1.1 A Pull Versus a Push Approach to Leadership Development 14
3.1 Creating a Possible Future Versus a Predictable Future 51
3.2 The Ladder of Inference 56
6.1 Sample of a Left-Hand Column Exercise 97
7.1 Triple Loop Learning 115
P3.1 The 12 Catalytic Coaching Conversations 132
12.1 The Journey to Creating the Impossible Future 187
15.1 Catalytic Breakthrough Projects: A Spearhead for Breakthrough 218
20.1 The Diagnosis-Intervention Cycle 268
20.2 Action Language to Build a Shared Understanding 271
23.1 Balancing Advocacy with Inquiry 313
24.1 Feedback Cycle 320
24.2 Sample Action Map 327
25.1 Methodology for Teaching New Skills and Capabilities 332
25.2 Building New Skills 332
25.3 EDS Infrastructure 337
29.1 The Cycle of Stewardship 370
Tables
2.1 The Difference Between Social Grease and Coaching Communication 30
7.1 Master Paradigms and the Action Strategies They Produce 119
Exhibit
23.1 Contrasting Models for Dealing with Undiscussables 307
To my son, Rob. He will be a great leader some day. (As he grows and develops, so will I.) I am lucky to be his father.
Preface
Since I wrote Masterful Coaching in 1995, coaching has become a hot phenomenon in both business and popular culture. Watch a Sunday football game or listen to any talk radio program like The Big Show in Boston, as I do, and you will discover that the endless fascination goes beyond the top athletes. Not only are people interested in the players, like quarterback Tom Brady’s latest march to the Super Bowl or Tiger Woods’s quest for winning yet another major, but also people are interested in the coaches, such as Bill Belichick and Butch Harmon, who help the athletes become household names and fulfill their mythopoeia destiny.
What are TV shows like American Idol, the cooking show Hell’s Kitchen, and design shows like Project Runway but forums for young talent to be scrutinized and receive coaching with sometimes brutal candor needed to reach an Impossible Future, whether it is to become a pop star, own a high-end restaurant, or have a chance to play at the top of the fashion world? Interestingly enough, the real stars of the show are not the performers, but people like American Idol’s judge Simon, whose brusque honesty lets people know where they stand—something most of us want at work but never get.
Coaching is also hot in the business world, as many signs indicate that companies like General Electric, Pepsi, and Apple have dropped the terms leader and manager and now use coach instead. Today, driven by the fact that most CEOs have jobs as difficult as putting a human on the moon and the fact that we are living in an age of talent, coaching has gone from a random activity, quietly practiced by a few, to an exploding profession practiced by the many.
Today thousands of talented people throughout the world from many different occupational backgrounds, including business
leaders, lawyers, psychologists, and accountants, are flocking to this new profession in droves. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reports that coaching is now a billion-dollar industry and growing fast. According to Bob Nardelli, chairman and CEO of Chrysler, “I absolutely believe that people, unless coached, never reach their maximum capabilities.”1
For talented people who have tasted success in far-flung fields, coaching hits a powerful sweet spot for fulfilling rising human aspirations and motivations. Everyone wants powerful and profound professional relationships. Everyone wants to have an impact. Everyone wants to get (yes!) rich. I happen to know of many people who have become millionaires doing executive coaching.
You’re invited. While this book is focused on a passionate professional who aspires to become a world-class executive coach, CEOs and frontline leaders will be able to find many lessons here that they can practically and immediately apply. (See Masterful Coaching Fieldbook for more on the leader as coach.)2
Share the Masterful Coaching vision. You will learn how you can be a Masterful Coach who can help people achieve something seemingly impossible and make a difference in their world. Reset your mind-set. Leaders develop in the process of producing extraordinary results and life-altering solutions, not homogenized leadership competencies or abstract training programs.
Learn the Masterful Coaching Method. The game is helping people to realize an Impossible Future and win at the great game of business. You will learn to deliver this through 12 Catalytic Coaching Conversations, a method that is transformational and result oriented.
Launch a super-successful coaching practice. This book will show you how to create superb client relationships and a growing profitable business. It will also show you how to create powerful coaching relationships with the people who report to you.
Introduction: Better Leaders, Better World
Coaching is the fastest, most powerful way to develop leaders.
My motto is, “Better Leaders, Better World!” In Boston, Bangalore, or Beijing, in the halls of every Global 1000 corporation, government agency, or nonprofit organization, with issues from affordable health care to equal educational opportunity or reducing our carbon footprint, life goes on at the same petty pace until a leader steps onto the scene and takes a stand that a difference can be made.
