Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Dare to be Different

Inspirational leaders capitalize on their unique qualities, using their differences to great advantage. This is probably the most important trait of the four we’ve been discussing.

The most effective leaders deliberately use their differences to maintain a social distance.  Even when drawing their followers close to them, they also signal a separateness.

This may be a distinctly different dress style, physical appearance or manner of speaking—or it may be a larger-than-life personality.  Typically, such leaders will show imagination, loyalty, expertise or even a unique handshake.  Anything can be a difference, it’s important to communicate it.

Many people are hesitant to communicate their uniqueness.  It may take years for them to become fully aware of what sets them apart.  This is a serious disadvantage in a world where networking is so critical and teams need to be formed overnight.

Inspirational leaders use separateness to motivate others to perform better.  They recognize instinctively that followers will push themselves if their leader is just a little aloof. After all, leadership is not a popularity contest.

The danger is that leaders can overdifferentiate themselves in their determination to express their separateness.  Losing contact with followers is fatal.  Once they create too much distance, leaders lose their ability to sense out situations, identify with people and care about them.

Situational Intuition

Leaders, as all people, make their decisions in an instant based on their gut instincts.

Our intuition is nothing less than pattern recognition in our highly efficient emotional brain--making quick and effortless judgments and taking action.  We form positive or negative impressions in a mere "blink" or "thin slice" of time as described in Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller, blink (Little Brown, 2005), which promotes decision concepts around what Gladwell refers to as the adaptive unconscious: "Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately."

Many managers mistakenly assume that leadership style is always a function of personality rather than strategic choice.  Their leadership style is based upon their innate signature talents and this represents their default leadership behavior.  However, leaders can choose a different leadership style that best addresses the demands of a particular situation.

Being unaware that we can change our leadership style to match the situation at hand, we unconsciously engage our default behavior.  Only when we become aware of something, are we able to make choices as to the action we wish to take.  The ultimate leadership responsibility is modeling the behaviors you expect from others.  To a large degree, leaders operate in a fishbowl.  Employees are constantly watching the leader--and learning from him or her.

Tough Empathy

Leaders know how to exert pressure, say 'no,' and start and win fights when necessary. 

The key to their success is to empathize with the person they are confronting.  Emotionally intelligent leaders state useful facts rather than impressions, offer alternatives along with their objections and limit comments to the situation, not the person.

Of all dimensions of emotional intelligence, social awareness may be the most easily recognized.  We have all felt the empathy of a sensitive teacher or friend; we have all been struck by its absence in an unfeeling coach or boss. 

But when it comes to business, we rarely hear people praised, let alone rewarded, for their empathy.  The very word seems unbusinesslike, out-of-place amid the tough realities of the marketplace.

But empathy doesn't mean a kind of "I'm okay, you're okay" mushiness. 

It doesn't mean that leaders should adopt other people's emotions as their own and try to please everybody.  Rather, empathy means taking employees' feelings into thoughtful consideration and then making intelligent decisions that work those feelings into the response.  And, most crucially, empathy makes resonance possible; lacking empathy, leaders act in ways that create dissonance.

When leaders are able to grasp other people's feelings and perspectives, they access a potent emotional guidance system that keeps what they say and do on track.  Empathetic people are superb at recognizing and meeting the needs of clients, customers or subordinates.  They seem approachable, wanting to hear what people truly have to say.

Real leaders don't need an interpersonal-skills training program to convince people they care. They already do.  Successful leaders empathize fiercely with the people they lead and care intensely about the work.

Tough empathy means giving people what they need, which isn’t always what they want. It balances respect for the individual and the task at hand.  Attending to both isn’t easy, particularly when times are challenging.

Sources: BusinessWeek, September 29, 2008 and

Daniel Goleman, Annie McKee, Richard E. Boyatzis: Primal Leadership
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Reveal Your Weaknesses

When people seek help from others, they generally aren't as well-prepared as they could be.  Only when you "know thyself,"  your own goals, strengths and weaknesses, are you able to figure out whom to turn to for support...and...know how to ask for and apply the advice you receive effectively.

Are you comfortable reaching out for help, sharing your experiences and soliciting feedback?

Admitting a flaw or weakness shows people you’re human. This is essential for building trust and rapport. When you share that you’re not a morning person, can be somewhat disorganized or are nervous when speaking in front of large audiences, you’re being transparent and authentic.

This authenticity displays your willingness to trust people enough to be vulnerable and real—and they generally want to return that trust.  Exposing a weakness helps get people onboard. If you solely communicate your strengths, others will have no desire to help you out.

That said, you should select which flaw to reveal wisely.  Never expose a weakness that can be seen as a fatal flaw critical to a central aspect of your professional role.  Confessing to a lack of attention to details is inappropriate in a financial leadership role.  It would be better to admit to tangential flaws that don’t affect your performance.

