The Sense Makers

Researching the background for a keynote on the difficulties executives have in onboarding either from the outside (new to the organization) or by promotion from the inside, I was struck by the low levels of trust that employees have of their CEO; in other words, their leader.

Across 18 countries 29% of employees trust their CEO and, here is the shocker – 17% in the USA!

Let’s look at the impact of this finding:  71% of employees DON’T trust their leader.  This rises to 83% in the US.  If the level of trust is really at this level, none of the messages given out by the organization leaders is believed.  Every communiqué is listened to, the cynical filters applied with the result that, however important the message, it’s content is discarded as suspect.

As coaches and facilitators working with teams to build trust, we now begin to understand why we work so hard with teams and come back from time to time to help rebuild content-rich and direct communication between team members.  The collective cynicism and expectation that each person applies to his or her everyday listening is transferred to the team members.   This is a slow process until a team member behaves badly and is not ‘called’ by the other team members.  From this point on, trust tumbles down the short, steep and slippery slope: the result – a well-performing team crumbles into a dysfunctional group operating in a toxic environment.

Back to the executive onboarding process.  Would you, as a rational person, bet against odds of 70% plus chance of failure?  And we do!  Every day people are promoted and hired into executive roles.

Here is the second shoe.  40% of excecutive hires fail in the first 18 months of their tenure.

We have one good reason, trust, but there are more.  Let’s not look at the reasons as excuses but get to both the process and cost.  The next article deals with the process of onboarding and a subsequent article roams around the costs associated with failure.

Not being psychologists, we shortchange the individuals becasue we don’t deal with their hurt and the impact sush a “failure” has on their self confidence.  But let’s air some of the causes and create a serious discussion around what can be done to reduce the 40% non-success rate.

As I network to position myself as an executive coach, the feedback has been along the lines of “what exactly is coaching” and “that’s not what I want.  I want you to engage me, challenge me, be a consultant to me BUT DON’T tell me what to do”.

And so, I began the soul-searching to work out what I really am and how I can constructively engage executives and their teams in improving their personal performances in tangible ways.

I now know that I am happiest “helping people help themselves” but the ‘how‘ part has eluded me for some months.  Even with the diagram published by the Harvard Business Review, I still struggled in the trade-off between consulting (a 30+ year veteran) and coaching.

Here is where I am today:

• I have a wealth of experience in facilitating, problem identification and scenario development, supporting executives in grappling with tough decisions and helping executives work with their teams and helping the teams work with their executive.  This sounds peculiar, I know, but how many times have teams rolled their eyes at a meeting, said nothing in the meeting but been vocal around the water cooler, in hallways and with anyone who is prepared to listen to their dissatisfaction with the decision.

• I have been uncomfortable ‘coming up with answers’ as I really don’t know the nuances of the organizational context.  In contrast, I am very good at defining problems, engaging people in and around the problem in a process of ‘unpicking’ the problem knot while not being sidetracked by symptoms and facilitating scenario development with those who are steeped in the organizational context.

• As an executive consultant with a coaching focus, I can rove through the difficulties you face by asking powerful questions, play various roles you need, use life stories to illustrate behaviors and outcomes and help you help yourself by getting to the best solution in your context.  I am not responsible for ‘telling’ you what to do: you carry that responsibility and are accountable as a capable leader.

• You don’t get a voluminous report that justifies the position I have taken and represented in the recommendations.  You get a dynamic interaction which results in an action plan to change your future or a part of your future, we give other feedback on the process and look to improve the level of trust and imagination (with trust, more lateral solutions fall into our reach and we can plan for the increased risk as a natural consequence of more ‘edgey’ scenarios.  And, you also get the kudus of success and know you have a backstop where the plan did not work as expected.  You get a thinking partner walking a mile with you in your shoes.
  

We focus on the future, we are relentless in looking for better individual performance and we do this by you discovering your own path.

• This outcome is successful coaching.

• Now, really successful coaching sees you learning how to coach and applying the principle to your teams and helping them increase their performances, work more cohesively as a team and feed back your bad behaviors to you in a supportive way.

• Each person is seen, heard and understood.
  

Isn’t this what each of us craves – the recognition of our strengths and contribution?

Executive coaching is all about improving performance – your personal performance, that of your teams and your combined contribution to the organizational brand.

We look at brand as the broad ‘holder’ for quality of product or service, customer interactions, response to market demands represented by agility and flexibility, internal processes and solid teamwork between all levels in the organization.

Exceptional results are likely to follow once the variables are well established and ‘owned’ by the individuals making up the teams and leaders.

So, where does executive coaching pay?

Lets start with you, the leader.  If you are able to talk through thorny issues with a person having significant business background and know that your discussion is kept in complete confidence, you have an opportunity to weigh potential options rationally.  As a coach, I will challenge your assumptions and ask those deceptively simple questions that make you stretch your thinking.  In effect, we are walking backwards up the results chain by identifying the results gap, analyzing the actions, understanding your behavior and, finally, working out how to change your context of operation.  If you look at this as a scenario, we test the impact of a different context on different thinking which drives behavior and actions.  Then we test the possible result to see how close we come to closing the gap.

The payoff is in the clarity of seeing possibilities through a different lens.  The lens is mirror the coach holds up to you, the space you gain to think differently, the assumptions you hold and are challenged by the coach and, finally, the scenarios you are to built and test for fit in theory.

Now, we put an action plan, timeline and checkpoints in place and get to trying the chosen scenario out in practice.  The key to learning and improving is reviewing the scenario results and analyzing how and why both the strong and weak points have happened, doing more of the good and tweaking the weak results by changing the approach, publishing the learning and instilling the lessons into ‘the way we do business round here’.

Internalizing learning is the fundamental building block of iterative change: celebrating these learning wins at all levels of the organization sets an example and involves all the organization members in the business.  We want to use the full range of brainpower available to the business to its maximum.

And so, performance improves, people are engaged and participate, celebrate wins, learn from losses and raise the bar on quality.  In turn, brand grows along both breadth and depth.  Your customers increase trust in the organization and form a solid base for earnings – what the Wall Street analysts call “quality of earnings”.