march 2008

	Leadership Coaching: Is It Heart Work?	Gregg Thompson
	Leadership Development – A Top Priority	Kim Lamoureux
	Impostors – Reader’s Responses	Ron Crossland

Leadership Coaching: Is It Heart Work?

By GREGG THOMPSON

The coaching wrap-up conversation over coffee quickly turned uncomfortable, at least for me. “You touched me,” said the client, “you really touched me.” With a quick “thank you” in return, I try to quickly change the topic to something much more benign. (My mind is racing…is the Super Bowl still fresh enough to provide a quick detour in the conversation?) He was not to be dissuaded. “You are not hearing me. You touched me here.” This time he pointed directly at the middle of his chest. “Right here!”

I have spent many years positioning leadership coaching as a practical and potent performance improvement process (and it clearly is that) while minimizing the more personal aspects of this work. After all, we are coaches, not counselors. And not just regular coaches for that matter. We are leadership coaches whose clients are primarily senior business managers. We use words like “partnership” and “challenges” not “intimacy” and “compassion.” We ask our clients to step up to a bigger game, not get in touch with their feelings. And now, standing right in front of me is the seasoned COO of a major manufacturing enterprise telling me that our coaching work has not only rekindled his passion for leadership, but for life itself. He continues, “I have made three commitments, and I am living these every day. First, I have committed myself to have a positive impact on the jobs, careers and lives of every single person in our organization, regardless of their position. Second, I have recommitted myself to be a real servant leader in my family. Third, I have committed to leave this planet a better place when my time is done.” And then he said the words to which I had no response: “My heart has been opened up to a whole new world.”

Coaches rarely teach. We mostly remind our clients of their talents, their passions, their aspirations and their potential. That day over coffee, my client reminded me of something I really have known all along – it is impossible to fully explore leadership potential without touching the heart along the way.

In this column I often provide a few insights or aphorisms for those readers who are interested in the leadership development field. This time I simply have some reminders for myself:

When I am coaching I need to remember that:

1. I cannot separate the leader from the person. The whole person is in the coaching relationship with me. (To the coach: Be accepting)
2. All leadership development is, in fact, personal development. The person being coached is the instrument of leadership, and the only way that development occurs is when the leader works on him or herself. (To the coach: Be human)
3. The most intense leadership development comes as a result of a deep personal commitment. (To the coach: Honor the heart!)

Gregg Thompson is President of Bluepoint Leadership Development. He can be reached by email

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Leadership Development - A Top Priority

By KIM LAMOUREUX

If you’re wondering where to best focus training for your company, you certainly want to explore the far-reaching benefits of leadership development. According to our recent research at Bersin & Associates, 43% of companies rate leadership development as the talent management function that needs most improvement. The same study finds that 60% of companies (up from 51% in 2007) identify gaps in the leadership pipeline as their top talent issue. And, from a budget standpoint, leadership development is where most companies are spending the biggest percentages of their training budgets. Of all the hundreds of companies from all industry sectors and sizes that we interviewed as part of our leadership development research, three key development techniques common to all the top leadership programs emerged. Companies creating and re-evaluating their leadership development strategies should strongly consider these techniques. Your company culture, business, and target audiences will factor into how and when they’re used.

• Assessments. Self knowledge and awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses are hugely critical factors for a leader’s success. Assessments are particularly important early in a leader’s career; 360 degree assessments, aligned to leadership competencies, can be performed at 12- to 18-month intervals and help leaders to increase their leadership effectiveness in a powerful and objective way. Personality and leadership assessments help leaders to understand individual differences and uncover new ways to work and interact with others.
Assessments offer a number of benefits to a leader including:
• An understanding of others’ perceptions of one’s leadership style
• An awareness and acceptance for development
• Insight into behaviors that drive their performance and that of others.
• Experiential Learning. People learn to lead by doing, so the best leadership development programs focus heavily on experiential learning. As a matter of fact, we found that formal training only encompasses about 10% of someone’s total learning experience; 20% of learning comes from interaction with other people. The remaining 70% of learning is derived from experienced-based assignments, such as on-the-job activities, project assignments and job rotations.

