head examined. Coaching conversations are about achieving what you need to achieve, not therapy or remediation. We will ask you to look at what territory has been taken, what's working and not, as well as what's missing that will make a difference. This could involve looking at both who you have to be and what you have to do to produce what's missing.
4. Coaching must provide feedback that rips the blinders off versus just a list of prescriptions. You may show up on any given day as brilliant, impeccable and a shining example of leadership, especially when you consciously design your behavior. We say, "That's great!" Yet at the same time, a big part of our job is to provide you feedback about the things you unconsciously do that get you in trouble. For example, 1) being arrogant, 2) being melodramatic, 3) exhibiting emotional volatility, 4) being cool, aloof, distrustful, 5) trying to look good and please, 6) showing up with passive resistance, 7) getting stuck in perfectionism; 8) having an aversion to risk, or 9) being overly gung ho. Coaching not only means giving feedback that rips the blinders off, but also getting to the source of this behavior and transforming it. Transforming behavior is distinctly different from merely providing a list of prescriptions, as the right answers are often not enough, and it requires surfacing, questioning, and revising assumptions. (See diagram 1.2 on Triple Loop Learning.)
[Insert diagram 1.2 Triple Loop Learning]
5. Coaching is a month-to-month, day-in, day-out process, not an isolated event at the annual review. In this book, coaching will be viewed as an integral part of reaching goals, solving problems, and grappling with emerging issues, not as a separate activity. Coaching, to be powerful, has got to be a continuous activity, not a stop-start activity that happens at the annual review or when the CEO or human resource manager notices that it is leap year again and that everyone should get 360º feedback, or attend a three-day training seminar. We suggest that after you write down the first draft of your leadership, business, and career goals and as you begin to move into action to make them happen, come up with ways to get friendly, frequent, informal coaching and feedback, "How am I doing?" For example, after your next round of town hall meetings or a planning and goal setting session, ask five to ten people to send you an e mail with an honest comment as to how you showed up as a leader.
What's the Opportunity in Coaching for You?
Now that you have some clarity on what masterful coaching is and is not, it is time to look at the opportunity in coaching for you. Often as we speak with leaders and managers about the opportunity in coaching, we hear the comment, "I am paid to do this job myself." When I hear this, I like to respond by way of an analogy. If you like to shop at Home Depot, you may have noticed the sign "Home Depot, The Do It Yourself Store." Whenever I speak to managers who think they have to do everything themselves and thereby have resistance to coaching, I often tease them about suffering from the Home Depot Syndrome of "do it yourself." So ask yourself, do you suffer from the Home Depot Syndrome?
There are several good reasons for breaking out of this syndrome, not the least of which is "two heads are better than one." The fact is that, as people rise in most organizations, the more they are expected to show up as an extraordinary leaders, to deliver extraordinary results and, most importantly, to know all the answers. And yet, the higher you go in the corporation, the more daunting a task it becomes for you to lead, the more difficult it becomes to reach your goals, and by the time you have figured out the answers, all of the questions have often been changed-usually becoming more complex.
In reality, there are many opportunities in coaching for leaders and managers, starting with making sure you have worthwhile goals, stretching your definition of yourself and your business. Also if you haven't already noticed, no matter how brilliant you think you are, you are only seeing your situation from your own point of view and there may be other points of view to look at. One of the most powerful roles that a coach can play is as a thinking partner, based on the notion that two heads are better than one. Finally, we all need feedback. We tend to see the wonderful things we consciously do to produce intended results, and not see the not so wonderful, unconscious things we do that produce unintended results.
If you haven't begun to see the opportunity in coaching for you by this point, think about the following questions: When was the last time a Masterful Coach capable of teaching you powerful lessons in personal (organizational) change walked up to you and said: I am going to dedicate the next year helping you create an extraordinary future for yourself and organization? How many times has a Masterful Coach (or teacher) walked up to you and said: I am going to dedicate myself over the next year to you transforming who you are as a leader (from good to great) in light of the extraordinary future you have declared? How many times has a coach walked up to you and said: Let's spend the next eight hours seeing what we can do to spearhead a breakthrough in business results? The most likely answer is never.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow might say that discovering the opportunity in coaching for you might lie in fathoming your own human needs. For example: 1) You (want) need as a leader to make a difference, to have an impact, to be effective, as a way of actualizing yourself; 2) You may want to achieve an extraordinarily business result, not only to impact your company's bottom line, but to also have a greater experience of yourself (and your self worth); 3) You may want to build a better team, not just to enhance collaboration but also to be part of something larger than yourself; and 4) You may want to get a higher level of safety and security-for example, keep your job.
