Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Too Busy for Tough Decisions

The greatest barrier to tough decision-making is a lack of deep thinking.

In today's email/text message/cell phone/BlackBerry world, we're all so busy that we have no time or energy to think deeply about our real challenges.  To compensate, we often consciously or subconsciously avoid making clear decisions, hoping to think more deeply about them later.

As a result, development efforts are scattershot.  Energy is wasted.  Effectiveness is diminished.  Combine these factors, and you are left with stunningly poor execution.  Most failures that are blamed on poor execution are, in truth, the result of poor leadership early in the process.

A lack of leadership creates a chain reaction of problems:

Product lines are broad but not deep in quality, advertising is unfocused and unconvincing, sales teams are unhappy and unproductive.  When Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan simplified his company's menu, he found his stores could offer consistent 30-minute deliveries--a persuasive selling point.

When focus is sharp at the top, great results follow.

Source: Doug Hall, author of the Jump Start Your Business Brain book series in BusinessWeek SmallBiz, Winter 2006

Coached to Healthy Living

Joe Pellegrini got yet another nagging phone call.  It was from his health coach, a woman working on behalf of his employer, Scotts Miracle-Gro Co.  The coach's prescription: "You need to lose weight and you really, really need to lower your cholesterol."

Pellegrini is a supply-chain executive at Scotts headquarters in Maryville, OH and is an Armani-swaddled triathlete who often cycles 36 miles to and from work.  Lose weight?  "Give me a break," he thought, "It's all muscle, folks."

But a time bomb was ticking beneath the taut physique.  Medical specialists working on behalf of Scotts had been scouring every aspect of Pellegrini's health.  His profile--athletic, high body-mass index, and bad cholesterol (brought on by a love of 28-ounce sirloins)-- triggered an alarm.

Eventually, Pellegrini succumbed to the company-applied pressure and agreed to abide by his health coach's action plan, which included an immediate visit to his doctor.  A few weeks later, a specialist studying Pellegrini's angiogram spotted the heart valve of what should have been a dead man.  Within hours, two stents were installed.  The surgeons later told him the 95% blockage would have killed him within five days.  "It was that close," Pellegrini says.

The new wellness fixation is happening at companies as varied as IBM, Microsoft, Harrah's Entertainment, and Scotts.  Companies save money.  Employees get healthier.  But the wellness craze raises important issues.

With a wellness program, no company wants to give managers an opportunity to discriminate against employees based on their health.  That means bringing in a third party to run the thing.  In 2005, Scotts hired Whole Health Management, that manages on-site primary care and fitness centers for dozens of corporations.  Whole Health aggregates health and insurance claim data so Scotts can forecast trends.  But individual data are kept strictly confidential.

Scotts employees are now urged to take exhaustive health-risk assessments.   Those who balk pay $40 a month more in premiums.  Using data-mining software, Whole Health analysts scour the physical, mental and family health histories of nearly every employee and cross-reference that information with insurance-claims data.  Health coaches identify which employees are at moderate to high risk.  All of them are assigned a health coach who draws up an action plan.  Those who don't comply pay $67 a month on top of the $40.

The wellness program, which costs $4 million a year to run, is a financial drain.  But the company expects it to pay for itself in three to four years.  Other large companies have seen a 3-to-1 return on investment in their wellness programs.

Source: BusinessWeek, February 26, 2007

What is coaching?

Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and business potential. 

The coaching relationship is a strong, resilient, dependable and safe vehicle in which change can take place for the person being coached.  Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help people improve their performances and enhance the quality of their lives.

A coach is not a problem solver, teacher, advisor, instructor or expert.  A coach is a listener, sounding board and awareness-raiser.  Coaches are trained to listen, to observe and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach's job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has.

All areas of coaching are most often characterized by one-to-one interactions that often are provided through face-to-face or telephone conversations. These interactions share three essential core competencies: connection, clarification and commitment.

The core competencies are intertwined with one another in a continuous cycle of exploration and discovery of the espoused theory (what they say) and the theory in use (what they are observed doing) of the person being coached.  The lack of integrity or coherence between these two theories is fertile ground for coaching interactions.  In this way, the core competencies become the primary tool to surface and explore the discrepancy between the espoused theory and the theory in use.  In addition, the competencies enhance the emotional intelligence of the person being coached, promoting personal, interpersonal and organizational effectiveness. 

Each coaching session typically is result or goal-directed with emphasis on the person being coached taking action and sustaining changes over time.  This action often is to improve performance in a specific area of interest to the person being coached and his or her employer, family and friends.

