"To love things spiritually, that is to say, intelligently and disinterestedly, means to love the love in them, to worship the good which they pursue, and to see them all prophetically in their possible beauty.
To love things as they are would be a mockery of things: a true lover must love them as they would wish to be. For nothing is quite happy as it is, and the first act of true sympathy must be to move with the object of love towards its happiness."
—George Santayana
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Churchill was fond of saying that the higher you rise in an organization, the more you can see the big picture of strategy instead of mere tactics. That is not necessarily true any more. As companies flatten, essential intelligence is now bound to lie at the organization’s bottom and periphery – where the company meets the customer. Imagine a firm with seven reporting levels. If the people at every level report fifty percent of what they know up to the next higher level, the leader at the top will know less than two percent of what is actually going on in the organization. If control resides solely at the top, the consequences of being so out of touch can be disastrous for decision-making. Imagine what happens if the leader bases his or her decisions on the wrong two percent!
The time when a few great leaders guided affairs with a firm hand is coming to an end. Reality has become such a complex jungle that no single leader, no matter how great, can cut through the thicket alone. Even men like Churchill or Gandhi or Kennedy, were they alive today, would be hard-pressed to lead.
In response, a new generation of leaders, unlike the ones we’ve known in the past, is emerging. Just as the industrial age has given way to the information age, we are seeing the end of one era of leadership and the birth of another. This transformation is happening because the way we live and do business – the landscape in which leaders must lead – is changing.
In the new era coming into being, each of us has the opportunity to express leadership—to shape our own destinies and those of our organizations and societies—to an extent never before thought possible. More than ever before in history, ordinary people are being summoned to lead. Whether we are managers or workers, whether we live in industrialized or developing countries, whether we are students or teachers, soldiers or generals, politicians or voters, women or men, we can no longer wait for an extraordinary, charismatic leader to tell us what to do or who to be.
For one thing, employees can no longer be treated as mere subordinates. Today, when a company’s true assets – its human and intellectual capital – leave the office every night, traditional chains of command are largely irrelevant. One cannot look for leadership only at the top, and bosses cannot simply tell knowledge workers and free agents what to do.
So how do you manage leaders? The answer is: you don’t manage them, lest they stop leading. You empower them. You coach them. In the old industrial paradigm, managers could get by without coaching. Command-and-control was good enough. But knowledge workers are far more independent than traditional ones. This independence demands a complete change of your management and leadership style. You may need to learn a thing or two about how to coach specialists who know far more than you do in a particular field. The celebrated former Stanford University head coach Bill Walsh says: “Today, in sports as elsewhere, individualism is the general rule. Some of the most talented people are the ones who are the most independent. That has required from management a fundamental change in the art and skill of communication and in organizational development.” Ordering people around is simply not good enough anymore – not even in traditional hierarchies like the military. Coaching has become an essential competence. And the heavy-duty globalization of recent years has only increased its importance. You can’t tell people in other countries what to do; you can’t order them around. If the command-and-control model is obsolete in a domestic context, it is simply bankrupt when you manage across borders.
So how do you coach leaders? Most people’s understanding of coaching comes from the world of sports, whose professionals have used coaches for a long time. Already in the 1980s, Boris Becker worked with coach Ron Tiriac to win Wimbledon and become the world’s #1 tennis player. In 2003, Andy Roddick signed on Brad Gilbert as his coach. Tiger Woods uses a coach (a fact that many leaders mention to justify using their own coaches: even the very best can always get better). But coaching has reached into many other areas. Actors and opera singers have acting and voice and accent coaches. Professionals have career coaches. In September 2003 the New York City Board of Education began employing coaches, offering weekly 55-minute sessions to incoming teachers. Even the staid German Federal Agency for Employment has introduced coaching in its work processes. And after presidential candidate Howard Dean gave a lukewarm performance in a September 2003 presidential debate among Democratic candidates, his supporters called on him to hire an image/debate coach.
Not least, managers use executive coaches. Just a few years ago, news that a CEO or senior executive had a coach would have raised eyebrows in the boardroom. But now coaching has become fashionable. David S. Pottruck, CEO of the Charles Schwab Corporation; eBay, Inc. CEO Meg Whitman; and Paul O’Neill, the former Alcoa CEO and treasury secretary, to mention only some US examples, all have used executive coaches. While coaches are most prevalent in the United States, the use of some sort of coaching is spreading globally. A 2002 survey of human resources professionals by the Hay Group, an HR consultancy, found that more than half the 150 organizations in Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America had increased their use of coaching in the previous twelve months; 16 percent were using coaches for the first time.
It is becoming clear that coaching is a key success factor in exceptional performance, but the coaching process is often badly understood and largely absent from most management. The term “coaching” is often used to mask old-style methods like advice or criticism, or more sinister applications like manipulation or coercion. And unless manager-coaches understand the deep-seated and often subconscious experiences and psychodynamic structures of their team members, they will likely do more damage than help – even with the best of intentions. All too often managers have been promoted to senior management positions because they excelled in a specialized technical skill-set – for example finance or engineering – but never had the opportunity to develop their people skills, let alone their coaching capacities. But unless managers learn leading through coaching, they are unlikely to produce lasting change.
