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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Transform the next generation of talent into capable and productive leaders In Leadership Revolution: The Future of Developing Dynamic Leaders, distinguished executive coach Lori Mazan delivers an exciting new approach to leadership development tailor-made for the 21st century. Drawing on lessons learned from coaching top executives for 25 years and from democratizing executive coaching by founding a cutting-edge scalable leadership coaching firm, you'll learn how to attract and retain talent by accelerating and individualizing their professional growth and how to re-think leadership in the new remote and hybrid work environment. You'll also discover how to help your staff flourish by relying on a sense of community and shared purpose, even when they're working from a distance. The book includes: * Concrete, hands-on strategies for becoming a leader who develops other leaders * Ways to avoid the creation of a gap between the upper echelon of executives and high-potential managers and grow a diverse leadership pipeline * Techniques for carefully considering a potential leader's skills, experiences, and interests while moving them up the leadership ladder * Deep understanding of how leadership coaching opens the door to breakthrough thinking and results * How to move from the traditional focus on measuring activities to measuring and cultivating true developmental and organizational impact An invaluable and practical strategy guide for leadership and talent development, Leadership Revolution is the perfect resource for managers, executives, coaches, and other business leaders looking for proven ways to shape the next generation of leaders in their firms.
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Seitenzahl: 364
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Preface
The Spirit of a Coaching Engagement
What's Ahead
PART I: Clarity
CHAPTER 1: The Big Leap
The Unity of Opposites
Coaching's “Secret Weapon” Era
The Platinum Rule
“You Can't Ask That Question”
Your Progress Is
Your
Job
The Gasp
CHAPTER 2: Letting Go of Outdated Thinking
The Trouble with Popeye
Power Matching
The Compliance Mentality
Why Do I Have to Stop?
Putting People in Boxes
Change Mindsets to Change Behavior
“Problem Children” and Other Things HR Sees
Reimagining Potential
Avoiding the Easy Way
CHAPTER 3: What Do You (Really) Want?
Any Road Won't Do
The Long Shadow of
in Loco Parentis
Hiring Adults
Mommy Benefits
Make It Meaningful
Eye‐of‐the‐Storm Wants
Thinking Partners
Is Being Right Really All You Want?
Following the Rules Is Not Enough
How to Get Beyond “Being Right”
Next!
PART II: Challenge
CHAPTER 4: Jumping off the Cliff
The Lesson of the Lavender Suit
Thinking versus Doing
Three Ways Forward
Breaking through the Excuses Barrier
Collecting Nos
Paying the Piper
“Tell Me to Get Going”
Wait, Are We Just Starting?
Just Make It to the Deck
“I'll Jump with You”
CHAPTER 5: Break Down
Persistence over Time
Feeling Failure
Blame and Courage
Breaking (Failure) Down
But What If I
Do
Get Fired?
Leave It Behind
What Will Be Successful Next?
Break Through
The Path of Action
The Choice Is Yours
CHAPTER 6: Breakthrough
Learning by Sparring
Why We Get Stuck on the Horizontal
The Real‐Life Test
That's Not a Nail
Interweaving
Maximum Capacities
The Right Timing
Context Is King
Breakthrough
CHAPTER 7: The Third Right Answer
How Do I Think about This?
Beyond Binary
Embrace the Unexpected
Judgment
Endless Alternatives
CHAPTER 8: Making New Choices
Community, Not Family
Cooperative Competition
The Balanced Equation
The Pandemic Effect
Levels of Community
So Close You Can't See Anything
Beyond the Third Right Answer
CHAPTER 9: Why Context Is Key
Who Is in the Context
Coaching in Context
On the Levels
Culture Clashes
Stay or Go
The Mantra Method
Context as Opportunity
The Coaching Context
PART III: Impact
CHAPTER 10: Lasting Change
The Democratization of Complexity
Don't Hire a Soccer Coach to Teach Tennis
Coach First
Coach (Only) Leadership
Create Lasting Change
Boldly Level Up the Leader
See Blind Spots—and Peek Around Corners
You're Not a Coach Until You've Been “Fired”
Organizational Impact
Use Technology to Deepen Coaching Impact
CHAPTER 11: The Power of Alignment
Activity Isn't Enough
Alignment, Not Uniformity
Mind the Gap
Working with Heart
What Does Your Company Really, Really Want?
