The Psychology of Executive Coaching

You can find all my book summaries — here.

1 paragraph summary:

Brilliant summary for aspiring executive coaches, but also for anyone who wants to understand what they do + get a basic grasp on the areas you can get coached on. The book gives a comprehensive overview of the underlying theory and literature and couples it with practical examples.

Note: This is the longest “summary” I’ve ever written — lots of good quotes and detail in there — not all of it might sense if you haven’t read the book.

Exec Coaching — What is it?

Psychological skills and methods are employed in a 1:1 relationship to help someone become a more effective manager or leader. These skills are typically applied to specific present-moment work-related issues (rather than general personal or psychopathology) in a way that enables this client to incorporate them into his or her permanent management or leadership repertoire.

Examples of skills:

• Active listening
• Empathy
• Self-awareness
• Process observation
• Giving and getting feedback
• Assertive communication
• Conflict resolution
• Cognitive restructuring
• Learned optimism
• Effective use of reinforcement
• Hypnotic language
• Functional analysis
• Stimulus control
• Social learning
• Resistance management
• Detriangulation
• Reframing
• Motivational interviewing

The most important workplace skill was, is, and always will be the ability to get along with people. If you don’t have that skill, any success you will have will only be temporary.

Here are 4 foundational ways Exec Coaches can help:

1. When big things in the org change (ie M&A)
2. Skill development for individual transition (ie promotion)
3. Specific skill development (ie public speaking)
4. Resolving specific problems (ie dysfunctional behaviour)

It’s a 4 step process:

1. Get Things Started — find a coach
2. Gather information and make a plan — person assessment and clear, measurable and actionable plan
3. Implement — 3 months to 2 years, sometimes includes shadowing in workplace
4. Lock in changes — arrange for ongoing, continuous improvement and support

Assessment

Leaders at the top rarely get any negative feedback at all, and sometimes — because of flattery or fear — they have a distorted sense of their strengths, weaknesses, and abilities. Structured assessment is important because people are generally not accurate self-reporters in spite of how certain they may be about themselves.

The first part of the assessment is to understand if the client is mentally ready for a change.

Instruments:

1. 360 degree interview

a. this should be used for development purposes, NOT promotion purposes
b. let client choose people to get feedback from
c. let client have input on questions and topics
d. be scrupulous about confidentiality
e. give feedback in gentle and supportive ways

Base questions of the goals for the coaching — here are some general areas:

• strengths
• weaknesses
• what’s it like to work with them? Do you enjoy it? Look forward to it?
• what would you like the person to know about how to best work with you?
• what does this person have to learn to be successful at the next level?

2. Homemade instruments

Questionnaire or emails — just make sure everyone understands security and confidentiality

3. Interview

Conversation with client — your reactions, impressions, ability to listen, speak clearly, focus, openness and defensiveness, humour

• Write your impressions down

4. Direct behavioural observation

Seek opportunities to observe your client as they work — meetings, video, phone, read their emails

5. Formal assessment instruments

Ie Myers-Briggs, MMPI, IPAT, CPP, CCL

Psychodynamic View

A mechanism to defend yourself, which can be observed as a coach:

Adaptive Mechanisms

• Altruism — avoid your own uncomfortable feelings, by converting them into helping others
• Sublimination — uncomfortable energy channelled into something socially acceptable, rather than be hurt/angry you “get busy”, throw yourself into work
• Humour — when faced with pain you emphasise funny aspects
• Substitution — you substitute one uncomfortable thing with another — ie difficult situation with getting busy cleaning desk
• Compensation — we’re not good at one thing, so overcompensate in another
• Rituals — repetition of behaviours which can cover anxiety
• Identification — become company men and give up own values or independent judgment
• Affiliation — you share your feelings with others in the hope that they will comfort you, but don’t hope they solve the problem

Deny Mechanisms

• Denial — ignoring of facts
• Repression — banish a particular thought or line of thinking from reality
• Isolation — detach feelings from behaviour

Twisting Reality Mechanisms

• Rationalisation — change the explanation to make it more acceptable
• Intellectualisation — ignore feelings and discuss matters on only intellectual level
• Projection — put an emotional desire on the other person — instead of I hate him it’s He hates me

Mechanisms that cause people to behave strangely

• Reaction Formation — we push people away we like
• Help-Rejecting Complaining — complain or ask for help but offers are rejected — cover feelings of hostility that cannot be expressed directly
• Displacement — express hostile behaviour towards safer targets — yell and kids not at boss
• Regression — when anxious regress to old practice — ie stop delegating and do everything yourself
• Conversion — instead of dealing with the problem, have physical reaction ie cough, rash or cold sore
• Passive Aggression — express negative feelings passively
• Provocative Behaviour — provoke the other person to behave poorly

Behavioural Concepts

If something happens to you repeatedly, it is almost certainly being reinforced in some way. It makes sense, then, to explore and understand the cues and contingencies that serve tho maintain our behaviour, as well as the behaviour of those with whom we work. The central theme of this point of view is that behaviour is a function of its consequences.