The follow are examples of very specific opportunities in coaching that some of our clients have come up with.
I want a coach to help me make a difference, specifically in the triumph of possibility over cynicism. For example, an executive in a new job told us that the team he inherited had in the past been told that they were "not paid to grow," which lead to a cynical "Why bother?" attitude. He explained that past attempts to grow the business had led to a low return on capital employed, which led to the assumption that this would always be the case. In this company, we coached the leader to begin to question what people took for granted. We opened a new possibility that "every business is a growth business" and that, although not all growth was good, what was required here was something we called "profitable growth." Soon possibility began to triumph over resignation. People started seeing openings to profitably growing their business in a "capital lite" way. These openings just didn't exist before.
I need a coach to reach goals and aspirations when I have hit the wall and cannot make further progress on my own. You go to a coach when you need or want to accomplish something "big" and you realize that, despite your own best efforts, you will never accomplish it on your own. This realization often comes about as a result of doing the same thing harder to no avail, which leads to feeling stymied, frustrated, and thwarted. The coach's role is to help people see something differently, which allows them to do something differently. For example, we coached one manager of a retail store chain whose job it was to reinvent the supply chain to see that the main obstacle to reaching his goal was to be able to master the human side of change by engaging and enrolling his organization rather than trying to just master the technical side of change.
I would like to have a coach to transform how I show up as a leader. In Masterful Coaching we are fond of saying, "In the end, all you have is who you be." You can talk about the importance of vision and values, about mobilizing people to initiate real change, and about accomplishing things, yet in the end, you are the message. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that who you are speaks so loudly that it drowns out what you are saying. Getting people to believe your message may require you to transform yourself from a power wielder to a real leader. Transforming who you are as a leader starts with taking a stand for a purpose larger than yourself, then speaking, listening, and taking action from that stand. It also involves finding a coach in your business environment that can give you some real feedback, "How am I doing?"
I could use a coach to help me get my career out of being stuck in neutral. By and large, most of the leaders and managers we speak to have the feeling that their career is going nowhere fast. They are either not climbing up the ladder fast enough, or don't get much job satisfaction, which leaves them with the vague, intuitive feeling that they should be doing something else, and frequently doing it somewhere else. Think about it, could we be talking to you here? If the answer is "yes" and you feel stuck in neutral, you better fasten your seatbelt quickly because we are about to switch gears here and accelerate.
Reflection: What is the specific opportunity in coaching for you?
Take a moment to write down some thoughts about this.
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Creating an Extraordinary Coaching Relationship Means Each Person Giving Their 100%
Once people see the opportunity in coaching for themselves, it is time to set up the coaching relationship. As we said earlier, we have discovered that the most powerful and profound ways for leaders to achieve an extraordinary future is through an extraordinary coaching relationship. An extraordinary coaching relationship is not just one where there is great chemistry, but one that in and of itself becomes a powerful force for a higher order of change in the organization (world). It is often the relationship with the coach that determines whether the leaders declare an extraordinary future or a predictable one, source their vision powerfully, or get caught in the incredible number of demands coming at them.
An extraordinary coaching relationship is one in which there is a "co mingling" of souls around what George Bernard Shaw called "a noble or mighty purpose." There is much more than setting goals and making plans, or doing a 360º assessment of yourself as a leader; there is a real spirit of thinking and working together. The leader and the coach work iteratively-on a leadership development plan for the next generation, a Monday morning strategy presentation to the board, or a process map-each adding value, as if passing a ball of energy back and forth until the collective work product reaches a level of brilliance. Jose Maturana, biologist, described this kind of interdependent relationship as "structural coupling." The result is that the two achieve something that neither could achieve on their own.1
You might be asking yourself right now, how do you create such an extraordinary coaching relationship (especially in a book)? Our answer to that question is that you create an extraordinary coaching relationship by each person coming to the relationship with something at stake. For example, one of the things we have at stake in every coaching relationship is a bone deep commitment to empower leaders to make a difference in their world, and this greatly influences who we work with. We also have at stake a commitment to not just provide some coaching, but to have a real impact that shows up in measurable results.