Don't Focus on the Problem Outliers
The Risk (and Why to Take It)
CHAPTER 12: The Big Beyond
Building a Leader Success Model
Flexibility (Finding Balance)
Measuring from the Outside
Self‐Reliance
The Self‐Reliant Organization
Celebrating the Big Beyond
Notes
Chapter 2: Letting Go of Outdated Thinking
Chapter 3: What Do You (Really) Want?
Chapter 4: Jumping off the Cliff
Chapter 6: Breakthrough
Chapter 7: The Third Right Answer
Chapter 8: Making New Choices
Chapter 10: Lasting Change
Chapter 12: The Big Beyond
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 6
Table 6.1 Twenty‐first‐century leader development
List of Illustrations
Chapter 6
FIGURE 6.1 A comparison of horizontal and vertical development.
FIGURE 6.2 Horizontal development.
FIGURE 6.3 Vertical development.
FIGURE 6.4 Horizontal and vertical development work together.
Chapter 11
FIGURE 11.1 Example of a manager‐reflection questionnaire.
FIGURE 11.2 Example of gap analysis.
Chapter 12
FIGURE 12.1 A model for leadership‐capacity building.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Preface
Begin Reading
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
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LORI MAZAN
PRESIDENT AND CHIEF COACHING OFFICER, SOUNDING BOARD, INC.
LEADERSHIP REVOLUTION
THE FUTURE OF DEVELOPING DYNAMIC LEADERS
Copyright © 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
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ISBN 9781394171828 (cloth)ISBN 9781394171842 (ePub)ISBN 9781394171835 (ePDF)
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To my son Mike and his generation of present and future leaders.
Foreword
I never found leadership literature to be all that helpful. Throughout my career as an eager, ambitious leader, I often googled and read leadership books, articles, and how‐tos as I encountered various leadership challenges. Although I got great frameworks and tips, it was hard to translate them into the situation in front of me.
So it's ironic that I'm now writing this Foreword for “yet another” leadership book. What I hope you will realize is that this is not just a leadership book. It has all the elements of a great leadership book—strong perspectives, innovative ideas, and, of course, incredible stories. But it's so much more. This isn't a how‐to. It's a systematic breakdown of the process of aligning the individual values, belief systems, and mindsets that we all carry into the organizations that we work with throughout our careers. Lori's guidance is not just theoretical; it is an approach grounded in real‐world experiences, offering practical tools and actionable insights that will undoubtedly transform the way you lead. And you'll be able to apply it again and again as you find yourself faced with new challenges.
I got to experience this process firsthand when Lori became my coach. My work with her transformed who am I as a leader and a person—so much so that I decided we needed to start a company together to scale this experience to thousands. I've shared the origin story of Sounding Board with many people—how Lori helped me uplevel a business to hundreds of millions in revenue, and navigate the challenges as a young executive at a high‐growth startup. But what I haven't shared is that I was actually a reluctant skeptic. I didn't believe that I needed any help—after all, I had been one of the youngest, fastest‐promoted executives. Didn't that prove I knew what I was doing?
What I've learned, and what I hope you'll learn, from this book is that while it may be easier to keep doing what we know and going it alone, there is another level you can unlock in your life, particularly your professional career, if you don't. Everyone needs a sounding board. Through the lens of dynamic development and the Leadership Revolution, Lori will challenge you to become more self‐aware, think about the “third option,” and cultivate a dynamic mindset that will equip you to take that “big leap” in our ever‐evolving world.
Lori, thank you for everything. You've been an incredible coach and partner for me on our vision to build the world's most impactful leaders. I'm so excited for you to share your approach with the world, and help millions of leaders find their own “green suit.”
Christine Tao
CEO and Co‐Founder, Sounding Board, Inc.
Preface
In my years in leadership development—first in traditional corporate training, then as an early practitioner in the emerging field of leadership coaching, and ultimately as an entrepreneur working to make leadership coaching accessible at much greater scale—I've seen and experienced a lot of change.
And I've encouraged change, too. Today's work world is so different from the one I started in that it requires an entirely different and much more dynamic mindset to succeed. If you try to develop leaders the way it was done 30 years ago, you won't get far.
Everyone knows this. But to a shocking degree, many organizations and managers stick to old assumptions and practices. Maybe most of all, they still assume that there is some single answer or set of answers that will work for every developing leader, in every context. It's an almost industrial‐era mindset that's completely out of sync with the modern world. Yet it stubbornly hangs on.
But part of what drew me to coaching in the first place was the realization that this isn't true. An effective coach doesn't tell you what to do. Rather, an effective coach functions as a sounding board, or what I sometimes call a thinking partner, who helps you decide what to do, based on your context, by offering fresh and often challenging perspectives. An effective coach is not focused on procedure or applying the same leadership approach to every client. An effective coach is focused on outcome and results that coachees arrive at in their own way.
There's an art to this, as you'll see in the pages ahead, but for now just know that it goes beyond a one‐size‐fits‐all methodology following prescribed steps in a certain order. By design, this approach is much more fluid—almost a conversation of thinking.
This willfully flexible, responsive approach is exactly why coaching has proven so effective. For years, top executives knew that effectiveness, because they were the only ones with access to it. But that's changing. In fact, that's the change I'm encouraging, through my career and, now, through this book.
The Spirit of a Coaching Engagement
There is most certainly a tried and tested methodology guiding the arc of a successful coaching engagement—and I've built this book to reflect and echo that arc. Think of the 12 chapters as 12 coaching sessions, each building on the last.
To help capture that flavor, each chapter/session begins with a snippet of coach–coachee dialogue that sets up what's about to be explored. And each ends with a set of provocative suggestions for further exploration. That reflects the way I conclude a session in real life: We cover a lot of territory, but it needs to end with what you make of it, discussing what's sticking, how it's shaping your point of view, what you are going to do about it.
This may sound like an untraditional approach for a book—but that's the point. I wrote this book because it is time to break with the old assumption that what works for one emerging leader works for all emerging leaders. We can't keep doing things the way they've “always” been done in an environment that has not only radically changed but that will keep on changing. What we need is not another prefab set of supposedly universal “rules,” but, rather, the nimbleness and openness to respond to an environment in which the rules are changing all the time.
That's why this book is intentionally shaped so that it speaks to, and can be read from, multiple perspectives. Ideas about this new thinking on leadership development are examined, and their implications and opportunities explored, from several angles: a coach's point of view, an employee's point of view, and an organizational point of view.
Depending on who you are, where you are in your career, and what your context is, this book will—like a good coaching cycle—engage you in different ways. I hope you'll embrace that. What we're offering here is not a presentation; it's an informed and challenging conversation. That's where leadership development is headed, and there's no turning back.
This book is intentionally shaped so that it speaks to, and can be read from, multiple perspectives.
Coaching is not only about doing, and it's definitely not about following a universal series of steps. Certainly coaching is focused on results and outcomes, but it's also about helping people to increase self‐awareness, as well as coaxing them into new ways of thinking, all the while modeling how to deal with the unknown, with ambiguity, with the undeveloped space that leads to innovative thinking. In this book, sometimes I am telling and explaining, sometimes I am coaxing, and sometimes I am just helping people get comfortable with an unpredictable world. It's a balance, because this is not a self‐help book. Yet sometimes I can offer ideas that can help people help themselves.
In that spirit, I'll sketch where we're headed from here.
What's Ahead
A productive coaching engagement starts with identifying the Big Leap that the coachee wants—or perhaps needs—to make. This is counterintuitive to some, who expect things to start with a lot of delving into what got the leader to this point. But it's actually better to focus on the future, and set the stakes, right away. Often, coachees are taken aback at the immediate challenge. And that's the idea.
Getting clarity on the Big Leap is a vital step, but of course it's only the first step. It's seldom, if ever, possible to offer a specific roadmap for the arc of a coaching engagement, but the rest of Part I of the book follows the theme of this chapter: figuring out how to make a Big Leap that is personalized to the individual and uniquely theirs, and still appropriate to the twenty‐first‐century workplace.
So, far starters: Out with the old. Breaking out of old patterns is always key to real change, so we'll delve into what that means for cultivating leaders at all levels, whether at big, established firms, or brand‐new start‐ups. Too much management practice today is based on thinking developed as far back as the 1950s. It's time to figure out what to hang on to—and what to discard.
The next step is to confront an eternal theme that's often ignored: Chances are, what you are doing now isn't creating what you want. That's why you—whether you're in HR, a manager, a CEO, a coachee, or a coach—need to focus on sorting out what you want. What you really, really want. And that may well mean embracing unpredictability and ambiguity.
This means learning to deal with resistance: from your organization or from yourself. Everyone is familiar with the feeling (or the colleague's excuse that “This always worked for me before” or “I don't know what else to do!”). The key is breaking through to new ways of thinking, and one framework for doing so is learning the difference between horizontal and vertical development models. You'll learn why to seek community—not “family.” And you'll see why what matters is alignment—not uniformity.
The book's second section echoes the middle sessions of a coaching engagement: a crucial period, when the coachee can fall into the trap of feeling they've made changes, but most of those changes are (so far) superficial. It's in these sessions that the engagement must deepen, recommitting to a true Big Leap.
This flows directly into cycles of new actions and new behaviors that result in real impact and real growth. The specifics depend on understanding the culture and context in which you're operating (one size does not fit all!), and by learning to differentiate among diverse possibilities, you'll learn how to focus on (and achieve) real payoffs.
These middle sessions of a coaching engagement—and the middle chapters of this book—face down the real challenges of making true progress. This includes learning to confront and to break down failures and faulty steps. For individuals and organizations alike, taking novel steps and actions is risky, but that's okay: While difficult and messy, it's the only way to find the answers that lead to real progress. And as the coachee gets comfortable with this new way of thinking, breakthroughs follow.
For organizations, this can entail a similar embrace of new thinking around how leaders are developed and evaluated. It means less emphasis on the safe and familiar practice of cultivating “skills,” and the more challenging practice of cultivating the leadership “capacity” for coping with the unpredictable (which is central to effective leadership). The middle sessions of a coaching engagement involve facing hard truths about making genuine change. But there are no easy shortcuts to real progress, and eventually that sinks in.
The book's third section reflects the home stretch of the cycle: As the pieces fall into place, the engagement becomes more and more forward‐looking, building momentum toward a fresh mindset. Similarly, the last chapters address how our company, Sounding Board, is making the coaching‐led development practice that has previously been accessible only to top executives much more available to a wider swath of management and aspiring leadership. Along the way, we've built our own systems for assessing and tracking leadership progress—methods that truly reflect the modern work dynamic in all its complexity, variety, and ambiguity.
Naturally a successful coaching cycle concludes with a well‐earned sense of celebration. But it also involves a question: Now what? The goal is to be ever forward‐looking, but also to leave the coachee with a sense of having attained a set of vital capabilities. A good coach fosters a sense of independence. The idea is: You've made a big leap—now keep going!
So what about your big leap? That's where we start: You have to accept that there is no single, works‐for‐everybody, five‐check‐points leadership paradigm. If you realize that the whole idea of leadership being one specific thing is simply a comforting myth, then you're ready to take the big leap into figuring out what works best for your company, your managers, your team, for you. Like a successful coaching relationship, this will take some work. But in the end, you'll find a new beginning.
PART IClarity
CHAPTER 1The Big Leap
I guess you'll need me to tell you a lot about my background.
Coach: Actually, we won't need to dwell too much on the past.
Then where should we begin?
Coach: Let's focus on what you really care about: your future.
Let's start with a big leap.
That's how a winning coaching relationship begins, not (contrary to common assumption) with a slow, meticulous excavation of the past, but with a clear, even blunt articulation of aspirations and goals. What are we trying to do here? What change do we wish, or need, to achieve?
In the case of this book, we need to start with a leap beyond the familiar “leadership” paradigm. At various points in my career I've been pressured to define a leadership philosophy that outlines “this is what it is to be a good leader.” But I have remained adamant that I am not—and my company is not—going to do that. That's because (here's the big leap) there is no single leadership paradigm. We need to start by breaking the myth that being a leader means one specific thing.
For some reason, people resist this idea. So much leadership thinking dating back to the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s literally argues that to be a successful leader you must follow some very specific model: You have to be a leader like this. And then they'll proceed to name, say, five particular traits. I have read dozens of books like this—and I thought every one of them was wrong.
Not just wrong, but disappointing. Often my clients would say, “Oh, I read this book, and people are saying this is what successful leaders look like, so I want to have these five traits, too,” but those traits didn't match with who they were as a person at all.
For example, I remember one client, a very analytical type, really rational and deliberate. He'd been quite successful. But then he'd read in some leadership book that was trendy at the time that leaders must be “charismatic.” And he was pretty introverted. So he tried to become charismatic, and soon people who worked with him began asking, “What's wrong? Why are you acting like this?” It was all so out of character that some of his colleagues wondered if he was ok. That's one of the reasons he ended up seeking a coach—me. He explained how he'd read that he had to be charismatic. As with other clients who have tried to follow some supposedly universal success blueprint, I'd say, “Ah, well, to do that, you're going to become a totally different person.”
And of course that's not sustainable. Because under stress, people default back to who they are. A leader is not going to be able to maintain a leadership façade that doesn't match who they are for very long, so why waste time trying to fit in someone else's mold? Let's find the style of leadership that matches who you really are as a leader, and that is also successful and influential and impactful. This will be an approach that a leader can sustain over time, because it fits their natural way of being. (That charisma‐seeking client was relieved he could stop devoting all this energy to trying to become a different person. He was already successful in his own style, and we just needed to focus on enhancing that success, mostly through improving his communication skills and habits, but in the context of his natural way of being.)
The best leaders are the people who can blend their authentic self with a set of skills, capabilities, and capacities.
To be clear, this doesn't just mean “be yourself, period.” After many years of “five traits” style advice, some of the leadership literature swung the other way with the concept of “authentic leadership.” This approach suggests that to be successful you should be only “who you are”—be purely authentic at all times. This doesn't work, either. I might strike a strict tone at home, or give my kids the hairy eyeball, but that wouldn't be appropriate with a direct report. I once ran a training course for an oil company where one manager in the group kept making double entendre jokes about “horizontal drilling.” I'm sure he was being his authentic “funny” self, but obviously you shouldn't be telling those kinds of jokes at work. Good leaders can't just blurt out anything that comes into their mind! They need to have skills, and use and think about them strategically. The best leaders are the people who can blend their authentic self with a set of skills, capabilities, and capacities.
The Unity of Opposites
So how do you find the place in the middle, blending who you naturally are with the skills and capabilities you need? It's elusive, to say the least. Just naming five traits is so much easier than trying to identify where the self and leadership interconnect. I've practiced Tai Chi Chuan for three decades, and one of its ideas that I use constantly is called “ the unity of the opposites.”
Just naming five traits is so much easier than trying to identify where the self and leadership interconnect.
This does not mean compromise. Most people think when you're trying to deal with dichotomies, you have to somehow compromise or come down in the middle. But the unity of opposites is more of a blend. In this case that means blending what makes good leaders—including appropriate traits for you—with who you naturally and authentically are. This is the magic formula.
It's not a compromise, because you are still being yourself, but in a leadership role. Think of it as your authentic self, wrapped in clothing of your role. That clothing has to fit not only your body but also with your style. Back in the 1950s and 1960s: Men wore a similar corporate uniform, right? Black suit, white shirt, and so on.
My dad had those suits, too, but he quietly refused to only wear that. I remember him wearing a green suit sometimes, and I'm sure he was the only guy in the office wearing a green suit. He first wore it on St. Patrick's Day. After that subtle change, he began wearing it as part of his regular rotation. He still wore his black and white to the big meetings but softly added a little of his own style into the mix. One of the big differences between the previous century and this century is that people now want to be themselves at work. In the past, maybe people wanted to be told how to “dress for success.” Now everyone would just laugh at that. “You can't tell me how to dress!” they say. This more independent willingness to be yourself is a part of a new way of being at work.
Maybe the pendulum has swung a little too far, now that it's gone from “wear a black suit and a white shirt” all the way over to “wearing your pajamas on Zoom is fine.” The point is, my dad wore those black suits when he needed to. But then other times, he just wore something else. He was able to blend.
The key, then, is not being the same person all the time, or showing the exact same behavior (or wearing the exact same clothes). It's ensuring that your behavior is in alignment with who you are—even at work, even in the context of your leadership.
It’s ensuring that your behavior is in alignment with who you are—even at work, even in the context of your leadership.
The idea of trying to emulate five certain traits is the opposite of finding that blend. Those books and theories are too one‐size‐fits‐all, not allowing individuality or style differences, trying to force everyone into a black suit. The goal is to be secure in who you are and build from there. That's why what coaching does is the exact opposite of exploiting insecurities. It's about getting people comfortable with who they are, what their unique gifts are, and what their individual points of view are. It's about owning their personal experience and specific expertise and cultivating the ability to take the risk to show who they are—but still in the context of their leadership. It's about helping them, so to speak, find their perfect green suit.
Coaching's “Secret Weapon” Era
I've been an executive coach since the early 1990s—pretty much the beginning of the coaching industry—and it has turned out to be an interesting profession. In that time, two things happened. First, the coaching business itself has dramatically changed. And second, the process for developing leaders has changed, and is still changing.
In its early days, the practice of coaching was defined pretty narrowly. Originally associated with management‐professor‐turned‐coach Marshall Goldsmith, the practice was first seen as a process for helping “derailed” executives get back on track. (This term refers to executives with a successful track record, but whose progress had stopped short of their perceived potential.) At that time, coaching was a “behind closed doors” activity: Executives didn't want anyone to know they had a coach! Sometimes a leader would even make a deal with a coach on the side, without the company knowing. In my own early days, I sometimes had contracts with leaders drawn from their discretionary budget. For some, it became almost like a secret weapon. No one wanted to be seen as “derailed,” yet many saw the value of having a coach, much like an elite athlete.
Over time, HR departments got involved and a more formal process of coaching began. But there was not much oversight or clarity in reporting results, problems that in some ways still exist and that I'll address in the pages ahead. And while it was no longer such a secret activity, coaching was still widely seen as something only for the C‐suite.
That's finally changing—as it should. Coaching tuned to follow the specific needs of an organization, and the individuality of the coachee, can be useful for all layers of management, and for closing all sorts of leadership gaps. It can help leaders transitioning into new organizations, being promoted, or preparing for leadership roles, prepping for senior leadership, leading key initiatives. It can be an integral part of building a leadership bench or for developing diverse leadership. It's in tune with leadership's present, and future.
The Platinum Rule
In short, it’s time to stop relying on the leadership paradigms of the past century.
As the concept of coaching has evolved, so have the ideas about leadership, although those changes have been more gradual. That's why our big leap involves thinking about where leadership is going, not where it is or where it was. In short, it's time to stop relying on the leadership paradigms of the past century.
A lot of thinking around leadership has come out of thinking about parenting. For years, companies saw themselves as “in loco parentis,” hiring employees right out of school, managing their careers for them, and then taking care of them in retirement as well. So it's not surprising that past century leadership thinking had its roots in parenting. At that time, there was a push around the idea that parenting should be consistent—but since then, people have realized that consistency isn't a great ideal. What works for one of your children doesn't work for another who has a different personality or different talents and weaknesses.
The same is true in leadership. To achieve outcomes that feel fair, respectful, and productive, you can't just treat everyone the same. Workers with different backgrounds might require different approaches, distinct forms of help, development, or encouragement. To take a simple example I often use, a company might have a practice of rewarding a worker for a job well done with a public congratulations at a companywide meeting; sure, some will like being in the spotlight, but others will be mortified, and would have preferred a private note or some more personal reward.
Just being “consistent” actually doesn’t work, because figuring out how to treat employees means taking differences into account.
Now think how gender, or race, might apply. Just being “consistent” actually doesn't work, because figuring out how to treat employees means taking differences into account. The workforce was much more homogenous in the past when the concept of consistency was broadly applied. Now, workforce diversity is dramatically increased, with six or more generations in the workplace, and employees have very divergent backgrounds, culture, and ways of thinking.
We all know the Golden Rule: Treat others the way you would want to be treated. Well, when you're coaching, training, managing, or leading, replace this with the Platinum Rule: Treat others the way they want to be treated. This may not be the same as how you would like to be treated.
This can be challenging, particularly for large companies. It's much easier to create a blanket set of rules and expectations, and for years that's what companies have done. But today employees expect to be treated in a more personalized manner and want their specific circumstances considered. Developing a more individual approach to employee needs is a demanding new challenge. But it's also an unavoidable one.
The Platinum Rule: Treat others the way they want to be treated.
The underlying idea is that the majority of the population is not like you. Suppose that you are fairly similar to about 25% of the people you interact with. If you treat everyone how you want to be treated, you are only going to be doing the right thing for about a quarter of the people you're dealing with. Everyone else will be saying, “Why are they doing that? I don't like it.”
My philosophy is that there are capabilities or capacities that you have to develop as a leader, but there's no single set of answers, no checklist that applies to everyone. And one reason I believe this is because it's what I did! I wasn't willing to behave like a standard corporate America male leader. I mastered the skill sets and the mindsets related to that, but I did them in my own way, and in tune with my own personality. To do that, I had to take some big leaps.
“You Can't Ask That Question”
I was born in a little town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and when I got to school age, we moved to northern Virginia, closer to Washington, DC. I went to college at the University of Virginia, which had just gone co‐ed a few years earlier. I majored in psychology, with a biology minor.
