Geoffrey Bellman

At the base of it all, we’re all a bunch of naked human beings. Down underneath it all, in the game we never talk about–the primary game–we’re all down there reaching, grasping, clinging, lifting, floating through life.

But we seldom acknowledge this. We’re all equal in that regard. We all share a resistance to looking into the deeper meaning of what we are doing.

Let go of the idea that we are ever going to fully understand it, but always keep trying to understand the unspoken game. We are always going to be discovering more about ourselves, our games. We need to acknowledge that the game goes beyond our ability to make sense of it. It is a fascinating life mystery.

Then he goes on, now talking as a consultant:

Whenever I tell clients to “Do this,” ” Don’t do that,” I imply that the game is “solvable.” It is not. My advice, my techniques, tools, and models are only attempts at fuller understanding; these tools will not give me answers, the complete picture.

This is such a powerful reminder to all of us who coach, whether you are a manager or an independent like me. We can’t “fix” things for those we coach. And we owe it to tell those same people–and ourselves–that there is no ultimate solution to the challenges of swimming in an organizational soup. There is only the prospect of continuing to become a gradually better swimmer.

Here are a few of their findings:

• 52% of companies currently have business coaching programs in place and 37% plan on adding such programs in the future.
• The demand for coaching is being driven by the impending talent shortage when the baby boomer cohort starts retiring.
• Coaching works!
  • Companies with coaching programs report strength around revenue growth, market share, profitability and customer satisfaction.
  • Managers who have been coached are more likely to set work-related goals and have their leadership abilities trusted by their staff.

Organizations can reap a healthy payback on their investment in coaching when it is targeted at:

1. executives
2. high-potential employees
3. key employees who can contribute high technical/functional value but are challenged by dysfunctional attitudes and poor interpersonal or leadership skills.

It makes sense that coaching works because it offers a scalpel approach when behaviors, attitudes, and habits of thought must be changed to make an already key employee make their full contribution to the enterprise.

And the coaching process is pretty darn effective at getting the client to lock in the new behavior/thinking patterns!

Put aside for the moment flex time, work life balance, glass ceilings and mommy tracks. The fact remains that women are rising in influence and numbers with the ranks of management in our organizations, including the many that are being founded by the fairer sex.

I see this trend as bringing more of the proven leadership skills we need in this post-modern economy: teamwork, collaboration, dialogue, relationship building, and treating employees as “thou’s” not “it’s.” In my workshops and presentations on leadership I notice more concurrence and head-nodding from women in the room when I talk about these people-centric approaches.

It’s not the whole picture, obviously. We still need managers who can be tough, deal with conflict, push for stretch results and the like. But when you combine these with an ability to engage your employees as the whole human beings they are, you become a “best boss ever.”

For this reason I am heartened by the trend.

The hard part is the last ten percent, sure, or even the last one percent, but it’s the hard part because everyone is busy doing the easy part already.

Studies by Jack Zenger and his crew reveal that managers above the 90th percentile in terms of leadership effectiveness achieve significantly higher results in areas such as commitment, thinking about quitting/leaving, satisfaction with pay, net income, turnover…need I go on?

In fact, however, very few of the managers I meet in the course of leading management development workshops and keynoting on leadership are trying to enter the top 10%–even 20%–of managers. How about you? Have you considered setting a goal to be a truly extraordinary manager? And, is your organization giving high priority to this across its management and supervisory cadres?

The payoff is there. I just wish more business owners and C-suite executives would realize it. Making a serious investment in the quality of your managers may not constitute the absolutely “lowest hanging fruit” for growing your revenue. But is the longest lasting and the most competitiveness-enhancing and, therefore, the sweetest.

Entitled “2009/2010 Trends in Executive Development,” the research reveals a mixed picture with respect to those managers who show general potential to move into the top level over the next 3-5 years. On the plus side, they have high integrity, ability to deliver results and manage multiple operational priorities, and strong technical skills and knowledge.

There is a serious gap, current senior executives surveyed said, in two critical areas:

1. Critical Thinking (strategic perspective, ability to create a vision, a system understanding of the enterprise, ability to shift back and forth from big picture thinking to operational and tactical issues)
2. Motivating and Influencing Others (leading change, inspiring and engaging employees)

These both involve complex constellations of competencies, the first cognitive and the second emotional/relational. They take time to develop. Here are three things you can start doing immediately:

1. Put a comprehensive leadership development program and process in place. This includes combining formal and informal on-the-job development, coaching, and training. See my April 8/10 blog post for more on this. As well, it calls for some form of leadership development pipeline and succession strategy that feeds ready talent onto your future executive bench.
2. Give your high potential managers real opportunities to tackle the kinds of business issues that are fuzzy, with many non-quantifiable variables and with no clearly superior solution. Whether they succeed, fail or do just OK on these, what they will learn about themselves, mixing metrics with intuition, and involving the wisdom of others will be invaluable in mastering Critical Thinking.
3. Develop their emotional intelligence. This includes the ability to build relationships with employees, boss, peers, customers, and key others within and without the enterprise, listening, managing feelings (theirs and others’), enrolling and exciting others about the vision, etc.