Mrs. Powell, let Colin lead

With numerous religious/civil wars around the world, people recognize the need for leadership ethics more than ever before.   

As the highest ranking African-American in the executive branch, your husband has the experience, wisdom and leadership skills to take command of his country in this time of need.

Winston Churchill, who stepped up to the leadership role of his country when called, once defined leadership as "going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm."  Today, America has lost its enthusiasm and trust in its leaders just as Nixon's Watergate venture was a low point in our history and needed a Gerald Ford to step up and restore confidence in government. 

Now, it is your husband's turn to do what destiny has determined needs doing by putting the right man, in the right job, at the right time. 

Let the General lead, Mrs. Powell.  Our future is in your hands.

What is the Law of Attraction?

Everyone seems to be talking about the Law of Attraction today but few seem to know what it is.

So, what is the "secret" behind the Law of Attraction?   Simply stated, the Law of Attraction is: What you think, happens to you...whether you want it, or not.  Envision what you want, and it will come to you.  There is an exact correlation between what you have been thinking about and what is actually coming into your experience.  You attract it all, no exceptions.

An awareness of how the Law of Attraction works is essential to living life on purpose.  As you give your conscious attention to what you specifically want, you are setting forth the thought that is important to you.  When you understand the Law of Attraction, you will have a clear understanding of why everything happens the way it does.  You begin to deliberately apply Divine Laws which will always be consistent and in attunement with you.

Your attention to this law includes it in your vibration, and if you hold it in your attention or awareness long enough, the Law of Attraction will bring it into your experience.  Things do not manifest into your experience instantaneously.  There is a wonderful buffer of time between when you begin to think about something and the time it manifests.  That buffer of time gives you the opportunity to redirect your attention more and more in the direction of the things that you actually do want.

Understanding the Law of Attraction and recognizing the absolute correlation between what you have been thinking and feeling will cause you to be more aware of the stimulation of your own thoughts.  The Law of Attraction is evidenced when you see that the one who speaks most of illness has illness; when you see the one who speaks most of prosperity has prosperity.

Source: Abraham-Hicks Publications, www.abraham-hicks.com

Succession Planning Matters

Unexpected events -- surprises, whether good or bad -- can make or break your business.

Your company's ability to recognize and react to these events is key to both its growth -- and survival.  According to an Institute for Corporate Productivity of St. Petersburg, FL survey of 1,400 global executives, 40 percent of the respondents said their organizations experienced a shock or surprise within the past year that was severe enough to disrupt core operations, strategy or mission, and even threaten business viability.

According to a series of surveys by The Center for Board Leadership, the research arm of the Washington-based National Association of Corporate Directors, in collaboration with Mercer Delta Consulting, CEO succession was increasingly important to corporate boards of directors.  Yet, about 50% of board members consider themselves less than effective in the area of CEO succession. 

In addition, about one-quarter of those board members believe their boards fall into "below acceptable" levels of CEO succession planning.  Such findings come despite directors identifying CEO succession as among the leading concerns facing their companies.  Strategic planning and corporate performance were also among the highest concerns for boards.

Source: HR Executive, February 2007

Management Turnover in the C-Suite

Volatility increased in the C-Suite as management turnover was way up in 2006....rising 68% to 28,058 changes from corporate directors to vice presidents.  CEOs came and went at a 30% higher rate and CFO churn rose 23%.

Companies with a market cap of at least $1 billion changed CFOs three times more often in 2005 than in 2002, according to 10-K Wizard.  And while the rate of exits slowed a bit at big companies last year, Richard Jacovitz of Liberum Research found that among public companies of all sizes, CFO exits increased from 1,867 in 2005 to 2,302 in 2006.

Why is there Skyrocketing Turnover in CFOs?

At least 12 FORTUNE 50 CFOs left their posts in 2006.  Combine the workload necessary to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation and the knowledge that you're almost certainly the sacrificial lamb if the SEC comes calling, and you have the answer.  Another reason there's greater volatility at the CFO level is because there's more room to grow as a CFO, like moving into a CEO position.

CFOs are leaving public companies for private equity firms where there are significant opportunities and fewer restraints and headaches.  Sarbanes-Oxley, passed in 2002, has forced CFOs to spend nearly a third of their time on IT systems, paperwork and tedious board inquiries rather than on the big picture.  That's in addition to typical responsibilities like communicating with Wall Street and dealing with creditors.  Some companies are trying to reinvigorate the CFO job by creating a new position: the chief accounting officer, equipped to handle the technical aspects of finance.

