Your Goals Need High-octane Fuel

The dictionary defines the word vector as “(to) direct (an aircraft in flight) to a desired point.” In life too,  one needs an appropriate vector to guide us to our desired goals. And my client B needed one.
Over the years since he had joined his father in his business, he had progressively moved into an increasingly executive role. With his father involving himself less and less in the business, he was now at the cusp of a critical decision - how should he now define his role to himself?
Enter the coach.
Over two intense coaching conversations, wide ranging at first and funneling into more focused ones, he gradually arrived at a role definition which proved a powerful vector. And that was the role of a ‘Change agent’.
This role definition has proved to be transformational, providing him clarity of action and purpose. And this has translated into more satisfying outcomes

The Power of Story

When I asked him what his values were, he looked a bit lost. After some thought, he said the 7 Habits book had influenced him greatly. But as a coach,  I saw a difference between ‘influencing’ and ’driving’. For, values not only influence - they drive every one of our actions and define our emotional states. Experiences aligning with our values are considered reward and violation a threat.
So I had to make him think deeper.
The solution?  Tell a story, a personal experience that shaped my own life. I shared one such, and voilà, he immediately came up with five of his own values.
That's the power of the story. It has the power to shift your thinking.

Navigating Emotions

To navigate something as intangible and changeable as cologne, industry “noses” require a vocabulary of sorts. But the key among all the nomenclature is the ”family” to which the fragrance belongs (eg ‘floral’, ’aquatic’, woody’). Like human families, these boxes often bleed into another and you can end up with unusual hybrids. - Bloomberg

CoachConnect
Human emotions, like fragrances, are just as intangible and changeable, and they too can end up as unusual hybrids. The coach, by helping the client give appropriate labels to his emotions provides a handle to better deal with them. 

Unproductive Emotions Take a Toll

The key to projecting an air of power is being self-confident, says the Business Insider. And the worst thing for self-confidence is having a nagging thought about a flaw in your appearance. No one may notice the missing button on your jacket, but as soon as start to worrying about it, your behavior may unconsciously draw attention to it.

CoachConnect
Has it happened that what you are worried most about, turns out as inconsequential as that missing button on the jacket? Unproductive emotions take a toll on our priorities. Conversations with a coach, help take a healthier perspective on life.

The Coaching Approach

Intelligence, takes more than one form. There is the linear, which enables us to deal with the material world; & there is the intuitive, over which we have no conscious control. It is this latter intelligence that is the source of creativity. - Alan Garner
CoachConnect
“It is as if my every thought is getting a voice.” said my client D after a coaching session. This state is born of a deep trust & comfort of being with one who wishes only your success, This, along with a design thinking approach produces an uninhibited, nonlinear expression of ideas that tap into the client's ability to intuit.

Ruthless Prioritisation

“The conversation with you”, said client B, “made me realize that I am spending only 0.5% of my time on my key priorities“.

CoachConnect
This kind of a realisation is a result of a deep dive into what you really want in life, and how you want to take your business to new heights. It’s a process Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook would call ‘Ruthless Prioritisation’.

Want to know what your Ruthless Priorities are and fast track your personal and business growth? Get in touch.

Why a Coach?

Vishal Gondal bought different fitness bands and apps to keep fit but none helped him achieve his goals.
Till he met a coach.
The coach began asking him for his data and started tracking what he was doing and how he was doing, on a regular basis. With this regular tracking and monitoring by the coach - who wouldn't meet him on a daily basis - he managed to remain committed to the daily targets. His learning; technology alone cannot achieve fitness goals, human interface and engagement is equally important to achieve necessary results.
#Learning
If fitness goals are hard to achieve on one's own, what of life and business goals? Being on our own and lacking the expert advice of a coach results in limited engagement with our goals, limited reinforcement and limited motivation and therefore,  failure to achieve them. Ultimately It is not about setting goals, it is about how much of an impact their successful achievement has on the health of your business and the happiness of your people.