I graduated in 1981—a recession year. In Virginia at that time, if you were a woman, you had about five career options. You could be a secretary. You could be a nurse. You could be a teacher. You could be a mother. You could be a mistress to someone in Congress. That was pretty much it. I didn't want to do any of those.
But UVA had something called an externship program; you would go to a location and have the experience of working there. Mine was at Stanford University, working in the student affairs office. I loved California. So I moved to San Francisco. (That was my first big leap.)
After a few years as a social worker, which broke my heart, I ended up working at a small university as the director of residence halls, while I got a graduate degree and trained as a therapist.
During my training, I would always ask clients questions that were some variation of: What have you done differently since the last time we got together? And my supervisors and advisers kept telling me: You can't ask that question. I was told that, instead, I must go back in time, and focus on healing my subject's traumas from the past. Although healing past trauma is obviously useful to undertake, my bent was so much more toward the present and future than the past. I found this approach to therapy wasn't a fit for me. My thinking was, this wouldn't help them today!
I didn't want to delve into people's pasts endlessly, in pursuit of healing, but without really changing anything tangible in the present. I wondered, “Now what am I going to do? I just spent three years getting a therapy license!” For a few years, I switched over to teaching social psychology and similar subjects, and I started exploring training and development, and started teaching subjects like leadership skills.
And then, around 1991, I heard about this thing called coaching. Right away, I discovered they were using my question: What have you done differently since the last time we talked?
I discovered they were using my question: What have you done differently since the last time we talked?
As soon as I heard that question being asked, I knew that this was the approach I'd been waiting for.
Your Progress Is Your Job
In the early 1990s, I trained at the Coaches Training Institute, which was maybe a year old at the time, and got certified. When the International Coaching Federation was established not long after, I was among the first few hundred ICF certified coaches in the world.
I put an ad in The Marin Independent Journal, a paper in the county where I lived at the time, north of San Francisco. It said, “Learning to be a coach; discounted sessions.” Everyone had told me it was almost impossible to get clients for this new profession, but I got about 100 responses. After spending 100 hours over a period of a couple of weeks talking with each person, I realized that most of them needed therapy as opposed to coaching, because they had to heal their past traumas before they would be able to move forward. This was surprising and a big validation for the therapeutic approach. But it wasn't the goal of coaching. Ultimately, I accepted one client.
Obviously traditional therapy has a lot of value, and coaching is no replacement for someone who needs that kind of help. And the two are not mutually exclusive. What appealed to me about coaching was that it was practical and forward looking. It was goal oriented: Here's where you are now. Here's where you want to be. How do you get there? By all means, if your past needs healing, do that work. But in the meantime, let's get your life functioning in a way that's helpful.
The one client that I took on from that initial batch of responses to my newspaper ad was the executive director of a climate change organization who wanted to influence its board and employees more successfully. That sounded interesting! And I was able to help her. (She eventually went on to be elected to the California State Assembly.)
My practice grew, and after about a year, I realized it was becoming too burdensome for me. I was feeling too responsible for my clients' lives. Clients kept asking me what I thought they should do, instead of doing the work to uncover what they wanted. They were looking for me to direct their lives.
At the time I had about 25 clients, and I proceeded to have the same conversation with each one of them. The message I sent was essentially, “I feel like I'm doing too much work on your behalf, and you're not doing enough work on behalf of yourself.”
Every one of those people laughed—and agreed.
I wasn't laughing. What I'd realized in my first year of private practice is that my clients' progress isn't my job. It's their job. The function of a coach is to be the sounding board for clients, the neutral observer and mirror that reflects back what they see and hear from the client. The goal is to deepen their introspection, guide them to a greater self‐awareness that allows them to make hard decisions, challenge them to shift their mindsets to the next level, and to champion and encourage them when they do.
So I said, “Here are your options: You can step up and take more responsibility for your own professional life, and we can keep working together. Or you can pause until you're ready to do that. Or we'll just wrap up, because maybe you don't have the time, motivation, or agency for this right now.”
Half of my clients left. But in the long run, that was the right step to take. (Another big leap.)
The ones who stayed really made progress. They took ownership of their own development instead of relying on me to “make them do it.” And so did the people that came in the door next. Soon enough, I found myself coaching in corporations. I did not set out to target the business world. In fact, I was a little bit anti‐establishment. And I had to get used to being the only female on the executive floor, or sometimes in the building, who was not a secretary.
