Making a Difference in South Africa

This morning I received a letter from Rubi Davids, a coach and mentor in South Africa. It really inspires me to get letters like this from people who have read my books and are applying it to make a difference in their world. So, if you are out there, I would love to hear from you. I would like to share Rubi’s letter to me and my response.

Dear Mr. Hargrove, I have been involved in coaching, counseling, and mentoring for many years now. I reside in Cape Town. There has been a significant increase in depression in teen girls especially, so that I decided to design a mentoring program - older women mentoring teen girls. This program has been accepted by many Cape Flats Communities and has had a great positive impact in the lives of these teen girls. This year I have embarked on a certificate course in Coaching at the University of Stellenbosch and as a practical book assignment, I chose to read your book "Masterful Coaching." It has really given me a deeper insight into coaching and I am really inspired by the work you have done. I have just learned about your new book and will be investing in purchasing one. Kind Regards, Rubi Davids

Hello Rubi, Thanks for writing me. It’s great to hear my message about Masterful Coaching is getting out there in the world, and especially South Africa, a country I visited, several times and have a fond regard for.

I did a coaching program in the Northern Transvaal 10 or 15 years ago called “Battle of the Races” trying to build shared understanding between blacks and whites in that area. It was very rewarding personally.

Several people have written me about coaching and mentoring with respect to SA Street Kids, but you’re the first who wants to do something for teen age girls. (BTW, I have three teenage girls in my own house and self esteem is an issue, even with all the advantages.)

It seems from the ten or so letters I have received from people in South Africa that the country is one that is very receptive at least to the whole idea of coaching.

Several people have asked me to come to SA to lead a Masterful Coaching Certification Program but they couldn’t find a sponsor who could put the finances together to make a trip by me possible. Others have wanted to come to Boston to take my program but in the end couldn’t afford it. I wish there was something we could do, as I really do love the country and its people.

Anyway, please do invest in a copy of the third edition of Masterful Coaching. It is by far the best and has 12 catalytic coaching conversations that will guide you in a year long coaching program. While it’s written with executives in mind, you can easily interpret it for any audience. I think it will really help you. All the best, and again, thanks for writing. It’s really appreciated. Robert Hargrove

Strategic thinking and inspiring leadership are in as biz digs out from the turmoil

At Masterful Coaching we take into account that you’re not going to get very far as a coach if you don’t have anyone to talk to. That’s why in the MC Certification Program we talk to you about your marketing efforts first and coaching methods second.

One good clue is to focus your marketing on companies that have a proven track record both in investing in leadership develop and in delivering bottom-line results.

I came across a 2010 report from the Hay Group recently that identified the top 20 companies for leadership development that you might find useful. For what it’s worth, I know for a fact that most of these companies use executive coaches. See study.

2009 TOP 20 BEST COMPANIES FOR LEADERSHIP

1. General Electric
2. Southwest Airlines
3. 3M Company
4. Procter & Gamble
5. Accenture
6. Wal-Mart
7. Nestle
8. Coca Cola
9. McDonald’s Corp
10. Infosys Technologies
11. IBM
12. Cisco
13. United Parcel Service
14. IKEA
15 ABB
16. Zappos
17. Hewlett-Packard
18. Goldman Sachs
19. Unilever
20. General Mills, Inc

Among the study findings: Strategic thinking and inspiring leadership are the most valued qualities in leaders this year, indicating that businesses are starting to dig out from the turmoil and are thinking more about their future long-term growth again.

Other areas were these companies excel compared to all respondents are:

- Actively manage a pool of successors for mission critical roles,

- People stay at the organization primarily for growth opportunities,

- Use corporate social responsibility to recruit employees,

- Have a high proportion of women in senior leadership, and

- Have a sufficient number of internal candidates ready to assume open leadership positions.

Note: The list was based on a survey of over 1000 companies world-wide, from 98 countries.

Fire the Leadership Training Department

GE is a company world famous for its leadership pipeline that turns out world-class CEOs, not only for GE but for other companies. It started back in the 50’s when GE CEO Ralph Cordiner decided to decentralize GE into a 150 operating units, each of which would require a CEO in its own right.

This led to developing a top down, centralized approach to leadership development made famous by Jack Welch and copied by many firms. Its hallmarks include coming up with a list of GE leadership competencies, sending high potential executives to the GE leadership center at Crotonville, and a month-long yearly talent review known as Session C, culling the bottom 10% of the management ranks.

However, there are signs that the basic paradigm of leadership development that GE made famous is about to change. It started when CEO Jeff Immelt was faced with the impact of the global banking crisis on GE Capital. This reduced the company’s net worth from something like $500 billion to $250 billion, and led to a precipitous drop in the stock price from $29 a share to about $6.

Up with CEOs Coaching High Potentials; Down with the Corp U

After going through what he termed as a period of “self reflection on steroids,” Immelt started re-visioning GE’s top-down, centralized, leadership development paradigm. To paraphrase his comments in a recent Businessweek article: Someone at GE Capital must have been thinking ‘Aren’t we overly invested in subprime housing shares?’ If they did, why didn’t they tell me? What kind of leaders are we developing around here?