I have observed in my work with hundreds of executives in a multitude of organizations throughout the world that it’s generally only a handful of extraordinary people who dare to see and hear the call to leadership concerning pressing human needs and wants and mobilize people to bring about the introduction of a new order of things.
What if we could somehow increase the size of that handful of leaders? Or double it? What if we could find a way for ordinary people to become extraordinary leaders? What would the impact be on our schools and neighborhoods? What would the impact be on the struggle for the United States to maintain its economic leadership now that the world is flat and there is no job that is America’s Godgiven right anymore? What would the impact be on global warming, global poverty, and hunger? On global terrorism?
Today almost every business is faced with a leadership lag: the time between coming up with a vision or game-changing strategy and the time it takes to find the leaders to implement it. The question is: How do you create an effective leadership pipeline?
How do you develop leaders consciously and intentionally rather than by accident?
I have worked with many CEOs and top executives in Global 1000 corporations, as well as trained almost thirty thousand people in leadership development programs and through my work as a director of the Harvard Leadership Research Project. I have come to realize that the traditional paradigm of leadership development based on a list of homogenized corporate leadership competencies and abstract training programs is wrong-headed.
Out of a commitment to inspire leaders to make a difference in their world, I stumbled on what I believe is a real breakthrough. It is based on coaching leaders to declare an Impossible Future that they passionately care about. An Impossible Future is one that cannot be achieved based on history and can be only realized by leaders reinventing not just their organizations but also themselves. It’s my belief, based on a decade of experience, that coaching is the fastest, most powerful, most profound way to develop leaders—whether in the White House, the executive suite, hospitals, schools, or neighborhoods.
The implications of this discovery are vast, and this is why I say that coaching is a cause for me, not just a business. I am not interested in coaching as just another dangling leadership development initiative. I am interested in coaching as a vehicle for developing leaders who, as a result, have the capacity to win in their business and make a difference in their world. I am also interested in interacting with people in such a way that at the end of the day, they see coaching as the ultimate self-development and growth experience—something that is life altering for them.
I have drawn on three traditions:
1. The tradition of the great leaders and coaches in business, like Jack Welch of General Electric, Steve Jobs of Apple, and N. Murthy of Infosys in India, who realized Impossible Futures through game-changing solutions and thus created unparalleled profits, growth for stockholders, and wealth for thousands of employees.
2. The tradition of the sports coaches from Boston, my home town—like Red Auerbach of the Celtics, Bill Belichick of the Patriots, and Terry Francona of the Red Sox—who took
teams from worst to first and created a legacy of winning championships.
3. The tradition of the great gurus, such as the Dalai Lama, whose stock in trade is based on the tradition of Nalanda (an ancient university in India and translated from Sanskrit as “giver of knowledge”). I consider myself a student of all of these people and think of them often.
The Masterful Coaching Method presented in this book is the fastest, most powerful way to develop extraordinary leaders and extraordinary results. As I wrote in the first edition of this book, the aspiration to become a Masterful Coach who can help leaders realize an Impossible Future and make a difference, whether in the life of one person or the life of all humanity, is one of the highest aspirations of what it is to be a human being. It is difficult for me to think of a more noble profession and occupation to go into or one that has the potential to have more of an impact. At the same time, coaching has the potential to be very lucrative, and many people I know in the field have gotten rich.
Having said that, there is a world of difference between the Masterful Coaching approach and most of the usual coaching approaches on the market. In most cases, these are throwbacks to the old paradigm of leadership development based on studying characteristics and traits. It is my observation that most abstract training programs produce lots of information but with little impact on people’s leadership ability. If leadership development happens at all, it tends to be very slow.
Extraordinary leaders develop in the process of producing results.
This is a book about Masterful Coaching as it applies to realizing a vision or transformational goal in business. I like to work with people who have been put in a job that they are not yet quite ready to do and then use that as an alchemical chamber for them to grow. I have noticed a direct correlation between coaching people to achieve an extraordinary result and their development as a leader. The faster people are able to achieve results, the faster they will develop. Thus, the whole Masterful Coaching method is designed to give people power and velocity in reaching their goals.
Business is a wonderful medium for this to happen because it provides people with an opportunity to stretch their minds and skills in the process of producing results. Consider the following three premises:
Business is the ultimate self-development and growth experience.
Business is the ultimate proving ground for building a leader’s soft skills in the process of achieving hard bottom-line results. Business is the ultimate transcendent service opportunity.
