Leading Effectively Series
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Rick Neuheisel, UCLA football coach, is on a roll this year. His team is 3-0 (including a defeat of my beloved Tennessee Vols which I am still trying to get over).
 Despite his team beating the Vols, one of the things I like about him, he coined one of the best terms used on the Dan Patrick Show ever – “Passion Bucket.” He said during an interview with Dan Patrick a couple of years ago, when talking about how to defeat UCLA’s main rival, the USC Trojans, “When you’re at UCLA, you have to have your passion bucket full.” Lots of people have since used the term “Passion Bucket” on radio or television or in interviews, like Kobe Bryant, Bob Costas, Tim McCarver, and Kevin Love.
I love the term “Passion Bucket” and have tried to drop the term in conversation when I can. What “Passion Bucket” really means to me, it is a way to measure your enjoyment of life, a way to measure if you are living life to its fullest, a measurement of your energy and enthusiasm and motivation, a measurement of whether you are able to give everything you have, a measurement of how much you love and enjoy yourself and who you are.
 Sometimes your “Passion Bucket” may be overflowing; sometimes it may be empty. Leaders need to pay particular attention to the latter. When your “Passion Bucket” is empty, you won’t get work done; you won’t be a good leader, a good worker; you won’t be a good friend; you won’t be a good husband, wife, father, mother, son or daughter.
What can leaders do when their “Passion Bucket” is low, or empty? I recently had to think about this myself when there was nothing left in my own “Passion Bucket.” That was a rough time; work and non-work stuff was just awful, full of frustration and rejection, trying as hard as you can and nothing good coming as a result, not getting any breaks, a lot of hurt. As you can guess, I could not get work done, I didn’t enjoy life, I forgot what the good things were that made me who I was and made me unique. I was lost. That is a horrible place to be.
How did I start to refill my “Passion Bucket?”
I talked a lot to those closest to me and they listened to my frustrations. I also did the stuff that made me happy. I ran more miles. I played more golf. I listened and played more music. I went to Home Depot and bought all the yellow flowers I could find and planted them. I also really and truly thought about what were the things that made me who I was, the things that made me the individual that I love and that the people in my inner circle loved about me. I just didn’t give lip service to it, I really thought about those things. My inner circle of people also helped me with that as well.
Only you really know how to fill your own “Passion Bucket.” At work, maybe it’s concentrating more on the people you lead and less on the tasks of work (or vice versa). Away from work, maybe it’s journaling or writing. Maybe it’s hiking, or going on vacation. Maybe it’s scrapbooking or throwing a huge party with friends and family. Maybe it’s meditating or getting involved in the community or with certain religious activities. Maybe it’s spending just a bit more time with your spouse or kids. Seeking the advice of a professional counselor can also be invaluable.
 So, if your “Passion Bucket” is empty, allow yourself to take the time to figure out how to fill it back up.
Work, events, even people that you think are close to you can drain your “Passion Bucket” but ultimately, time and only you and those who are truly close to you can help refill your “Passion Bucket” to where you want it.
A full “Passion Bucket” is worth its weight to you at work and away from work, so don’t neglect it.
 So, it's college football season again. I was watching ESPN one weekend morning, and Lou Holtz was being interviewed. I know of Lou Holtz from being a famous and successful football coach at the University of Notre Dame (where he won a national championship) and the University of South Carolina. Before that, he was also a successful football coach at Minnesota, Arkansas, NC State, William & Mary, and even coached professionally for the New York Jets.
When I was watching television that morning, he was being interviewed because he was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame. It really struck me as to what he said – it was very refreshing. He said he was thankful for his wife, thankful for his family, the athletic directors who hired him, the coaches who coached with him, the players who played for him, because without all of those people, none of his successes would have been possible.
 Even though so many of us are working nonstop just to survive, I encourage you to take a few moments and think about those who helped you get to where you are today, who helped you be successful, and why. If they are still alive, let them know. Your family, your spouse, your kids, your coworkers, your friends. Get in touch with that high school teacher or college professor who had an impact on your life and thank them. If they aren’t alive anymore, take a moment to think about them. Because without any of these people, deep down inside you know, you would not be where you are today.
If you feel inclined, leave a comment about who you are thankful for. Maybe people will be inspired by who inspired you.
