Executive Coaching: Articles

Leadership by Persuasion

“Effective persuasion becomes a negotiating and learning process through which a persuader leads colleagues to a problem’s shared solution.” —Jay A. Conger, PhD  Professor of Organizational behavior, London Business School Author, Winning ’Em Over: A New Model for Management in the Age of Persuasion

As a leader, your success depends upon your ability to get things done: up, down and across all lines. To survive and succeed, you must learn to persuade people: to convince them to take action on your behalf and under your direction, often without formal authority.

Persuasion is widely perceived as a skill reserved for sales and negotiation. Now, it’s an essential proficiency for all leaders, requiring you to move people toward a position they don’t currently hold. You must not only make a rational argument, but also frame your ideas, approaches and/or solutions in ways that appeal to basic human emotions.

Discovery, Preparation, Dialogue

Any attempt to persuade may provoke colleagues to oppose and polarize. Because persuasion is a learning and negotiating process, it must include three phases: discovery, preparation and dialogue.

Before you even begin to speak, consider your position from every angle. Presenting your ideas may take weeks or months of planning to learn about your audience and prepare your arguments.

Dialogue occurs both before and during the persuasion process. You must invite people to discuss solutions, debate the merits of your position, offer honest feedback and suggest alternatives. You must test and revise ideas to reflect colleagues’ concerns and needs. Success depends on being open-minded and willing to incorporate compromises.

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Finding Your Next Big Idea: Where Will It Come From?

The business enterprise has two, and only two, basic functions: marketing and innovation. It is not necessary for a business to grow bigger; but it is necessary that it constantly grow better. ―Peter F. Drucker

The organization that fails to continually innovate new products and services will not survive long.

But not all innovations produce commercial success. A new business idea must offer customers exceptional utility at an attractive price, while delivering a tidy profit.

Most business opportunities emanate from methodical analysis of seven areas of opportunity, according to Peter Drucker (Harvard Business Review, 2002).

Unexpected Occurrences and Failures

Unexpected occurrences can be illustrated by what happened in the early years of computer technology. Univac, which had the most sophisticated machine, spurned business applications. IBM quickly realized their potential and redesigned a computer for payroll applications, making them an industry leader within five years.

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Coaching Leaders- 6 Reasons Some Executives Give Up

How do you help leaders succeed? Give them some coaching, that’s the widely accepted solution. Then why do some executives give up on coaching programs designed to help them improve?

Executive coaching offers a tremendous opportunity to leverage leadership talent and resources. Coaching is no longer reserved for problem leaders. It is more frequently sought by top performers whose organizations value their management and growth potential. Yet, sometimes coaching programs just don’t work. Why?

Why Leaders Give Up

When it comes to change, some leaders lose motivation and fail to “stick with the program.”

Coaching can be daunting for some leaders, as they must be willing to be vulnerable and open. It is exhilarating for those who embrace it and commit to change. But for many, it's difficult to make real behavioral changes.

Unlike management science or academic theory, coaching is an intense interpersonal journey.

Coaches and their clients form strong bonds built on trust, openness, confidence and achievement. For coaching to work, the connection must be firm and the coaching program must operate with clear ground rules.

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Leadership Power Stress: Part 1, Sources

“Power stress is part of the experience that results from the exercise of influence and sense of responsibility felt in leadership positions.” - (Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, Resonant Leadership, Harvard Business School Press, 2005)

Leadership requires the exercise of influence or power. It requires having an impact on others to make things happen. It involves responsibility for the organization. Leaders are under continual scrutiny and evaluation. All these things increase the feels of pressure and stress.

For people who head organizations, choices are rarely simple and clear. Communications and decision making are incredibly complex. Worse, leaders are often called upon to get results and lead people over whom they have little authority.

There is no doubt that it's lonely at the top. Affiliation with others is known to relieve stress, yet leaders are selected for their high need for power and achievement. Under pressure, a leader will work harder, rather than reach out to others.

Furthermore, the higher one is in position, the less authentic the feedback. Leaders are prone to CEO disease, where the feedback going upwards is distorted or diluted.

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Leadership Power Stress: Part 2, 3 Resources for Renewal

“Power stress is part of the experience that results from the exercise of influence and sense of responsibility felt in leadership positions.” - (Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, Resonant Leadership, Harvard Business School Press, 2005)

Leadership requires the exercise of influence or power. It involves responsibility for the organization, and it requires the sacrifice of personal needs for those of company.  Leaders are under continual scrutiny and evaluation. All these things increase the pressure and leads to power stress.

Without awareness of power stress, and what is needed to renew oneself, leaders are vulnerable to burnout and dissonance with the people they lead.

The Leadership Paradox

Daniel Goleman, authority on emotional intelligence in organizations, calls this the leadership paradox: “For leaders, the first task in management has nothing to do with leading others; step one poses the challenge of knowing and managing oneself.” (Resonant Leadership, page x.)

This includes:

• Connecting with the deep values that guide us
• Imbuing our actions with meaning
• Aligning our emotions with our goals
• Keeping ourselves motivated
• Keeping ourselves focused and on task

When we act in accord with these inner measures, we feel good about what we do. Such emotions are contagious. When we as a leader feel positive, energized, and enthusiastic about our work, so do those we influence. But we can only maintain high effectiveness when we are able to manage the cycles of sacrifice and renewal. This involves being mindful, and expressing hope and compassion.

The Brain and New Age Rhetoric

Before you dismiss the concepts of mindfulness, hope and compassion as being new-age rhetoric, pay attention to the research.

Recent studies in management science, psychology and neuroscience all point to the importance of the development of mindfulness and the experiences of hope and compassion. These practices are supported by scientific evidence.