Although I am interested in other domains—such as government, health care, and education—I have decided to focus on this area because it is where I have the most domain expertise. Take heart, however: the Masterful Coaching vision, mind-set, and methods can easily be applied by leaders not just in business, but in government, health care, education, and other areas. All the aspiring coach needs to do is read the book extrapolatively and improvise according to their situation.
Masterful Coaching is about realizing an Impossible Future. Beware of coaching people on a predictable future or little game. I love working with a leader I admire and respect on an Impossible Future or big game and hate working with a leader on a predictable future or little game. I love the idea of making big changes to big things and abhor the idea of making little changes to little things. I love the idea that a coach’s role is expanding people’s capacity to win the Super Bowl of their own life and hate the idea that a coach is just there to listen, like Dr. Freud.
Thus, I decided early on to experiment with the idea of coaching executives one-on-one (and later in teams) to build the capacity to realize an Impossible Future and win at the great game of business. This seemed in keeping with the fact that we are moving from an age of progress based on predictable goals, competitive benchmarking, and incremental improvement to an age of disruption based on Impossible Futures through radical innovation and blue ocean strategies that take people out of bloody red oceans where the competition is fierce into uncontested waters (markets).
I looked for leaders with big organizational and personal ambitions, together with an attitude of learning. For example, I worked with John Young, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics at the Pentagon, who was tasked with transforming the military for an age of terror. I worked with Marsh Carter, who now has the task of transforming the New York Stock Exchange from a U.S.-based to a global-based concern. Then there was Gerard Kleisterlee, CEO of Phillips, who in 2006 become European CEO of the Year and told me his Impossible Future was shifting the corporate culture from “make things better” to “make different things.”
The person who was there before isn’t there now; the person who is there now didn’t exist before.
The impact of Masterful Coaching on a leader is transformational.
I ask people to define an Impossible Future or extraordinary result with the intention of pulling off a bit of what I call wizardry. I get people inspired, empowered, and ready to take on the world, then hit them with the other half of the double whammy: “Whatever it is that got you here as a leader isn’t going to get you there. Your old leadership style may have gotten you to be able to consistently deliver on so-called stretch goals and every boss you ever had loving you and your team respecting you, but it may not take you to your Impossible Future.”
People soon begin to see that to reach their Impossible Future or reinvent the organization, they are going to have to reinvent themselves first. I make it clear to people, at least in principle, that the first step in dramatic organizational change is dramatic personal change. This usually leads to talking about the Masterful Coaching feedback process, which is such a world apart from the typical 360-degree feedback that is based on computer tick sheets, check the boxes one through five that it is almost unrecognizable. (See Chapter Ten for more on the feedback process.)
The Masterful Coaching 360-degree feedback approach is simple and powerful, and it is totally transformational. It is designed to produce an alteration in people rather than just be another ho-hum assessment that people don’t know what to
do with. People get meaningful feedback one by one from each colleague based on interviews, which has the impact of helping them break the grip and excel beyond winning strategies that made them successful in the past but now have become a source of limitation.
As people go through each interview, they (1) unfreeze their noble certainty in their whole leadership approach that has gotten them here; (2) change who they are being as a leader in the light of the Impossible Future or unintended results; and (3) refreeze their newly discovered leadership approach by making it real through action.1 The transformation doesn’t happen overnight; it takes time. The person who was there before isn’t there now; the person who is there now didn’t exist before.
The Masterful Coaching method also employs triple loop learning (synonymous with transformational learning) as a way of coaching leaders to produce desired results in real time. It is based on the premise that falling short of your main goal or producing unintended results is usually the result of some way of being, a way of thinking, or action that is unknown to the person at the moment. The book shows you how to teach people to alter their way of being and their patterns of thinking and behavior so as to be able to produce intended results for the first time. (See Chapter Seven for more on triple loop learning.)
The Masterful Coaching approach connects coaching to ROI.
In my work in leadership development over the years, I have regularly been asked how one shows return on investment (ROI) or measurable results. In truth, as long as the work I was doing was about leadership characteristics and traits or only about transforming thinking and attitudes, it was a difficult question to answer. Like most other leadership gurus, I stumbled around in the dark thinking of something smart to say. In truth, the human resource people asking the question lived so far away from the world of results that they didn’t even really want an answer.
Yet when I started coaching leaders on realizing an Impossible Future and winning at the great game of business, all of that changed, because suddenly there was a scoreboard. It showed that Joe, for example, grew the company by $1 billion through organic growth largely due to innovating business concepts (products) and achieved $500 million in real improvement
through Six Sigma. Furthermore, the leadership pipeline that was broken with key leadership positions unfilled was now brimming with top talent, in part due to a fundamental shift in corporate culture.