Bonie Hagemann, Executive Development Associates’ CEO said,

The results of this research, combined with the current demographic shift in the workplace, should be a wake-up call (emphasis added) for any organization that is not focused on developing tomorrow’s leaders.

Is your top team still asleep when it come to your future bench strength?

Imagine you are down on a dance floor, dancing, obviously. While you are in the midst of the dance, moving in close rhythm with your partner and with people swirling all around you, your vision is restricted in two significant ways:

1. You can’t see the big picture of what’s going on across the entire floor and how effectively and smoothly you are in flow with the other dancers.
2. You are so focused, in-the-moment, on what you are doing that you haven’t the time or opportunity to reflect on your performance.

Now, imagine you leave the floor and go up to a balcony overlooking the dance. Now you can see the big picture and reflect on how you are doing and what you need do in order to be more effective tripping the light fantastic down there.

So it is, say the authors, with leaders who seek to enhance their ability to make an impact on their unit and organization. They need to continually be shifting their focus, over time, from the floor to the balcony and back again.

I’ve just run across this again, in Henry Mintzberg’s great new book, Managing. His conclusion is that the practice of management is so complex, such a tapestry of roles, influences, contexts, personal energy, level of character development and interplay with countless others that it can’t be taught in an MBA program, let alone in a short classroom workshop. In fact, he says, management can’t be taught by anyone! The individual must learn primarily through his or her own efforts. To quote Mintzberg,

It is through the interplay of reflecting and acting that managers strive for synthesis. Managers work not only work deductively and cerebrally, from reflection to action…They also work inductively and insightfully, from action to reflection.

So what does this mean–practically–for you and the managers you want to develop? Here are a few of my thoughts:

• Most shifts toward greater mastery of people management come from experiences (successes and failures, positive and painful) and approaches and techniques we try out on the job. (the dance floor)
• This learning in the crucible of our job can be augmented periodically by classroom training (balcony), to focus on acquiring and practicing skills in specific areas on which we need to focus.
• Coaching (balcony), either from an external coach, from the immediate boss, or from a mentor, is great for targeting a few critical skills and help the manager delve into them in depth.
• 360º feedback assessments (balcony), often done in conjunction with one-on-one coaching, can generate extremely useful data on which to reflect. Out of it can come significant change in both behavior and attitude.
• Focused discussions (balcony) among managers, either in a structured group coaching sessions or informal get-togethers (e.g. monthly, over lunch) are a powerful way to build learning. Here managers, exchange ideas, best practices, tips, and techniques, as well as lessons learned and things definitely not to do, and reflect on how each of them can improve as a manager.
• The best way to leverage time and money invested in training or coaching is to have the manager return to work (dance floor) and consciously apply a newly acquired approach or skill and then assess (balcony) how well it worked and how it could be tweaked to be even better.

For this reason, we are building more ways to support, back on the job, the learning people take away from our leadership development programs. This includes:

• follow up monthly reinforcer emails to the participants
• post session teleseminars or webinars
• structured conversations, pre- and post-program, between the participants and their respective managers
• facilitated small group coaching sessions where participants bring their current issues, questions and people management challenges and this forms the agenda of the discussions.

What has worked for you or where you work?

Instead of distinguishing managers from leaders, we should be seeing managers as leaders and leadership as management practiced well.

While we may be able to separate the two forms conceptually, asserts Mintzberg, you can’t disentangle the two in practice. This has a certain resonance with me. It has always felt a tad artificial to separate leading and managing, although our programs have positioned the former as more influencing and big picture thinking, vs. the skill-based nature of pure managing.

So, how do leading and managing intermingle as the “manager” goes about her duties? Mintzberg has a practical model of what the manager does. She works her magic by operating on three planes, each of which involves both an internal (i.e. within the unit) and external focus.

1. Information – Collecting, organizing, authoring and communicating information out into the wider organization and beyond as well as down into her own unit. She uses information to suggest, cajole, and frame certain actions and decisions on the part of unit employees and others outside the unit.
2. People – Encouraging, helping and developing (i.e. leading) individuals and teams within her unit to make decisions, get things done and develop new capacities to perform. On the “people plane” you also have linking to people outside the unit, for example, building relationships with individuals in other departments, customers, vendors, public officials, and so on. Here is where a manager’s networking skill is so critical.
3. Action – Internally, it means getting directly involved, hands-on, in key decisions, projects and problems. Beyond the unit, the manager makes deals to mobilize support for the unit’s needs and interests by exchanging reciprocal power and influence.