10 Reasons Why I Am Passionate about Coaching

I subscribe to an interesting newsletter by E.R. Haas, whose outfit provides virtual training products for personal and professional excellence. His recent newsletter had the subject line; The Power of Why will change the way you look at business success. Intrigued, I opened the newsletter, because I must tell you, I have been struggling with this 'why' business for a long time now! Long have been the hours I have spent thinking of why I am so passionate about coaching. Unfortunately, every statement I had thought of had sounded like a motherhood rather than  a statement which captured the key drivers of my passion. Things had come to such a pass where doubts had started to creep into my mind of the sincerity of my passion! And now this newsletter had come along to rub salt into my wounds! Or so I thought, as I decided to see what this guy Haas had to say. And I must say what  he had to say, pushed me finally into getting down (once again) to find answers to the question which had haunted me all this time about why I coach. And this time I finally managed to crack it!! Here is how my moment of epiphany happened. 

The Eureka Hour!

The trigger of stimulation in Haas's newsletter was a video of a TED presentation called 'Start with Why: How Great Leaders inspire Action' by Simon Sinek. Sinek spoke of what he called the Golden Circle, which looked like this.

According to Sinek, everybody knows “what” they do 100%. Some know how they do it. But very very few people or organizations know WHY they do it. (he was telling me!) The answer, Sinek said, wasn't about making a profit, that was the result. It was the “why”, why do you do it, why do you get out of bed in the morning, and why should people care. Simple yet profound, and it immediately got me researching (aka google) my unanswered question of 'why I coach' with renewed vigour. My search led me to a presentation by the Master Motivator Tony Robbins called Why we do what we do, in which he talked of the "invisible forces" that motivated everyone's actions. I spent the entire evening mulling about what Robbins had to say. I slept over it, and the first thing the next morning, as soon as I woke up, was this sudden blinding clarity! A clarity about all the reasons why I was so passionate about coaching! All of them seemed to want to burst forth like a dam burst! The best thing was, I could relate every one of the reasons to something that had actually occurred sometime in my coaching situations! I immediately put pen to paper and started jotting down my thoughts. And here is what I wrote: 

I coach because it enables me to make a difference to people’s lives. I do this by helping them:

1. Discover things about themselves they weren’t aware of

2. Feel they are worth it

3. Convert inertia in their efforts at success into impatience to get going

4. Add new meaning and depth to their relationships

5. Make their life and work feel more fulfilling

6. See  their life and work situations and events in new ways

7. Create their own processes to learn, grow and evolve

8. Create relationships between what they are aware of about their life and work, and what they were not aware of in those contexts

9. Get new insights in the patterns of their behaviour 

10. Put things into context by connecting past life and work events with present actions, behaviours and attitudes

Most importantly, the nature of the challenges my clients face, give me insights into those of my own.Their efforts and commitment to overcome their challenges give me the motivation and the learning to act on those of my own. 

And the bottom line - my clients’ every ‘ah aah’ moments give me SATISFACTION, their successful outcomes FULFILLMENT and the learning, ENRICHES  my life.

Thank you Haas, Simon and Tony!

Planners and Doers

Alan Cohen is an inspirational writer and author of The Daily Dose of Sanity. I read a page a day from the book for, as the blurb on the book says, my "five minute soul recharge." I find every thought  inspiring and often profoundly insightful. Today's 'soul recharge' was about how a participant at one of Cohen's seminar asked him for a good spiritual community to join. The lady appeared very interested and also took notes of the details Cohen gave her. Later that night, one of the seminar sponsors asked him whether the lady had inquired about spiritual communities, when Cohen replied in the affirmative, the sponsor told him that she has been doing this for years, and she doesn't follow up."She just likes asking," he concluded.

The lesson Cohen draws from the incident is, while the lady certainly craved community, she had more of an investment in the question than the answer. She symbolized the part all of us have that would rather seek than find.

