Coach John G. Agno is your own cultural attache; keeping you abreast of what's effective in leadership. People learn better and are positively motivated when supported by regular coaching.
PERSONAL COACHING Leadership onboarding coaching helps the executive adapt to the employer's culture, create rapport with their team and develop productive ways to achieve necessary goals.
SELF ASSESSMENT CENTER Leadership skills and style testing. Know how you motivate and coach people to gain success at work and in life.
WHAT IS LEADERSHIP? Leadership is an interactive conversation that pulls people toward becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility and commitment.
LEADERSHIP TIPS “The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both.” Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press)
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People involved in the delivery of coaching may also become ambassadors of coaching in their sphere of influence. However, it is the high-level management of coaching initiatives that sets the overall frame and direction of coaching within an organization and provides the central basis for successful coaching.
What qualifies you to be a manager responsible for coaching in your company?
What experience do you already have in the field?
What relevant training/education have you undertaken?
What coaching bodies and associations do you belong to?
What relevant characteristics/signature talents do you bring into the organization?
What are your key strengths and weaknesses in terms of implementing and improving coaching?
What is the breadth and depth of your coaching capability?
On a scale of 1 to 10 (10= very high), what degree of coaching implementation and improvement intelligence do you have?
How committed are you to enhancing your coaching intelligence further?
Find optimal ways to fill your identified gaps
Use external guidance and support to develop your coaching capability to the needed level: receive mentor coaching on being an effective manager responsible for coaching in a firm.
Employ one or more suitable coaching experts to raise your company's internal coaching implementation and intelligence.
Consider full outsourcing: Have an external coaching manager appointed to the role of managing coaching in your company.
Pick and start with only those areas where you already have suitable coaching capability.
Whatever choices you make, keep ownership of the process as a whole and find a suitable mix of external and internal coaching capability for your specific purposes.
Excellent coaching can only produce benefits and unfold its potential when properly implemented and used by the person(s) being coached. A slight lack of integrity and quality in a coaching initiative may lead to a significant loss of trust, consistency or functionality and bring about the failure of a coaching program.
1. Identify and define your company-specific integrity and quality standards for coaching.
2. Get and/or develop suitable people to meet the requirements properly, monitor integrity and quality effectively and carefully.
3. Intervene and act promptly where the standards are not fulfilled and ensured.
It is particularly important to create a learning atmosphere where people, who are being confidentially coached, are encouraged and feel comfortable to talk openly with their professional coach about their setbacks, problems and concerns in order to allow their perceptions to evolve.
No manager or executive within an organization wants their boss or the human resource (HR) department to know their personal weaknesses or concerns. That is why the best solution is to engage an "outside professional coach" whose integrity and ethics will maintain the confidentiality of conversations with the person-being-coached. It is especially important for HR departments and top management to be aware of the risks of breeches of confidentiality and possible conflicts of roles/interests in the context of utilizing "internal coaches" within an organization.
Setting clear rules, in particular regarding confidentiality, and ensuring a safe and respectful learning environment in a coaching program is essential to maintain trust of participants. Top management must respect the confidentiality/privacy of personal and performance coaching and not abuse coaching (e.g. by telling an "internal coach" to manipulate an 'uncomfortable' employee in a certain way).
In today's fast-paced and hyperconnected global economy, leaders are pressured to make multiple decisions and do so quickly.
In such an volatile environment, leaders tend not to take the time to reflect and use sound judgment; the result is hurried decisions that lead to poor outcomes for themselves and their organization.
In particular, some leaders tend to decide instinctively based primarily on their own experience, without paying enough attention to the changes in the larger context. Risk averse, they may either procrastinate when faced with difficult decisions or make decisions that may yield tactical benefits but be unviable in the long term.
Other leaders are more willing to make bold decisions that could generate strategic long-term benefits. But given their self-centered and emotional personality, they tend to rush into decisions without heeding their intuition, let alone getting input from others.
Wise leaders are more effective decision makers due to their unique decision logic--that is, the set of systems, processes, and reasoning principles they use in decision making--developed over time and tested in different scenarios. Context awareness and ethical clarity altogether form the cornerstone of a wise leader's decision logic. This clarity gives wise leaders discernment--the ability to judge well in crises and make ethically sound and yet pragmatic decisions using a combination of logic, instinct, intuition and emotion.
To maximize our potential in a rapidly changing global economy, people recognize the need for leadership ethics more than ever before. Developing commitment in a world of "free agents" and "volunteer" talent is not an easy assignment and requires the development of leadership skills; effective leadership ability that you didn't learn at the university or in executive education.
