Stuck Not Broken: Tops teams understand this concept.

Not broken, just stuck.

Executive coaching and leadership development is a strange place to inhabit, an area of working with leaders and senior managers to improve their performance. Usually this is funded by a company who understand that investment in the person is investment in the business, in it’s most simplistic terms, ‘it is a little bit like servicing the engines components’. Development is understood to make a difference, sometimes it is tangible (performance figures improved), sometimes it is intangible (people just feel better) and the belief, correctly held is that the latter enables the former.

The development and coaching of senior individuals and teams is sometimes made out to be very complex, with the internal observers bought into the fact that the political, emotional, career and strategic nuisances are so truly binding that the best ‘we can hope to do is get them to play nice”. It is with this in mind that companies call in an individual to help them move forward, someone from the outside who isn’t bound by the hierarchy, the politic or the emotion and is able to both ‘support and challenge’ from a non-judgemental and peer level respected position; so that’s where I come in.

One of the first things I like to get people/teams to discuss is the idea of being ‘stuck’, rather than ‘broken’, it seems like semantics but in reality being ‘stuck’ is usually the reality, apart from death there aren’t many things that prevent you from moving forward, granted you might not like the options or you may not be comfortable with them, but they exist, I mean how bad can it be: Aron Lee Ralston (born October 27, 1975 is an American mountain climber and public speaker. He became widely known in May 2003 when, while canyoning in Utah, he was forced by an accident to amputate his right arm with a dull knife in order to free himself from a boulder). Are things ever, ‘cut your arm off bad?’ Unlikely.

As a coach my role is to enable people to see in between th gaps of the facts, as between those gaps usually sits the emotional content that prevents the individual, the team or the business from moving forwards, it is supplying the question, the challenge and the tool to become ‘unstuck’.

I refer to the gap between the facts as the ‘shadow’, taken from a poem by T.S Eliot, for that’s what moving forward is really about, yes understanding the facts as you know them to be, but then facing the shadow (your fears and your colleagues) to process data with an understanding of the emotional content and then to act, working with high performing teams to enable the best performance is as much about the competence of communcation and function as it is about the interpersonal dynamics at play within the individual and the team.

“Between the idea and the reality,
Between the motion and the act,
Falls the shadow”
- T.S Eliot

Executive brand in the techonology age

“The single biggest problem in communication
is the illusion that it has taken place.”
- George Bernard Shaw

Adoption of technology is critical for senior executives, many senior managers are simply ‘too busy’ or ‘just not interested’ in understanding the value and the mediums of the modern technological age; here are a few stats on senior leaders adoption of technology:

- Only 5% of all Fortune 500 CEOs are on Twitter
- 64% of CEOs are NOT engaged on company or social websites
- Only 13 Fortune 500 CEOs have active Twitter accounts
- Only 4% of global CEOs have a profile on Facebook or LinkedIn

This is in comparison to the growth of social networking from a society perspective.  Facebook alone has:

- More than 750 million active users
- 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- Average user has 130 friends
- People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

The reality of the modern technological age is that for many non executives, the technology and the medium that sits within it: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn are a wholly consuming experience, there is a vast proportion of society that quite literally don’t go a day, or at the least a morning or afternoon, without ‘referencing, connecting and engaging’ in some way through their PC or Smartphone.

This is both a good thing for the senior exec as well as a potential danger, often the exec who thinks they are ‘very amusing’ is managed in their fantasy through being limited to the annual conference and thus damage limitation exists through them being limited to 30 mins, “no really you only have 30 minutes!”. All of a sudden they have a vehicle for their ‘wit and humor’ that can land them in huge trouble if they don’t receive honest council. Which is why many execs stay away from things such as Twitter, “if I am not on it, I can’t do something dumb”, as I was recently told, is probably quite an astute and profound statement.

However we are in a time of less pay, more work and greater expectations and to ‘touch and engage’ with the the business at a real level requires connecting with people ‘at a real level’ Facebook and Twitter are now a realistic expectation for senior managers to understand and manage.

Top Tips for managing your brand online:

• Let someone else do it for you
  Be that a brand consultant or internal comms, perhaps it might be a good idea to let a professional do it, and then you contribute in the margins.
• Consolidate your medium
  Keep the message constant and the same across the medium, that way you reduce the time involved and appear constant as different people connect to the message through different touchpoints.
• Control your personality
  Let it appear, but you aren’t a hollywood star, this is business with a character, not the personality with some business.

It’s not just a job, it’s a life

“Never continue in a job you don’t enjoy. If you’re happy in what you’re doing,
you’ll like yourself, you’ll have inner peace.”
- Roger Caras

Why would you lie at an interview? What point would that serve? How could you possibly benefit from misleading the other party? When the reality of what you have said comes to be understood, how can the relationship survive?