Quite like one of my coaching clients, let us call him J, who was more of a planner than a doer. In the course of every coaching session, he would get some brilliant insights into some aspect of his life or business, and he would duly note it down as an action point. Come next session, when I would ask him the status on the action points he had noted the last time, he would always say   that he hadn't attended to them. After several such incidents, I finally asked him if he ever, even referred to the notes he so enthusiastically made at every session. His reply was another "no!" No wonder it took him one year to recruit a person for a critical position - he would call the same person time and again and never be able to take a decision!

My coaching lesson was that some of us have a greater emotional investment in the intellectual exercise of planning than in the uncertainties of the results of the execution of the thought. 

Coaching For Ethical Dilemmas

Recently, I came across an article from Fast Company, The Nine Faces of Leaders which dealt with the attributes FedEx uses to identify it's potential leaders. Among the nine,one was Integrity. Now Integrity to my mind, is colored with shades of both moral as well personal values, as a result of which,  Integrity based leadership-decisions are likely to be fraught with personal and professional  conflict. Having written my last blog piece on the subject of Managing Value Conflicts, I was curious to understand the  definition of this attribute, and since the Fast Company article gave only an edited version, I decided to explore a bit more for the complete version. This, I found, was how FedEx explains this leadership attribute

Integrity; A leader with integrity adheres to a code of business ethics and moral values, behaves in a manner that is consistent with the corporate climate and professional responsibility, does not abuse management privilege, gains trust/respect, and serves as a role model in support of corporate policies, professional ethics, and corporate culture. 

In my experience as a coach, I have found clients having to deal with conflicts managing their personal vs. business values everyday in the memos on their desks, in their engagement with difficult employees and in their negotiations with their clients. Finding it challenging to adhere to a code of business ethics and moral values, they look to a coach to help them work through their conflicts. I have often found coaching in these situations to be less than easy. How, exactly, should I help them clients think through their ethical issues, what questions should I be asking, and what are the factors I should consider? 

Hence my attempt to create my personal framework for coaching clients with ethical dilemmas.Hope it helps you too!

The Five-Step Ethical Coaching Framework
Manuel Velasquez is a professor of Business ethics and the author of a widely used text book.In their article Thinking Ethically: A Framework for Moral
Decisions Making he and his associates describe
five different approaches which philosophers down the ages have developed to deal with moral issues. 

More important, he and his co-authors offer a useful 5-step framework for coaches to help their clients explore ethical dilemmas and to identify ethical courses of action.

Step 1: Recognize an Ethical Issue

1. Could this decision or situation be damaging to someone or to some group? Does this decision involve a choice between a good and bad alternative, or perhaps between two "goods" or between two "bads"?
2. Is this issue about more than what is legal or what is most efficient? If so, how?

Step 2: Get the Facts

3. What are the relevant facts of the case? What facts are not known? How can I help the client  learn enough about the situation to make a decision?
4. What individuals and groups have an important stake in the outcome? Are some concerns more important? Why?
5. What are the options open to client for acting? Have all the relevant persons and groups been consulted? Have?How can I help client  identify creative options?

Step 3: Help Client Evaluate Alternative Actions

6.  Ask following questions to help client evaluate the options:

• Which option will produce the most good and do the least harm? (The Utilitarian Approach)
• Which option best respects the rights of all who have a stake? (The Rights Approach)
• Which option treats people equally or proportionately? (The Justice Approach)
• Which option best serves the community/organization 
  as a whole, not just some members/employees/stakeholders? 
  (The Common Good Approach)
• Which option can lead client to act as the sort of person he wants to be? (The Virtue Approach)

(For details on the Approaches click here)

Step 4: Make a Decision and Test It

7. Considering all these approaches, which option could best help client address the situation?
8. If the client told someone he respects-or told a television audience-which option he has chosen, what would they say?