So think about, what you have at stake as you read Your Masterful Coach in a Book? Are you willing to take a stand that a difference can be made in your business (world)? Are you willing to commit yourself to having an impact in a particular situation? Are you ready for a breakthrough in effectiveness? If you are, you will find Michel and I like the wind at your backs, supporting you one hundred percent in everything we say in these pages and beyond them. In fact, you can even test that for being something more that hot air by sending Michel and me an e-mail describing your goals, issues, problems, and so forth. We will do our best to provide an answer to your questions or a word of advice.
One of the things we have also discovered in creating extraordinary coaching relationships is that both people must bring a one hundred percent commitment to the coaching relationship at all times, and this needs to be monitored regularly by asking, "How are we doing?" We wrote Your Masterful Coach in a Book, with a particular commitment to you. We wrote it with a passion to save you time and make you rich in the insights needed to gain power and velocity in reaching your personal and organizational goals. We wrote it to help you gain the insights to crack open problems, puzzles, and dilemmas that have been confounding you. We wrote it to make sure you receive the championship level coaching you need to be super successful.
Now that we have written what our one hundred percent would look like in an extraordinary coaching relationship, let's talk about what your one hundred percent would look like, because we would like you to come to Your Masterful Coach in a Book with a particular commitment as well. We ask you to come to this book with a commitment to suspend any notions that you are a super successful person who can do it yourself and surrender to the idea of being coached for a while. We ask you to come to this book from a commitment to empower us as your coaches by being a committed listener and taking on the teachable points of view offered here. And we ask you to come from a commitment to taking these ideas and putting them into action. If you are willing to do that, then a great deal can be accomplished here.
Reflection: What do you have a stake in our coaching relationship?
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Structuring the Coaching Relationship
As we have already mentioned, one of the most important aspects of our Masterful Coaching method is to build the coaching relationship around concrete goals and to structure the relationship in an ongoing manner rather than in a stop/start way. Besides scheduling monthly meetings and weekly phone calls, we have also developed a process that follows the five distinct phases that are outlined below. It is important to note, however, that in reality the phases are not as time bound or linear as this might suggest. The process is more of a loose/tight structure. Awareness of the five phases will give you an idea of how the coaching process unfolds over a year. (See Diagram 1.3).
[Insert Diagram 1.3: Five Phases of Breakthrough]
Phase 1. Formulation: Clarify Your Goals (months 1 to 3) In this stage, the coach works with you to create an extraordinary coaching relationship and to clarify what you are going to accomplish. You formulate significant leadership and business challenges that will cause you to stretch your definition of yourself and your business. You also formulate a Source Document for transforming the organization.
Phase II. Concentration: Jump into Action (months 3 to 6) Your coach asks you to take your leadership and business goals and identify what's missing that, if provided, could make a difference. You and your coach then take "what's missing" and design small projects that can be achieved in weeks, not months. The idea is to act with disciplined intensity and actually make something happen.
Phase III. Momentum: Don't Let Up! (months 6 to 8) The idea in the last phase was to get going right now to produce a success. In the momentum phase, your coach encourages you to not let up and to use the momentum from your initial successes to create a widening circle of success. The coach inquires with you into what happened, what's missing, and what's next.
Phase IV. Breakthrough: Celebrate Success (months 8 to 10) In this phase of the coaching process, other leaders in your organization are likely to remark that they see a sudden and visible change in your leadership style, or acknowledge that you are now producing results that would have previously considered difficult or impossible. The coach continues to ask, "What's happened?" "What's missing?" and "What's next?"
