COACHING
LEADERS/BEHAVIORAL COACHING
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dimension of what is really (and should be) going on . . . psychotherapeutic
intervention. When it comes to subordinates, most managers are blissfully
comfortable with themselves, blindly indifferent to the needs of others, and
relatively disinclined to do anything that does not provide immediate self-
benefit. Should we be surprised? Anyone who works for a company today
knows how self-interest gets rewarded, understands the pressure to self-
aggrandize, and recognizes that corruption has been made interpersonally
legal. It’s the rare and special leader who sheds those self-imposed limita-
tions on the way up the ladder to become someone truly worth following.
Typically, we are called in to “coach” when high-flying executives have hit
an abrupt interpersonal wall. Either they have suddenly—and for no apparent
reason—lost the support, commitment and admiration of “their people”; or
they have so alienated colleagues, customers, or staff that their careers are in
immediate jeopardy. This is not a rare occurrence. In fact, it happens all the
time. Managers, by nature, rarely figure out what it takes to be a real leader
without the healthy shock of imminent derailment. They are simply not hard-
wired to let go of the technical skills, capabilities, and intelligence that got
them where they are today, in order to embrace a new, softer skill set that
will serve themselves and others better from now on.
The work that we do is (and must be) developmentally based. Generally, we
engage with a client over a two-to-five-year time frame. Anything less is nothing
more than assuaging upper management that something is being done. We are
not interested in what might be considered palliative; what we really want to
accomplish is something meaningful.
To be effective, our approach must be developmentally integrated for the
individual and done in a group context. In other words, we rely on the ex-
pertise and help offered by those surrounding the manager who have the
true experience of interacting with him or her. This differs from the typical
360-degree feedback love fest. In our view, traditional 360s are a waste of
time because they never enjoin the people who provided the data as part
of the solution. Instead, they get everyone to fill out the right paperwork,
throw it into some vat, and provide it to managers in sanitized form for later
retaliation. In the approach we take, we gather the perceptions and experi-
ences of a variety of stakeholders as data input; but we also recruit those
people as part of the therapeutic intervention.
In our model, we teach managers to develop three
behavioral constructs,
which are probably different from the methods of most coaches. First, we
guide managers in learning how to be irreverent. Leaders need to look at
themselves from the point of view that who they are and what they are
doing is worth examining, doubting, and changing. Second, we try to
invoke in
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