Seems like a pretty fair statement, but guess what? I am referring to the company offering the job, not the person applying for it! I have sat in on a few interviews recently, as part of shadowing executives in their daily role and have been quite surprised at the spectrum of approaches that I have witnessed.

I am not talking about the style or competence of interviewing, which is another topic completely but the shifting of reality of what the organisation and the role is. It is expected that any role when you start will not be ‘quite’ as you expected, due to the fact that it is genuinely quite tricky to get the reality of your environment across to someone that has not experienced it. It’s a little like describing a meal you had, the reality of the taste often doesn’t match the experience.

So at one end we have the ‘Reality of Terror’, where the interview goes to great lengths to describe every single awful thing that might be encountered, so the other person is under ‘no illusions’ about the role and the business; at the other end we have the ‘World of Wonderment’ where reality doesn’t exist and the interviewer is treated to the ‘how I’d like it to be really’ version, or my now all time favourite, ‘this is how I think it really is’; (I mean, everyone is nice to me!).

Why do I raise this point? Mainly because I recognise that in the times we live in, if as a business you are offering a person a role that means leaving a secure and valued role, then it is a very dangerous ruse to ‘big things up’ or to ‘sell your vision’ if these are to be realised within 48hrs of the person starting to not be accurate.

Case in point, don’t sell the role as , “working with x and y to enable better pitches to clients”, when in reality it turns out that you are setting that person a new business target, and they are to be front facing into the client.

As an executive coach, I have worked very closely with a few non related clients recently that have been guilty of this, as they express the belief, “that things will sort themselves out”. When what they mean is, they’ll either succeed or leave, completely failing to recognise the damage to their reputation in the market and even for those that do stay, they often become terrorists due to feeling tricked and trapped.

When interviewing, ask yourself:

• How honest is the description of the task at hand?
• How honest can I be with the ‘way things are around here?’
• 6 months from now, could I be proud of the accuracy of the expectation I created for this individual.

Leadership Talent Strategy – Keep an eye on the edges

“there are a lot of interesting
things that happen on the edges of
a business”
- Executive Coaching Guru

Many leaders have their plate full with the BAU stuff, you know the simple things like running the company, so it is hardly a surprise that this monopolises a leaders thoughts and thus a teams focus. In my role as an executive coach and leadership developer I have come to witness the leaders that are able to focus on the centre (BAU), whilst at the same time keeping an eye to the outer regions, the edges of the company.

I don’t mean the geographical edge, but the edge of peoples thoughts and thinking, the stuff that people think is not ’board room’ compatible, and thus in that moment many great ideas get lost and nullified, I agree that not everything needs to be a presentation to the board, but the proposition I put to you is:

• Scenario
  Presume that there are a huge amount of great ideas out there, that are lost in the ‘filtering’ that occurs to get to your heady heights.
• Challenge
  What are you go to do to find the one that you should know about?

I am a great believer in the hidden talent that never gets spotted, forget the 9 box talent grid in this context, still use it, but what about the people that never make it onto the grid, the ones that perhaps have been there a little too long, have lost the faith, the ones that if approached could ‘tell you how things really are’, the ones that if given a new line manager would flourish…..How are you going to find them? Or are you only after the talent that can make it up in the template. Nothing wrong with that, there is much excellence there.

But I wonder if there are enough weirdo’s in your company? Not trouble makers, but the people that might see the next curve, the ones that have a sense of the market and it’s direction from a perspective that you might never see in the often ‘soften and rounded’ data that is presented to you.

A few years ago I was facilitating an away day for a very successful company that had a strong focus on direct mail and cold calling and had built a very successful business. They had a researcher come in from a well known organisations that went onto the explain that if people kept signing up to Telephone Preference (I centralised site that makes it illegal to call that number), then within 6-8 years the pool of people to call would be minuscule.

The reaction, “well there wasn’t one, it was ignored completely”, what became apparent very quickly was that there was no room for ‘left of centre’ thinking, one person actually said, “why did we get someone in that doesn’t understand our model” (I don’t have to explain the blinkers on that statement do I?). Of course as you then looked at their Talent Process, it existed, but it only found and developed people that “understood their model”.

So what is the thinking? For me as an Executive Coach, it is to challenge the habits that we get into, the fact that we put in the process to find the talent and then years later we are in a ‘happy rut’. Sir John Harvey Jones was reported as having listened to his HRD on the topic of talent management, Sir Harvey (with his only qualification being a ‘signalling’ qualification from when he was in the Navy), asked (paraphrased), “would this programme have found me, if I was applying now”…..apparently not! So that was the end of that!

More importantly when you look to the fringe of peoples thinking and ideas, as a leader you are seen as being a very different animal to the ones that don’t (which will be nearly everyone else!)

Look to the edge!

Executive Success – All in the look?