Step 5: Help Client Act and Reflect on the Outcome

9. How can the client's decision be implemented with the greatest care and attention to the concerns of all stakeholders?
10. How did the decision turn out and how can I help client review learning from this specific situation?

Coaching for Ethical Practices

Dov Seidman is a consultant who helps corporates develop values-based cultures, he believes that in the 21st century, it is no longer what you do or what you know that counts most. It is how you do what you do that has become the greatest source of advantage. We are deep into what he calls the 'era of behavior'. 

By using The 5-Step framework coaches can help their clients to work through their moral and value conflicts, and shape behaviors for conceiving and re-conceiving how they can build for growth. 

Coaching Using Principles of Behavioral Economics

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, Thaler and Sunstein, authors of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, explain, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself. Decision makers do not make choices in a vacuum. They make them in an environment where many features, noticed and unnoticed, can influence their decisions. The goal of Nudge is to demonstrate how thoughtful “choice architecture” can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice. The person who creates that environment is, in the authors terminology, a choice architect. 

Reading more on Nudge in the various web references gave me more and more the feeling of just how remarkably similar the role of a choice architect is to that of a coach. Here's why: 

• Anyone  who indirectly influences the choices people make, the authors say, can be called "choice architect". A coach does exactly that, hence he is a  "choice architect" too.
• Choice architecture, can be used to help nudge people to make better choices (as judged by themselves) without forcing certain outcomes upon anyone. This is one of the basic tenets of coaching. 
• The tools described by the authors (though differing in nature and application) sound very similar to the ones a coach would use. For instance, the tools highlighted are: 
• Expecting error (the coach tool: empathy) 
• Understanding mappings (the coach uses assessments to map client needs) 
• Giving feedback (a primary coaching tool)
• Structuring complex choices (the coach is a clarifier)
• Creating incentives. (the coach uses small wins as incentives so client is motivated for the big wins)

The remarkable similarities set me thinking. How could one incorporate the discipline of behavioral economics on which the book is based, with the practice, and business, of coaching?

This article is my attempt to do just that.

Applying Principles of Behavioral Economics to Coaching

The use of behavioral principles is fundamental to any coaching practice. Behavioral economics can help coaches understand better what every coach always understood, albeit unwittingly: That people are not rational.  Any new understanding of people's behaviour can only give coaches a better understanding of how exactly coaching works. Or how they can make it work better. 

Stephen Covey the personal development guru applied his mind to why humans behave the way they do and what they could do to avoid human susceptibilities that lead to wrong decisions. The result was his book The 7 Habits of Effective People, and the first of the seven habits is Be Proactive. Proactive people, says Covey, are those who are in control of themselves and do not surrender to a stimulus in the external environment but use their personal power to deal with the stimulus, whether people or situation. How are they able to do this?

Stephen Covey's Proactive Model

Proactive people know that there is a gap between a Stimuli and Response and within that gap is their freedom to choose the right response to maintain control over their self and be above circumstances.

What about people who are not proactive? Often, resistance to change is the result of lack of clarity because of a conflict between the rational and the emotional mind which comes in the way of allowing any change to stick. Ideas, and in turn change, is effective when it stays with you over time and changes the way you think.

Weaving the two models together- Thaler and Sunstein's derived from behavioral economics and Covey's based on new age theories of personal development, could, I realized, help create a useful model for coaching: Nudge Coaching

In his Proactive model, Covey talks of the four tools humans have at their command to effectively exercise their freedom to choose. The four 'hot buttons of pro-activity' being:

1. Self-awareness
2. Imagination
3. Conscience
4. Independent Will

Through the process of Nudge Coaching applied to each of the four 'hot buttons of proactivity', the coach would be able to resolve the conflict between the rational and emotional mind, and makes change happen.

The Nudge Process of Coaching 

Choice architects, according to Thaler and Sunstein, can have considerable power to influence choices. Or to use our the authors preferred language, they can nudge. The authors explain this term as "...any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives." Most important from a coaching point of view - nudges are not mandates.  