Another well-known strategy is to pick a weakness that can be considered a strength, such as being a workaholic.

An overextention of a strength can be a weakness in certain situations.  It has been said that every problem is a 'nail' for those who are good with a hammer.

Again, the most important quality here is authenticity.  If you expose a vulnerability that isn’t real, people will be quick to spot the incongruence.

Four Leadership Qualities

For all the leadership training workshops, very few people can confidently explain how they take charge, engage others and develop their leadership skills.

“Why should anyone be led by you?” It’s a great question, as well as the title of an excellent September–October 2000 Harvard Business Review article coauthored by Robert Goffee and Gareth Jones.  It’s worth summarizing here.

Four Qualities

To be inspirational, leaders need four essential qualities besides vision and energy:

1. They selectively show their weaknesses. By exposing some vulnerability, exceptional leaders reveal their approachability and humanity.
2. They rely heavily on intuition to gauge the appropriate timing and course of their actions. Their ability to collect and interpret soft data helps them determine when and how to act.
3. They manage employees with “tough empathy.”  Inspirational leaders empathize passionately—yet realistically—with people, and they care intensely about the work employees do.
4. They reveal their differences. Effective leaders capitalize on what’s unique about themselves..

The focus here is not on financial results per se, but on how leaders capture the hearts, minds and energy of those who report to them.

Great results are hard to obtain without these qualities. That's why we will focus on each of these qualities in the next four leadership postings.

Leader as Coach

Coaching is a leadership competency and is all about performance, feedback and learning.  Leadership development is self-development. 

People are different--they come from different places emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. A coach's challenge is to meet the client where they "come from," so they can take the action they truly desire.

Professional coaches help leaders build their own coaching capability....so they can build the capacity of those that they coach at work.  Coaching inspires people to reach heights they never imagined they could reach on their own.  A coach understands what others need to know to achieve their own results, and how they can facilitate that happening.

Simply stated, leadership is an interactive conversation that pulls people toward becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility and commitment. 

Effective coaching can happen on the dance floor of conversation.  It's OK to begin a conversation by confronting the other person with questions that seem awkward but set the stage for a respectful exchange.  Why waste time on small talk?   Just ask to-the-point information-seeking questions, like: "What are you here for?  How do you want to spend our time together?" 

Conversations are not meant to be structured.  Leaders must be open to conversations that they are unprepared for and focused on the interests of the other person (not the leader's purpose).  Personal transformation happens when the right questions get asked--not by providing answers.  When you focus on the solution, you are trying to sell the person something.  When you allow people to answer their own questions, they discover what they were not aware of---and what is needed to move forward.  Personal transformation leads corporate transformation--one person at a time.

Focus on Connect, Clarify and Commit

Many executives decide not to coach and mentor associates because they are uncertain as to how to approach them and concerned about the time it would take away from their functional duties.

However, leaders as coaches and mentors can make a huge difference in a person's life with little effort.  And coaching isn't a distraction from getting work done, it's about building trust with the people where you work and managing the relationships that gets the work done.  Results are achieved while people understand what they need to learn through your coaching and mentoring.

Many employers struggle with providing performance feedback to correct workplace issues.

Employees want to succeed in their work.  Most accept that goal-directed feedback is an effective means of guiding their work activities to be in concert with team and organizational goals.  By having a performance feedback conversation with the employee (where you coach while doing more listening than talking), you can insist that he or she tell you what will be done to correct the situation.  The impact on the employee will make him or her responsible for personal actions and sets clear expectations.  The consequence is he or she has the opportunity to design a solution to the issue.

Too many executives receive poor or no coaching.

They miss opportunities to become more effective in their positions of influence and are often denied promotions they deserve.  Hiring an executive coach can help them enormously. It’s the right tool to alleviate common leadership problems.

 

Achieve Success through low cost self-coaching insights delivered to your smartphone, tablet, eReader or computer at: www.coachedtosuccess.info

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Art and Science

Neuroscience excels at unraveling the mind from the bottom up.  But our self-consciousness seems to require a top down approach.

As novelist Richard Powers wrote, "If we knew the world only through synapses, how could we know the synapse?"  The paradox of neuroscience is that its astonishing progress has exposed the limitations of its paradigm, as reductionism has failed to solve our emergent mind.  Much of our experiences remain outside its range.

While neuroscience continues to make astonishing progress in learning about the details of the brain, these details only highlight our enduring enigma, which is that we don't experience these cellular details.  It is ironic, but true: The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.

Sometimes, the whole is best understood in terms of the whole.

This world of human experience is the world of the arts.  The novelist and the painter and the poet embrace those ephemeral aspects of the mind that cannot be reduced, or dissected, or translated into the activity of an acronym.  They strive to capture life as it's lived.  Artists have been studying such emergent phenomena for centuries and have constructed elegant models of human consciousness that manage to express the texture of our experience, distilling the details of real life into prose and plot.  That's why their novels have endured: because they feel true.  And they feel true because they capture a layer of reality that reductionism cannot.