So what is professional coaching and how does it differ from consulting?
Self-coaching helps you acquire useful leadership skills, clarify your values and guiding principles and actively build your reputation. Self-knowledge provides the personal integrity to engage in powerful action oriented relationships.
“The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both.” Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press)
Effective leadership can happen on the dance floor of conversation.
Leadership is an interactive conversation that pulls people toward becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility and commitment. Leadership is not just for people at the top. Everyone can learn to lead by discovering the power that lies within each one of us to make a difference and practicing the law of reciprocity.
Leadership is applicable to all facets of your life: a competency that you can learn to expand your perspective, set the context of a goal, understand the dynamics of human behavior and take the initiative to get to where you want to be. Through discovering who you are and your life's work, you develop the self-awareness and confidence required to lead.
Coached to Success insights help you to develop the leadership skills necessary to become the master of yourself so you will be ready, willing and able to lead others. Self leadership happens through self-learning and self-coaching. As you build your capability to lead, people become attracted to you and this opens the door for trusting you. When they trust you, people will be open to listening to what you have to say.
What is Success?
Success lies in being who we are and in the choices we are willing to make for ourselves, not in the fear of what you should do or be. Fear is the only thing that holds people back from achieving personal success.
Only you know what's important in realizing your vision of success. However, we all seek shared outcomes to provide a foundation for where we want to be. You can drastically increase your chances of succeeding in business and life when you learn from a coach or mentor – someone who once stood in your place and overcame all obstacles to earn success and happiness.
The common thread throughout history has been that you learn mastery performance from the master. Whatever quality or skill you want to develop, you "get it" by hanging out with people who have it.
Know your leadership style?
The Leadership Blog
Leadership development is not an event.
Albert Einstein once said, 'We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve.'
Leaders know and science has discovered emotionality's deeper purpose: the timeworn mechanisms of emotion allow two human beings to receive the contents of each other's minds. Emotion is the messenger of love; it is the vehicle that carries every signal from one brimming heart to another.
Leadership happens in a series of interactive conversations that pull people toward becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility and commitment.
That is why leadership development is not an event. It is a process of participating in respectful conversations where the leader recognizes his or her own feelings and those of others in building safe and trusting relationships.
For human beings, feeling deeply is synonymous with being alive.
SAP (Systems-Applications-Programs) AG, a global provider of business software, has implemented coaching programs based on effective personal development accomplishing business goals while meeting the challenges of the coachee's professional role in an optimal way. SAP leadership has been following these prevailing coaching issues from:
After six years, the "leader as coach" pool in Germany comprises more than 70 internal part-time coaches (i.e. coaches who work as a coach besides their main role/activity) coming from all levels of hierarchy and functions.
The return on investment (ROI) of coaching can be enormous, especially in the context of project management. The following feedback may illustrate this point: "Coaching helped us prevent a potential project loss of at least Euros 100,000, because an excellent project lead found a way to manage tremendous task overload for almost a year."
Coaching is one of the fastest growing business phenomena in the world.
Coaching is increasingly used as a professional business tool and becoming ingrained into organizational life in various ways. The challenge for organizations is how to implement and optimize coaching successfully.
Many enterprises are not applying the management tools for the successful use of coaching in companies yet. In particular, the following five critical areas can be identified in the current poor coaching practice in many companies:
The 2013 Edition of "The Global Business Guide for the successful use of Coaching in Organizations" is available as paperback or ebook editions and provides a complete set of 7 effective management tools for the optimal design, implementation and optimization of coaching programs and confirms the implementation of coaching in organizations as a distinct discipline. This book addresses beginner, advanced as well as master levels regarding the use of coaching in companies. Wherever coaching is right now in your organization, the Global Business Guide will help you to take coaching to the next level.
Great basketball players like Bill Russell have an intrinsic understanding of the principles, rules, strategies, and mechanics of their game, but their play is dictated by what is required in the moment, often without conscious thought on the part of the players. The Art of Insight is the same way.
A sports analogy for finding the "sweet spot:' "It is the championship game. Your team has the basketball with fifteen seconds left on the clock, and you are down by a point. Do you want to be wound up and tight or loose and confident?"
Great players always want the ball in these situations, and they are always loose and confident--present in the situation, open to whatever happens, and able to integrate many hours of practice into the immediate unfolding of the game. Lesser players get tight and try too hard to find the "right" action to take. Their breathing gets labored, and neither their brains nor their muscles move with the fluidity necessary to make the shot. They get so locked up in "over-thinking" that we use the term choke to characterize their efforts.