The fascinating and intriguing discovery was that it seemed that each step the leader took toward realizing an Impossible Future or transformational goals required a corresponding step (or rather leap) in his or her development as a leader. Suddenly I started getting letters and e-mails that Joe had not only achieved more than anyone thought possible but transformed as a leader in the process. This work eventually led me to an epiphany: extraordinary leaders develop in the process of producing extraordinary and tangible results, the heart and soul of the Masterful Coaching method.
Once I saw leadership development and results as connected, it was as if the scales had fallen from my eyes. First, I needed to see myself as a business guru, not just a leadership guru. Second, I needed a different time span for the coaching relationship than the typical three-day training program, because significant results cannot be produced in three days. Third, the coaching process that occurs from month to month has to be able to deliver on helping people achieve something impossible and change their lives.
Masterful Coaching: Three Editions and Going Strong
Your second edition was not like a second edition; it was like a new book.—A reader
I admire Picasso because he woke up every day and delighted in the act of creation. I can’t say I am on the level of Picasso, but I admit to being like an artist as well. I take pleasure in the sheer joy of creating things—whether it’s cooking an Italian fish stew, building an innovative house, or writing a new edition of a book. I have written three editions of Masterful Coaching (the first came out in 1995), in large part because my wonderful editor, Matt Davis, gave me the opportunity to ply my trade by requesting the books. Each has been dramatically different. I recall
someone writing me after the second edition was published and saying, “It’s not like a second edition with a new prologue by the author; it’s like a different book.” To me that was a great point! I am sure readers who have known me for a while will say the same thing about this book.
It’s amazing how much the climate of the times has changed since I penned the last edition in 2002. The talent wars, the “China price,” collaboration on the Internet, and more have changed everything. Although the principles of Masterful Coaching remain the bedrock on which this edition is built, the state of the art has advanced in the light of new challenges for business leaders and new coaching experiences. The stories, examples, and metaphors used in this book have been updated as well.
Masterful Coaching, First Edition: Inspire and Map the Territory
I wrote in the first edition that the desire to be a Masterful Coach by helping leaders realize Impossible Futures and change the world is one of the highest aspirations for what it is to be a human being. Also, I framed coaching in terms of producing extraordinary and tangible results, not a psychological or mechanistic approach predicated on figuring out the right set of leadership behaviors and getting them into people. The book also provided the first iteration of the Masterful Coaching method: a five-step coaching model.
Coaching is one of the highest aspirations for what it is to be a human being and takes place in the domain of accomplishment, not therapy.
I knew that if I was to get plum coaching assignments, I had to become the future of coaching, not be associated with coaching’s past. There were few executives at the time who used executive coaches, and the reason was that there was no cultural clearing or opening in the corporation for that to happen. In many organizations there was an old conversation about coaching that got in the way of establishing a culture and the common thought that “coaching is a last-gasp effort before being shown the door.”
My intention was to generate a new conversation about coaching that would create a new cultural clearing that would allow and pull for executive coaching and the leader as coach. This got expressed as debunking the Five Myths of Coaching, a goal I have been somewhat successful in, as there are many executive coaches in both big and small companies today, though many don’t yet buy into the approach. Consider the myths and the reality:
Myth 1: Coaching is for losers, a last-gasp effort before being shown the door.
Reality: Coaching is for winners who seek to go to the next level.
Myth 2: Coaching is about filling leadership behavior gaps. Reality: Coaching is about an Impossible Future and changing your life.
Myth 3: Coaching is a separate leadership development activity. Reality: Coaching integrates leadership development and results.
Myth 4: The coach is a process consultant who asks questions from a distance.
Reality: The coach is like a sports coach on the playing field, doing whatever it takes to win.
Myth 5: Coaching is an activity that happens in annual reviews. Reality: Coaching requires continuous, but not continual communication.
Results versus homogenized leadership competencies; results versus 360-degree computer tick sheets; results versus behavioral modification.
Masterful Coaching, Second Edition: Further Insight
into the Paradigm and Method
I wrote Masterful Coaching with the idea of putting coaching on the map, and to some extent I must have succeeded. The demand for revolutionary new leaders and for implementing revolutionary new business models and the inability of traditional leadership training to deliver created a huge opening to jump-start the coaching profession.