The number of chief operating officers (COO) at the nation's largest companies continued to drop from 219 in 2005 to 213 in 2006, according to a recent study by Crist Associates, a Chicago-based executive search firm.  There are 17 percent fewer COOs today than in 1999.

There is potential danger ahead when a C-level executive moves to a new leadership position.  The brutal reality is that executives have less time than ever to prove their worth.  40% to 60% of high-level corporate executives brought in from outside a company will fail within two years.

Sources: FORTUNE, February 5, 2007 and Human Resource Executive, February 2007

The Neu(t)ral Computer

Jeff Hawkins is the chief innovator in the brain-meets-machine world of computers.  With the breakthroughs of the Palm-Pilot, first introduced in 1996, and the Treo, unveiled in 2001, Hawkins has been polishing up his theory of how the brain works.

Now approaching 50 years of age, Hawkins is about creating the first truly intelligent computer through his start-up company, Numenta, founded in 2005. 

The computers running Numenta software will not be programmed like regular computers.  The algorithms that Numenta has come up with allow machines to learn from observation.  The neocortex-like computer memory system remembers the patterns of the world presented to it and uses them, the way a human does, to make analogies and draw conclusions.  If it works as Hawkins expects, the applications and business opportunities will be stunning.

To understand how Numenta's software works, it helps to first understand Hawkins' concept of the brain.  Hawkins is interested in only the neocortex, the outer, pink part of the brain where he believes intelligence resides.  "Intelligence is about creating a model of the world and making predictions," he says.  Hawkins views the neocortex as a memory system that constantly adapts and reorganizes its connections to create that model.  "When you come across new things every moment of your waking life," he says, "it looks at previously stored experience and predicts what will happen next."

The different regions of the neocortex all do pretty much the same thing, Hawkins believes.  They store spatial and temporal patterns that can represent things like language, music, and vision.  In his view, all the human senses work the same way: Data from the world goes in as patterns of firing neurons, memories of the patterns are formed, and every piece of new information is matched to a stored sequence of patterns.  In other words, there is one general brain algorithm that recognizes and interprets all those blips on the brain. 

To many neuroscientists, this is a gross oversimplification but Hawkins thinks that "....what's missing is a concrete theory about how it (neuro-science) all hangs together."  Numenta is developing what Hawkins calls a "hierarchical temporal memory (HTM)" system.  The system mimics the structure of the neocortex.  "The HTM has to really learn from its data---the way we learn growing up as children," explains Subutai Ahmad, Numenta's vice president for engineering.  The key difference between an HTM and a regular computer is that you don't program an HTM, it learns by itself through observation.  This could fundamentally change the relationship between the programmer and the computer.

For Hawkins, the ultimate applications will be those that allow us to acquire new knowledge in areas of science such as quantum mechanics and biology.  "What is exciting to me," he says, "is the prospect of building intelligent machines that sit comfortably in the realms of science where we have difficulty thinking.  It will be like having a dedicated Einstein working around the clock on these problems."

Source: Business 2.0, January/February 2007

A love story: two think as one

This love story is about how science is helping us to understand that our body, mind and spirit work together as we interact with those creatures we care about.

The Source of Human Emotions

Because human beings remember with neurons (the cells of nerve tissue), we are disposed to see more of what we have already seen, hear anew what we have heard most often, think just what we have always thought.

Within the brain, every mental activity consists of neutrons (electrically neutral subatomic particles) firing in a certain sequence.  An "Attractor" is an association of ingrained links that can overwhelm weaker information patterns.  If incoming sensory data provoke a quorum of the Attractor's units, they will trigger their teammates, who flare to brilliant life.

An Attractor can overpower other units so thoroughly that the network registers chiefly the incandescence of the Attractor, even though the fading, firefly traces of another pattern initially glimmered there.  A network then registers strikingly new sensory information as if it conformed to past experience. In much the same way, our sun's blinding glare washes countless dimmer stars from the midday sky.

The limbic brain (i.e. the emotional brain) contains its emotional Attractors, encoded early in life.  Primal bias then forms an integral part of the neural systems that view the emotional world and conduct relationships.  If the early experience of a limbic network exemplifies healthy emotional interaction, its Attractors will serve as reliable guides to the world of workable relationships.

No individual can think his way around his own Attractors, since they are embedded in the structure of thought.  And in human beings, an Attractor's influence is not confined to its mind of origin. The limbic brain sends an Attractor's sphere of influence exploding outward with the exuberance of a nova's gassy shell.  Because limbic resonance and regulation join human minds together in a continuous exchange of influential signals, every brain is part of a local network that shares information--including Attractors.

