Leading Effectively Series
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"Don't send me any more psychologists! I need a coach who understands business!"
 This was the cry of one of my clients a couple of years ago who was fed up with the local executive coaches, all of whom were apparently recycled clinicians. When I came to CCL as a coach 10 years ago, the majority of coaches, even at CCL, were mental health professionals who loved working with leaders. Many were and are outstanding coaches because they have the socratic interviewing skills that encourage those they coach to think more deeply, reflect on how they affect others, and develop greater self-awareness; all of which are critical abilities for self-development as a leader. At the same time, their lack of familiarity with the realities of managing a business could frustrate the leader who didn't want to spend time educating the coach on real life. For a number of years now, CCL has recruited coaches with real world business experience. Sometimes they have to learn to throttle the advice and stories based on their own experiences, but they "get" the world their coachees operate in.
In setting standards for CCL coaches, I've given significant thought to what business acumen is and how it is developed. It's clear that just having business experience doesn't give that to you: there are plenty of business leaders who need more of it, too. Here are four of the key pieces of business smarts that make a coach useful to the business leaders they coach:
1. The most important bit of business acumen is always the understanding of how a particular company makes its money. What does it create and offer that customers want to pay for? How is that different from others who are trying to convince customers to pay them for similar or related services and products?
2. The second element is knowledge of the marketplace in which a company is selling. Who are the competitors? What are the dynamics that drive relationships in it?
3. Element three is the business: Do you understand the interlocking chain of activities and functions that it takes to make a business work? This is the system of essential operations that is the business: sales, marketing, research, supply chain, purchasing, human resources, learning and development, production, etc.
4. Fourth element is language: Do you know the secret language of business? The club handshake? The etiquette of spreadsheets? This is a dynamic language, always in flux, and it requires continuous language lessons. For instance, in the U.S. the top dogs are called "executives," but in some parts of the world, the "executive" is the staff person who executes what his or her seniors direct.
What's your experience of business acumen? I'd love to hear how you frame the business background needed to effectively work with top leadership. Talk back to me.
Doug
 I love American Public Radio's "Marketplace" program. Early every morning, I download the previous evening's podcast onto my iPod and listen while I get ready for work.
A segment on the Thursday evening program particularly intrigued me…host Tess Vigeland interviewed London Business Professor Donald Sull about how businesses can survive the financial crisis.
Professor Sull indicated two broad strategies organizations can employ, and he used an intriguing boxing metaphor to bring those strategies to life:
Organizations could employ an agility strategy, bobbing and weaving and dodging and parrying, looking for the opportune moment to make a quick strike – think Muhammad Ali. Make targeted investment with resources and energy.
Or organizations could employ an absorption strategy, using available resources to weather the blows – a la George Foreman (prior to entering the world of kitchen appliances).
The punch line was that organizations need to do both, choosing correctly in what arenas to be agile and optimistic, and in what arenas to absorb the body blows, to hold as steady as possible.
The metaphor captured my attention, not just for organizations, but for individual leaders. I've been reading about and watching people's varying responses to downsizing…whether they are ones who lose their jobs, or ones who remain at an organization after a RIF.
I see people across the spectrum – some Alis, some Formans, some both. I also see effective and ineffective application of these strategies across that spectrum. The challenge is to correctly determine what actions will be most effective, given the unfamiliar landscape. The right opportunities in which to invest energy, to sting like a bee, are no longer obvious.
Revisiting long term goals should be a top priority. Those goals may require a serious recalibration to reflect what may be a years-long societal shift. The good news is that those goals will help achieve relative clarity about where to exercise agility (and how), and where to absorb (or prepare to absorb) blows.
Many thanks to Marketplace, Tess Vigeland, and especially Professor Don Sull for a useful reframing of the challenges of our times.
Do you find yourself more drawn to agility or absorption? How are you deciding when to do which?
A-Rod, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Miguel Tejada, Jose Canseco, Jason Giambi, Andy Pettitte, Eric Gagne, Ivan Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, Mark McGwire – pretty good all-star team, or something else in common? Floyd Landis, Michael Phelps, Michael Vick, Adam “Pacman” Jones, and Plaxico Burress can be lumped with the others as well. All of these successful stars were implicated or caught in doing something wrong, doing something dishonest, doing something against the law, something that was not expected of them. Some cheated their way to the top, some participated in illegal actions off the playing field or out of the pool.
