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)
Let's not waste another minute...if your intentions are to manage a successful career.
Recognize, once you get to a certain level in business, everyone is smart and you are expected to compete.
Professor Wayne Baker in his book, "Achieving Success through Social Capital: Tapping Hidden Resources in Your Personal and Business Networks" says, "There is a deeply rooted myth in North American culture that shapes our behavior. The myth: Success is an individual effort. This myth celebrates rugged individualism as the key element in becoming a self-made man or woman. The belief is that everyone succeeds or fails on the basis of individual efforts and abilities but this just isn't so. Adhering to this go-it-alone mentality and lone wolf perspective actually holds us back from achieving the success we seek."
Simply put, success is not only determined by what you know and can do but also by who you know, and more importantly who knows you. Success is powered by three things: Know-how, a strong network of contacts, and your reputation. That's it. That's the secret.
The formula for success= your human capital (what you know and can do) times your social capital (who you know and who knows you) times your reputation (who trusts you).
The higher up you go in an organization's hierarchy, the value to the organization of your technical skills decline, while the value of your interpersonal skills dramatically increase.
Since your peers all have the technical competencies necessary to fulfill the role they were hired to do, who is more likely to accelerate their success?
Studies reveal the skills that initially got you in the door are not the same skills required to progress. Because all work is done through relationships, business rewards social and emotional competencies. Don't lose sight of this important lesson.
Stop yourself if you are inclined to get so busy completing tasks that you ignore developing your contacts and network of influential players. Whether you recognize it or not, each day you are building your brand--the good, the bad and the ugly!
Because when we are unaware, we unconsciously engage our default behavior. Only when we become aware of who we are and how others see us are we able to change our behavior.
Sometimes, just being aware, allows the problem to solve us--rather than requiring us to solve the problem.
The paradoxical premise of "THE TRIPLE PACKAGE" is that successful people tend to feel simultaneously inadequate and superior. This unlikely combination of qualities is part of a potent cultural package that generates drive: a need to prove oneself. Groups that instill this kind of drive in their members have a special advantage in America; because contemporary American culture teaches a contrary message--a message of self-acceptance and living in the moment.
That certain groups do much better in America than others is difficult to talk about. However, the package of three cultural traits becomes a source of empowerment unconfined by any particular definition of success. Ultimately, the Triple Package is accessible to anyone. It's a sense of beliefs, habits and practices, that individuals from any background can make a part of their lives or their children's lives, enabling them to pursue success as they define it.
A seemingly UN-American fact about America today is that certain groups starkly outperform others. The death of upward mobility in America has been widely reported in recent years. If you're an American born after 1960, how well you do is heavily dependent on how well your parents did. Yet, the American Dream is very much alive for certain groups, particulary immigrants.
For example, after 1959, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled to Miami, most arriving destitute. By 1990, the percentage of U.S.-born Cuban Americans with household incomes over $50,000 was double that of Anglo-Americans. Although less than 4% of the U.S. Hispanic population, Cuban Americans in 2002 accounted for 5 out of 10 wealthiest Hispanics in the United States---and today are 2.5 times more likely than Hispanic Americans overall to be making over $200,000 a year.
Why do some groups rise in wealth while others don't?
A misconception is that Protestants still dominate the American economy. Today, American Protestants are below average in wealth, and being raised in an Evangelical or fundamentalist Protestant family is correlated with downward economic mobility.
The Triple Package is about the rise and fall of groups. Its thesis is that when three distinct forces come together in a group's culture, they propel that group to disproportionate success. These three cultural forces, taken together, are called the Triple Package:
1. A SUPERIORITY COMPLEX. This is defined as a deeply internalized belief in your group's specialness, exceptionality or superiority. A crucial point about the Superiority Complex is that it is antithetical to mainstream liberal thinking; like "everyone is equal to everyone else." Everyone of America's extremely successful groups fosters a belief in its own superiority
2. INSECURITY. Insecurity is a species of discontent--an anxious uncertainty about your worth or place in society, a feeling of worry that you or what you've done or what you have is in some fundamental way not good enough. Note that there's a deep tension between insecurity and a superiority complex. This unstable combination is precisely what gives the Triple Package its potency.
3. IMPULSE CONTROL. Impulse control refers to the ablility to resist temptation, especially the temptation to give up in the face of hardship or quit instead of persevering at a difficult task.