Further, Immelt may have gotten wind of a quiet revolution brewing amongst GE executives who have started to question the wisdom of marching people off to abstract training programs and spending so much of their time away from the business and customers.

Today, Jeff Immelt’s new approach to leadership development looks much more like personalized coaching and much less like the top-down, centralized approach of yore. A few months ago, Immelt started what he calls a “sleep over” program. Each month, he holds 10 personal one-on-one dinners at his house with the top GE leaders.

Invest in Relationships with a Pivotal Few vs. Marching 100s Off to Abstract Training Programs

The typical evening involves a few drinks, a plate of pasta, and conversation focused on getting to know each other. At night, Immelt stays home and the executive goes back to the GE Conference Center. The next morning the executive returns and the two have something like a real coaching session on everything from leadership development to strategy, to current problems.

Immelt has also brought in (for the first time) to leadership coaches for many of GE’s top 150 leaders to work on their leadership and business challenges. In the past, coaching was reserved for remedial efforts. Immelt doesn’t quite say to fire the GE training department (the whole nine yards), preferring to say things like Crotonville, Session C, and Boca Raton meeting are cauldrons: “We have to change what happens in them.”

Focus Coaching on Real Goals, Not Artificial Leadership Competencies

However, my thought is that, if you keep these cauldrons, everything will take the shape of the container. I have been told many times by company Chief Learning Officers that they need to bring in coaching. The next thing you know, they invite me to do a 1 day training program on coaching versus actually pick a few executive as guinea pigs and provide them executive coaching.

Every company thinks they need a leadership development department, but I fundamentally question that assumption. The job of developing leaders in this approach is offloaded to HR or corporate universities, who for the most part, don’t operate in the world of business, customers, or results. On the contrary, I have seen first-hand the power that comes from a handful of executives declaring an Impossible Future and then deciding to take on the task of coaching the high potentials to help realize it.

That’s why I suggest throwing out the old top-down, centralized leadership development paradigm and the corporate universities and training departments that foster it, and replace it with something much more effective. To me, this looks like CEO’s and executives getting personally involved in setting high goals, hiring top talent, and then coaching people to accomplish what really needs to be accomplished.

Google's "Hire a Coach"

There are some signs that I am not alone in this thought process. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has said that the best advice he ever got when he became CEO was from the famous venture capitalist John Doerr: “Hire a coach!”

Google has a philosophy of hiring the best people, bringing them into a hot project, and setting them free. Google has no list of homogenized corporate leadership competencies, no formal leadership development program, and no culling of the bottom 10%. Why do that if you go to extreme ends to hire the most talented people in the world? However, Google does encourage high potentials (just about everybody) to get personal coaches.

Cathy Pacific's CoachingOurselves

Other companies, like Cathay Pacific, are experimenting with self-directed leadership development methods that smack of coaching, not the old training methods. Their Chief Learning Officer, Graham Barkus, has adopted an approach created by McGill University Professor Henry Mintzberg.

It’s called CoachingOurselves and is used for team learning. Each month a group is given a topic to learn about that has been thought through by a noted professor. For example, “leading change, by Harvard’s Joseph Kotter.” The participants come to the CoachingOurselves session, sans facilitator, having read the material and engage in a 90-minute dialogue.

The idea is for each student to reflect on the topic in light of a recent management experience and share their thoughts with the group. This leads to some very powerful and profound conversations.

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall. - Che Guevara

When I wrote my book Masterful Coaching in 1995, I had spent years criss-crossing the globe on business trips. I often sat next to executives on flights who would voice their disappointment with both leadership training and management consulting. The typical comment was: “We spent over a million on a McKinsey study last year and not a single recommendation was ever implemented.”

I heard similar complaints about leadership training: “Every year we march thousands off to abstract leadership training programs, but what’s the impact on bottom-line results?” I had my own well-established leadership training and consulting business, but I couldn’t keep from asking myself: What’s missing from this picture?

I got interested in “coaching” because it was distinct domain with a long tradition in sports and the performing arts, and to some extent business. It seemed that coaches in these fields were expected to expand people’s capacity to realize an Impossible Future for themselves and their organization, something that could only happen if the people involved grew by leaps and bounds in the process.

By contrast, consultants are only expected to deliver reports and recommendations, and leadership trainers expected to deliver the course material and receive happy sheets with high marks by participants at the end of a typical three-day training program.

I wrote about all this in Masterful Coaching. My basic paradigm of coaching was that extraordinary leaders develop in the process of producing extraordinary results. Though this sounded good on paper, it wasn’t until I actually started practicing executive coaching with a handful of clients that I discovered that I had stumbled onto to something with revolutionary game-changing potential.

My first clients not only declared an Impossible Future, but also made giant strides in realizing it by delivering on extraordinary and tangible bottom-line results. At the same time, they were calling this work “the ultimate self-development and growth experience.”