This book aims to contribute to a deeper, fuller and more systematic – yes, in a word, a more “Swiss” – understanding of the coaching process. One client of author and leadership coach Thomas D. Zweifel, a senior executive at a multinational energy company, told him that his coaching methodology differs from conventional approaches. “You provide a backbone of principles, not just the fad of the moment,” he said. “This is not just theory, but applied. Normally there is no reflection – we just file the notes; but with you there is reflection, and we incorporate the concepts in our everyday business. Normally we end up with a slew of new problems – you on the other hand solve problems. Your coaching does not waste time; on the contrary, it speeds up our work.” Zweifel could not have asked for a better summary of our approach. A combination of features makes the coaching approach in this book unique – indeed, it is the author’s conviction that coaching will not produce sustainable breakthrough results unless it sports these features:
- An undying commitment to leaders’ success and measurable, bottom-line, breakthrough results (rather than relying on a pre-existing program);
- A focus on action (rather than merely on theory in costly seminars, where ideas sound good and never have to be proven);
- A dedication to revealing the brilliance of the client (rather than remedial coaching designed to “fix” the client);
- An emphasis on communication – listening and speaking – as the medium in which all coaching happens (rather than on mysterious psychological concepts);
- A cross-cultural approach that allows clients to decode their own and other people’s cultures (rather than assuming a one-fits-all methodology that often emanates from only one culture and does not work in another);
- And last but not least, a realization that the coach is a catalyst that interrupts business-as-usual (rather than an expert or mentor).
Forged in the Fire
How did Dr. Zweifel develop his unique coaching approach? Over two decades ago, The Hunger Project quietly pioneered a new style of leadership—leadership from below. In a previous incarnation as director of global operations, Zweifel was charged with pursuing highly challenging business goals in 27 affiliates around the world, a responsibility that certainly prevented him from getting too much sleep. But the title “director” suggests more authority than he actually enjoyed. Each organizational affiliate was incorporated in its own jurisdiction, and legally and fiscally required to report to its own national board of directors, not to the global board of directors or to the director. The only legal authority Zweifel had was to revoke the name “The Hunger Project” if an affiliate failed to carry out the programs outlined in the organization’s charter. Otherwise, he had no legal power to tell people what to do.
Years later, after Zweifel had left the organization and had coached private-sector clients, the genius of this structure dawned on him: it had forced him to work in true partnership with people around the world. His lack of formal authority – the very thing that had given him so many sleepless nights – had made him build profound relationships, foster people’s internal commitment to the organization’s mission and methodology, become a transformational leader who inspired rather than merely a transactional one wielding carrots or sticks – in short, become a useful manager-coach.
Zweifel was forced to become a new kind of leader: a leader who supports the people rather than ruling over them; a leader who focuses not on placating his own ego, but on coaching others to fulfill their aspirations; a leader who is about unleashing the human spirit to make a difference. This book is about the new style of leadership he learned in the process.
Today Zweifel says, “I learned the art of coaching the hard way, in the action. I made lots of mistakes. In hindsight, some of them seem stupid (don’t take my word for it, just read my stories). Looking back, I often wonder: how could I have been so blind? Yet I am grateful for my blunders. They taught me what works and what does not. And hopefully they will allow others to see what will work and what won’t in their own endeavors as leaders. Perhaps reading about my mistakes and my successes will mean that they won’t have to reinvent the wheel.”
And this is what makes Coaching Leaders a very different book from most others. It is written by one who was forged in the fire, who had to test his theories in the action with hundreds of leaders in all sectors – corporations and small/medium enterprises, government agencies and the military, nonprofits and UN agencies. Coaching is an art, but Dr. Zweifel believes it is also a science: far from being a mystery, it consists of laws that can be taught and learned. He teaches leadership at Columbia University, he writes on it, he speaks on it in organizations and in the media; but he also lives leadership every day. Unlike many other leadership experts, he is a coach-author-professor folded into one. This gives him a unique vantage point on the practice of coaching leaders.
True, there is scant scientific evidence or statistical research on the efficacy of the coaching approach, compared to traditional top-down control. Most books and articles on coaching involve only one successful case or a few anecdotes, which doesn’t prove anything. How can we know that the coaching approach as an independent factor makes a positive difference in an enterprise’s productivity? But the author’s experience over twenty years of coaching shows the superiority of the coaching methodology. His coaching has reliably produced hundreds of leaders who think for themselves, transform obstacles into opportunities, and get results that were virtually impossible prior to coaching. In one company, the retail team produced an 11.5% increase in sales while the industry average declined by 1% in a difficult year. Also in one year, another coachee exceeded his goal of 5 million euros in sales with new products not even on the market before the coaching project. In another organization, sales increased by 1,000 percent in the three months after a coaching intervention.
Yet coaching is not merely about results. Nor is it a euphemism for telling people to do stuff. Coaching is a never-ending quest for what it means to unleash the human spirit. May Coaching Leaders give readers an intense appetite for coaching as a life-long quest – the commitment to revealing the very best in those around them. And in the final analysis, integrating the coaching paradigm in the organizational culture is – at least in the medium and long term – the best and most cost-effective investment in the organization’s people and future. |
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