When you think about it, working these three planes internally and externally, the manager has to slide back and forth, frequently during the same interaction, from leading to managing. At one moment she is directing her staff to move on certain priority tasks. Then she represents her department at a senior team meeting. Then she negotiates with finance for leniency on reporting requirements just this month. Then she meets with an irate customer company, listening and problem-solving their complaint.

In the end, says Mintzberg, managing is a “soft” craft (with an element of art thrown in), not a hard science. This is why management training and leadership development can be a difficult “sell” to technically-oriented decision makers. Craft though managing may be, the strategic importance of developing the leadership roles of your managers is in no way diminished.

These were outlets for my leadership learning to blossom. Looking back, I should have channeled this energy back into my career but, hey, I was young and naive. It seemed easier to make a leadership mark in a volunteer capacity. Furthermore, it was self-affirming, a lot of fun, and I received recognition for my efforts.

Leadership development, aka talent development and high potential (“hi pot”) development, is a hot issue, particularly in the private sector. The best organizations are always on the lookout within their ranks for potential future leaders. And at least the larger firms have formal processes for identifying these folks.

But how do you know that you have a future star in your department, especially if the work you have for them doesn’t provide an opportunity to lead others?

Listen for what your people do outside of work. With some, you’ll be pleasantly surprised–and impressed. Are they running a community baseball league? Organizing a 10K run for some worthy cause? Chairing a committee in a non-profit organization?

Now your challenge, as their manager, is to find ways for this enthusiasm to manifest itself in the workplace. What a loss if it doesn’t.

1. Precontemplation (not yet acknowledging a need for changed behavior)
2. Contemplation (acknowledging the need but not yet willing to proceed with the change)
3. Preparation/Determination (ready to make the change and gearing up for it)
4. Action (engaging in the new behavior)
5. Maintanence (sustaining the new behavior over the long term, hopefully permanently)
6. Relapse (returning to the old ways)

What intrigues me here, in the context of executive coaching, are Stages 1 & 2.

Obviously, no successful growth to more effective leadership behaviors will happen if the individual doesn’t:

• see a problem with how he or she is operating currently, or
• have a genuine desire to become better as a manager.

Coaching is an investment made mostly in current relatively senior managers or individuals identified as high potential future leaders. So, as you look at potential candidates in which to invest your limited development resources, the first question is to clarify is to what extent they are at the Precontemplation or Contemplation stages.

If not, here are several ways to move them through to stage 3:

• Express your belief that they have potential to rise to a senior leadership role in the organization (This is by no means a promise. You are just informing them of your perception of them.)
• Administer a 360º feedback process for them, to give them a reality check on how they are currently being experienced by others.
• Challenge them as to what are their own goals and aspirations for their career.
• And, for less-than-acceptable performers, give them clear, tough feedback about their current poor performance and the consequences if they don’t turn this around.

These strategies will raise the individual’s conscious awareness that there is a problem or an untapped potential. The final step before you decide to invest in him or her is to solicit to what extent he/she is willing to do the tough personal and professional developmental work in order to make a shift to greater effectiveness.

Absent that genuine willingness, don’t waste you money on coaching.

But lingering somewhere in the back of our minds is the idea that when this is all over and we all have jobs back again, things will return to how it was before derivative financing and house prices tanked.

Well, it looks more and more like things won’t!

This week Newsweek Magazine featured an excerpt from Author Greg Easterbrook’s latest book, Sonic Boom. In it he talks about the frenetic pace of change due to globalization and how, once we come out of the recession, this will sweep us all back into its vortex, resulting in both benefit and pain. Let me quote him on the bad news part of our future:

…just as favorable economic and social trends are likely to resume, many problems that have characterized recent decades are likely to get worse, too.

Job instability, economic insecurity, a sense of turmoil, the fear that when things seem good a hammer is about to fall–these are also part of the larger trend.  As world economies become ever more linked by computers, job stress will become a 24/7 affair. Frequent shakeups in industries will cause increasing uncertainty.

I think this means managers must consciously shift the context of the conversations they have with their employees. We need to create a new consciousness about how…

1. We really mean it this time–there really won’t be that elusive thing we call security as we go forward in the decade.
2. This means that each one of us, manager and employee alike, needs to start seeing ourselves as what William Bridges calls “You & Company.” We have take personal responsibility for our job performance record, our skill and educational development, and our ability to stay marketable in the crazy economy coming at us.

We have to get it ourselves! And we owe it to our employees to drive the message home to them as well.