UNLEASHED

U nleash the highest performance in others;
N ow bring out the best that is still untapped!
L isten, confront, challenge to higher levels
E xpect greatness and exceptional deeds!
*A s guide, catalyst and facilitator;
S erve to make impact, leave a legacy;
H ave passion for
E xcellence developed!
D are be a difference maker to transform!

"You Raise Me Up" tune
* refrain

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From:
Unleashed!: Expecting Greatness and Other Secrets of Coaching for Exceptional Performance.
© Gregg Thompson, 2007

Chapter 1: The Leader as Coach

“You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.” -- Galileo

I have four things to say right up front.

First, leading today’s organizations is difficult work. Organizations are chaotic, demanding, and messy. As Clarke and Crossland state in their book, The Leader’s Voice: “You will certainly stumble.
Failure will stalk you like a predator. The toughest problems will be yours alone.You must take responsibility for the failures and give credit for the successes. Lose the fantasy that you will be
cherished, immortalized and revered. Expect long hours and few moments of gratitude.”
If the raw, unvarnished honesty of this quote has you nodding your head, read on, because you get it!
Leadership is difficult. Coaching is tougher!

Secondly, there’s no simple, multi-step coaching process that you can follow to become a great coach (or leader for that matter). Coaching is a way of being, not doing. Despite what many authors will have you believe, there is no universal formula for coaching—it’s far too big an endeavor to be compressed into a finite number of steps. Coaching is a complex human-to-human process that needs to be adapted to the countless different ways that humans interact with and respond to one another—much to the frustration of those who set out to coach!

Thirdly, you have to change. I wish I could give you better news, but I cannot. You must change.
Being a great coach is primarily about who you are in your relationships with other people. Think for a moment about your staff, co-workers, boss, and customers. Think about your interactions with them, about your influence on them, and the impact you have on their working lives.

Are you important to them?
Do they perform better because of their relationship with you?
Would others call you a coach?
Do the people with whom you interact trust that you have their best interests at heart?
Do others attribute their success to you?

If you continue following the same course, you will keep getting the same results—or lack of results—you are getting now. Are you happy with these results? No? So a change is required.

Since who you are with others is the key factor in determining your ability to coach others for high performance, the change must start with you.

And lastly, at least half of the people who work on your team or in your organization consider themselves “not engaged.”

Recent Gallup surveys report that approximately 70 percent of respondents admit that they are not performing anywhere near their full potential.1

Face it. Some of these people work for you, and they are leaving their best talents and efforts at the front door every morning. It’s easy to look around our organizations and spot the very poor performers. You know the ones: bad attitudes, minimal production, and little initiative.

But what about those in your organization who are performing well enough, but nowhere near their full potential?
How many people on your team fall into this category?
Worse, might there be some whom you believe are fully engaged, but who are actually only performing just well enough to get the job done?
What if your top performers have talents that are never used?
What if your poorer performers are really able to contribute at much higher levels?

It is tempting to attribute those depressing Gallup statistics to other teams and other organizations, and not our own. But this disengagement has to be happening somewhere and it is likely occurring in the building you walk into each day.

2
Take a long, hard look at yourself as a leader.
What do you see?
Is it time to change?
Are you ready to be a different leader?
Are you ready to be a coach?

If you answered yes, you are now likely wondering how to increase your coaching effectiveness.

Think back for a moment on your own career.

Can you identify a person who saw talents and potential in you that no one else did? Someone who encouraged you to explore new possibilities?

Someone who challenged you to achieve a higher level of performance?

A person who truly cared about your development and success, and invested those rarest of commodities in you: time and attention?

Why does this particular person come to mind?

What did this person do to make such an impact on you?

What personal qualities attracted you?

How did you feel about yourself in her presence?

Is there something she said or did that you remember to this day because it had such a positive effect on the person you have become?

I have just introduced you to an outstanding coach.

Can you be this person in the lives of others?
If so, are you prepared to make fundamental changes in the way you lead in order to be such an important individual in the lives and careers of others?

As a manager, you’re ideally positioned to play the role of coach. In fact, because there are so few good coaches in the workplace, by becoming a great coach you can distinguish yourself as one of the most integral types of leaders—the developer of talent. The opportunity awaits you but it is not easy.

You likely already have solid interpersonal and leadership skills; most managers these days are astute enough to develop these early in their careers. But while they are without a doubt important, they are not the subject of this book. The Great Expectations model of coaching consists of universal, timeless principles that will help you move from simply being a good leader to being the kind of person whom others readily invite into conversations about some of the most important, and often most highly guarded, spaces of their lives—conversations about their talents, aspirations, and potential.

This model is about high-level, one-on-one communication between you, the Leader Coach, and the individual you coach, the Talent. In Unleashed!, we refer to the person receiving coaching as the Talent in recognition of the natural abilities he possesses. Our job as coaches is to challenge him to fully employ all his gifts and to unleash his highest performance. This book will not teach you how to do coaching; coaching is not something that can be done to someone. Instead, it challenges you to establish the kind of relationships that facilitate real performance improvement, and to engage in conversations that inspire others to achieve their full potential. It takes you beyond the mechanics of the coaching process to address not so much what you do in the role of coach, but rather who you are in the role of coach.

Defining High Performance

Early in my career, I had the good fortune of working with Dr. Herb Shepard who taught me to see high performance in people as a direction, not a destination. As a young technologist, I had spent the first few years of my career eagerly measuring the performance of all manner of things —processes, systems, machines, and people—treating them all essentially the same.