It boils down to the brain. The brain processes information and sends signals to the sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous systems. These two systems create bodily reactions of either fight, flight, or relaxation and calm.

Optimal functioning involves both systems, those that lead to action, and those that lead to recuperation. Unfortunately, in organizations little emphasis or encouragement is given to renewal and recovery activities.

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Onboarding: How to Pick a Winning Team in the First 90 Days

Assessing a team—deciding who should stay and who should go—is one of the most critical tasks an executive faces when transitioning into a new position.

The first weeks are crucial for learning and evaluating. During this time, leaders are most vulnerable, without a firm support network in place. If you are promoted to a new position from within the organization, you are likely acquainted with some of its key people. Transition from the outside, and you face the task of identifying and placing the right people into the right positions—a much greater challenge.

How to Assess an Existing Team

When performing your evaluation, you’ll find some excellent, some average and some unsatisfactory people in place. You will need to sort out who’s who, the functions people perform and how the group has worked in the past.

o Who will you keep in place and/or develop?
o Who will you move to another position?
o Who will you observe for a while?
o Who will you replace (low and high priority)?

“The most important decisions you make in your first 90 days will probably be about the people on your team. If you succeed in creating a high-performance team, you can exert tremendous leverage in value creation. If not, you will face severe difficulties, for no leader can hope to achieve much alone.” — Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

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Decision-Making - Emotion or Reason?

Have you ever made a foolish decision that had unpleasant consequences? Needless to say, we all have. Consider the following:

• We go grocery shopping with the resolve to eat healthfully and buy a gallon of ice cream… just in case friends stop by.
• We need to replace our used car… and end up buying a brand-new one.
• We bet on a sports team we don’t really  think can win because the risk offers great financial reward.
• We take a job with long hours because the benefits seem too good to pass up.

Later, we cannot seem to find rational explanations for our decisions—but  we still manage to come up with “logical” excuses for our illogical behavior.

Neuroscientists learn more about the brain each day, including how it processes information and how we make decisions. While much remains to be discovered, we may not be as rational and “in control” as we think.

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Office Politics: Survival of the Savvy

There’s one skill everybody at work wishes they were better at, but you won’t find it taught in MBA courses: office politics.

Tales of political sabotage, power plays and turf wars are part of any organization’s history. Nonetheless, political competence is the one skill everyone wishes to have more of — but no one admits to it.

Political competence is the “ability to understand what you can and cannot control, when to take action, who is going to resist your agenda, and whom you need on your side. It’s about knowing how to map the political terrain and get others on your side, as well as lead coalitions,” according to Prof. Samuel B. Bacharach who wrote Getting Them On Your Side, 2005.

Defining Political Savvy

It’s naive to suggest that all office politics are destructive and unethical. If you define politics in such a narrow and negative way, you overlook the value of political awareness and skill. When political astuteness is combined with ethics and integrity, it can produce positive results for you, your team and your organization.

By avoiding or denying its existence, you underestimate how political behavior can destroy careers, a company’s reputation and overall performance. If you define politics in only negative terms, you are naively under-political, which leaves you vulnerable to overly political, self-serving individuals.

Three Phases of Political Competence

Political competence can be developed in an ethically sound way with a three-phase process.

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Bargaining to Win - and Still Be Friends

Without signing up for the Harvard Negotiating Project, how can you learn to bargain to get what you want?

Let’s face it: Each of us negotiates every day. At work, we discuss additional compensation when we’re promoted to a new position. We plan a vacation or a move. We negotiate with our spouse over what’s for dinner and which TV shows to watch. We negotiate all sorts of things, big and small, on a daily basis.

Negotiation is a means of getting what you want from others. It consists of back-and-forth discussions designed to reach an agreement with another party anytime you face common and opposing interests. But sometimes differing interests can cause the discussion to careen off track into an argument. Even when you reach a compromised agreement, the relationship may be harmed.

Positional Bargaining

Most often, when people bargain, they become entrenched in their positions. They try to reach a compromise that’s as close as possible to their original goal. This means bargaining in a give-and-take fashion.

The problem with this process, known as “positional bargaining,” is simple: Once you take a position, you lock yourself into it. The more you defend it, the more committed you become to it. Some people try to use soft bargaining, with an emphasis on preserving the relationship. This works—unless the other party is a hard bargainer.

An Alternative Process

There’s an alternative to hard or soft bargaining: Change the game entirely. Based on the Harvard Negotiation Project, this method—described in the book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton—is called principled negotiation, or negotiation on the merits.

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Leadership Talent: Winning the Succession Wars

Summary: The demand for leadership talent greatly exceeds supply. If economic growth continues at a modest 2 percent for the next 15 years, there would be a need for one-third more senior leaders than there are today. Who will replace your retiring executives, and how will you keep your company’s leadership pipeline full?

The demand for leadership talent greatly exceeds supply. If economic growth continues at a modest 2 percent for the next 15 years, there would be a need for one-third more senior leaders than there are today.

Baby boomers have already started to retire. Most large companies will have to scramble to meet gaps in senior leadership talent. Who will replace your retiring executives, and how will you keep your company’s leadership pipeline full?

To make matters worse, the global and more dynamic economy of the 21st century requires executive talent with a more complex skill set:

• Greater technological literacy
• A sophisticated understanding of global marketplaces
• Multicultural fluency
• Relationship savvy, with extensive networks of alliances and stakeholders
• Leadership skills over a delayered, disaggregated and virtual organization

Succession Planning in the 21st Century

In response to these challenges, organizations have a renewed interest in succession planning systems. While these systems functioned merely as replacement charts in the past, and were HR executives’ function, there are two critical differences today, emphasizing:

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