Bill Russell, star center for basketball's legendary Boston Celtics, describes a quiet mind in a very fast setting:
"Every so often, a Celtics game would heat up so that it became more than a physical, or even a mental, game and would be magical. That feeling is very difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened, I could feel my play rise to a new level. It came rarely, and would last anywhere from five minutes to a whole quarter or more. Three or four plays were not enough to get it going. It would surround not only me and the other Celtics, but also the players on the other team, even the referees.
At that special level, all sorts of odd things happened. The game would be in a white heat of competition, and yet somehow I wouldn't feel competitive--which is a miracle in itself. I'd be putting out the maximum effort, straining, coughing up parts of my lungs as we ran, and yet I never felt the pain. The game would move so quickly that every fake, cut, and pass would be surprising--and yet nothing could surprise me. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion.
During those spells, I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. Even before the other team brought the ball into bounds, I could feel it so keenly that I'd want to shout to my teammates, "It's coming there!"--except that I knew everything would change if I did.
My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt than that I not only knew all of the Celtics by heart, but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me. There have been many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine.
Sometimes the feeling would last all the way to the end of the game, and when that happened, I never cared who won. I can honestly say that those few times were the only ones when I did not care. I don't mean that I was a good sport about it--that I'd played my best and had nothing to be ashamed of. On the five or ten occasions when the game ended at the special level, I literally did not care who won. If we lost, I'd still be free and high as a sky hawk."
Obviously, a quiet mind does not necessarily mean that you are quiet. You might be mentally quiet but also very physically active, like Bill Russell operating "in the zone."
The Insight State of Mind doesn't include a lot of internal monologues. It is not a state where you stop thinking, but it is a state where you are not working hard on your thinking. Techniques aren't necessary to reach the Insight State of Mind. You simply pay attention to the presence or absence of the feeling you associate with your best state of mind. Although your proficiency may have fallen due to neglect, none of this is new. You must simply reacquaint yourself with this natural, inborn capacity.
An insight is a thought we've never had before. It's a fresh thought.
Insights are those "Aha! moments" when the clouds part and the solution to your problem arises right in front of you. They happen when fresh new light is spread on a subject you've considered for some time. We all have experienced these moments of deep understanding, even if we might not know what to call them or how to describe them.
An insight is a discovery or realization that goes beyond face value, beyond the obvious. It is a deeper, more universal understanding that is often very relevant to you. With insight, a new cognitive structure is formed that is different from the sum of its parts, and it usually calls for a different action.
While the circumstances in which people have their insights are as varied as the individuals, everyone has reported a common state of mind. It's an easy going, unpressured, open, and ungripped state. The more often you reside in this state of mind, the more often you will have insights.
Conversely, when you are agitated and bearing down with your thinking, insights become more elusive. While the Insight State of Mind is our natural, default state, we inadvertently think ourselves out of it.
A strategic insight is a simplifying "Aha! moment" that often radically redefines business and the competitive advantage. Once articulated, these strategic insights seemed like simple common sense to everyone. They are easily understood and acted upon. In fact, implementation usually occurs with far less effort than forced march that often characterizes strategy implementation.
The Art of Insight is a new book that teaches readers how to have more "Aha! moments" in life. Based on the authors' years of research, reflection, and experiences, The Art of Insight presents practical methods of recognizing and cultivating an Insight State of Mind. Charles Kiefer and Malcolm Constable describe these thinking methods that are designed to foster fresh thoughts and perspectives. But this is not a rigid set of rules--it's a creative pursuit.
"Have you ever seen a winning team that had no coach? You cannot perform with excellence unless you have a coach. Even people who are the best, the top one percent or two percent in their field, still have a coach. Ironically, in business, we are expected sometimes to play without a coach. That's not the best way to play, either in sports or business. Business is a team event. Winning is about execution, so performance coaching always has a role. I can see people performing better because of the coaching." --Senior Executive, Global Manufacturer
Leadership is not just for people at the top.Everyone can learn to lead by discovering the power that lies within each one of us to make a difference and being prepared when the call to lead comes.
Leadership is applicable to all facets of life: a competency that you can learn to expand yourperspective, set the context of a goal, understand the dynamics of human behavior and take the initiative to get to where you want to be.
Effective leadership coaching can happen on the dance floor of conversation. Here are five guiding principles that guide respectful conversations:
1. When peers connect change happens. Effective coaching can happen on the dance floor of conversation.
2. It's OK to begin a conversation by confronting the other person with questions that seem awkward but set the stage for a respectful exchange. Why waste time on small talk? Just ask to-the-point information-seeking questions, like: "What are you here for? How do you wantto spend our time together?"