At the time of writing the second edition, the number of coaching companies was staggering—almost ten thousand. Even in 2000, according to one survey by an executive coaching company of 150 firms, it was reported that 30 percent of CEOs and 50 percent of executives use coaches. Seventy percent of the companies planned to increase their use of coaches to develop high-potential leaders. It also showed that 90 percent of those leaders who had used a coach planned to do so in the future.2 As of today, this trend has not abated.
In the second edition of Masterful Coaching, I built on the many experiences I had in coaching over one hundred executives in different companies and various industries. The work I did with clients allowed me to enrich the second edition’s favorite coaching tales as well as provide new guiding ideas, tools, and methods—for example, building a one-year coaching program around an Impossible Future or creating a Source Document or winning game plan or providing a new approach to executive 360-degree feedback.
The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.
Michelangelo
I also noted in that second edition that my experiences with executive coaching led to a new program, team-based action coaching, which involves a coach, the business leader, and the leader’s team. This program resulted not only in leadership breakthroughs but also in business breakthroughs. Fred Stiers, an oil refinery leader who participated in the program, told me of the tremendous
impact the program had: “We pretty much followed the Masterful Coaching approach and it made the company hundreds of millions of dollars.” It became clear to me soon after the second edition of Masterful Coaching was published that coaching was not only catching on like wildfire, it was beginning to make both traditional leadership development and consulting irrelevant. Coaching was beginning to be recognized as a powerful new domain and, as Fast Company put it, a fad that wouldn’t go away.
One CEO told me that by working with his executive coach as a thinking partner, he could come up with much better strategic answers than any of the Big 8 consulting firms, as well as actually implement them. Also, there is a huge difference between developing leaders through real-time coaching and developing them through the typical classroom approach.
Masterful Coaching, Third Edition: Establishing Coaching as a Distinct Profession with Standard Operating Procedures
While coaching is clearly part of the conversation happening in the CEO’s office and human resource department, there is a huge variation between what I was talking about in the first and second editions of Masterful Coaching and most of the coaching happening on the front lines of business. To be sure, some of the feedback made me feel triumphant; other feedback I got was troubling, however. One British executive told me, “There are more coaches in London than hot dinners and I am not sure the quality in some cases is even equal to British food.”
There is a need to establish a universally accepted definition of executive coaching.
It occurred to me that while the growing popularity of coaching has given rise to hundreds of schools of coaching that offer socalled executive coaching certification programs, questions arise:
Who is certifying the certifiers?
What are they certifying people in?
Is coaching about accomplishment or therapy?
What are the process and criteria for certification?
How can you certify people in the profession of executive coaching if there is no universal definition of what it is and no universally accepted standard principles and practices?
Let me illustrate. If you live in Boston, Brussels, Bangalore, and go to an obstetrician to have your baby, the doctor will almost invariably follow the exact same set of standard operating procedures. The same is true with dentists, lawyers, and so forth. However, the standard operating principles that executive coaches follow are almost always random.
I also learned in giving a talk at the Vistage Conference in California (a successful CEO coaching organization based on monthly and group meetings) that people are already inspired one-on-one enough about coaching leaders to shift from good to great, and most coaches have been exposed to various five-step models such as the GROW model (goal, reality, options, work). What they are looking for is a more advanced methodology for coaching leaders over the course of a year in a world of change, complexity, and competition.
My intention in this third edition of Masterful Coaching is to provide what’s missing that will make a difference. The goal is to wed Masterful Coaching and extraordinary leadership throughout the twenty-first century, rather than have it be a passing fad that will lead to cynicism. To that end, the book establishes:
A universally accepted definition of coaching: Achieving the impossible and changing your life
A powerful new paradigm for leadership development: Leaders develop in the process of producing extraordinary results
The Masterful Coaching method (standard practices and principles): executive coaching; 12 months; 12 Catalytic Coaching Conversations
The basis for designing executive coaching certification programs and criteria for certification offered by universities and other educational bodies
Executive coaching is an amalgam of leadership coaching and business coaching.
As an executive coach, you eventually hit a crossroads. The road most often taken by executive coaches is transactional tips and techniques about leadership, delivering on predictable goals as promised, and occasionally incremental improvement. The road less taken involves coaching people in transforming leadership, Impossible Futures, and winning in their business.
The Masterful Coaching approach is the road less taken and is not for the faint of heart. The Masterful Coaching Certification Program equips people to deliver on breakthroughs in business and breakthroughs for leaders. Whereas most executive coaching certification programs involve a certain number of hours in a classroom, the Masterful Coaching approach is based on practice and study.
There is a classroom component to teach the Masterful Coaching vision, paradigm, and fundamentals; the Masterful Coaching method; and especially the 12 Catalytic Coaching Conversations. Yet the lion’s share of the certification program involves coaching candidates as they coach their clients over a year’s time. People are certified after completing three successful coaching engagements based on specific criteria.
A Masterful Coaching engagement is not complete until: The clients have declared and made significant headway in realizing an Impossible Future.
There is a visible difference in the client’s leadership as validated by 360-degree feedback interviews before and after. There is a culture change in the client’s organization (team). The client makes the shift from a red ocean strategy where they compete in bloody waters to a blue ocean strategy, where they compete in uncontested market space.
The client comes up with game-changing solutions, products, services, experiences.
There are extraordinary and tangible bottom-line results. The client says this has been the ultimate self-development and growth experience.
This book has four parts:
Part One: Mapping the Territory of Masterful Coaching.
Part Two: The Journey to Masterful Coaching
Part Three: Coaching Executives to Create an Impossible Future and Win in Their Business—12 Months; 12 Coaching Conversations
Part Four: Master Classes with Robert Hargrove—Powerful Lessons in Personal and Organizational Change
In Closing
I very much enjoy hearing from people who have read my books, and I promise to respond to you. I would not only appreciate your comments on the book, but would like to learn about how you applied it on your own journey to Masterful Coaching. My e-mail address is Robert.Hargrove@MasterfulCoaching.com.
Part O NE Mapping the Territory of Coaching
Part One maps the territory of Masterful Coaching for professionals, leaders, and managers. The chapters address the vision of Masterful Coaching, “Better Leaders; Better World,” and emphasize that becoming a Masterful Coach requires resetting your mind-set to the fact that coaching for results, not changing behaviors, counts. It introduces the Masterful Coaching method, which is based on Impossible Futures, winning, and transformational learning.
Chapter One shows how the cumulative effect of change is making coaching not just a good idea but also a necessity. As organizations are disembodied through outsourcing and offshoring, the span of control shortens and managers increasingly have to coach small teams of top talent on game-changing projects. This requires that command-and-control leaders transform themselves into leaders as coaches who can bring out the best in genuinely talented people who don’t fit job descriptions and have no interest in punching a time clock. The chapter introduces the Masterful Coaching method, which is all about Impossible Futures, winning at the great game of business, radical innovation, and personal and organization transformation, as opposed to predictable futures, coming in second, continuous improvement, and behavioral tweaks.
If you want to reinvent the organization, reinvent yourself first.
The Masterful Coaching method is not for everyone, so if possible, choose your clients rather than just hungrily accepting any assignment that you get. Chapter Two advises looking for extreme leaders who push the envelope in terms of vision, build teams of talented deviants, and take bold and unreasonable action versus middle-of-the-road moderates who are leaders in name only and who hate vision, fake teamwork, and tend to retreat at the first sign of opposition. Extreme leaders not only raise the bar, they are, surprisingly, the most coachable. This chapter also discusses how to deploy coaching on an enterprise-wise level to achieve power and velocity in reaching goals.
Masterful Coaching is about inspiring, empowering, and enabling people to live deeply in the future, while acting boldly in the present.
Let’s say you are now coaching a leader and it’s going swimmingly, but how do you know whether you are showing up as a Masterful Coach or teetering on the edge of a so-so evaluation one that you will never actually hear about until your contract is cancelled? Chapter Three provides a kind of GPS with four waypoints so you can tell whether you are in the zone of Masterful Coaching or way off course and heading for the rocks: (1) the coach has a real seat at the table, not a casual consulting relationship; (2) coaching is about standing in an Impossible Future and getting your client to take action to make it a reality versus getting distracted; (3) coaching is about engaging clients in personal (organization) reinvention, not a competency tune-up; and (4) a coach is a thinking partner on puzzles, dilemmas, and conundrums.
Chapter One
Coaching Is an Idea Whose Time Has Come
The Masterful Coaching Vision, Mind-Set, and Method
Leaders today need to become revolutionaries or risk becoming irrelevant. Welcome to the revolution. This book is a call to arms—an invitation to take a stand for the future. The winds of change are blowing at gale force against the barricades of the status quo. We are shifting from the age of the machine to the age of talent, from a mass economy to a creative economy, from “The world is our colony” to “The world is flat.” Think Wal-Mart versus Sears, Apple versus Sony, Google versus AOL, Whole Foods Market versus Safeway, YouTube versus MGM.
CEOs have no choice but to become revolutionaries or risk becoming irrelevant at the hands of their competitors. This book is for leaders at all levels whose aim is to make a difference in their world and for coaches who desire to play a catalytic role in this process. This book is a manifesto and manual. It’s for people who believe that an Impossible Future is something you create, not just something that happens to you by luck. It is a book for innovative leaders who are unwilling to play it safe and for coaches who want more than just another contract. I introduce the Masterful Coaching vision, mind-set, and method—a powerful and concise step-by-step process. Before going further, let me set the table. Companies need revolutionary leadership and business models in order to compete. We have reached a tipping point where
the cumulative effect of change demands revolutionary new business (management) models. The future of management is with the visionary leader, profit mechanic, and coach. The leader will be a visionary who changes the game while others sleep—a profit mechanic and a people developer. Creative intellectual capital (think Microsoft, Google, Apple), not a big organization on merger steroids, is the key to success.
If we aim to realize an Impossible Future and change the world, we better get together the best professionals in the world. Nothing less will do. Organizations need to be acting as organizers, not just employers (think Visa International, Amazon.com, or Linux software). Hierarchy, bureaucracy, and employee IDs will give way to hot zones, a stew pot full of joint ventures and astounding projects. Look for more brassy brands and professional service firms. The focus will be on creative intellectual capital, superb client relationships, and turn-key, life-altering solutions. Here are some of my favorites that have already succeeded in this realm:
IDEO—innovation is a team sport
Cirque du Soleil—ultimate entertainment experience Whole Foods Market—gourmet healthy fast food eHarmony—compatibility matching system UPS—“What can Brown do for you?”
Everything on the Internet: Web2.0 (web businesses), not Web1.0 (just brochures)
Second, big centralized organizations are giving way to “empires of the mind” consisting of twelve people. The value of industrial-era M.B.A. degrees and huge, sprawling, centralized organizations with overlapping product divisions all but disappears as we make the shift to the age of talent (creative economy), and the trend toward outsourcing and offshoring continues. At the same time, the value of visionary leadership, together with creative intellectual capital and radical innovation, comes boldly into view. Bill Gates and Microsoft, with an empire of a dozen minds surpassing General Motors, America’s biggest corporation, in market capitalization was a sign of the times, as was IBM selling its PC business to China’s Lenovo.
Prediction! Even the best CEOs will find it hard to keep organizations like GM, IBM, GE, and so forth from being broken up in the next decade, as 90 percent of white-collar jobs “disappear” and or become reconfigured beyond recognition. The CEO as steward of the big company who had little choice but to be a command-and-control manager in order to coordinate the efforts of tens of thousands will be passing into history. The CEO as entrepreneur with an empire of a dozen minds (Apple, Google, Facebook) and a vision of an Impossible Future based on a dramatic difference will come to take their place. One thing is certain: if the people on your team are some of the smartest people in the world, command and control isn’t going to cut it. Nor will running the company according to the laws of physics that dictates if you want to grow, buy a big company.
Third, coaching has become an idea whose time has come as millions of business leaders seek an Impossible Future and 75 million baby boomers retire. In the next decade, coaching will become an idea whose time has come as CEOs discover that the old-fashioned management muscles needed to deliver predictable results and occasional incremental improvement aren’t sufficient to lead a team of talented people to an Impossible Future based on game-changing products, exciting new services, and spellbinding experiences. Increasingly they will tap into a growing army of coaches and consultants drawn from the ranks of 78.2 million baby boomers used to a high standard of living, loaded with expertise, not ready to retire, and looking to get the most out of the rest of their life.
For example, when Jeff Immelt became CEO of General Electric, he said that his primary task as a leader was not to wrestle a thousand-pound gorilla to the ground (stay on top of everyone and everything), but rather to act as a coach who would take people to an Impossible Future based on 8 percent growth a year for the company. His coaching started with a winning game plan. He personally got involved in building a talented cross-functional team to launch a new company, GE Infrastructure, a general store to third-world countries. His coaching duties also involved helping to transform a culture of general improvement efforts into a culture of radical innovation. Immelt believes that no executive can reach his or her potential without coaching, and one of
his first acts as CEO was to retain his old boss, Jack Welch, as his executive coach.
The Leader as Coach Is Displacing the Leader as Commander
Leadership from on high based on command and control, a poltergeist from management’s past, will finally be exorcised, and the leader as coach based on stimulating imagination and radical innovation will take its place. The unit of organization has shifted from a big organization to a great group with a hot project, where each person is free to discover his or her own greatness. Interestingly enough, the best role models are coming from outside the United States. N. R. Narayana Murthy, with the formal title of chairman and chief mentor of Infosys in Bangalore, India, launched the $20 billion company that employs fifty-five thousand people with the creative intellectual capital of six talented software engineers and a $250 loan from his wife.
First of all, I must say that God has been very kind to us because, as Louis Pasteur once said, that when God decides to announce his presence, he comes in the form of chance.
N. R. Narayana Murthy
He had a vision of an Impossible Future of Infosys being one of the world’s top three software firms and creating wealth for the Indian professional population based on the PC revolution, offshoring, outsourcing, and an army of talented, English-speaking Indian engineers. He also had a vision of leadership without formal authority based on the Indian tradition of the guru, which his title of chairman and chief mentor reflects. He lives in the same house he lived in when he started the company, starts each day by scrubbing toilets, and drives a locally made car to work at 7:00 a.m., when he frequently holds meetings with the board on strategy or coaches software engineering teams on the Infosys values of honesty, respect, and decency (charity).
I would like Infosys to be a place where people of different genders, nationalities, races, and religious beliefs work together in an environment of intense competition but utmost harmony, courtesy and dignity, creating more value for our customers.
N. R. Narayana Murthy
As big companies that make and sell things morph into professional service firms that offer customized solutions through joint ventures and hot projects, the chain of command has been decimated, and the senior person who used to see it as part of his or her job to mentor talented junior employees to get them up to speed has either disappeared or is working on a project in Dubai, London, or Singapore. Most newly hired talent rarely gets one lunch a year with the boss and often doesn’t see much of a stretch assignment either. Companies are going to need coaching and mentoring to realize an Impossible Future and win the nonstop talent war. It’s one thing to bring on a mentoring program, another to create a mentoring culture.
Bruce Wasserstein, chairman of Lazard Ltd., is a leader who has embraced both ideas. A masterful deal maker in 2005, he launched the seemingly impossible 2006 coup at Lazard in which he famously disassembled the family ownership and took the fractious merger and acquisition firm public. In 2007, he coached his veteran team of investment bankers on $300 billion worth of deals, something that always involves offering a CEO’s advice: Are you sure you are going to keep the number two guy in the company you are acquiring, because the number one guy is definitely going to leave? Wasserstein invests heavily in attracting a network of young stars. Every junior staffer gets a mentor who teaches this person the ropes and at the same time stimulates his or her imagination. The idea is to create a hothouse where young talent is encouraged to think deeply and creatively about the client relationship.
Today’s leading CEOs, who have mind-bogglingly complex jobs as tough as climbing Mt. Everest, are increasingly realizing they can’t do it alone. When Sir Edmund Hillary went to take on the Impossible Future of climbing Mt. Everest, one of his first acts
was to hire his sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, as a guide. Leading CEOs are now increasingly looking for a coach to guide and instruct them in reaching their goals and dealing with dilemmas.
How do you attract New York Yankees’ top talent level with a Nashville Sounds’ low budget? How do you break out of the no-growth morass? How do you transform a big organization that stifles game-changing ideas and create a gathering place that is as stimulating as Google search and as engaging as eBay, MySpace, or YouTube? In most cases, it’s not about the coach having the answers but about coach and coachee discovering the answers together.
The image of the CEO as a solitary Zarathustra-like figure is giving way to the image of the CEO and Masterful Coach whose destinies are joined at the hip. In Nietzsche’s book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, the hero proclaims that God is dead and then attempts to conquer the world on his own, only to die early in battle having failed to create allies or take counsel from the wise. Nietzsche unknowingly created an apt metaphor for today’s CEOs who are being fired in record time and record numbers for much the same reasons. My Pentagon pals have said of Donald Rumsfeld that during his years at the Pentagon, he acted as if he was so smart that he neither brought in the team nor requested coaching; however brilliant and powerful he may have been, the goals and complexities of Iraq proved too much for him.
In my opinion, in the years ahead, CEOs will stop drawing their identity from the solitary Zarathustra-like figure and start drawing their identity from the image of the CEO in partnership with a Masterful Coach who together go after an Impossible Future that would not be attainable individually. Can you imagine Sir Edmund going for the summit of Mt. Everest without Tenzing Norgay? No. Can you imagine Jeff Immelt becoming CEO of General Electric without the coaching of Jack Welch? No. Can you imagine Tom Brady winning four Super Bowl rings without Bill Belichick? No.
The CEO needs to get personally involved in bringing in coaches and mentoring programs rather than delegating it to human resources (HR) or whoever holds the fashionable (albeit empty) title of vice president of talent development. This area of blindness is based on a fundamental misconception that coaching
