Category Archives: Leadership

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Can They Hear You Listening?

Consultant?  Mentor?  Coach?  However you might be trying to encourage someone who is already an outstanding professional do what they do better, what is most likely to get in your way?  It is quite possible that professional is not accustomed to being on the receiving end of good coaching.  Any leader who spends most of their time getting things done promptly, inspiring a team with excellence, may have forgotten or never have learned how to be open to quality feedback.  That may seem like the executive’s problem, but it is clearly a challenge any great coach should be excited to accept.

One of the key problems many executives face is the impossibility of getting honest, useful feedback, often until it is too late.  A study last fall from the Kellogg School of Management identified the Icarus Paradox as a particularly pernicious factor in the continuing success of accomplished CEOs.  Where top executives are often most in need of quality feedback, they are often at the disadvantage of their own nervous circles.  Exaggerated levels of flattery and opinion conformity are too often the norm within organizations, leaving the already exposed leader even more exposed than necessary, too often in the spirit of being well-meaning.  “My advice would be to remember that the higher you are, the more likely you are to be ingratiated, and therefore you should make sure you get advice from people who do not depend on you,” wrote Northwestern professor Ithai Stern, one of the authors of the study.

There’s some interesting advice — seek input from someone who has no reason to flatter you, but rather is 100% aligned with you objectively for success.  Sounds like opportunity with huge upside for the right person ready to provide that challenge in a manner where it is unfiltered, constructive, and uncompromised.  The goal is not so much self-enhancement of the individual as it is strategic enhancement of the individual’s mission, upon which so many are depending.

CTI Executive CoachingSounds like an ideal place to be, but how do you get there?  Surely it’s possible for someone like Baseball Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax to return to his Dodger roots and offer a pointer or two to Cy Young Award Winner Clayton Kershaw, who is still early in his career and confident enough in his own pitching to know how to listen to a legend.  What if your experience is different from that of the person you are coaching — can you still be of high value?   Because I do this every day with world-class individuals who do things I could never do, I promise you that you can — but you do have some immensely hard work ahead of you.

Imagine you could help anyone in the world get better at what they do in a professional context, regardless of his or her area of expertise or your own.  Hey, this is for fun, pick anyone you want — an artist, an athlete, a headline corporate leader.  Great, keep that person in mind, and presume you are not renowned for the same things they are.  How are you going to get past the barrier of getting them to accept your insight?  That perhaps is a much bigger challenge than getting the fantasy assignment in the first place.

You might be saying to yourself your initial goal has to be to establish rapport, and that would be a good place to start, but what does it mean?  In the Executive Coaching Workshop I lead with John Vercelli at Coaches Training institute, we talk less about the notion of rapport, and more about the notion of empathy.  In the many exercises and role-playing scenarios we run, we have yet to find two individuals so disparate in life experience that they cannot find a path to empathy.  In this context, empathy is the basis of common understanding, an appreciation of shared aspirations and motivating factors, an interlinking of common goals outside the specifics of a work-oriented task.  No matter how far apart people begin, if they make the effort and commit themselves to finding reciprocal empathy, they can find common ground to break down a set of complex problems quickly and consistently.  The outreach that constitutes the task of discovering empathy leads to the bond of trust that is essential in any coaching relationship.  Find empathy, establish trust, and the process of being open to outside support is not nearly as hard as it seems.

Is it any wonder that this kind of trust is difficult for an executive to exhibit in the hyper competitive workplace?  Anyone in a position of leadership is constantly faced with endless conflicts of interest, mixed messages, hidden agendas, and far too much flattery.  When a coach can break through all that noise through the powerful act of focused listening, the next person likely to listen might be the executive.  That could constitute an unequaled breakthrough and the beginning of a powerful business friendship.

If Professor Stern and his colleagues are right about the Icarus Paradox, and senior business leaders can be set up for a fall by unrealistic levels of strategic confidence fostered by too many piled up compliments, then the smartest ones are going to look outward for the right kind of listening and more useful forms of feedback.  That’s a field day for the executive coach willing to step up and be honest, empathetic, and a confidential source of creative exchange.  With that kind of listening, flattery can be replaced with progress.

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A Simple Secret Weapon

Ever hear the catch phrase, “Try to catch someone doing something right?” It’s from The One Minute Manager (1981) by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. No matter how many times you hear it, it doesn’t get enough airplay. Apparently, it is way too easy to forget or ignore.

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal by Sue Shellenbarger titled “Showing Gratitude at the Office – No, Thanks” got me to stop and digest the quoted statistics twice before posting a sustained gasp across all my social networks. Here’s a telling clip:

Research suggests that employees who feel appreciated are more productive and loyal. But that message hasn’t reached many of those in charge. Some bosses are afraid employees will take advantage of them if they heap on the gratitude. Other managers believe in thank-yous but are nervous about appearing awkward or insincere—or embarrassing the employee they wish to praise.

A common attitude from the corner office is “We thank people around here: It’s called a paycheck,” says Bob Nelson, an employee-motivation consultant in San Diego.

The workplace ranks dead last among the places people express gratitude, from homes and neighborhoods to places of worship. Only 10% of adults say thanks to a colleague every day, and just 7% express gratitude daily to a boss, according to a survey this year of 2,007 people for the John Templeton Foundation of West Conshohocken, Pa., a nonprofit organization that sponsors research on creativity, gratitude, freedom and other topics.

We can admire business leaders for being tough, for being direct and never taking no for an answer when facing immense challenges, but I don’t think our expectations of their motivational abilities have to end there. Clearly there are at least two schools of thought for executives and managers on driving employees to exceptional results: 1) You can never (or almost never) express appreciation to keep employees guessing about what you think of their performance and push themselves harder; or 2) You can offer praise when it’s earned, heartfelt, and precisely the unexpected good word a dedicated employee needs to hear when a job is well done.

When praise is withheld purposefully as a tactic to prohibit an employee from becoming self-satisfied, I suppose I can see the envisioned logic in that, but that logic is flawed. When a boss is constantly lavishing praise to the point where employees simply expect it and the words no longer have impact, I can also see the potential downside, but somehow it doesn’t have me worried. Withholding appreciation for effect is seldom as intentional as some bosses would have you believe. More often it is its own form of laziness, or arrogance, or nonchalance, or unaware omission.

I fondly remember a tough water polo coach I had in high school—a league legend who went simply by the name Mr. J—who used to say, “As long as I am yelling at you from the sidelines, it means I still have faith in you and think you can do better; when I go silent, it’s because I have given up.” It took me a long time to fully interpret that message, and I get it now. First, he told us in advance why he was driving us hard, because he really cared, not so much about winning (that, too) but about pushing us to do our best. There was never a time in the pool when we were getting yelled at that this message was not in our heads. Second, anytime we did something extraordinary, as a team or an individual, he made a point of it in team meetings. So he could have it both ways—he could motivate with the stick, because we knew there was always a carrot. We also knew the stick was highly convincing play-acting, but the carrot was authentic.

Top Secret! Courtesy - DocStocWhen I am on the job as a day-to-day operator, I make a point to meet with my direct reports weekly and my indirect reports monthly, largely for the purpose of setting and reviewing goals. I don’t at all like annual performance reviews (more on that in a future post, I promise), but what I do like is establishing agreed criteria and then constantly measuring against that, quantitatively and qualitatively. I also have a stealth agenda in these meetings, which is to find the surprise in the weekly or monthly status report, the chance to catch someone doing something right and blind side them with a few striking words of praise. You cannot imagine the impact after 55 minutes of goal regression of throwing a quiet knuckle ball at an employee along the lines of a Steve Jobs “Oh, one more thing” moment.It goes something like this: “How did you possibly find the time to _______ with everything else on your plate, and do it so creatively, and so thoughtful—do you have any idea how much an impact that had on your team and our business? Well, I do.”

I’m telling you, try it. It does not matter what level of employee you are motivating, senior management can benefit from a genuine, unprompted, thumbs up jolt just as much as those at the entry-level. Fill in that blank, put it in your own words, point out what is positive but not obvious with conviction and a nod. If you have never done this before, I assure you it will feel party time good. If your employee has never heard it before, watch the size of their eyeballs physically enlarge.

Each month when I am reviewing our team business plan against individual status reports, I pick one person who did something truly special and I send a personal email from me to her or him, no cc’s, and tell them how amazing his or her contribution was. No big bucks bonus, no gift certificate, just a brief email. That email accomplishes two things—it shows you are paying attention, and it shows you care. It buys you a grapevine of goodwill, and a good deal of room to set seemingly unrealistic stretch goals in the periods before or after. Some of you reading this have received one of these. I’ll bet you kept it. The ones I happen to have received over the years—I have kept those.

When a boss whispers, it’s a shout. When a boss shouts, it’s a scream. When a boss high fives, it can be the World Series.

I’m a not asking you to shower undeserved praise—far be it from me to let a team have reason to go soft in these challenging times, that would be inconsistent with my style. What I am suggesting is that the holidays are upon us and that is always a good milestone to say thank you. Say it often, only when it is earned, and be specific—but find a reason, if you have a great team then you have innumerable good reasons.

Yep, the season is upon us. Perhaps we needn’t let our better side be limited to such a narrow window, but at the very least, let’s try to show a little extra holiday cheer. It’s good for business, and it’s good for the people who are the business.

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Debate Takeaways Tallied Tactfully

I try hard in this blog to leave out my personal politics, which isn’t all that hard to do since I consider the topic of business innovation and its various threads to be about as nonpartisan a subject as there should be.  Business enterprise and creativity are as fundamental to a shared sense of values as I can imagine, and where we may often disagree on the “how” I hope we don’t much disagree on the “why.”  Together we create our economy, our opportunities, and our experiment in progress called democracy.  We argue as we should about issues of governance and legal particulars, but we should agree that following the law is our duty as much as evolving it with the times is our right.

What does all that have to do with the Presidential Debates?  While I was watching the first of them this week, I saw as I often do a collection of ideas that can be applied to our business thinking, in complete abstraction of the of the candidates, what they said, or who won, if there is such a thing (anytime rigorous and important discussion is had in front of and with the people, the people win).  Presidential Debates are anything but ordinary, like the Olympics we have to wait four years for the next staging, but other than reinforcing what we already believe or possibly swaying a swing voter, there seems a deeper construct evidenced and worth exploring.

During the first debate one of my friends on Facebook likened it to a supercharged job interview, where the applicants were down to the final two, and given the stakes forced to faceoff in front of a panel consisting of more than 65 million of their prospective employers.  I liked that analogy a lot — I am not even sure it is an analogy — but I was thinking about the event a little differently.  For some reason, the debate struck me as the ultimate competitive sales call, where rather than entering a prospective client’s office before or after your potential competitor, you had to handle the sales call in tandem.  Many of us have been on more sales calls than we want to remember, but seldom have I heard people either leaving or entering the room thinking of the other guy as their opponent.  Perhaps that is more the case than we think — if that were going through our minds, we might approach the business pitch a little differently.

What stood out for me in the debate was the immense amount of time both candidates invested in preparation for the 90 minutes they spent together in the public eye.  That 90 minutes on the rarely shared dais probably felt like a lifetime to the candidates, or opponents, but once it was behind them, it probably felt like a millisecond.  I am sure the time leading up to the debate never felt excessive, as every precious moment invested in preparation was clearly a tradeoff borrowed from some other critical activity.  As they felt the pressure of the event nearing, those tradeoffs had to favor dedicated preparation pods over other pressing conflicts.  Preparation time is always discretionary, but imagine procrastinating too long when you know in heart and mind that preparation is everything.  Definitely reminds me of selling — if you aren’t prepared, you’re sunk, your client expects you to be prepared and has no reason to cut you any slack on a stumble.

Second to preparation, I was struck by its counterpart, the role of extemporaneous behavior, dancing in the moment, listening, reacting, evidencing spontaneity that reflected realtime analysis and response to the unexpected, to the extent anything said might be unexpected.  You can rehearse a speech or pitch perfectly, and both candidates did for multiple segments, but how do you handle the moment when someone says something you believe to be wrong, untrue, or unsupported?  I was wary going into the debate that both opponents had come with a quiver full of “zingers” to flick at the other, where I couldn’t imagine anything less dignified than a canned response played as in the moment.  Luckily we were spared that disrespect, and I take it as a lesson.  There is a huge difference between a heartfelt moment and a too cleverly scripted remark — no one wants to hear B material from an A level player.  The balance of preparation and live playtime is the heart of sales as it was the heart of the debate.  We can argue at will about who did it better, but in my mind I kept thinking how consistently hard this is to pull off, to balance preloaded preparation with inspired retort, the art of the pivot.

Holding the balance between preparation and extemporaneous response was the notion of authenticity.  Each word a candidates says adds to an outcome, and as we all have so often experienced, style is content.  Any debate coach or sales leader will tell you how you say something matters as much or more than what you say, and here again, you have to be careful at all moments under extreme pressure to keep your eyes on the prize.  The presentation layer matters, its visceral nature reflects passion and deliberation, that which people remember more than words.  Yet it can’t be an act, it has to be who you are.  Surely you can say what you want, anything you want, and you can say it any way you want, but ultimately your goal is not to win the debate, it is to win the Presidency.  Cut to the sales call; you need to make a good impression, often you think you need to say what the client wants to hear just to stay in the room, but after you leave the room those words and that style can haunt you.  Are you being consistent with what you said before and what you intend to do after?  Do people believe that is what you really mean?  That is the authenticity of your belief set, it underlies every moment you are on your feet, and it matters.

Only in high school are the trophies handed out after the tournament.  In most of life the true impact comes much later — which means that immediately following the debate is the regroup.  What went right, wrong, better or worse than expected, and how will that be factored into your next encounter.  High stakes exchanges often reward innovation and quick thinking, playing it safe is unlikely to impress, and taking the right risk at the right moment calculated on the spot can be what it takes to close the sale.  These candidates still have time to course correct or double down on their strides, and in the same way, an account is seldom awarded after an early high stakes encounter.  To internalize the impact of your efforts and incorporate that into a subsequent approach is to know you participated in the event rather than performed.  The real prize can still be up for grabs, which takes you back to the process, the cycle — preparation, extemporaneous interaction, authenticity, and strategic evaluation to reposition.

Landing an account of any size will never be the same as a Presidential Debate, but maybe with President Obama and Governor Romney at the podium fixed in your mind, your next high pressured sales call might be a tiny bit better.

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The Art and Science of Coaching

Most great athletes wouldn’t think of stepping into competition without a coach, both in practice running skill drills and on the sidelines during an event for strategy and encouragement.  Where you find a great business leader, there is often a similar proxy — a mentor helping guide them, either a current boss, a past boss, or a colleague who just cares enough to help.  When you want a coach and aren’t lucky enough to have a mentor, where can you turn?  Some have tried executive coaches, paid professionals hired to fill the role, sometimes successful, sometimes not.  Because I find the role of being a mentor the most satisfying aspect of my career, I have taken up an interest in coaching over the past few years and learned through experience some stuff worth sharing.

John Vercelli, with whom I teach the Executive Coaching Workshop at Coaches Training Institute, recently sent me an article from Human Resources Executive that largely captures why we created our new program.  The article, by Andrew R. McIlvaine, pretty much says everything I was intending to write in a post here, not the least of which is:

Too many executive coaches lack the business experience necessary to help clients.  But others say such experience isn’t necessary to effect real change — and in some cases, it may even be a hindrance.

John and I are somewhere in the middle (surprised, huh?).  We believe it is virtually impossible to be an executive coach if someone hasn’t developed empathy for the job of the executive.  Yet we also believe that just because someone has significant executive experience, that may not qualify them to be a world-class executive coach.

That’s why we decided to lead the Executive Coaching Workshop together, and are having a blast doing so.  John is a longtime member of the faculty at CTI and now serves as Director of Corporate Programs.  I have taken courses at CTI, but I am not a certified coach.   I have immense respect for the work of the coach, but that’s really John’s expertise as one of the senior curriculum designers for CTI.  My role in this program is to help prepare a new wave of coaches to step into the corporate arena by placing them in real world simulations that illustrate the weight of walking in an executive’s shoes.

We can no more substitute a lifetime of making business decisions in a few intense days of training than we can alter the personality of someone who doesn’t appreciate empathy to exhibit it.  What we can do is paint a picture of what high level business decision-making is like day-to-day as well as year to year, and how a good coach can add value to that decision-making by helping frame the context of situations as a resource and sounding board rather than an “answer machine.”  The combination of John’s co-active creativity and my goal oriented pragmatism — both tempered by true commitment to human potential and respect for the individual as well as the team — seems to be working.  Here are a few things we have learned in the initial trials:

1. Role-Playing Creates Memorable Models: When we take prospective executive coaches and load them up in exercises with the burdens of time bound goals, intense competition, market forces, unforgiving shareholders, management hierarchies, and corporate politics, they start to understand the client by becoming the client.  Of course this is no substitute for the reality of the client’s struggles, but it’s a good start down a path toward empathy.  If you have a little high-octane improv you want to try out, there’s nothing quite like giving your material a no-fault test run.

2. Intellectual Curiosity Can’t Be Faked: If you want to cheer people on, you need to be interested in what they do.  As obvious as it may sound, an expressed interest in business is prerequisite to being a recommended executive coach.  Reading the Wall Street Journal regularly, digging into corporate annual reports, subscribing to industry email newsletters, participating in webinars — all of these help to build a shared vocabulary around profit and loss, return on investment, and growth opportunities.  Where prospective executive coaches don’t find the subject matter naturally interesting, easy flowing dialogue is not easy.

3. It Takes a Toolkit: There is no single path to success for the executive, and there is surely no single connect-the-dots methodology for successful executive coaching.  The dynamics of today’s business environment are fierce and opaque, creating a landscape of ambiguity that has to be constantly reevaluated and balanced.  There is no reward without risk, and helping the executive to consider risk requires an establishment of trust and credibility that constantly has to be reinforced.  We believe empathy is possible through extrapolation of life experience, but thin analogies will only get you so far.  Experience and knowledge compound over time to broaden the context of dialogue, convincing us that process is your friend to the extent you have the personal resources to chart new paths under immense pressure.

How deep can organizations go with coaching?  A recent post in Psychology Today suggests that even a CEO can benefit strong from an executive coach, although building that level of trust and empathy is no small task.  The point is that everyone can benefit from a sounding board, and in a perfect world everyone would have one that embodies a level playing field of shared knowledge.  Since that business utopia is unlikely to emerge anytime soon, we think great executive coaches will be increasingly in demand, but like anything worth the money, the difference between good and great can be considerable.

The science of coaching is most likely to be revealed through improved business results, the scoreboard of performance upon which the client’s metrics will be formally evaluated.  The art of coaching may seem more abstract, as each coach will undoubtedly develop his or her own style for working with the client to achieve the anticipated metrics, but without concrete improvements in financials, style won’t much matter.  John and I believe you can’t have one without the other, and it is the integration of this vision that motivates us to help fill that toolkit.