And, by the way, Lou Holtz is also known for his motivational speeches and pep talks both as a football coach, and on television for ESPN and College Gameday, like this one, probably the coolest ever.
 Cochon was the 3rd restaurant I called. We were embarked on an apparently hopeless task: getting a table for 4 in New Orleans on a Friday night in April. We were aiming for 7 pm (I know how crazy that sounds...it was already 6:30 pm) and no one had anything before 9 pm.
At Cochon it was the same story:
“Can you take a party of 4 anytime around 7?”
“I can take you after 9 pm, nothing before.”
“Oh,” I sighed.
“You could take your chances, I suppose. We have tables outside and there might be something in the bar, but no guarantees.”
“Maybe we’ll try that. What’s your name?”
“Why do you want my name? Do you think you’re going to get me in trouble? I’m the assistant manager...no one gets me in trouble!”
“I never say anything bad about the people who feed me.”
(pause)
“Honey, you come right over and I’ll take care of you...we’ll get you a table somehow!”
Good as her word, Audrey had let the hostess, Elaine, know we were coming and a table was waiting right in the middle of the dining room.
I always assume that underneath the role there’s a person. If you can get through to the person, you will often find a solution that works for both of you. Sometimes it takes a little humor (“I never p.o. my food server”) and sometimes it’s merely genuine solicitude for someone who’s been on his feet too long. Either way, we’re both better off if we refuse to let our roles define us or others.
Your always-nice-to-the-waitress friend,
Doug
"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
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
 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
The Super Bowl - the championship game of the American National Football League - is Sunday, February 1. That got me thinking about past coaches who have won the Super Bowl. The coach who sticks out in my mind the most is Bill Walsh. He coached three Super Bowl winners for the San Francisco 49ers. What could be even more impressive is his legacy, shown through his “coaching tree.” Look at his assistants who became head coaches, and their assistants who became head coaches, and their assistants who became head coaches. One tree is here but is a little outdated.
Here is another example that is a little bigger, a little more up-to-date as well:
Six coaches from the tree have eight Super Bowl wins between them (Holmgren, Gruden, Shanahan, Seifert, Billick, Dungy), still others have gotten to the Super Bowl, but lost (Callahan, Fassel, Fisher, Fox, Reid, L. Smith, Wyche; Holmgren also has Super Bowl loses). A lot of former and current NFL head coaches are on the Walsh Coaching Tree.
You can even trace one of the coaches of this year’s Super Bowl, the Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, back to Walsh. Tomlin was an assistant under Tony Dungy, who was an assistant under Dennis Green, who was an assistant under Bill Walsh. Oddly enough, Dennis Green helped build, shape, and draft much of the present roster of the other team in this year’s Super Bowl, the Arizona Cardinals, before he was fired in 2007.
That’s an impressive legacy. Consider though, Walsh is a branch off of legendary coach Paul Brown’s coaching tree – who are others on that tree? Don Shula (2 Super Bowl victories, most career NFL wins), Bud Grant (4 Super Bowl loses with Minnesota Vikings), Weeb Ewbank (won a Super Bowl coaching the New York Jets, what many consider the most important game in NFL history), and Chuck Knoll (4 Super Bowl victories).
Another Bill Walsh legacy that I just found out: Walsh pushed the cause for black coaches in the NFL. He worked with the NFL office to help black NFL assistants prepare for being head coaches by creating the Minority Coaching Fellowship.
With a new U.S. president, that also got me thinking about legacy. Bush guiding the U.S. through the 9/11 terrorist attacks and not having a terrorist attack on American soil after 9/11 could be one of his lasting legacies. Financial support of AIDS research could be another legacy. Troubles in Iraq or a bad economy are more than likely what many would consider to be his legacy, at least right now.
Will Barack Obama’s legacy be largely that he is the first African American president of the United States, or will some act, some policy, some deed, be his legacy?
Research conducted at CCL found that a majority of the 182 leaders surveyed wanted their legacy to be around an improved organizational culture or financial stability. Development/retention of employees and enhancing business operations were not that far behind.
What is your leadership legacy? Will it be the people who worked for you or who you mentored? Will it be some act or decision you make? Will it be that you averted disaster or brought prosperity? Will it be that you raised a family, were an outstanding husband, father, wife, mother? Will it be your ethical nature?