Before you break something apart, it helps to know how it hangs together.

In this sense, the arts are an incredibly rich data set, providing science with a glimpse into its blind spots.  Until science sees the brain from a more holistic perspective, our scientific theories will be detached from the way we see ourselves.  Art can make science better.

Our mind evolved in a simplified world, where matter is certain, time flows forward, and there are only three dimensions.  When we venture beyond these innate intuitions, we are forced to resort to metaphor.  The only way to know the universe is through analogy.

Source: Why Science Needs Art by Jonah Lehrer in SHIFT: At The Frontiers of Consciousness, September-November 2008

The Leadership Development Challenge

Organizations, both for-profit and not-for-profit, have realized that many challenges can be met with coaching.  A global survey of 5,000 executives around the world identified the top two human resource (HR) priorities of today as being managing talent and improving leadership development.  According to this global study by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the World Federation of Personnel Management Associations (WFPMA), managing talent will remain at or near the top of executive agendas in every region and industry for the foreseeable future.   

Organizations place increasing emphasis on measuring results--from financial success to management effectiveness and return on investment (ROI).

Today's Human Resource (HR) professionals are the people tasked with sourcing qualified coaches and seeing that the high cost of personal coaching delivers a calculable return-on-investment (ROI).  Yet, unlike investments in technology, which often result in cost and time savings, there's no easy way to attach a dollar figure to intangibles such as improved leadership skills and enhanced interpersonal relations. 

In tracking the coaching process, it is recommended that the HR professional or corporate sponsor hold quarterly status meetings with the executive being coached and his or her coach.  Before implementing a professional coaching program at work, some background on what to expect from such an effort makes sense to HR professionals.  Here are some comments on a book that addresses these issues:

“Coaching That Counts is filled with compelling insights on leadership coaching and how to manage this powerful development process to deliver strategic value. A must read for anyone involved in coaching.”
- Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Manager® and Customer Mania!

“Coaching That Counts belongs on the shelf of every professional coach and leader who cares about the sustainable development of people.   The Andersons portray the impressive results of the marriage between coaching and research by using the data and real life examples of case studies that never fail to ask and answer the relevant questions.
Coaching That Counts leaves the reader with a deeper understanding of why coaching is of value, what needs to happen for coaching to produce results, the value of an empirically based model for coaching and even how to measure the ROI of coaching. This is truly a book that counts.”
– Nadjeschda Hebenstreit, President of the ICF , Germany, Founder of TheSuccessClub for Solopreneurs

“This book is a must for anyone who is introducing coaching into an organization or managing a coaching initiative.”
– Ross McLelland, Managing Director, Pacific Consulting Resources Pty Ltd, Australia

“This book is a must read for coaches who are interested in working within organizations, program managers of organizational coaching initiatives, and Chief Learning Officers who need to be able to articulate the value of executive coaching to key stakeholders.”
– Vernita Parker-Wilkins, Executive Development Learning Manager, Booz Allen Hamilton, USA

Dianna Anderson: Coaching that Counts: Harnessing the Power of Leadership Coaching to Deliver Strategic Value (Improving Human Performance)

Ripple Effect of American Layoffs

More Baby Boomers are becoming members of a burgeoning species: the involuntary retiree.  An expert estimates that 3.5 million people between the ages of 40 and 58 vanished from the American workforce from 2001 to 2004.  That's about 5% of all Baby Boomers. 

Losing a job isn't just a career setback, it can be a permanent blow to the community, a recent study finds.  Using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which tracked 4,000 high school graduates over 45 years, researchers at UCLA and the University of Michigan studied the community involvement of workers aged 35 to 53.  Their finding: After being laid off, employers were 35% less likely than before to participate in community or church groups, and charitable organizations. 

And few returned once they got new jobs.  Instead they focused their energies on professional and political groups--in the belief, hypothesizes UCLA sociology professor Jennie Brand, that both could have an impact on finding and keeping work.

Pessimism about America's future is growing.  People worry about the long-term impact of the housing crisis, global competition and expensive energy.

Self Awareness Facilitates Change

Being unaware, we unconsciously engage our default behavior.

Only when we become aware of something, are we able to make choices as to the action we wish to take.

Sometimes, just being aware, allows the problem to solve us--rather than requiring us to solve the problem.

We really don't know how the world works.  We only perceive how the world works and our unique perception is based upon who we are and what we are aware of that is happening around us. 

Here is a mental model to use in your world:

1. Beliefs influence perception.
2. Perception structures reality.
3. Reality suggests possibilities.
4. Possibilities generate choices.
5. Choices initiate actions.
6. Actions affect outcomes.
7. Outcomes impact beliefs.
8. Awareness facilitates change.

Source: Author unknown