Leadership in dire times

I recentlty watched the BBC news and saw Dr.Robert Holden being interviewed and frankly was transfixed by this man. Recognising the experience I was having was due to seeing true leadership in front of me. This isn’t a sportsman, all 6ft 6inches of muscle, or some on screen Adonis of who we often refer to as Hero figures, this was a man who as a doctor lead a normal life of hard work and being ‘normal’ in the context of a professional man who was about his daily business and then something happened.   

For on that day four suicide bombers killed 52 people and injured nearly 800; on that day the No.30 bus in London Tavistock Square (07.07.2005) was blown up outside the Headquarters of the British Medical Association and to quote Dr.Holden, “I thought ‘I am really in it now’”, he then goes on to say that he thought to himself, “You have been trained for this…come on”.   

He goes went onto explain that he’d been trained to take control of disaster situations, though he had never done it before, “people knew I had had the training and they all looked to me, one person said, “Robert what do you want us to do?”. He goes to say how he said he needed a moment, sat down and on a piece of paper jotted down the things he needed to do.   

Dr.Du Feu was quoted  as saying, “the scene was chaotic until Dr.Holden stepped in….he just assumed responsibility for everything…so people knew what to do and they knew who to ask…the scene was transformed into something resembling sense”.   

When on the couch the interviewer kept saying, “so what did you do?” wanting to hear about how he was running around being heroic Dr. Holden seemed unsure about answering this until he came out with something that will stick with me forever, he said, “my job was to keep my hands in my pockets”.   

And there it is, “keep your hands in your pockets.” He said that he knew that that would be the hardest thing to do as he would want to jump in there and do what he was best at, but he knew that once he did that all would be lost .   

This is something I experience in many senior leaders, they are often heroic in terms of the late hours, the getting stuck in, taking on huge workloads and feeling a huge responsibility for everything; but unfortunately they fail to see how impornt the second part of this story is, they don’t know how to and/or can’t ‘Keep their hands in their pockets’.   

There are lessons for leaders from this story:   

• How often do I rob others of their capacity to learn by me telling them the answer?
• How often do I assume control, when I could actually not?
• How do I develop my people to the point I can & do keep my ‘hands in my pockets’?
• How do I learn to change my fear of doing this into a leadership skill?
• Where do I receive honest ‘support & challenge’ as to how I do this?

Dr. Robert Holden

Leaders role in disarming conflict

“Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can
make the difference between damaging your relationship
and deepening it. That factor is attitude.”
- William James (Philosopher)

Conflict exists! And it is pretty well everywhere. Max Lucado the prodigious author (some 50+ books) said that, “Conflict is inevitable, combat is optional” and that’s a pretty good place to start, especially as a leader. It’s a farce to presume that we should all be at one with the universe, as most of us are (when I last checked) pretty well struggling with being human.

People irate people and that is a fact. Let’s face it, if I introduced you to 10 people at a party, how many would you like? Then what if I told you that regardless of your thoughts, you were now going to know then for then next 5 years and have to have them in your life for around  7 hours a day, sound familiar? Well if not welcome to the workplace and generally its a lot more than 10 people.

As an executive coach I get to work with people who are constantly trying to navigate the emotional map that is ‘other people’, I get asked how do I manage my relationship with X or Y? And over the years I have come to understand that of course there are processes to managing a relationship, you could do a lot worse than the Covey approach of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in understanding the habit of ‘Seek first to understand, before you seek to be understood’ and the philosophy of ‘win/win’ outcomes; these are googleable and easily accessible.

However there is something that sits in front of the process of managing the ‘situation’ or the ‘person’ that is identified with the conflict and that is in asking your self this simple question: “In handling this conflict, how much of what I am doing is focused on the other person and not on me?”. It’s an important point, for as a leader you are not just judged by the size of the stick you brought to the party, or simply the way you ‘soughted’ the situation, I’d say that generally you are judged, after the fact, on reflection about the ‘experience of you’ whilst you were handling it.

As you approach conflict situations, consider the following:

• When this is done, what do I want the commentary from others to be?
• If I was able to watch myself on a TV documentary, handling this situation, what would I be shouting at the screen?
• If the people involved were my own children (even if you don’t have any) how would I approach this?
• How much of what I am doing is to ‘sort this in the short term’ or ‘healing it for the long term?”
• Is your presence relieving those in conflict of their responsibility to own the answer and way forward?

New course, new intentions, new counsel

It’s been a busy few months for the Executive Coaching Guru, running leadership development programmes and working with senior leaders in supporting and challenging leadership behaviours. Recently I have been involved with a couple of leaders who seem to have been hell-bent on ‘self destruction’ after they have been on a leadership development programme; they were determined to be ‘authentic’ and ‘true to themselves’, which I am all in favor of.