Environment matters.

Behaviour followed by something perceived as pleasant is more likely to recur, behaviour followed by something unpleasant or uncomfortable is less likely to recur. This is reinforcement.

We reinforce one another in a process he called reciprocal influence. When you yell at your kids, they stop jumping on the furniture. This rewards your yelling behaviour, so you tend to yell again in the future. Your kids have reinforced you while you were reinforcing them.

There are two ways for coaches to use behavioural principles:

1. Help clients understand themselves and to change

2. Teach clients how to use methods to manage and improve their own organisations

Reinforcement

• Intrinsic — inside, value system or feelings, ie pride
• Extrinsic — from outside, a bit artificial, ie money
• Primary — innately reinforicing
• Secondary — must be figured out, have to be repeated until learned
• Reinforcements have to be clear and immediate.
• Fixed ratio — regular nth responses — when the reward goes away, behaviour stops quickly
• Variable ratio — irregular nth repsonses — powerful learned response and great persistence ie slot machine
• Fixed interval — ie monthly salary
• Variable interval — powerful and resilient behaviour, ie earthquakes / strong buildings
• Individual difference — reinforcements might work on some people, cause the adverse reaction in others
• Premarck principle — break it up with tasks you enjoy
• Successive approximation — break it up into small pieces
• Stimulus control — control what happens just before the desired behaviour
• Social events — include them for stronger conviction
• Modeling — imitative learning — we learn from observing
• Rehearsal — train it and practice
• Token economy — rather than real rewards, set up a points system

Person Centred Approach

Relationships rule the world.

There are three characteristics for a growth-promoting climate in which people can realise their full potential:

1. Congruence or genuineness
2. Unconditional positive regards and acceptance
3. Accurate empathic understanding

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care. Plus, people who do not listen are just not interesting. They do not seem smart and are not taken seriously.

Active listening involves the following skills:

• Stop and pay attention
• Use physical listening — posture, physical mannerism, eye contact
• Ask appropriate questions
• Restate — teach clients how to repeat and summarise
• Paraphrase
• Reflect — reflect back feelings to speakers
• Summarise — tie things back together into theme
• Listen for feelings — notice feelings
• Share — reveal important reactions appropriately
• Withhold judgement whilst listening
• Acknowledge difference

Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Therapy

A coach can teach a client how to improve the quality of their thinking and, as a result, improve the way they feel and behave.

We cannot control life, but we can control how we think about life.

By controlling our thinking we are then able to manage our emotions and behaviours.

It is important to note that cognitive therapy does not advocate positive thinking. It emphasises correct or accurate or reasonable thinking. Positive thinking is fine, as long as it’s reasonably accurate.

4 ways of thinking of depressed people:

1. Arbitrary inference — a conclusion is drawn in the absence of sufficient evidence — ie you’re worthless because it’s raining on the day of your picnic

2. Selective abstraction — a conclusion is drawn based on only one of many elements — ie you blame yourself for failure, even though there were lots of other people involved

3. Overgeneralisation overall sweeping conclusion made on the basis of the single, trivial event — ie I’m worthless because of this one small exam score

4. Magnification and Minimisation — gross errors in performance evaluation — ie belief car is ruined because it has a tiny scratch

Distorted Thinking

1. Filtering — take the negative details and magnify them whilst filtering out the positives
2. Polarised Thinking — black or white, good or bad
3. Overgeneralisation — you come to general conclusions based on one event
4. Mind reading — without their saying so, you know what people are feeling and why they are acting the way they do
5. Catastrophising
6. Personalisation — you think that everything people do or say is some kind of reaction to you
7. Control fallacy — you feel externally controlled, you see yourself as totally helpless
8. Fallacy of fairness — you think you know what’s fair but other people don’t agree
9. Emotional reasoning — you believe that what you feel must be true
10. Fallacy of change — you expect that other people will change to suit you if you pressure them
11. Global labelling — you generalise one or two qualities into a negative global judgment
12. Blaming
13. Shoulds — you have a list of rules how others should act
14. Being right — you continually on trial to prove that your opinions and actions are right
15. Heaven’s reward fallacy — you expect all your sacrifice and self-denial to pay off

It is the coaches job to identify and notice the below thoughts and patterns and substitute them with effective ones:

1. Universal approval — you have to be loved and approved by everyone for everything you do
2. Competence — you have to be competent, adequate and achieving in everything you do
3. Bad people — some people are bad, wicked and villainous and they should be blamed and punished
4. Control — it is catastrophic when things don’t go the way we want them to go
5. Happiness — nobody can control it as it’s externally caused
6. Fixation — when something is dangerous or fearsome one should be terribly occupied and upset with it
7. Self-responsibility — it’s easier to avoid difficulties and self-responsibilities than to undertake more rewarding forms of self-discipline
8. Past — the past is all-important and because it has been important in the past it will indefinitely affect you
9. Change — people and things should be different and it’s catastrophic if perfect solutions are not immediately found
10. Passiveness — maximum happiness can be achieved by inertia, inaction or by passively “enjoying oneself”

Some ways to help clients to replace thoughts with new ones:

- Imagery — mental pictures, comforting images — replacing old image with new one

- Application — Perception -> Thinking/Cognition -> Feeling/Emotion -> Behaviour, identify the thinking part of why you did something and challenge it, come up with a thought pattern which is more true

Family Therapy and System Thinking

Contrary to popular belief, family therapy systems are not about families at all, but rather about individual persons.