Limbic Attractors thus exert a distorting force not only within the brain that produces them, but also on the limbic networks of others--calling forth compatible memories, emotional states and styles of relatedness in them. Through the limbic transmission of an Attractor's influence, one person can lure others into his emotional virtuality.  All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another's emotional mind with ours.  Each relationship is a binary star, a burning flux of exchanged force fields, the deep and ancient influences emanating and felt, felt and emanating.

The limbic transmission of Attractors renders personal identity partially malleable---the specific people to whom we are attached provoke a portion of our everyday neural activity. Ongoing exposure to one person's Attractors does not merely activate neural patterns in another--it also strengthens them. Long-standing togetherness writes permanent changes into a brain's open book.

In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner.  This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain's inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them.

Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.

Source: A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.

A Love Story

Paul and Patricia Churchland met when she was nineteen and he was twenty, and they have been married for almost forty years.  Both are professors of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego.  They test ideas on each other; they criticize each other's work.  Their work is so similar that they are sometimes discussed, in journals and books, as one person.

When they met, Paul and Pat were quite different from each other and from what they are now: he knew about astronomy and electromagnetic theory, she about biology and novels.  But as time went on they taught each other what they knew, and the things they didn't share fell away.

Paul sometimes thinks of Pat and himself as two hemispheres of the same brain--differentiated in certain functions but bound together by tissue and neuronal pathways worn in unique directions by shared incidents and habit.  To imagine his wife's brain joined to his is merely to exaggerate what is actually the case--two organisms evolving into one in a shared shell.

Paul is suspicious of those of us who rely on our basic perceptions of seeing, hearing and touching to make meaning of our world but he concludes we cannot help perceiving the world through the medium of our ideas about it.  It's not just a matter of what we pay attention to but of what we actually see.  Pat realizes that philosophy can actually change your experience of the world.  And if it could change your experience of the world then it had the potential to do important work, as important as that of science, because coming to see something in a wholly different way was like discovering a new thing.

In recent years, Paul has spent much of his time simulating neural networks on a computer in an attempt to figure out what the structure of cognition might be.  Thinking must be distributed widely across the brain, since individual cells continually deteriorate without producing, most of the time, any noticeable effect.  It seems to him likely that thinking takes place simultaneously along millions of different neural pathways, each of which was formed by a particular stimulation in the past and which is, in turn, greatly or minutely altered by the new experience of the present.  All of these pathways, connecting each neuron to millions of others, form unique patterns that together are the creature's memory.  When the creature encounters something new, its brain activates the pattern that the new thing most closely resembles in order to figure out what to do.

Sometimes, Paul likes to imagine a world in which language has disappeared altogether.  We know that the two hemispheres of the brain can function separately but communicate silently through the corpus callosum, he reasons.  Presumably, it will be possible, someday, for two separate brains to be linked artificially in a similar way and to exchange thoughts infinitely faster and more clearly than they can now through the muddled, custom-clotted, serially processed medium of speech.  He already talks about himself and Pat as two hemispheres of the same brain.  Who knows, he thinks, maybe in his children's lifetime this sort of talk will not be just a metaphor.

Source: Two Heads, The New Yorker, February 12, 2007

For more on the subject of love, go to:

www.LawofLove.com

 

 

Passing the ACID Test

Whenever we are communicating with others, they first must buy into us emotionally before they are willing to listen to what we have to say to them.

Here is an email message I received today from a client who had requested some sales coaching in an earlier session:

Hi John:

IT WORKS LIKE A DREAM!  "Hi Sandy, Is this a bad time?".

I have been using it all week and just about every time, the person said "no" and allowed me to speak with them.  I can also tell by their slight reaction that I threw them a little bit of a curve ball by that opening...which is fine.

I have shared this with a couple of persons in my office, including our appointment setter who I have heard use it on the phone already.

THANKS!

It is always important to achieve favorable attention when connecting with someone.  The small pause the salesman noticed, by the person he asked the opening question to, indicates that he had impressed her with his empathy and therefore had passed the first step of the ACID test.

The ACID test in an interpersonal interaction is:

1.  A = achieve favorable Attention

2. C = inspire Confidence (in that you know what you are speaking of)

3.  I =  build Interest in your story

4. D = instill Desire in the person for what you have to offer

When the connecting process gets to the "D" stage, stop talking.  Allow the other person to take charge of directing the conversation and you will get the sale.

A good "opening" paves the way to a profitable "close" of the sales process.

For more sales tips, go to: www.SalesTip.info