However these individuals seemed to be getting negative feedback that indicated career limiting reactions, from senior players. Why? Well on review and observation it became clear, that the choice to be ‘authentic’ and ‘true to yourself” is a powerful position to live from, however the ‘choice’ to do these things doesn’t necessarily mean that you are thus automatically good at it. As an executive coach I see this quite a bit, the good intentions of a course, workshop, book etc….leading to the desire to be a ‘better’ leader and thus new actions. What I also see is that we are not always able to ‘self calibrate’ how effective we are with this new behaviour; and rather like the participants on the X Factor, who don’t seem to have a real friends to tell them “Stop!”, as leaders we can easily fall into this trap of believing just because it is the right thing to do, then we are automatically good at it.

So the learning seems to be:

• Yes move ahead with new actions
• Whilst seeking counsel and feedback as to your effectiveness
• Be overt about your new intentions so others don’t have to guess
• Be seen to adjust your behaviour, after seeking feedback, so others feel connected to your behaviour

Good leaders enable others to maintain their identity

“I DON’T WANT TO BE LIKE YOU.
I DON’T WANT TO THINK LIKE YOU.
I’M GOING TO BE LIKE ME”
- Sir Bob Geldoff (1976)

Business I have always felt has an identity all of its own, it’s difficult to understand it untill you get to work with many different people in many different organisations; in the guise of the Executive Coaching Guru, I have been privileged to work with hundreds of senior managers and leaders on leadership development programmes and executive coaching interventions; and one thing keeps coming up and that’s that the business makes demands!

Now the business is of course made up of managers who are in essence ‘making the demands’ but even they end up saying, “the business makes demands”, as if the business is in itself bestowed with its own identity, as if the business itself is sentient and calculating and maybe it is, maybe in some ways when groups of individuals come together there is an agreed group consciousness that bestows ‘personality to the business’ rather like owners of pets who anthropomorthise  (the attribution of human characteristics to non-human animal or non-living things, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts) their dogs and cats, then perhaps the same thing can be done for business as an entity.

What does this mean? Well if we allow ourselves to create an entity that doesn’t actually exist, if we empower the story of a ‘They’ and ‘It’, then we as leaders are weakened by the fact that we acknowledge a power over ourselves that doesn’t in fact exist. This is very important stuff! It goes to the heart of enabling people to be themselves, to have their own characters, characteristics, foibles and in some respects their own oddities.

When we as leaders seek to stifle the individual quirkiness, to knock out the ‘human being, from the human doing’ I know it is from the fear of the what ‘They’ will think, when in reality what is really happening is the personal fear of loosing ones own personality as people are over whelmed by the workload of email, project management, people management and politic.

 I work with people who are excellent at their jobs, who generally speaking are good people, who care about others, though often this circle of care has shrunk to a very small circle with family and sometimes line reports in it, this is the ever-growing pressure that many feel to conform and as one executive put it, “I have become beige!”

Leaders enable not just the intellectual and business skills growth, but true leaders, the ones that are reveried, remembered and referenced enable the people within the business to grow as people, to learn how to operate in a commercial context whilst not ‘hiding’ their identity, but overtly bringing it to the work place to add even greater value.

1. Do I welcome character in the interactions in the team/business?
2. Do I show my own?
3. Do I give room to my character and others in conversation?
4. Do I create space for the growth of character with work and factor that into development?
5. Do I understand the difference between character and personality? (“Just because you are a character, doesn’t mean you have character” – Mr Wolf.Film-”Pulp Fiction”)
6. Do I blame the business for defining the culture in my own environment?

Communication Skills for Leaders

“The Art of Conversation” is in many respects the art of Executive Coaching and in the guise of the Executive Coaching Guru, I am lucky to have great conversations with leaders and other coaches at the top of their respective game; over time I have come to understand that the great practitioners of the art share some common traits:

Communication & Connection
Great connection is not about friendship, but the willingness to engage with others on shared agenda’s, the willingness to be truly ‘present’ in the moment, having parked your own agenda and able to fully focus on the individual(s) in front of them.

True ‘connection’ does not require more time, in the most fleeting of moments ‘connection’ comes from the position of the person communicating, in essence the capacity to not be ‘bewitched by your own agenda’. Leaders that see communication as a standalone enterprise, as getting the facts across are missing the point and making things hard for everyone else, including themselves.

The switched on leader see every communication as a vehicle and a conduit for connection and rapport, not gained through friendship, but rather thought experience of you as being fully engaged, present and authentic.

Sounds easy right? Ask yourself this question:

“How often do you have a conversation, whilst thinking about what you are going to do next?”

Now how powerful an experience do you really think people have of you? Well whatever the answer, if you can ‘park’ your daily agenda when in conversation, as opposed to seeing the person your are in conversation with ‘through the lense’ of your agenda…..well then your personal presence and thus the experience of you will grow hugely.