The Triple Packageis so powerful an engine of group success because of the first two forces of superiority and insecurity; that together tend to produce a goading chip on the shoulder, a need to prove oneself or be recognized. This "I'll show them" mentality is common among immigrant groups and is one of the world's great motivators.
David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants. By "giants," is meant powerful opponents of all kinds--from armies and mighty warriors to disability, misfortune and oppression.
Each chapter tells the story of a different person who has faced an outsize challenge and been forced to respond. Should I play by the rules or follow my own instincts? Shall I persevere or give up? Should I strike back or forgive?
Through these stores, the author explores two ideas. The first is that much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty. And second, that we consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong. We misread them. We misinterpret them.
Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weaknesses. We need a better guide to facing giants--and there is no better place to start that journey than with the epic confrontation between David and Goliath three thousand years ago.
In order to rediscover our natural confidence and live a fearless life, we must examine the challenge: we must "recognize fear."
Fear, for the neurophysiologists, is a stimulus to investigate, discern and resolve. Taking a Buddhist perspective on fear, however, requires that we make a simple, yet somewhat outrageous, observation: fear does not exist. This is not to say we don't experience fear and its many forms. Of course, we are afraid of death and pain, afraid that we can't handle life. We fear new situations and the unknown. Yet, while we may want to define fear, explore fear, and possibly even resolve it, we first must acknowledge that we cannot actually find such a solid thing as "fear" at all.
In order to recognize fear, then, we need to examine our experience, right here, right now. When the elusive, uncertain nature of life shifts from background to foreground, as it always does, we struggle and panic. Falling in love with a colleague, being diagnosed with cancer, or just missing an appointment, we instinctively sense that life happens in a way that we cannot grasp, and we become bewildered. Becoming familiar with such bewilderment is how we examine and recognize fear.
We breed cowardice with story lines of all kinds: "I'm freaked out because I am going to lose my job and won't be able to handle life!" or "I think my foot has cancer--it hasn't been behaving itself lately." Yet, when we are completely honest with ourselves, we discover not only that we are primordially exposed but that panicking is optional. Being exposed to life is sharply real and unavoidable, but being a coward is not required. And by leaping in with no guarantees, we stop seeking a life free from fear, but instead discover how to live life fearlessly.
Fear of the Unknown
Conor Mayo-Wilson, a researcher of mathematical philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, studies how people learn and solve problems by sharing information in groups. These groups, however different, take advantage of a diverse range of experiences and knowledge, so it’s reasonable to think that collective intelligence might come to a more accurate conclusion than any one individual. But research done by Mayo-Wilson and others shows that this isn’t exactly the case.
For instance, we know today that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria, Mayo-Wilson said. Scientists were making connections between bacteria and stomach ulcers as early as 1889. But in 1954, Edward Palmer published a paper that claimed to find no bacteria whatsoever in 1,000 human stomachs. Palmer’s study was flawed, but knowledge of that paper spread faster and more widely than the earlier work. Soon everybody knew that bacteria couldn’t live in the stomach, but what they knew was completely false. Linking people into virtual groups enables the sharing of knowledge, but when that information isn’t accurate, it can lead the group consensus astray causing widespread fear of the unknown. “When information comes from a common source, that can cause problems with individual decision making, because it can eradicate minority viewpoints,” Mayo-Wilson said.
Mayo-Wilson said, “How those people receive information can influence whether or not they make a good decision.” The group itself isn’t what matters. What matters is who they are, what they know and how they interact.
At least 15 million American adults say they have had a near-death experience, according to a 1997 survey—and the number is thought to be rising with increasingly sophisticated resuscitation techniques.
The once-taboo topic has gotten a lot of talk these days. In the movie "Hereafter," directed by Clint Eastwood, a French journalist is haunted by what she experienced while nearly drowning in a tsunami. A spate of books details other cases and variations on the theme.
Yet the fundamental debate rages on: Are these glimpses of an afterlife, are they hallucinations or are they the random firings of an oxygen-starved brain?
"There are always skeptics, but there are millions of 'experiencers' who know what happened to them, and they don't care what anybody else says," says Diane Corcoran, president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, a nonprofit group in Durham, N.C. The organization publishes the Journal of Near-Death Studies.
As a 17-year-old college student, I had a near-death experience (before it was categorized as such) during an automobile accident. During this intense positive experience, I said to myself, "If this is what it is like to die, it's not all bad." For I was at peace; calmly watching my "life review" play out while time seemed to stand still. That experience forever changed how I lived the rest of my life; for I no longer feared death nor failure as I led a passionate life.