Coaching clients are busy people who are trying to cope in a complex world and cannot think deeply about every choice they make. They adopt rules of thumb that sometimes leads them astray. The Nudge Coach brings organization and structure to the contexts in which people take decisions. Choice architecture does not seek to reduce choices - just influence them in order to improve the client's lives, as judged by themselves. Humans are susceptibile to various biases and hence the way an issue is framed makes a huge difference to the success of a coaching engagement. In other words, people are nudgable. In the Nudge coaching process, a coach helps clients to structure their choices and create strategies that makes it easier for them to do things that improve their lives. He uses four types of nudges to achieve these coaching goals:

1. Nudging Client Self-awareness: Faced with important decisions about their lives, people often make pretty bad choices—choices they would not have made if they paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities and complete self-control. They adopt rules of thumb that sometimes lead them astray. The explanation, according to Thaler and Sunstein, is rooted in some well-documented human behavioral quirks that are amplified by information overload and trying to cope in a complex world. All this leaves people with little time to think deeply about every choice they have to make. The Nudge Coach helps create awareness of their cognitive abilities and the resources available to them for better self-control.
2. Nudging Client Imagination: Sunstein and Thaler have spent a lot of time thinking about how people can be encouraged to make better decisions, and they offer some intriguing ideas. Their central thesis: People will make better choices if they are given a clear and well-designed set of options that acknowledge and offset human idiosyncrasies. For helping client's design and structure the options available to them,  the coach has to take into account his knowledge of behavioral science. By helping to rightly structure the choices available to the client, a coach helps to nudge clients to do the 'right' thing.
3. Nudging Client Conscience: Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik explains that the ideas of right or wrong, good or bad exist only among humans. No animal is good or bad - only humans would pity the antelope being being made meal of by a predator such as a a cheetah in a National Geographic documentary. Humans are greedy, unlike animals, who stop eating once their stomachs are full. Thus says Pattanaik, humans have the capacity to be worse than animals (greedy) and better than animals (generous). And it is in these subjective choices - greed vs generosity, right vs wrong and good vs bad that the coach, by structuring choices available to the clients, helps them to to improve decisions about their health, wealth and happiness.
4. Nudging Client Will: One of the basic tenets of behavioural economics is that people do not always take rational decisions. They have  status quo bias and change doesn't come easily. For reasons of laziness, fear, and distraction, many people will take whatever option requires the least effort, or the path of least resistance. All these forces imply that if, for a given choice, there is a default option—an option that will obtain if the chooser does nothing. The solution - helping coaching clients first make their choices, and then hold them accountable to their choice. Holding them accountable can at times  make the client feel challenged. A useful approach to overcome this is the one akin to the program in gmail. Every time a user mentions the word attachment but does not include one, prompts a pop-up, “Did you forget your attachment?” Similarly, by reminding the client of his commitment to the choice he has made, the coach can nudge the client will in non-threatening manner.

The Nudge Coach

By keeping an eye on the four nudges, a coach aka a choice architect can improve the outcomes for clients on their journey of the head and heart to fulfill their potential.

Journey to a Coaching Insight

Innovation was a term which had aroused my curiosity, and also bothered me  for a long time. The word was commonly understood as standing for something new or something novel - an understanding that did not satisfy my curiosity and therefore added to my bother.. For instance, I have always believed that my approach to any work I do, whether it is fixing things around the house, creating  new marketing strategies in my corporate career, or the tools and methods I use in my coaching have been uh, creative. I dreaded to use the word 'innovative' as a description of my methods, even to myself! This was because, in my mind the word stood for something radically different, and at the same time it also meant something incremental, creative or better. As you can see, the two were poles apart and just not reconcilable! Peter Drucker's definition of innovation as "Change that creates a new dimension of performance" was no help either.

