50 Secret Coaching Stories from the Top E-Book

Laura Komocsin

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 152

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

"Executive coaches have a unique vantage point on the corporate world, seeing leaders in their most intimate moments of struggle and triumph. This book is packed with these stories, told with humor and insight. It includes many valuable lessons for coaches and their clients alike." Marshall Goldsmith, #1 Leadership Thinker in the World "A clever and insightful book, which offers marvelous thoughts on coaching from childhood fables, personal experiences, and observations from a host of thought leaders." Dave Ulrich, #1 Management Educator & Guru

Leseprobe

LAURA KOMÓCSIN PCC

50

Secret Coaching

LAURA KOMÓCSIN PCC

50

Secret Coaching Stories from the Top

Business Coach

Author: Laura Komócsin PCC Editor: Anikó Uj Translator: Lívia Gecse Layout: Imre Arany Graphics: Édua Szűcs

© Laura Komócsin, 2016 © Business Coach, 2016 © Édua Szűcs, 2016

All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER 1Once Upon a Time...

1. The Knight Who Waited Five Years for the Sleeping Beauty

2. Homemade Play Dough

3. Looking for Bugs in My Office

4. Friendship or Loyalty?

5. Who Pays the Bill?

6. Green Tea with Milk

CHAPTER 2The Emperor’s New Clothes

7. Everybody Knows Me

8. The Power of Echo

9. Does He Know What You Expect from Him?

10. What Gets the Message Through

11. A Bird Is Known by Its Song, A Manager by His Office...

12. But My Door Is Always Open!

13. How Long Is a Workday?

14. Nobody Can Change Personalities

15. Shadow Coaching

CHAPTER 3The Little Match Girl

16. Global Company, Local Challenges

17. Do Try It at Home – The Benefit of Positive Gossip

18. Aha Moments with Lego

19. Introverted or Extroverted Coachees

20. Never Too Late to Praise

CHAPTER 4The Snow Queen

21. I´m Not Your Friend, Buddy!

22. General, Sir!

23. A Dyslexic Manager

24. Hold Up a Tie, Rather Than Yell

25. Ask Anything, Except On-Call Duty

26. Acting as a Role Model at a Team Building Event

CHAPTER 5The Princess and the Pea

27. Getting Fired or Sharing Knowledge?

28. Becoming Too Assertive

29. Nothing is Good Enough

30. Compatibility Issue

CHAPTER 6The Ugly Duckling

31. A Role Model Instead of Being Lame

32. A Dream Being Laughed at

33. Being “Homesick”

34. Dementor, Decoach

35. Basic Computer Skills

36. Don’t Read Today’s Paper!

37. Still a Good Manager

CHAPTER 7The Little Mermaid

38. Am I a Good Manager but a Bad Mother?

39. Other People’s Dreams

40. Deputy CEO with Extra Baggage

41. A Sign of Generosity

42. Border-Crossing Goals

43. Tears for a Pullover

44. A Colorless Leader

CHAPTER 8The Steadfast Tin Soldier

45. EQ=0

46. 27 Alternatives with Story Cubes

47. This is not Coaching: CFO with a Degree in Literature

48. A Very Expensive Friend

49. Don’t You Want to Be Our Vice President?

50. Good Times, Bad Times / We Laugh Together, We Cry Together

Notes

INTRODUCTION

Since this is a storybook, let me start it with the story of how I became a coach.

Between 1998 and 2004, I worked as a management consultant for Accenture, a global consulting and technology firm. In 2004, my daughter Izabella was born. She was six weeks old when a director of a large bank called me on the phone:

– Laura, I would like you to come to work for us. This project we’re running is just cut out for you. I know how well you manage teams, and I think you would do a great job on this project as well.

– Well, you know, my daughter is just about six weeks old, I’m not in a position to start a more-than-full-time job right now.

– I’m sorry to hear that.

Two weeks passed. My phone rang again:

– I’ve thought it through. If we put some really strong sub-team leaders reporting to you, you could manage this project with six-hour workdays.

– I do appreciate it that you insist on my being part of your project. But look, my daughter is just eight weeks old. She really needs me by her side.

He called me again two weeks later:

– We have a young, high-potential project manager candidate. If you two split the role, you could each do a four-hour shift every day.

– But Izabella is still only ten weeks old...

– Well, how many hours do you want to work, then????

– Two hours PER WEEK.

He just laughed...

Another two weeks passed...

– When you said you wanted to work two hours per week, I thought you were joking. But then I had this idea: we could put the young high-flier in charge of the whole project, and you could come in to coach him two hours per week. How does that sound to you now?

I said:

– Sounds great! I have one concern, though: I did learn something about coaching in the U.S., but I’ve never actually done it myself. It’s important for us to have a “win-win” situation. Why don’t we make an agreement? I’ll coach him for free for six months. You give me feedback on how I’m doing as we go along, and at the end, you give me a letter of reference. Afterwards, if you decide to do so, we can go on with the coaching on a commercial basis.

That’s how we did it. After six months, we signed a contract that suited us both. My daughter still had a full-time mother, and I could go back to work – in fact, I had just found a new career for myself!

When my second child, Ágoston, was born, I had another big decision to make: over the two years or so before his birth, I had gathered so many coaching clients, I was working almost 40 hours per week again. I wanted to give him the same attention and care as I had given to my daughter. However, I did not want to continue working full time – on my own. So I decided to build a team.

Coaching is a profession based on a very high level of trust. You don’t search for a coach in the Yellow Pages. So I started training future coaches, sharing my lessons learned, and selected the best of them to be part of my team. I could see how they worked and feel assured that they would share my professional values. Today, I continue to both coach and train the new generation of coaches together with key members of my team in order to be able to give my full attention to my grandchildren when they are born...

I started coaching executives in 2004, and I have been training new coaches since 2007. During the coach training sessions, I always share my professional experiences so that the next generation will not make the same mistakes that I made. I also often share coaching stories that are educational as well as entertaining. These stories ended up in a volume published in Hungarian in 2012. Since then, however, I have accumulated so many more coaching stories about international (meaning, non-Hungarian) executives that the time seems to have arrived to publish them in another book, this time in English, for an international audience. Among the top managers I have coached in this context have been a Brazilian executive who did not understand what work-related stress means, a director from South Korea who sacrificed her marriage and her children for the sake of her career and a Canadian top executive who decided to go down the opposite path, as well as an American man who commuted to work by helicopter every day. And many others. Each of these was a person of a different age and nationality working in a different industry, but they all had something in common: they were all seeking a coach in order to become happier and more successful.

As the founding president of the Hungarian Chapter of the International Coach Federation, I have always considered the sharing of coaching skills to be my duty, and I believe this book (published in both Hungarian and English) will serve as the best means to decrease the professional “mystification” of coaching and to help new coaches, who all work with a certain degree of uncertainty, by sharing the experiences of some “old hands”, and also by showing potential customers how effective coaching can be.

For confidentiality reasons, the identities and personal information of the coachees cannot be disclosed, so their names, positions, and industries have been altered to protect their identity.

My first book[1] contained 150 coaching tools accompanied by several anecdotes. Most of my earlier clients – whose stories were described in the book – received a complimentary edition along with instructions to let me know if they were able to recognize themselves in my stories. I was also curious to see if they would recognize themselves, since I had written their stories by altering their personalities and circumstances. In the following few weeks, I received many text messages and emails saying: Yes, we got it.

There was one executive, however, who did call me, and he was quite upset about not finding his story in the book.

I had promised that his story would be published, but he thought that it hadn’t been! I quickly grabbed the book and told him which page to look up. He quietly read the story while I remained on the line. Then he told me that he wasn’t upset any more about excluding him from the book. What he was upset about now was that the story was not true, that I had exaggerated too much. I replied that I had exaggerated in his own interest, and for the sake of amusing my readers.

He started fuming again. “What? My story wasn’t interesting enough? You think that I am a nobody?”

At this point, I started to lose my patience and felt that the proper thing to say was, “No, I don’t think you are a nobody, but based on your previous three sentences you seem to tend to take things way too personally. If you’d like to talk about this, I can refer you to a great psychologist.”

So what’s the conclusion here? Many people are happy to see their story in a book. Others do not recognize themselves, because their sense of self-awareness is not strong enough. In this book I have tried to find the right balance between telling true stories and giving the “extra touch” only when absolutely necessary.

I found further inspiration from Rolf Wunderer, who uses fairy tales from the Grimm brothers in order to give the right meaning to his management training. He believes that stories both help to bring to the surface the creative and curious inner child inside a person and allow everyone to think more freely: free of pre-conceptions and conventions. At the same time, fairy tale characters are often exaggerated, and the stories’ relevance becomes more obvious through the archetypal behaviors they contain. In his book Aesop and the CEO[2], David Noonan came to the same conclusion that the Iranian-German psychiatrist Nossrat Peseschkian did in his[3]. We tend to remember symbolic messages from a fairy tale far better than we do pure theories and concepts. My own first book[4] turned out to be a bit dry, so I thought it was time to leverage it with a new publication – and also because I have realized that most executives only read the case studies anyway.

Just as Rolf Wunderer relied on the Grimms, David Noonan on Aesop, and Nossrat Peseschkian on tales from the Middle East, I originally considered using the Collection of 77 Hungarian Folk Tales as the framework for my new book. However, since Hungarian folk tales are not well known internationally, and having the intent of publishing my book in English, I also started to think about another context. Finally, I settled on Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish author whose fairy tales have been translated into more than 125 languages and are today known worldwide.

I listened to and watched many Andersen tales as a child, and every single time I cried when the Little Match Girl died and always worried about the little boy who told the Emperor that he was not wearing anything at all. As a teenager, I sometimes felt like an Ugly Duckling (a story Andersen meant to be auto-biographical), and when I first fell in love, I wondered what I would have done if I had been the Little Mermaid. Whenever I met perfectionists similar to that in the tale of the Princess and the Pea, my childhood bedtime stories often came to my mind. In some regards, Andersen has been around me all my life. I have visited Denmark, the homeland of Andersen, several times, both as a child and also as an adult with my children. And the fact that my first employer was Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) seems like a pretty significant coincidence to me.

So I decided that even if couldn’t use all of 156 of Andersen’s tales in this volume, I could at least use the most widely known ones to serve as the overall theme for individual chapters.

•   Once upon a time... this chapter contains stories about the beginning of the coach-coachee relation-ship, how they get involved in the coaching process, and factors that influence the coachee when choosing the right coach.

•   In the story The Emperor’s New Clothes, two weavers promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions because they are stupid or incompetent. When the Emperor parades around before his subjects in his new clothes, no one dares to say that they don’t see the new garments until a child cries out, “But he is not wearing anything at all!” This chapter of the book contains stories in which the coach highlights points that the executive did not realize, or was not aware of, and was surprised by the discovery. Other stories describe executives trying to exaggerate and put on a show for others, while others involve suspicions of a lie, corruption or other unacceptable practices.

•   In Andersen’s tale of the same name, The Little Match Girl is out in the cold night on New Year’s Eve, in torn clothing, without shoes, selling matches from her apron. But nobody wants to buy them. Almost frozen, she starts warming her hands by lighting the matches one by one. In the light of every single flame she experiences a vision of herself happily feasting together with her long-dead grandmother, whose presence she has long yearned for. She has seen the light – and by the next morning she has left this dark world. The chapter entitled the “Little Match Girl” relates to stories about poverty and times when small joys bring great happiness.

•   The Snow Queen is about strong personal relationships and solitude that lack the experience of being loved. The Snow Queen lived in her gorgeous white empire, all covered by snow and ice, far away in the North. It was not only her empire that was made of ice: her heart was as well. She had a special “troll mirror” whose reflection turned everything into the opposite of what it was: everything that was nice appeared to be ugly, and even the smallest mistake was exaggerated into a huge one. One day, however, the mirror shattered, and all the small pieces were scattered all over the world. Every little piece of the shattered mirror exerted the same negative effect as the original one: if one of them got into someone’s eye or heart, the person would instantly turn into a cold and mean creature. Later, Gerda and Kay, two poor children living next door to each other, learn about the power of the shattered shards when some of them get into Kay’s heart and eye, making him turn cruel and aggressive. Gerda does her best to free him from the evil spell, and after many adventures in the Snow Queen’s land, they return to Kay’s grandmother and live happily ever after. This chapter of the book deals with stories about loud, aggressive, control-freak executives and situations involving severe conflicts.

•   In The Princess and the Pea, a young prince wants to marry a princess who was born to be a queen. He searches the whole world to find the right one – with no luck. One night, in the middle of a huge storm, somebody knocks on the door, and there is a princess, soaking wet, asking for shelter. The old king and his wife decide to put the princess to a test: they place a single pea underneath her mattress in order to see if she will notice it. In the morning, the princess complains about not being able to sleep due to the mattress being uncomfortable. The prince is happy because he has finally found his true mate: it could only be a princess who would be so particular about her comfort. The prince marries her right away, and the pea is put into the treasury. For this chapter of the book, I gathered stories about perfectionist executives and situations in which a tiny little thing served as the distinction between decisiveness and uncertainty.

•   The Ugly Duckling is a fable about a mother duck who has laid her eggs, and all but the largest one have hatched. The mother duck is worried, so she continues incubating the remaining egg. Finally, when the egg hatches, the little duckling that emerges proves to be very ugly, so all the other ducks make fun of him. He is often hurt by his peers, who don’t like him, so he decides to go out into the world, where he has many adventures and painful experiences. In the mean-time, he grows up to be an adult. One day, he sees swans flying in the air, and the swans land on the water where he is swimming. He sees his own image in the water and realizes that he looks the same as the swans. The swans accept him, and from that moment on he lives happily ever after. The stories in this chapter are about change, about people not being happy where they are, and most importantly, finding their true self as a result of their adventures.

•   The Little Mermaid is a story about the widowed Sea King and his six daughters, who all lived deep under the sea. The youngest daughter was the prettiest one. She was very interested in the world of humans. The girls were only allowed to see the outside world once they reached their 15th birthday. Each time when her five elder sisters returned, they all told a different story about it. When her turn came, the youngest got involved with a young prince. She got to know him, and even saved his life, but the prince could not return the favor. The little mermaid paid a high price for getting to know the outside world, and did everything for her love, even at the cost of her own life. This chapter contains stories about the importance of being a woman: the woman as a seductress, as a mother and in many other roles.

•   The tale of The Steadfast Tin Soldier