Sudden Discovery
Our ability to suddenly discover a powerful seat of fearless abundance may not be all that fantastic. In fact, rediscovering this fearless abundance is considered more likely than we think and is traditionally often referred to as "discovering the wish-fulfilling gem." Discovering the gem is said to happen abruptly, like winning a lottery, thus opening up a sudden physical and spiritual energy similar to that of riding a mighty horse. This frees the mind of impoverishment and revels the natural state of fearless abundance.
Ironically, this abundance of suddenly discovering a wish-fulfilling gem within our very state of mind is a not a "personal" experience, so to speak, but something larger and more fundamental. Just as a sparrow flies with ease or a tiger walks with confidence, so too we discover the jewel-like ease and wealth of our humanness. We relax back into our unshakable confidence that we, too, are exquisitely equipped to be on this planet under all circumstances.
An essential component of the strategy-making process that has been ignored for decades is: You. The leader. The person who must live the questions that matter most.
This is about gaining a new understanding about what strategy is, why it matters, and what you must do to lead the effort.
Does your company matter? That's the question every business leaders must answer.
There is a good chance that you can't articulate the specific needs your business fills or the unique points that distinguish you from your competitors on anything beyond a superficial level. Nor have you spent much time thinking concretely about where you want your company to be in ten years and the forces, internal and external, that will get the company there. Yet, there is no way a business can thrive until these questions are answered.
Many leaders today do not understand the ongoing, intimate connection between leadership and strategy. These two aspects of what leaders do, once tightly linked, have grown apart. Now specialists help managers analyze their industries and position their businesses for competitive advantage, and strategy has become largely a job for experts, or something confined to an annual planning process.
What's been forgotten is that strategy is not a destination or a solution. It's not a problem to be solved and settled. It's a journey. It needs continuous, not intermittent, leadership.
It needs a strategist. All leaders must accept and own strategy as the heart of their responsibility. Are you a strategist?
The concept of a coach is slippery. Coaches are not teachers, but they teach. They’re not your boss—in professional tennis, golf, and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach—but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.
Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention. Consider Maxwell Perkins, the great Scribner’s editor, who found, nurtured, and published such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. “Perkins has the intangible faculty of giving you confidence in yourself and the book you are writing,” one of his writers said in a New Yorker Profile from 1944. “He never tells you what to do,” another writer said. “Instead, he suggests to you, in an extraordinarily inarticulate fashion, what you want to do yourself.”
The coaching model is different from the traditional conception of pedagogy, where there’s a presumption that, after a certain point, the student no longer needs instruction. You graduate. You’re done. You can go the rest of the way yourself.
Coaching considers the teaching model naïve about our human capacity for self-perfection. It holds that, no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.
So what is professional coaching and how does it differ from consulting?
For example, Itzhak Perlman enjoyed the services of a personal coach all along. “The great challenge in performing is listening to yourself,” he said. “Your physicality, the sensation that you have as you play the violin, interferes with your accuracy of listening.” What violinists perceive is often quite different from what audiences perceive.
Canadian Malcolm Gladwell in his book, "Outliers," tells us that the way Canadians select hockey players is a beautiful example of what the sociologist Robert Merton famously called a "self-fulling prophecy" --- a situation where a "false definition, in the beginning....evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true."
Canadians start with a false definition of who the best nine and ten-year-old hockey players are. They're just picking the oldest every year. But the way they treat those "all-stars" ends up making their original false judgment look correct.
As Merton puts it: "This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning."
If you make a decision about who is good and who is not at an early age; if you separate the "talented" from the "untalented"; and if you provide the "talented" with a superior experience, then you're going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the age cutoff date.
Note: In Canada, the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1. A boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn't turn ten until the end of the year---and at that age, in preadolescence, a twelve-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity.
In the U.S., the cutoff date for almost all nonschool baseball leagues is July 31, with the result that more major league players are born in August than in any other month. The numbers are striking: in 2005, among Americans playing major league baseball 505 were born in August versus 313 born in July.
It seems ridiculous that this arbitrary choice of cutoff dates is causing long-lasting effects, and no one seems to care about them. In Canadian children's hockey, it's the biggest nine and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call "accumulative advantage." The professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his peers. And that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a bit larger, and that edge in turn leads to another opportunity, which makes the initially small difference bigger still--and on and on until the hockey player becomes a genuine standout.