Experiential learning can also include meetings with colleagues, global assignments, profit-and-loss responsibility, and team-based activities. Even exposing leaders to senior executives can provide experiences that can help improve managerial courage, business acumen, communication, and political and organizational savvy.

• Simulations. Simulations can be applied to build soft skills as well as business skills. Simulations can create environments to help leaders build trust, improve communication, lead teams, and accelerate the performance of others. According to our research, 60% of companies are using simulations today.

Business simulations enable leaders to gain experience in areas such as strategy, finance, marketing, sales, manufacturing and human resources. Within a risk-free environment, leaders can practice and experiment with different decision scenarios among different functional areas of the business.

This research highlights leadership development as a strategic priority, confirming the importance of using the right assessments, experiential learning and simulations for maximum effectiveness and measurable lasting results.

Kim Lamoureux is a senior analyst at Bersin & Associates. Bersin & Associates is a research company that tracks enterprise learning and talent management strategies, processes, and technologies.

The latest leadership development trends and issues are on the agenda at Bersin’s upcoming conference, IMPACT 2008: The Business of Talent. The conference program will include case studies, panel discussions, and research presentations based on recent research.
For more information, visit www.bersin.com/impact

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Impostors - Readers' Responses

By RON CROSSLAND

Last month I posed a question that equated success and failure to triumph and disaster via a couplet from the famous Kipling poem “If.”

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

We received a wonderful array of responses – so many that I was unable to respond individually to the emails. I was overwhelmed with how many said this poem was their favorite – several of you have it displayed in your homes or workspace. Many thanks to all who responded – I read every response and each one stimulated a new wrinkle to my brain, which is a good thing.

I have corralled and themed the responses. The following selections from our readers illuminate the themes. Some of you thought success and failure are not impostors and disagreed with Kipling:

“Success and failure are just there waiting for us just like life and death.”
“The thought that my failures are a valuable part of the fabric of my experience particularly appeals to me…if I dismiss them out of hand, it is to my detriment.”
“I experience triumph as a brief ‘punch the air’ moment that has usually been preceded by hard effort and determination and is usually followed by a swift return to the saddle to get on with life.”
“I do not think we should see Triumph and Disaster as impostors. I think we should see them as gifts, tests, and opportunities.”
“Would I be in the job I am in today, to which I had aspired for many years, if I hadn’t failed in my last one? The answer is probably not.”

Some of you straddled the line a bit and added a different perspective:

“You equate Kipling’s ‘triumph and disaster’ with success and failure. Maybe Kipling meant that triumph and disaster are imposters of success and failure.”
“I’ve never thought they were imposters. But I have believed that the emotions surrounding success and failure are indeed imposters.”

A number of you were more in tune with Kipling’s thoughts and connected them to other texts or experiences.

“From a Buddhist perspective…I think it does not really matter which one we have more of – in other words, they are imposters.”
“Verse 13 in the Tao te Ching expresses a similar idea: Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as fear.”

Many of you discussed the idea that a person’s perspective was the determining factor, not the events of success or failure themselves:

“They only have meaning to the extent we give them meaning.”
“Through what perspective are we interpreting triumph or disaster? It depends largely on what has been gained or lost.”
“If one is engaged in self assessment then success or failure can only be measured from the perspective of one’s own values and aspirations.”

The one reader who struck a personal chord with me referenced Pirsig’s book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The reader suggested Pirsig posed the question of evaluating good and bad writing in his treatise and found chasing such questions can lead to a kind of mental breakdown. As a continually aspiring writer, I have experienced this chase and its nuances. I’ll end this column with this reader’s perspective:

“We all need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that much of life is not under our direct control, and it is not how well we navigate the calm waters within our mastery that says the most about us, but rather how we behave during the storm which exceeds our ability to chart a course.”

Ron Crossland is Chairman of Bluepoint Leadership Development. Email Ron.

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