Enlightenment Happens

Then, I happened to read an interesting article by Brianna Sylver in Businessweek, What does "Innovation" really mean. And enlightenment dawned! I understood just WHY the word innovation had bugged me so much. The word, Sylvers pointed out, had been used to describe everything from the Apple iPhone a new template in Microsoft word (or our very own jugaad)! How could one term be used to describe such vastly different things? The problem, Sylvers explained, lay in the lack of qualifiers. The term was used to mean 'ground-breaking  or world shattering' (iPhone) as well as a situation where the object of change became 'better than what it was before' (MS Word). Ah, so there it was, the cause of my discomfort and lingering dissatisfaction was  all because of the lack of qualifiers! This was Step1 in my journey of understanding of innovation. 

At about the same time, I came upon two definitions of innovation that helped me take a few more steps forward in my understanding.

The first was its description by Dr R.A. Mashelkar, Chairman  of the Innovations Foundation of India as "moving from best practices to next practices." The other was it's description as a "solution designed to address a particular pain point." by Navi Adjou of the University of Cambridge. While Adjou described 'pain points'  as the improvements made in technology, poor skills or processes, I was not quite sure what Next practices meant. On doing some research, I found Best practices were those that only allow you to do what you are currently doing a little better. On the other hand, Next Practices called for imagining what the future would look like; identify the big opportunities; and build capabilities to capitalize on them. In other words, Next practices were about creating your own future rather than relying on the innovation of others.

After churning this understanding of innovation in my mind's blender, I came with the following two definitions (in my coaching context):
Best Practices: Means solutions to the client's pain points uncovered through discussions with clients or assessments. These practices for improving skills and processess may (but not necessarily) be picked up from what competitors or industry leaders have employed successfully. 


Next practices: Means looking beyond typical sorces of information like successful past strategies or even strategies that industry leaders are currently using. It means looking at future challenges and developing a strategy with new solutions and services. Requires coach in helping client imagine the future and look at ways to capitalize on the opportunities. Next practices are innovations meant to address such opportunities that create new dimensions of performance.


To Journey's End
But my understanding was not yet complete. I still had to figure out how exactly all this played out in my coaching practice, which the image below did. 


My coaching practice, I noted,  was directed at 3 levels

1. Individual (Owner/Business head), 
2. Work group (Key Decision-makers and/or executives)
3. Business (Working at both the above levels to impact whole business)

The process innovations co-created by the coach and the client and/or his team were across a continuum from Best practices to Next practices. We traveled the continuum in three ways:  

                             Best Practices....................Next Practices

                                       

1. Streamlining: Understand client's pain points. Look at, and adapt best practices of competition to address the pain points. 
2. Surfacing: Tap into client's vision for his business, or if one does not exist, help to develop one. Visualize opportunities in the context of the vision and co-create ways of capitalizing on them. Give concrete shape to the aspired future through an Action or Project plan..
3. Inventing: Help 'invent' the future. Co-create the next practices to ensure successful outcomes. 

The net result of coaching efforts directed at meeting current needs and/or aspired future are felt at 3 levels of the client's business:  

1. Structure and/or Culture: A Structures and/or Culture in sync with the desired goals.
2. Roles: Better understanding of  Leadership  and Employee roles  in sync with desired goals.
3. Procedures: Tools and techniques for Strategy development, Customer relationship management,  Communication, Collaboration and other critical areas of business success.

End of Journey. Beginning of Another

This leg of my journey - figuring out the what and how of innovation in my coaching practice, was now complete. I had started out by trying to address the discomfort I had felt with the use of the word innovation, and ended up, not only a wonderful understanding of it, but much more! I now had, not only a proper definition of innovation in my mind, but had understood the difference between Best practices and Next practices. Most important of all, I had understood exactly how all this played out in my coaching practice! 