Through many conversations and much coaching, Herb encouraged me to see human performance in a new light.
“Do you really believe that humans were created to be judged on the same scale as machines?” he would ask. One day Herb handed me a book entitled Born to Win by Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward. I read the first page and I was thunderstruck by the boldness and clarity of the authors’ view on this matter.

“Each human being is born as something new, something that never existed before. …
Each person has a unique way of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and thinking.
Each has his or her own unique potential— capabilities and limitations.
Each can be a significant, thinking, aware, and creative being—a productive person, a winner.”

So what is high performance? If we are to coach for it, we must be able to describe it. Many organizations invest heavily in both defining and measuring individual performance. Job descriptions, annual reviews, 360 assessments, competency lists, and MBOs are examples of processes commonly used by organizations in their attempt to calibrate individual performance. To the coach, however, defining and measuring high performance is quite simple; it is not an achievement but a journey. It’s realized when the Talent is on the road towards fully utilizing his natural capabilities in his work (and everywhere else in his life, for that matter). The Leader Coach’s role is to help the Talent onto this road and help him accelerate his journey. And who determines if the Talent is performing at a high level? The Talent— much to the consternation of performance assessment proponents everywhere.

You Are the Instrument
Like it or not, you are always on display. As someone in a leadership role, the impact of your actions is noted and magnified. Your behavior is continually scrutinized. People watch you and form opinions about who you really are. They even make up stories about you when they do not have enough information to paint a complete picture. They’re not being intentionally judgmental; they are just fulfilling the human need to have a frame of reference when dealing with you. They ask themselves if you’re the kind of person they respect and trust.

Is he the kind of person I want poking around in some of the most sensitive and important areas of my performance and career?
Do I trust and respect him enough to believe that he has value to offer me in my role?
Will he truly have my best interests at heart?
Do you inspire the trust necessary for others to want to share their most daunting problems and ardent dreams with you?

You may have a desire to coach, but the decision to coach is not yours alone. Coaching cannot happen unless another person invites you in to do so. Coaching will not happen until you’ve earned the right to make it happen.

“Who you are speaks so loudly, I can’t hear what you are saying.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Leadership is more about who you are as a human being than what you do for a living. It’s more about being than doing. If we don’t have a deep soul and a deep sense of ourselves as we engage with the world, leadership becomes manipulative: How can I get you to do what I want you to do and have you feel good about it?”
Dr. Robert Terry, President of the Terry Group

“Healthy leaders are … very talented in self-observation and self-analysis; the best leaders are highly motivated to spend time in self-reflection.”
Manfred F. R. Kets De Vries

“Coaching people to unleash their aspirations, move beyond what they already think and know, and maximize their results is one of the highest aspirations of what it is to be human.”
Robert Hargrove, Masterful Coaching Fieldbook

Whenever I want to coach others to higher levels of performance, I have to begin by looking at my own performance. This is the first—somewhat annoying—prerequisite of coaching! It would be so much easier if all I had to do was talk about higher levels of performance for others. But we are all pretty transparent, and we can expect to have little coaching impact unless it is obvious to others that we hold ourselves to the same high standard of performance. It’s pretty tough to fake this. When I enter a coaching relationship, I have to remind myself that great coaching starts with me. It is an inside-out game, so I need to start by focusing on my own work.

How do you become a great coach? It depends.
Some aspects of coaching will come naturally to you while others will need to be developed. Fortunately, coaching is an observable, learnable set of practices and approaches and everybody can do it. I have never met a person who could not employ her unique set of talents and aptitudes in the service of another. Coaching is less about having specific abilities and talents than it is about choosing to be coach-like.

Managers who seek to become coaches are well advised to look beyond their usual repertoire of leadership skills in their search for coaching effectiveness. Those who have become great coaches have combined their natural leadership strengths with two key practices employed by professional coaches:

1. They establish potent, development-focused relationships, and
2. They engage in difficult, performance-changing conversations.

The coaching relationship is at once dangerous and challenging, caring, and supportive. As a coach, you don’t tell the Talent what to do, nor do you merely listen. Your job is much more complicated.

The Leader Coach needs to help the Talent see her very best abilities, confront her with her own aspirations, and challenge her to perform to her highest potential.

It is interesting how much time and effort organizations invest in the performance appraisal process yet how little evidence exists to support its effectiveness.

Can you honestly recall a pivotal change in your performance or career that was the result of a performance appraisal?
Did the feedback you received from a supervisor during a performance appraisal ever inspire you to change the way you function in the organization?
Have you ever received a rating that was the motivation to achieve the position you have today?

Maybe, but it’s unlikely. I have posed these questions to hundreds of leaders and the implication usually stops them cold. They can rarely recall even a single instance when a performance appraisal had a significant influence on their performance or career. Their response, however, is quite a bit different when I ask them to name individuals who have influenced their careers. Most have little difficulty identifying two or three people who have been the stimulus for career-changing and sometimes life-changing decisions.

Would you like to be known as a leader who routinely has a profound impact on the careers and lives of others or merely as a manager who gets the job done?
Do you want to leave a real legacy in the form of unleashed talent or just have a fine reputation as a solid manager?

The Great Expectations model of coaching is about leaving a permanent, positive mark in the lives of the people around you.

It’s about making a real and lasting contribution. It’s about your legacy.
The big question is, “Are you up to it?”

Are you prepared to commit yourself to the success of another?
Can you see your role through entirely different eyes?
Can you function as a guide rather than a supervisor, a catalyst rather than a counselor, a facilitator rather than an advisor?
What are you prepared to sacrifice to become a coach?