I began to have dreams at night of starting a coaching revolution that would ultimately overthrow the tyranny of management training and consulting, and replace that with Masterful Coaching. This was over a decade ago and at first glance, it seems that great progress has been made in that revolution. Many Global 1000 firms hire executive coaches on a regular basis. The ICF claims to have almost 20,000 members and the Wall Street Journal has reported that coaching is a billion dollar industry.

Yet for all this noteworthy progress, I believe that the real revolution in coaching has yet to get underway. Consultants still do what they have always done – reports and recommendations. Trainers still do what they have always done – teaching homogenized corporate leadership competencies. At the same time, I have run across many HR managers, ICF Chapter leaders and other members of accrediting organizations who have yet to recognize that coaching takes place in the domain of accomplishment, not therapy.

It is time now to jump start a coaching revolution which seeks to overthrow individuals or certifying bodies who are fostering a coaching mindset and practices that are bound to misfire when coaching executives on the front lines of business, government, or other fields.

It is time to start a coaching revolution by first establishing a vision of coaching that is all about helping people realize an Impossible Future and accomplishing what they really need to accomplish, not just about personal growth and development in isolation.

The coaching revolution must occur in four key areas of professional practice and I will be writing blogs on each in the coming weeks. Taken as a whole, these blogs will represent the Masterful Coaching Manifesto:

Start a coaching revolution in management! Stop focusing on the leader as a steward of the past polishing up grandma’s china; start focusing on the leader as coach whose job is to realize an Impossible Future.

Start a coaching revolution in training! Stop thinking that extraordinary leaders develop by studying homogenized corporate leadership competencies; start thinking that extraordinary leaders develop while producing extraordinary results.

Start a revolution in consulting! Stop flying in at 50,000 feet with a nifty report or recommendation and then fly out in a cloud of dust; start sticking around to coach people on the vagaries of implementation.

Start a coaching revolution in HR, your Corp University, or Coach U! Focus 80% of your budget on classroom training for the many; focus no less than 20% of your budget to coaching the pivotal few on real goals and real problems in real time.

A few years ago I was going to give a talk on Masterful Coaching in Singapore. The sponsor asked my associate, “Is Robert accredited by the ICF?” (International Coaches Federation) Our response was, “No, and ICF has not been accredited by Masterful Coaching either.”

Why the attitude? Hey, they just don’t get it. At Masterful Coaching, we believe that coaching takes place in the domain of accomplishment. Coaching people to accomplish an Impossible Dream or big change allows for and pulls for them to grow and develop by leaps and bounds. At Masterful Coaching, we put results in the bow of the boat and everything else follows. This paradigm is totally validated by a long tradition of coaching in business, sports, and the performing arts.

ICF, an organization whose purpose it is to advance the profession of coaching and which boasts having over 20,000 members, has successfully marketed itself as an organization whose accreditation on your resume qualifies you as a coach. While this is a sincere and honest intention, I am sure the ICF seems to promulgate a paradigm of coaching that is totally wrong-headed.

I don’t know what the ICF official position is, but I run into a lot of ICF refugees, who tell me things that are a bit scary. 1) Most of their coaches don’t show up like business executives interested in building winning teams, but more like Dr. Freud with a pointy white beard who wants to put you on the couch. 2) The prevailing belief is that the coach should not offer a teachable point of view, but just ask questions. 3) The idea of the coach making self-development a subset of pursuing bottom-line results is something close to blasphemy.

I have been hearing a lot about an insurgency movement within the ICF that its leaders ought to be concerned about. For example, the boss of a big ICF chapter in Texas told one of its members, “What you will get from ICF is a psychologically-oriented approach, which will teach you to shut up and listen.” If you want to do business coaching, take the Masterful Coaching Certification program.

This past week, Sheri Mackey, a former top executive at Cisco Systems and now CEO of Luminosity Global Coaching, participated in the Masterful Coaching Certification program and got me riled up when she told me how shocked she was when she attended an ICF Global Conference in Florida this past year.

Sheri said that she was attracted to the Masterful Coaching approach because it focused on helping clients realize an Impossible Future and because it focused on the scoreboard. When she got to the ICF conference, she was stunned by the demeanor and attitude of the people she saw there.

She was told in one session that a coach should speak at his or her own peril and should stick to asking questions. Sheri’s response was, “If I hired an executive coach and they had nothing to say that could add value, I would clear them out of my office after one session.”

Later she had a conversation with another individual at the conference concerning coaching results. The conversation went something like this. Sheri’s question: “How do you quantify the value that you as a coach bring in terms of ROI or hard metrics?”

The response: “If a business demands that, than they have brought in coaching for the wrong reasons.”

Sheri, stunned by this remark said, “I am a business person, and business is about results.” She confided that it appeared that most of the people she talked to at the ICF Conference had pretty much the same attitude. “Not surprisingly,” said Sheri, “Most didn’t expect to make more than $20,000 a year coaching.”

Sheri put it well when she told me: “You need to have a strong business case to justify the change of direction that the Impossible Future suggests. People need to see how the Impossible Future is going to either bring dollar value or some other measurement (e.g., brand capital). Furthermore, you need to have a strong business case to justify getting paid as a coach.”