Further Reading: Seeking Out “Next Practices,” the Next Generation of Best Practices

The Theory of Coaching

At the beginning of the last century, two men raced to be the first to make it to the the South Pole - Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott.  While Amundsen used dogs to make his journey, Scott decide to make use of ponies and motorized sleds. What shaped their decisions on how to make it to the South Pole? Their different set of experiences and the ability to learn from them. Authors Sengupta and Heyden in their blog, The Leadership Lessons of the Race to the South Pole,  describe how these differences doomed Scott and handed success to Amundsen.

From his own experience as well as those of others,  Amundsen learnt that successful explorers are cautious. They remain flexible, and are ready to adapt targets and plans in light of conditions. When conditions are not right, it is better to turn back rather than rely on hope and luck. He believed that bad luck is often the result of insufficient preparation. This was his theory. 

On the other hand, Scott was a naval officer most of his life. Although he was to become synonymous with the Antarctic, his ill-fated 1911 venture was only his second polar expedition. However, despite the lack of experience of such climates, Scott was disinclined to rely others who knew similar terrain. Among the decisions which were to prove fatal for him, was the one not to use dogs for sledges, despite advice from both Amundsen and the pioneering polar explorer Fritjof Nansen. Instead, he relied on two options that had not been tested in polar conditions: ponies and motorized sledges. Neither proved well adapted. Scott's military background also played its part. Like all military men he was competitive. Since he was engaged in a race, he pressed on, despite worsening weather conditions.Scott compounded these decisions by making logistical and organizational mistakes that reflected a failure to appreciate from his previous experience just how unforgiving polar conditions are. 

When people face uncertainty, say Sengupta and Heyden, experience, the ability to learn from it, obsessive planning, and a willingness to alter course will trump determination and courage every time.

Shaping Theories from Experiences

Growth, as an American entrepreneur once famously said, means change and involves risk, stepping from the known to the unknown. In The Growth Imperative, author Clay Christensen a professor at Harvard, writes of how we often admire the intuition that successful entrepreneurs seem to have stepping from the known to the unknown, and build growth businesses. When they exercise their intuition about what actions will lead to the desired results, they  really  are  employing  theories  that  give  them  a  sense  of  the  right  thing  to  do  in  various circumstances.  These  theories  were  not  there  at  birth:  They  were  learned  through  a  set  of experiences and mentors earlier in life, as did Amundsen. 

According to Christensen, what brings predictability  to  any  field  is  a  body  of  well-researched  theory—contingent  statements  of  what causes what and why. Executives often discount the value of management theory because it is associated with the word theoretical, which connotes impractical. But theory is consummately practical. The law of gravity, for example, actually is a theory—and it is useful. It allows us to predict that if we step off a cliff, we will fall. 

Even  though  most  managers  don’t  think  of  themselves  as  being  theory  driven,  they  are  in reality  voracious  consumers  of  theory.  Every  time  managers  make  plans  or  take  action,  it  is based  on  a  mental  model  in  the  back  of  their  heads  that  leads  them  to  believe  that  the  action being       taken       will       lead       to       the       desired       result. Amundsen's mental model was dogs and skis should speed his journey to the South Pole. Scott's was different - which led to his decision to use motorized sleds and ponies.  

The       problem, writes Christensen, is  managers  are  rarely  aware  of  the  theories  they  are  using—and  they  often  use  the  wrong theories  for  the  situation  they  are  in.  It  is the absence of conscious, trustworthy theories of cause and effect that makes success in building new businesses seem random. No  matter  how  well  articulated  a  concept  or  insight  might  be,  it  must  be shaped and modified, often significantly, as it gets fleshed out into a winning business plan.

Rarely  does  an  idea  for  a  new-growth  business  emerge  fully  formed  from  a manager's head. And this is where a business coach comes in. He helps clients to shape and modify his theories and construct well formed mental models.  

                                                                                         Source: Quantum Leap

Unlike the Therapist, Consultant and the Trainer, who use prescriptive processes, a Coach (both Life and Business) helps his client clarify, construct and validate theories through a 3-stage generative process.