It’s not just sports stars either. Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was found guilty of lying about gifts from a contractor. Rod Blagojevich was auctioning off Obama’s senate seat in Illinois. Obama’s original pick for Secretary of Commerce, Bill Richardson, pulled his name out of the running because of an impending investigation into improper business dealings. Obama’s original pick for Secretary of the DHHS, Tom Daschle, pulled his name out of the running over his failure to accurately report and pay income taxes. Obama’s original pick for Chief Performance Officer, Nancy Killefer, pulled her name out because of concerns about her tax returns (as an aside, she previously was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration, led a major modernization of the IRS, and was later appointed to the IRS Oversight Board – how ironic). Obama’s pick for Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, the person who has authority over the IRS, the institution that Americans every year have to pay taxes to from our hard-earned money from jobs, himself, failed to pay taxes (again, how ironic). He was later confirmed.
And of course, there’s Madoff and just this week, Robert Allen Stanford, who lie, cheat, steal, swindle and commit fraud on their way to their good fortune at the expense of others.
Is there an honest person left?
Three things I encourage you, as a leader, to take away from the actions of these people.
1) Leaders are leaders wherever they are, whether they want to be or not. I am sure Michael Phelps was just trying to have a little fun, “act his age” when he was in South Carolina. But, with one single picture of him doing drugs, endorsements and credibility went out the window. Learn from Phelps. Michael Phelps is Michael Phelps whether he’s in a swimming pool, at a party, anywhere and everywhere. Leaders are the same. Leaders are not just leaders at work in their cubes or offices – they are leaders when they are not at work, when they are in the community, when they are in their place of worship, when they are with their families, even when they think they are alone. Leaders have to act like leaders wherever they are. You never know who is watching.
2) Make the actions of these people become a teachable moment for others, especially your kids. The truth eventually comes out. People can’t cheat their way to the top, to success, to riches. People can’t act like they are “above the law.” There are positive consequences to positive actions, and negative consequences to poor decisions, misjudgments, and unethical and illegal behavior. You can’t get away with something that is wrong.
3) To me, the most striking thing Alex Rodriguez said during his press conference this week addressing his past use of performance-enhancing drugs, was his plea to people that they not judge him for his past actions, but only look at him and judge him from this day forward. Impossible. People just can’t forget the past actions of others, particularly the bad, unethical, or wrong actions. Similarly, people will not forget your past actions as a leader either, good or bad.
I remember where I was when McGwire broke the single season home run record – the pride of watching that moment on television in my dorm room at Emory University with my friends left years later when McGwire said “I’m not here to talk about the past.” I remember where I was when Bonds broke Aaron’s all-time home run record. At the time, I agreed with what columnist and baseball enthusiast George Will said, that Bonds’s 756 was merely a yawn, because Alex Rodriguez would eventually break Bonds’s record, without cheating, without the cloud of performance-enhancing drugs over him like there was and still is with Bonds. Rodriguez was synonymous with a strong work-ethic, honesty, and purity. Was.
That changed over the past week. I am a Braves fan, and still consider Hank Aaron the home run king. I still think it is preposterous that Dale Murphy is not in the Hall of Fame. Those were honest people. So, sorry A-Rod (or as others have labeled him A-Fraud, or A-Roid) and all the others. What you did in the past is part of who you are in the present. We can’t forget your past misdeeds. It just ain’t gonna happen.
There are over 16,000 people who belong to the International Coaches Federation. How many of them could effectively coach the division president of an international bank in the midst of the current crisis?
It probably depends on whom you ask. If you ask the coaches, 15,999 of them might assure you that they could do it. If you were to depend on those who hold ICF credentials, about 400 would have some paper that asserts their ability to be a good coach. If you were to ask the training organizations and schools who received their tuition to get a certificate, all their graduates would presumably be equipped to do leadership coaching. Yet, for all the advertised capabilities, there is no generally-agreed-upon criteria for assuring the capability of a leadership coach to meet the coaching needs of senior execs in major organizations.
Let me spell out for you some of what concerns me about this situation and what I think needs to happen to fix it. Say, I'm the SVP of HR for a global pharma company and I need to find a great coach for one of my executives:
A. Can I count on a graduate of a coaching training program? So far as I can tell, neither the for-profit independent coach training schools nor the coaching programs associated with major (or minor) universities has ever flunked anyone who has paid their tuition and gone through the program.
B. Can I count on a person holding a certification from the International Coaches Federation or the World Association of Business Coaches or any other credentialing program? At this point, the certifications represent that a person has had some formal training and some mentoring and a review of cases (in some instances). Many of these coaches are terrifically talented (CCL employs a number of them who are really wonderful coaches). However, there is no ongoing requirements for review of their work and no measurement of their impact on the organizations in which their coachees work. The certificate guarantees that they have persistence, but not that they are effective coaches.
Here's what needs to happen in the world of leadership coaching:
1. Coach training and coach certification for leadership coaches needs to be targeted to address the special demands of working with leaders in industry, government, education, and the non-profit world.