Phase V. Stability: Make it Sustainable (months 10 to 12) The focus of the coaching is on how to make the breakthrough sustainable. For example, the coachee may elect to get 360º feedback on his or her leadership challenge on a quarterly basis. Or they may recognize that, while Herculean will satisfied customer's expectations on a big order, it is time to design repeatable processes that exceed customer's expectations every time.
In considering the best approach for structuring Your Masterful Coach in a Book, we considered, but finally decided against structuring the book along the lines of our year long coaching program, although many of the elements would be included here. Our reasoning for this was that it was hard for us to imagine the leaders and managers who read this book following any method over a yearlong progression, with just a book for a coach. We also thought that this would be too linear an approach for the casual reader or the person who just wants to "grab a golden nugget and run with it."
Instead we decided to design the book around four sections that concern the four major challenges in our year-long coaching program: 1) Your Organization Challenge; 2) Your Business Challenge; 3) Your Leadership Challenge; and 4) Your Career Challenge. This way you can read all sections in sequences or zero in on the one that's most appropriate for you.
In the introduction chapter of each of these four sections, we will provide you a Masterful Coach's frame of reference for thinking about your organization, business, leadership, or career challenges and we will ask you to write these down. The idea is to get it eighty percent right, and then iterate. We will also ask you to create a Route Map and Relationship Map for meeting your challenges. We find that most managers know something about creating a Route Map, but often fail to do this with discipline and rigor. We have also found that they have often not even considered the possibility or importance of a Relationship Map, which deals with the people you need to enroll and influence to get the job done.
In the ensuing chapters within each section, we will share with you the secrets of Masterful Coaches or "the golden nuggets" from the coaching conversations we have had with leaders around particular challenges. First, we will provide you a story of an executive we have worked with. We will invite you to be a fly on the wall to the coaching conversation we had with them on a particular issue or dilemma they were facing, an issue that you most likely face as well. At the same time, we will provide you with the teachable point of view that allowed the executive to see things in a new way and act in a new way. (I am talking about new ideas, fresh perspectives, simple but non-obvious solutions.) Finally, we will provide a template for action that allows you to actually make something happen.
You will see that as we coach leaders in each of the dilemmas or problems that they face that we follow what we consider to be the four steps to an extraordinary coaching conversation. Diagram 1.4 shows these four steps. The intention is two-fold: not only will you learn some of the "secrets" of Masterful Coaches, but also something about how to have extraordinary coaching conversations, whether that's with the chief executive of your company, your peers, or direct reports.
[Insert Diagram 1.4: Four Steps of an Extraordinary Coaching Conversation]
Getting the Most Out of Your Masterful Coach in a Book
Now that you have an idea of what masterful coaching is and is not, see an opportunity in coaching (something at stake) for yourself, and have thought about the structure of the coaching relationship, it is time to get into the formulation phase. First, let us offer you ten things that we believe will help you to make Your Masterful Coach in a Book work for you.
1. Write down your organization, business, leadership, and career challenges and iterate to improve them for the next month, making sure they are something that will stretch your mind and skills.
2. Show up as a request for coaching. Write down your coaching requests: goals you are struggling with, issues and dilemmas you need resolved.
3. Read Your Masterful Coach in a Book with gusto. Dog-ear favorite pages, shamelessly underline valuable passages, or even rip them out.
4. Take on the teachable points of view here and try them on for size. For example, for the next three months focus on CTB (creating the business) versus RTB (running the business).
5. Take the templates for action we provide seriously. Get going! Right now! Immediately, and just do it!
6. Send us an e mail with "requests for help" at: Robert.Hargrove@MasterfulCoaching.com, Michel.Renaud@MasterfulCoaching.com
7. Create a "deputy coach" or "thinking partner" in your organization who can give you ongoing coaching and feedback, and get your first three to four meetings on the schedule.
8. Buy a copy of Your Masterful Coach in a Book for your deputy coach, thinking partner, or team.
9. Create "Coaching Circles" with people in your team. Meet every Monday morning for a half hour about a particularly relevant session of the book.
10. Keep asking yourself: "Is the coaching relationship extraordinary or ordinary. If it's ordinary, what do I need to do to make it extraordinary?"