Let’s hear your thoughts – how do you as a leader want to be remembered? What is your leadership legacy? I look forward to seeing what you write.
A brilliant thought leader in the field of executive coaching calls it "the curse of mediocrity." His contention is that 'good enough' pushes away the possibility of 'insanely great.' I'm an American, so I like the sound of that, but I'm not sure that it isn't misleading in a way. There are many fields in which the aspiration to be "insanely great" (or to create products that are) is the most virtuous path. What they have in common, however, is that they are activities or products that demand admiration. The phrase "insanely great" comes, of course, from Steven Jobs who wanted a product to be transcendently desirable and got his fulfillment with the MacIntosh computer (and the iPod and the iPhone, etc.). The experience people have in our Leadership Development Program ought to be insanely great and it often is, evidenced by the impact it has on them and those they lead.
However, I think the wish for greatness in coaching may be misleading to the extent it stimulates our normal narcissism. The comparison with midwifery is instructive here. The coach is neither the mother nor the baby and though there may be enormous gratitude on the part of the mother for her services, she is not the star. She presides over and secures the process of birth.
The greatest coaching will not draw any attention to itself. The genius coach is not the one who sees the path forward clearly, but who sees the boundaries of thought, imagination, and emotion that may be limiting the person being coached, and who propels that person over them. She does this less through overt brilliance than through her own curiosity wrung through a realistic humility. She leaves the person being coached in charge of his choices and options and keeps the spotlight on him. Will coaches understand that standing in the shadows is the place of greatness as a coach?
Doug
 At the Greensboro, NC airport, for only $5.00, Horace will heal your shoes and provide some personalized coaching on the topic of your choice. My choice was politics and business, seeing as we just elected a new president and the economy is in the pits. Horace was willing to be both encouraging about my political choices (happily they agreed with his) and interested in exploring the finer points of the impact of political leadership on business climate.
Part of what instigated this coaching session was the surprising (to me and to Horace) information on the front page of the “Money” section of USA Today that stock prices have done better under Democrats than Republicans over the last 55 years. Especially interesting has been the fact that in the first year following the election of a Republican stock prices average a drop of almost 2% and following the election of a Democrat they average an increase of almost 10% (9.7%).
Horace promised to use this information to gently tweak his Republican clients, but it got me thinking about how misleading stereotypes can be. And to the extent that stereotypes may shape choices leaders make, how seriously they can sabotage otherwise brilliant people.
This affects succession planning and talent management generally in pernicious ways. Studies stretching over the last four decades have consistently shown that we select or nominate for selection people who are like us. While that may be a useful strategy when there is little change in the marketplace, where can you find business strategies that work in rapidly churning economic environments? Successful organizations have the capability to develop and promote leaders who are right for the next turn, not the last.
I was in the audience at a conference several years ago in which a consulting firm reported on its work with the top industrial leaders of an emerging Asian economy. They proudly discussed their process for generating a competency matrix for the next generation of corporate leaders by surveying these leaders on what would make for success. In the results it was abundantly clear that they had described their own considerable strengths, but not what the new leaders would need to be like. An example was the absolute absence of any orientation toward innovation or entrepreneurial skill, in spite of (or because) the nation was moving toward a true market economy. A generation of industrial giants reared on economic dynasties could not be expected to recognize that the success of the next generation would require an altogether different mix of competencies. This is the greatest challenge imaginable: creating systems for preparing the next generation of leaders for general management. It is dauntingly difficult to recognize that my skills are not the perfect match for what comes next.
As I sat in his chair, Horace happily greeted the procession of suits and uniforms who streamed by his stand. He told me about his market research (“It’s usually slow on Wednesdays. More people fly on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.”) and I watched his customer development process (“Hey, how’re you doing?”). He had determined that a combination of authenticity and good humor were the key strategic elements for building his business (seeing the sad state of my own shoes, he promised “I can heal those for you” with a reassuring smile). Tomorrow’s successful leaders will accurately read the news, challenge their own prejudices, assume nothing, and win in markets the pundits predict and those they don’t. They’ll also have very attractive shoes.
Your well-shod friend,
Doug
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