3. Conversations are not meant to be structured. Be open to conversations that you are unprepared for and focused on theinterests of the other person (not your purpose).
4. Don't get pulled into solving problems that may not matter to the other person. Allow time for the person to get to what's really important. Provide spaces where they can express their doubts and fears by being a thoughtful listener--without taking on the responsibility to fix or debate the issue. After all, you have invited the person to talk about what matters to her or him, not you, so allow time for the articulation of those thoughts and feelings.
5. Personal transformation happens when the right questions get asked--not by providing answers. When you focus on the solution, you are trying to sell the person something. When you allow people to answer their own questions, they discover what they were not aware of---and what is needed to move forward. Personal transformation leads corporate transformation--one person at a time.
That is why leadership development is not an event. It is a process of participating in respectful conversations where the leader recognizeshis or her own feelings and those of others in building safe and trustingrelationships.
Performance coachingis dialogue that recognizes excellence and achieves business goals by specifying areas for improvement and learning. Managers who coach others do so to help them develop new skills, initiate a desired competency or goal, stretch performance to the next level or redirect behavior to solve existing problems. Performance coaching must occur regularly and consistently, not just once or twice per year.
People who receive performance coaching usually look forward to it, knowing that it has the power to make them even better at what they do, thus opening up opportunities. Unlike other processes, performance coaching focuses explicitly on business results. Performance coaches spend most of their time discussing high-impact behaviors and linking them to results. They aim not just at addressing performance problems per se but more often at achieving high performance and reaching a person's full potential.
However, many executives, who have not been personally coached, have trouble understanding how to coach for high performance. With companies rarely observing the quality of performance coaching and managers sometimes exaggerating their time reporting on coaching activities, leaders often don't understand the nature of coaching actually taking place.
However, a single leader who coaches for elite performance can make a big difference within an organization. Yet, the real power comes when companies share high-performance coaching capability across all managers and leaders. Since most companies don't do this, scaling high performance coaching is a significant source of advantage, available for the taking.
The key success factor to integrate high-performance coaching across all managers and leaders is to strategically select a few emerging leaders for a six month engagement of weekly hour telephone coaching sessions with an outside executive coach; in order to understand, appreciate and be ready to implement with their team members the power of performance coaching.
These executive coached managers will then be ready, willing and able to structure performance coaching conversations with their direct reports to gain useful feedback and skillfully pinpoint the right workplace behaviors. Coaching can be hard to do and feel uncomfortable at first. But by being professionally coached and recognizing the benefits of their own personal development, these new leader coaches will begin to achieve exceptional team results within the organization.
Thousands of leaders attend leadership training every year to glean insights into how to lead better. At the end of the training, most of these leaders will resolve to become more effective by using these new insights; hopefully with the guidance of a personal executive coach. Unfortunately, few of them will implement these good intentions. Yet, they need to pay attention to their intentions in order to get to where they want to be.
Although the executive education debate still rages on whether leadership is learned or innate, there is no doubt that the subject is being taught. Back in October 2003, BusinessWeek reported that 134 companies from 20 nations spent $210 million to enroll 21,000 employees in executive leadership programs. Since leadership development is not an event, that's a significant investment in classroom activities that may or may not produce company leaders or even better managers.
Resources: Support desired changes with coaching and infrastructure.
The most important resources for leaders to access are human resources, both for themselves and for their organizations. It turns out that when desired behaviors are reinforced by personal coaching and institutionalized in human resources (HR) practices, they are much more likely to be sustained.
Coaching sustains change because it personalizes and reinforces a leader's intent for the future. In the last 20 years, as leadership coaching has mushroomed, the range of coaching expectations and services has exploded. To use coaching to sustain change, leaders should answer these four questions:
To lead to sustainable change, coaching needs to be based on a more rigorous typology of outcomes. Leaders sustain personal behavior change when they identify specific behaviors that can and should be changed: coaches provide feedback and advice about how to make those new behaviors consistently happen. Leaders sustain change when their coaches help them to see the valued corporate outcomes or personal results that come from the change.
Expert coaches can help leaders to sustain changes in both behavior and results. They may explore candid (and at times brutal) information about the leader's behavior and performance. They may make suggestions about how to improve and challenge the status quo. They may help the leader to create a personal leadership brand by combining behavior and results into a leadership identity.
When leaders use coaches to help sustain their behaviors, their chosen behaviors will be more likely to endure over time.