If Canadian hockey and U.S. baseball children leagues acknowledge that cutoff dates matter, they could set up leagues divided up by month of birth....letting players develop on separate tracks and then pick all-star teams. With all child athletes having a fair chance, then national teams suddenly would have twice as many athletes to choose from.
Some years ago, a former chief justice of the Michigan supreme court, Thomas Brennan, sent a questionnaire to a hundred or so of his fellow lawyers, asking them to rank a list of ten law schools in order of quality.
"They included a good sample of the big names. Harvard. Yale. University of Michigan. And some lesser-known schools. John Marshall. Thomas Cooley," Brennan wrote. "As I recall, they ranked Penn State's law school right about in the middle of the pack. Maybe fifth among ten schools listed. Of course, Penn State doesn't have a law school."
Those lawyers put Penn State in the middle of the pack, even though every fact they thought they knew about Penn State's law school was an illusion, because in their minds Penn State is a middle-of-the-pack brand. (Penn State does have a law school today, by the way.)
And where do these kinds of reputational prejudices come from?
According to Michael Bastedo, an educational sociologist at the University of Michigan, "rankings drive reputation." When a person has a task of assessing the relative merits of something he knows nothing about, a school like Penn State can do little to improve its position. To go higher than forty-seventh in the U.S. News ranking of universities, it needs a better reputation score, and to get a better reputation score it needs to be higher than forty-seventh. The U.S. News ratings are a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Bastedo says that reputation ratings can sometimes work very well. It makes sense, for example, to ask professors within a field to rate others in their field: they read one another's, attend the same conferences, and hire one another's graduate students, so they have real knowledge on which to base an opinion. Reputation scores can work for one-dimensional rankings, created by people with specialized knowledge.
Bottom Line: Who comes out on top, in any ranking system, is really about who is doing the ranking.
Source: Malcolm Gladwell, The Order of Things in The New Yorker, February 14, 2011
Most executives think it is important to "go it alone" due to their belief in the myth of individualism; they hold tightly to the idea that everyone succeeds or fails on the basis of individual efforts and abilities.
This assumption is so powerful that when an alternative view is suggested (that success depends on our relationships with others as much as it does on us) the usual reaction is denial. Denial of the role of relationships in the executive's success preserves the self-enhancing illusion that we are masters of our own fates and, therefore, deserving of all the credit for our successes.
The myth of individualism can negatively affect our chances for success.
Consider that four out of ten newly promoted managers and executives fail within 18 months of starting new jobs, according to research by Manchester, Inc, a leadership development firm in Bala Cynwyd, PA. "Failing" includes being terminated for performance, performing significantly below expectations or voluntarily resigning from the new position. When newly recruited, the following types of executives experienced the highest failure rates within the first 18 months: senior-level executives (39%), sales executives (30%), marketing executives (25%), and operations executives (23%).
Here are the major reasons for failure in the new job:
They fail to establish a cultural fit……………......................75%
They fail to build teamwork with staff and peers…...........…52%
They are unclear about what their bosses expect….............33%
They don't have the required internal political savvy…..........25%
There's no process to assimilate executives into the firm…...22%
Two out of every five new CEOs fail in the first 18 months (HBR, January 2005).
During the second half of 1999, when statistics began to be compiled, nearly 270 chief executives were forced to leave their companies or simply resigned, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the Chicago-based outplacement firm that follows employment issues. Since then, the pace has quickened--in 2004, 663 chief executives departed and turnover doubled to 1,322 in 2005, according to the firm.
CEOs are now lasting just 7.6 years in office on a global average, down from 9.5 years in 1995, according to consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.
Leaders often fail for a few common reasons: due to unclear or outsized expectations, a failure to build partnerships with key stakeholders, a failure to learn the company, industry or the job itself fast enough, a failure to determine the process for gaining commitments from direct reports and a failure to recognize and manage the impact of change on people.
John G. Self of JohnGSelf Associates, Inc., an executive search firm in Dallas, TX, said, "When I first read L. Kevin Kelley’s comments in the Financial Times – that 40 percent of 20,000 executives that Heidrick & Struggles placed quit, were fired or forced out in 18 months – [I] was astounded. As a recruiter, I have never had that kind of failure rate. But I have since read other studies and apparently, between the poor recruiting processes and the refusal of executives to reach out for help, Heidrick’s experience is apparently an industry average."
Executive onboarding coaching (of the newly recruited or promoted executive can turnaround this high rate of failure).
Here are some of links for self-coaching on leadership issues:
