Add Power and Velocity to Launching a New Business or Making a Breakthrough

One of the areas we will be breaking ground in this year at Masterful Coaching is a new program for entrepreneurs called Mastering Entrepreneurship. This one-year coaching program is designed for entrepreneurs who are in the start up phase, or small business owners who wake up every day staring at a wall and want to break through.

In the program, I will meet with a small group of budding CEOs (five people), four times a year, backed up with individual monthly coaching calls and a monthly group lunch for team learning. In conjunction with this new program, Vivian Song, President of Masterful Coaching Global, will be heading up a new chapter of the Boston Entrepreneurs Club, in part to launch this new venture, which is based on a whole new concept.

Why is coaching entrepreneurs relevant today? For one thing, entrepreneurship is a great way to create jobs in a sputtering economy. It also is a critical aspect of the trend towards globalization with $3 billion new capitalists. Interestingly enough, Congress is even considering passing a Start Up Visa Act to help foreign entrepreneurs with hot ideas and $250k to invest to come to America and go straight to Silicon Valley. The proposed act is being backed by Republicans, Democrats, and 126 venture capital firms. This is a great expression of globalization, and we want to be a part of it.

Beyond that, one of the main reasons we are starting this program is that the rate of “necessity entrepreneurship” (people starting businesses because other income opportunities are gone) increased to 24.7% of new U.S. ventures in 2009, up from 16.3% in 2007. For some of these entrepreneurs, getting laid off has presented them the opportunity to pursue business ideas they have long had, but didn’t try because they were getting a paycheck. These newly minted CEOs not only need help in launching their new business ventures, but need to generate a cash flow before their money runs out.

In our view, the MC Entrepreneurship Coaching Program will add tremendous power and velocity to the process of launching a new business, much more so than your typical three-day program, in part because instead of just focusing on teaching theory, we actually roll up our sleeves and work hand-in-hand with people over the course of the year to get their business off the ground.

Today, over 2000 B-schools teach classes in entrepreneurship, taking all comers: corporate refugees, striving immigrants, bored housewives, social workers, musicians. While there are a lot of people studying entrepreneurship, a new study by the Kaufman Foundation indicates that most of the B-schools haven’t figured out how to teach it. As evidence of this, less than 2% of the graduates of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business Entrepreneur program actually start their own business. The same pattern follows with other schools.

In thinking about the Masterful Coaching Entrepreneurship program, we asked ourselves: “What’s missing from this picture?” First of all, most B-schools and adult-ed programs tend to focus on coming up with a great business idea. While this is obviously important, the Masterful Coaching program will focus on follow through. We believe that coaching people in the process is the fastest, most powerful way for people to start their own business or achieving a business breakthrough.

It’s been my experience in working with hundreds of entrepreneurs that the acid test of whether a new venture is going to fly or not is not how great the business plan is (although this is important), but whether people get out of their chairs and take immediate action. The role of the coach is to create a climate of accountability and breakthrough that gets people into action that results in a rallying momentum.

If you or someone you know would like more info about the Entrepreneurs Club or who would like to participate in the Mastering Entrepreneurship Coaching Program, please contact Vivian Song at Vivian.Song@MasterfulCoachingGlobal.com.

Stop Acting Like the Grand Inquisitor

Dear HR Exec,
When I wrote my book Masterful Coaching in 1995, I ranted about a schism that took place in the history of management, which involved taking business results and putting it in the hands of the P&L managers and leadership development and putting it in the hands of HR.

The result was a wrong-headed approach to leadership development that was based on developing a list of homogenized corporate leadership competencies and forcing them on everyone in the organization. In my book, I was in effect attempting to rectify this wrong-headed paradigm. I wrote that leaders develop in the process of going for an Impossible Future and achieving extraordinary and tangible results. Since that time, executive coaching has really taken off.

I received a letter this morning that indicated that certain HR execs are becoming very threatened by the dramatic growth of the coaching movement. Further, they not only want to control coaching in their organizations, but make sure that it fits their worn-out, burned-out leadership development paradigm. This letter came from a person who was very excited about the MC Certification process, but who suddenly dropped out due to the threat of an HR Inquisition.

Please read the letter and then think about how you would handle a situation like this.

Hi Robert,

My apologies for the delay in responding to my earlier communication to you regarding my decision to defer the Masterful Coaching Certification process. Unfortunately, my communication with you coincided with a difficult work time and demanding travel schedule.

While I am still personally and professionally committed to learning and applying the Masterful Coaching process, I will likely need to find alternative options to practice it. The political chessboard here is requiring that I deviate from the process to a degree that I am not comfortable with, and I would not waste your time in trying to resolve.

For example, I am not allowed to use the word “coaching” in my efforts; whether it be in how I present myself or in the documentation I share during the process. Coaching is falling under the control of HRD and is being tightly controlled, with a primary focus on coaching to competencies.

Additionally, we could not use the 360 feedback process, which I think is critical to the coaching process. Corporate HRD is developing a company standard for 360 feedback, again revolving around defined “leadership competencies.” There are similar roadblocks along the balance of the process.

I was attracted to the process you developed based on my experience of what works and doesn’t work in trying to lead people through significant change efforts. I believe your process has integrity and I don’t want to spend my time, or yours, trying to adapt it to a highly restrictive environment that will build an “impossible future” around a narrowing set of constraints.

I will continue to explore opportunities to practice as much of the methodology as possible in this environment, while searching for opportunities (clients) where I could focus on truly learning and applying the process as intended. Be assured my interest in and commitment to learning the process is intact, but I will need to pursue other avenues toward certification. This decision may well take me down external paths for an environment supporting this expectation.

I wish you well and appreciate your guidance to date.

Best Regards,
John

Make sure your coachee has big ambitions

I am often asked by people in our Masterful Coaching Certification program, “How do you tell if someone is a good candidate for coaching?” This is a great question, as picking the wrong person to coach can lead to a very frustrating experience. Start with the right mindset: the coach must choose the people they work with based on a set of selection criteria vs. the other way around.

One of the things I look for in selecting coachees is someone with a big ambition, both personal and organizational. If a person has no ambition except to retire in a couple of years and be a high school teacher or curio shop owner, they are probably not the right person.

First I look for someone who has a big ambition for themselves personally. For example, even though we may not think of them that way, our greatest presidents—Washington, Lincoln, FDR—were all highly ambitious.

Washington had a special military uniform made for himself that made him look like a great decorated general, even when he was only off fighting Indians in the Virginia militia.

Lincoln wanted to become President because he wanted to prove to himself that someone from dirt poverty could reach the top. In China, Mao Tse Tung did just about every ruthless thing you can imagine to get to the top.

Having said, that it’s important that the person not only have a big personal ambition, but that these are wedded to strong organizational ambitions consistent with fundamental human values. Mao Tse Tung wanted to take China from being a backward feudal country to a world power.

If the person’s outsized personal ambition dwarfs their organization ambition, you wind up with a dictator like Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, or Adolf Hitler. I would advise early in the coaching relationship (or even before it starts) to just ask people: What is your biggest personal ambition? What is your biggest organizational ambition? The answers should tell you a lot.

My Advice to Wei Cheng: Make the Shift From Cop to Coach

I had dinner this past week at my home in the Boston area with Wei Cheng, Chief Regulator for China’s SOI’s (the top 128 companies to be exact, 1/3 of China’s GDP). He is a very smart guy, with roots in a humble farming family. He struck me as one of China’s future leaders, who at 38 or so was well on his way to making his mark.

I had heard Wei Cheng speak to a group of entrepreneurs at a Chinese New Year’s Gala the previous week about business opportunities in China. He emanated a kind of gravitas that captivated people’s attention. You could have heard a pin drop in the room.

As we sat around the coffee table in my living room, he said he heard about my work as an Executive Coach and talked to me about the possibility of working together. “I like your idea of Better Leaders, Better China,” he said, “help me to make better leaders.” (I wrote an article with this title a few years ago. If you would like a copy, let me know.)

I asked him to explain his goals and challenges in his job, and he pulled out a notebook and spoke to me courageously in English (much better than my Chinese). He said he had the power and influence to create an Impossible Future for many Chinese companies, but given the large number, his direct impact was limited.

He explained that one policy he had attempted to institute was that every big Chinese company have a strategy for becoming a global brand outside of China itself. He explained that most the CEOs of these companies had made a “commitment,” but there is a difference between commitment and mere compliance.

When I asked him what recourse he had, he replied that he could fire these CEOs if they didn’t comply. Then he back tracked by explaining the conundrum he faced. If he took the route of chopping CEOs’ heads off, they would only see him as a cop. Yet if he did nothing, they would not take the policy seriously.

I suggested he make the shift from thinking of himself as a Cop (regulator) to thinking of himself as a Coach, whose job was to bring out the best in these CEOs and their respective companies. He seemed to light up when he heard this, so I made a few other suggestions as well.

I said, “Over the course of the next year, instead of focusing on all 128 Chinese companies, why don’t you and your team focus on coaching 10 of these companies that really have the chance to become a global brand?” Finally, I suggested, “You could also set up a coaching process for recruiting, developing, and retaining board members for your companies.”

It was an interesting evening and we are exploring the possibility of working together.

The Checklist Manifesto

Masterful coaching is like dancing with the stars. You have to teach talented executives to do something they are totally unaccustomed to doing. First you have to get people to step out into their Impossible Future. Then you have to get them to shift their weight to the opposite foot and make sure they do what is necessary to keep their day job. Finally, they have to keep practicing this until they can do it with so much style and skill that their performance wows those watching.

What makes this so challenging is the incredible number of demands coming at executives and the level of change and complexity they usually have to deal with. It’s easy, despite good intentions, for something related to their vision or their day job to drop through the cracks.

If this is an issue for you as coach, I suggest picking up a copy of Dr. Atul Gawande’s book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. Gawande states that checklists can help anyone both prepare for the future and, at the same time, survive in their day job.

Gawande proves his point through a steady accretion of examples, starting with an Impossible Future at Boeing. In 1935, the company had staked its hopes on the B-17 bomber. However, the bomber crashed on its first test flight because it proved too complex for the skilled test pilot to manage.

The U.S. Army Air Corp ordered planes from Douglas instead, and Boeing nearly went bankrupt. But some test pilots believed in the B-17. They came up with a takeoff checklist to guide a pilot through all the crucial steps to get the plane airborne. Checklists in hand, pilots went on to fly the B-17 for more than 1.8 million miles without an accident. The Army ultimately ordered 13,000 B-17s, giving the U.S. a decisive air advantage in World War II....and pilot checklists became universal.

Gawande examines all manner of disparate tasks—from landing a plane on the Hudson River to building a skyscraper, to operating on patients—to show how checklists can improve outcomes. For example, he explains how a simple five-item checklist in the operating room can dramatically reduce hospital-acquired infections, which kill 99,000 Americans a year.

After reading the book, I was struck by a brilliant flash of the obvious: get each person you are coaching to create one five item checklist that pertains to their Impossible Future and which represents the bold and unreasonable actions that need to be taken in the next 30 days or so. Create another five item checklist that relates to repetitive (routine) tasks of the coachee’s day job.

Gawande says coming up with the right checklist isn’t always easy or obvious, but once you nail that, it’s a very powerful tool. As a coach, offer to be a thinking partner on this and monitor progress regularly.