2. The criteria for certification need to be established based on empirical studies of coaching outcomes, not adherence to a particular philosophy of coaching. The European Mentoring and Coaching Council, for example, does a very nice job of evaluating training programs based on common understandings of best practices in coaching (not necessarily leadership coaching) but the criteria have not been subjected to empirical evaluation. They are based on the beliefs of practitioners, but have never been compared with the outcomes from the coaching work with those who adhere to those practices. The same is true of other accrediting organizations.
3. Leadership coaching must be measured by its effects on the leadership effectivenessof those who are coached. Repeated studies have shown that coachees are poor judges of their own improvement, partly because they have large incentives to rate themselves as much improved. Studies that ask coaches to estimate how much their coaching was worth cannot get at the impact on the people who follow them.
You won't be surprised to know that I have some opinions about how we should be measuring these also. In a later post, I'll cover the kinds of measurement that would be more meaningful for coaching evaluation.
Til then,
Doug
I had seen several news features on Captain Sullenberger, as we all have. The words I might have used to describe him: noble, humble, gracious, dignified. Perhaps also heroic, serious, sincere, kind, and intense. I wouldn’t have chosen lighthearted. It wouldn’t have even been close to the list. A serious in-control hero like Captain Sullenberger didn’t seem to need the added bonus of humor in his life. He is just all about doing his job tremendously well and making excellent decisions, after all. He is a man of action. Taking care of and saving lives are all just part of his everyday fare. They are his daily expectations of himself.
So imagine my mouth dropping open when I saw the David Letterman show last night. There they all were, as they have been before, the five courageous heroes of Flight 1549, retelling their story as they have done before. The two pilots were first. Pilot Jeffrey Skiles, Captain Sullenberger’s second in command, appropriately deferred to Captain Sully for the telling of the story, but Skiles allowed Letterman to deftly extract a few one-liners from him. Skiles did not steal Sully’s thunder, but he did provide a little needed lightness. Finally, the dignified and reserved Captain Sullenberger broke into a grin that involved most of his face, and I’m sure had all of us in our easy chairs at home grinning right along with him. A real mouth-breaking bona fide face lighter-upper! Later on when the flight attendants came in, he did it again!
Ah, that lovely grin. Wow. When I went on YouTube today, there it was again. When I checked the CBS website, there it was again. I didn’t really need it, because I have it in my mind forever. It was just like my daddy’s grin, just like my son’s. It was the grin I knew of a fine and wonderful man having a good bellylaugh over something genuinely funny.
We like our heroes and leaders to be serious, so they can get the serious work done. But when it is finally done and over, we also like for them to be able to smile: “It was no big deal, really. We do this kind of thing every day. We’ll do it again if we need to. Relax. It’s all over now.” That’s how we know it’s all right again, when our heroes begin to smile.
President Barack Obama's choice for the newly created post of "chief performance officer," Nancy Killefer, withdrew her name from consideration. That raises some questions, but I've been thinking more about that the job even exists.
Chief Performance Officer.
I figure it means - person in charge of making sure things get done – or else. Whoever takes on this role will scrutinize the federal budget in order to eliminate what's not needed or doesn’t work and improve the things that do work. The new position is supposed to indicate a focus on responsibility, accountability and transparency of government. Yes, we have all heard that before but I’m glad we keep trying; it isn’t easy and it is a job that is never done.
There are a lot of perspectives, often conflicting, about what “doesn’t work” looks like and how to fix it. What’s working for me, may not be working for you – and even if we agree something isn’t working – we may have different ideas about why and what to do about it. Take all those differences in perspectives, multiply them by the programs, projects, policies, processes and everything else the government invests in and well, you’re looking at a really, really big job on which the leader is going to get a lot “feedback.”
To some extent anyone in a leadership position is expected to figure out what isn’t needed and doesn’t work (not to mention identifying what is needed and does work). Goodness knows I don’t have the answer – but I do know about something that can help: evaluation.
I’m not talking about the kind of perfunctory act that takes place after something is done and is often completed as quickly as possible. And, I’m not talking about that thing that so-and-so is in charge of – but nobody really understands or cares about. I’m talking about a process that is inclusive and seeks to define value before money changes hands or services are rendered; something that could, should, and often does take place anywhere leadership is happening.
 Early in a program, process, policy, etc. evaluative thinking prompts questions like:
- Why is this needed?
- What are other perspectives on this?
- What kind of difference will this make?
- How will we know it is working?
- How will we know what to “fix” if it isn’t working?
Asking questions slows things down – but if we’re talking about something “big” it could save a lot of money, heartburn, and/or embarrassment later. I’d rather avoid doing something that isn’t needed or doesn’t work than find out later I just wasted time, money, and probably other things.