1. Co-create descriptions, or characterizations of the phenomenon client wishes to understand.
2. Co-create classifications of the phenomenon into categories in order to highlight the most meaningful differences.
3. Co-create articulation of a theory of what causes the phenomenon to occur and why

Through this generative process, the coach helps clients avoid forming both life and management theories. The result - minimal chances of client observing one or two successes, assuming they have seen enough and proceeding impatiently to implement them.


And perhaps, end up committing mistakes such as those of Robert Scott.

Links

1. A Chapter from Christensen's The Growth Imperative
2. The Leadership Lessons of the Race to the South Pole
3. The Difference Between Coaching and Consulting. 
4. How the Coach Helped the Keen to Grow Butterfly.

Leaders as Role Models

One of the most important components of leadership is to be ambassadors of the values the organization stands for. In these day of a powerful media, where everything that prominent leaders do, gets either flashed on TV, or splashed in print, leaders have an especial responsibilty to symbolize the values of the organization they lead. Three prominent leaders, who, according to me,  manage to do this most effectively are; Vijay Mallya of the UB group, Rahul Bhatia of Indigo Airlines and the Dalai Lama, who needs no introduction.

Vijay Mallya, calls himself the King of Good Times and he symbolizes this image to the hilt! He owns - among other things -  a luxury yatch, a personal aircraft which boasts of a Picasso as part of it's beige and cream interiors, and a fleet of classic and antique cars. Wine, Women (his Kingfisher calendar featuring a bevy of beauties is well known) and Wealth sums Vijay Mallya's lifestyle. It also aptly reflects his moniker as the King of Good Times and pay huge dividends to his companies - liquor company UB, Kigfisher airlines (now in dire staits, financially) and FI and IPL teams, among others.

Rahul Bhatia is the founder of low cost Indigo Airlines.  While Mallya personifies a high flying lifestyle of luxury, Bhatia does the opposite  - he lives up to his companies values of a low-cost functional airline. At a recent meeting of owners of airlines and their CEO's with the Prime Minister of India, he drove down in a Santro driven with his CEO at the wheel. All the others came in expensive chauffeur driven cars. At the recent Economic Times awards for Corporate Excellence (he got the Entrepreneur of the Year Award), in a sea of suits, he was the only one dressed in a waist coat.

The Dalai Lama, the much respected Buddhist leader says his religion is 'kindness'. His ready laughter and child like quality help to reinforce the image of a benign soul. Both in his actions and utterances, he comes across as a simple person and the very epitome of kindness. He was the recipient of the1989 Nobel Peace Prize and his acceptance speech clearly reflected his values. "Although I have found my own Buddhist religion helpful in generating love and compassion, even for those we consider our enemies", he said, "I am convinced that everyone can develop a good heart and a sense of universal responsibility with or without religion."

Being a Role Model to Your Organization's Employees

By the very nature of their high profile roles, leaders such as Mallya, Bhatia and the Dalai Lama have the overarching responsibility of living up to their image more to their external customers. But how about leaders whose compulsions to role model are different? What can leaders whose responsibility lies primarily with their own people and organizations do to fulfill their responsibilities? They can reflect their own and their organizations desirable values with actions such as: 

1. The goals and performance standards they establish.
2. The values they establish for the organization.
3. The business and people concepts they establish.

Successful organizations have leaders who set high standards and goals across the entire spectrum, such as strategies, market leadership, plans, meetings and presentations, productivity, quality, and reliability.

Values reflect the concern the organization has for its employees, customers, investors, vendors, and surrounding community. These values define the manner in how business will be conducted.

Concepts define what products or services the organization will offer and the methods and processes for conducting business.

These goals, values, and concepts make up the organization's personality or how the organization is observed by both outsiders and insiders. And it is this personality which defines the roles, relationships, rewards, and rites that take place, that the leader has to role model.

Useful resource: Sample chapter from the book The Leader as Role Model http://tinyurl.com/bnv2jz8