What's the Elephant in Your Meeting Room?

Elephant, a photo by steffi's on Flickr.

Isn't it fascinating that we all know there is an elephant in the room and nobody wants to acknowledge it.

How come?

Do You Even Like The People You Lead?

Do You Even Like The People You Lead?

Or what about kicking it up a notch as Emeril would say, do you love the people you lead?

Some years ago I was part of an event in Boston in which several sports coaches, among them were Red Auerbach, John Wooden and Tim Gallwey, they were sharing their ideas about coaching with a few hundred executives.

One of John Wooden's comments has stuck with me over the years. He said, "I would not have a player on my team I didn't love, that I would not be willing to invite home for Sunday lunch or even let date my daughter".  At the time, I am talking the mid 90s, that was a pretty radical notion for most executives.

The L word in business, are you serious?

Have Things Changed – And If So How?

Well most executive recognize that command and control, and instilling fear in people does not work. Apart from the fact that turnover is higher in fear-based organizations which is a competitive disadvantage, innovation and creativity does not thrive in an atmosphere of fear. 

But going from making the atmosphere less fear-driven, to liking the people you work with, to creating an atmosphere of love and caring, may be a step too far for many executives.

The Case For Love And Caring

John Mackey Co-CEO of Whole Foods and Raj Sisodia Marketing Professor and Bentley University have just published their latest book, Conscious Capitalism: Liberating The Heroic Spirit of Business.

It goes without saying that Whole Foods is a very successful company. Anyone who has had the experience of shopping at Whole Foods can hardly miss the fact that the people who work there are bright, engaged, knowledgeable, helpful – just all around nice people. 

Well, if there is a secret sauce to creating a great company of engaged people, Mackey and Sisodia have just let the cat out of the bag. 

They take us way beyond the cultural myths about what it takes to succeed in business like: only the paranoid survive and nice guys finish last, to a perspective that will be challenging for may executives. Challenging because many of these myths are deeply ingrained and, for some, they are not myths but truths. 

In my coaching of executives I ask executives to have the point of view that their organizations are a reflection of their own values and ways of being. Mackey and Sisodia say it this way, "Most corporate cultures don't value love and caring enough, because their leaders have not fully integrated these values into their own lives."

The Key Elements of A Conscious Culture and Leadership

I invite you to add to this list with the values you consider are essentials – to be lived in day-to-day interactions:

• Trust
• Being truly purpose-motivated
• Fostering conscious leadership
• Recognizing that trust is reciprocal
• Transparency
• Love and caring
• Banish fear
• Making tough decision with love and caring
• Acknowledgement and appreciation
• Personal responsibility and accountability
• Open honest and direct communication, engaged in with caring and compassion
• ...

So Why Have a Coach – You are Successful After All

So Why Have a Coach?

No major athlete would consider a career in his or her chosen sport without a coach. The same is true in the performing arts. When peak performance is the goal most players, no matter the field, have coaches.

So how come coaches aren't as prevalent or as prominent in the world of business?

• It's not because business in not competitive – some would say business is even more competitive than sports
• Most would agree the stakes are higher in business – which would argue for even more coaching
• Maybe it's the lack of play-by-play scrutiny that athletes and performers are subjected to that most executives can more easily avoid. Or more easily explain away. 

Notwithstanding the fact that most executives are very well trained and credentialed, and have access to lots of advice and mentoring from more senior executives, from their Board members, and from executives in their network of relationships – they still have plenty of missteps to their credit, and the rumor mill about the things they do that don't work is rich with stories. 

  

With A Coach You Get What Exactly?

• A partner who will help you see your blind-spots, the areas where you act inconsistently with your commitments and values, so you can correct 
• A thinking partner – someone who can help you sort out the nice to haves, the pipe dreams, from what you really, really, really want and are committed to so you can focus your energies and resources
• Someone who can help you discern straight talk from equivocation and obfuscation so at very least you will know when you are not being straight with people – so you can discover how come and correct. If straight talk was part of every meeting and performance review, for example, organizational performance would be significantly increased
• Someone who can help you surface the problems to solve that will have the highest leverage in forwarding the business
• Honest feedback – most C-Suite executives don't get honest feedback from colleagues and staff because most of the people they interact with have an agenda – looking good to the boss for example, or just not rocking the boat.

All of us have areas of unconscious incompetence – the moments before the aha, before the penny drops, before the epiphany – the primary role of a coach is to help the executive he of she is working with accelerate the process of discovering and correcting what stops, block and thwarts vision, commitment and execution.

To Succeed With a Coach You Need to Bring What Exactly?

• Your vision, commitments and intentions – and/or a willingness to explore what they are really
• An openness to being contributed to, to being helped – the lack of openness is the single biggest source of failed coaching relationships
• The willingness to establish criteria for success and failure – without failing and correction there is little room for growth and development
• A healthy compassion, for self and others – extraordinary performance in any field is not arrived at without disappointments, upsets, and a whole range of human emotions
• And all your existing business savvy and worldly wisdom.

So What do Successful C-Suite Executive Say About Coaching?

Paul Michelman, writing in the Harvard Business Review Working Knowledge, says that most major companies now make coaching a core part of their executive development programs.

Marshall Goldsmith, a coach to leaders in Fortune 500 companies and author of The Leader of the Future, argues leaders need coaches when “they feel that a change in behavior—either for themselves or their team members—can make a significant difference in the long-term success of the organization.”

Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, who said that his best advice to new CEOs was "have a coach." Schmidt goes on to say "once I realized I could trust him [the coach] and that he could help me with perspective, I decided this was a great idea..." Mike Myatt says in his article, The Benefits of a Top CEO Coach.

So What Do You Say?

Share your experience and perspectives.

A REALLY Successful CEO On Trust

Jerre Stead Chairman & CEO of IHS

Talking on the topic of Aligning People and Sustaining a Culture of Innovation from a panel discussion in San Francisco in October 2012 from Chief Executive January/February 2013 p62 :

"We actually create a culture that operates with 100 percent trust of every person in the company. If you don't do that, you'll never maximize innovation. Back when I was CEO at Square D, an 85-year old,very rigid company, a guy brought me two policy books with 650 corporate policies. I took them out in the parking lot and burned them. It worked. I wanted to get folks to understand [that] I trusted them"

Trust is a declarative phenomenon – I trust because I say so. It is the context for accountability and responsibility. It is the condition in which personal initiative thrives. It is the explicit permission to explore, experiment, fail, correct, learn and grow. It is the necessary condition for collaboration, and teamwork. 

When trust is withheld or when it is conditional – when they prove themselves, when I have evidence they are trustworthy, and so on – disempowerment is rampant, responsibility is missing and people are made subordinate to the micro-managing whims of their bosses. In other words people have be systematically de-geniused.