That said, I’m all for risk-taking as long as folks know that is what they are doing. I’m willing to take a risk on something as long as it doesn’t cost too much and I’m not likely to lose something I don’t want to lose. When it comes to a medical procedure, I want to be sure it is needed and there’s evidence it works (and that it will work in my situation). Then again, if I had an ailment rare enough to not be fully understood – I might be willing to try out an experimental treatment. As long as I know what kind of risk I’m taking – I’m cool with it. In complex and high-need situations, sometimes you have to try different things out to figure things out.
But to really benefit from – well, just about anything - someone with a keen evaluative eye should pay attention as things unfold. Asking questions like – Are things going as expected? Should we make changes in order to reach our goal? Should we change our goal? Have we learned something we can apply to make improvements? And at the end of a phase or whenever makes sense – it’s time to ask about how well something worked. Was it worth the resources? Keep in mind there may be different answers to those questions from different perspectives.
 Since a number of people have noticed that the times are trying, many of them have decided to give advice on how to lead in trying times. As a professional opinionator, I thought I should not neglect to add my voice to the cacophony lest I be thought of as a person who is Out Of Touch. This is a sore subject for me as I have been evaluated by many teenage children for the last several years (my eldest turned 13 in '93 and there has been a teen-aged editorialist in the house ever since). Teenage children have a canny knack for pointing out in verbal and non-verbal communications that their Ancient Father is Out Of Touch and no matter how much they assure you later that you are actually The Cool Dad, it does little to erase the persistent messages of out-of-touch-ness. But I digress.
When everything is slipping out from under you and your world is heels over head, these are the leadership ideas that I wished I could have remembered at the time:
1. Don't get fancy and don't bother with getting in a hurry.Things that are messed up don't yield to going faster. Going faster when you are spinning generally leads to greater centrifugality. In other words (real English words, for example) you end up trying to go in many directions at once. Any organism with more than one cell should not attempt it.
2. Character matters more than smarts.If you obfuscate or simply spin the truth till it's more attractive, no matter how brilliantly, it will come around and take a large bite from your gluteus maximus. We can't have our leaders jumping from one frame to another, like the deceased eminences at Hogwarts. We need our leaders to stay put in our mental landscape, to be dependable presences, who tell the truth about their assessment of the depth of the manure.
3. Involve everyone you can in finding solutions.Crisis makes everyone 20% dumber because 50% of your energy is devoted to not losing your grip as the tornado spins the cows past the farmhouse. Smart leaders I've known spell out the direction and turn over the driving to the rest of the crew. It may look like a Volkswagen full of clowns, but everyone arrives at the same place.
4. You were a human before you were a leader. That gaunt, sad beanpole of a President, Honest Abe, told jokes and stories in the worst of times. No one ever committed their lives, their wealth, or their sacred honor to someone who didn't feel what they felt. At the same time, you are the hope miner, the confidence weaver, the one searching for the light. When honey bees find a good source of nectar they dash back to the hive to dance the story of their discovery. Your little jig on behalf of hope is the confidence-builder that merits the commitment of your people.
Your Ancient Friend,
Doug
 On a recent "This American Life" podcast (National Public Radio), Will Felps, now a professor of Talent at Erasmus Research Institute of Management of the University of Rotterdam, described his dissertation research on the power of a "bad apple" to spoil the whole environment of a team. The interview is at the beginning of this podcast which you can listen to at this link click here to listen for free. His research suggests that a strong negative personality can have a disproportionate effect on the operations of a team working on a joint task. It seems that bad behavior can be contagious and infects all that is taking place in the work environment. Will says he got the idea for his work originally from the experience of his wife, who was working in an extremely negative workplace. However, when the critical player (a guy he described as "mean, but in a funny way") was overcome by a chronic illness that caused him to be away from work for several days at a time every week, the environment stopped being cold during those days. People encouraged each other and it became a more productive workplace.
The three types of bad behavior Felps looked at in the lab included just such a person (the mean but funny guy who makes fun of others), a confederate who played the disengaged, indifferent slacker, and the seriously depressed person who finds a dark cloud in every sky. In nearly every test group Felps observed, his confederate was able through one of these behavior patterns to influence the group to poor performance. The only exception was one group, where the son of a diplomat used questions to help the group find its direction and get aligned. In that group, his confederate's influence was neutralized. More on this in a later blog.
The implications of this research for coaching skills development among managers is intriguing. More obvious is the thought that selection and promotion needs to take seriously the kinds of attitudes potential leaders bring with them. The "bad apple" already has more power than others in a team. You don't want to poison a larger group with these toxins.
You can find information about Dr. Felps at the Erasmus web site ERIM Doug
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