This view avoids blaming the individual, but the system.

Rather than examining the client, you are examining the relationship of the client with the system/organisation.

There are 7 overarching concepts in family therapy which can help in coaching:

1. Homeostasis (The Premise)

Organisations and their members strive to maintain things the same.

2. Change does not require understanding

You don’t have to figure out how the problem came about or what it means. You just need to intervene in a way that produces lasting change.

3. Focus on the present

The answers lie right here, right now, in the present system. Don’t worry about “if only I’d have done something different” or “how I got to be this way”.

4. Start anywhere

Equifinality — you can initiate action anywhere in a system or org and come to the same eventual conclusion.

5. Problem Locus

We examine the system, not the individual. The system only changes when the individual changes.

6. Attempted solutions can become problems

The central idea is that our scratching causes the itching to get worse, worrying about a problem inhibits our ability to actually take action to solve that problem.

7. Feedback, first-order change and second-order change

First-order change occurs when an individual member of a group makes a change in behaviour from inside of the system that does not influence the way the others in the system function. System protection of current homeostasis tends to force first-order change back to its original state.

Second-order change typically comes from outside of the system. It is the change of another order. The rules themselves change or the structure of the system changes.

Useful ideas for coaching:

- Systems and subsystems

- Rules and norms — which ones can be changed and ignored

- Myths and mystification — stories which protect the organisation

- Roles — what roles do people play? What happens if they stopped?

o Star, Blamer, Hero, Rebel, Martyr, Scapegoat, Distracter, Cheerleader, Jester, Invalid, Placater, Favored Son, Mascot, Saint, Skeptic

- Pseudomutality — act nice and friendly even though in dysfunctional state

- Triangulation — people are excluded and information flow is in coalitions -> choose path to openness and integrity

- Rites and rituals — how many can you disrupt? Ie seating at meetings

- Directives — coach can issue direct change, if the system resists it’s a great learning otherwise you might achieve a goal

Here are 7 ways to use Family Therapy with clients:

1. Teach the system point of view to the client

2. Observe important process variable within your client’s organisation or teach the client to do so ie teammate behaviour at meetings

3. Explore family of origin experience — we often act in ways that were formed in the past

4. Help examine organisations like family

5. Give directives — give instructions to disrupt the system, see what happens

6. Provide direct skills training

7. Explore solution-focused methods

a. Miracle question — miracle happened overnight and you’re significantly more efficient and productive — what changes?

b. Exceptions — tell me abut the times or situations when this current problem does not happen

c. Magic Wand — If I could wave a wand and change anything about you, what would it be and why?

d. Trait shopping — imagine that you find a store that sells personal traits — what would you want to buy and why? What would happen if you had it?

8. Take action on the system itself — together with the client if you have permission

Existential Stance

The literature on existentialism is varied and often complex.

Existentialism is less of an –ism than a way of approaching things, a stance or a “posture”.

Our personality does not define us, personality is simply a label and a rather global one at that. Our choices define us wafter we make them, and then we are free to make new ones in the next moment. WE choose ourselves.

Our essence (or reputation) is defined by our existence (our moment-to-moment choices), not the other way around. Your reputation does not define your behaviour. Your behaviour, as manifested by your choices, defines your reputation, and that can change, based upon new choices.

To have a satisfying career is to take risk. Without the risk, work becomes tedium. Existentialism urges us to take the risk (with eyes wide open) and avoid the tedium. Life is to be lived intensely, not tediously.

Six core concepts:

1. Individuality and context — no one is a fixed person. Human behaviour has to be understood in context and social psychology has highlighted the fundamental attribution error, the tendency to overestimate internal (personal) factors and underestimate situational factors.

2. Choice — live is to choose, to make endless choices from moment to moment. Help clients notice when they have stopped choosing or when they let others choose for them, or when they move along thoughtlessly from day to day, just to go with the flow.

3. Intensity — existential view is to reject mediocrity and tedium and to become fully engaged in life, as if each day were our last (as it very well might be). This means that we take risks, we get involved, and we become actors rather than spectators. We cannot wait, because we have no assurance that we have much time. Death’s presence also serves as a values clarifier. If you are aware that your life is time-limited, does the influence what you do today?

4. Herd instinct — humans are inclined to be lazy, to be fearful, to seek comfort, and to hide behind habits that keep us safe and the same and distract us from our appointment with death. He also observed that humans in society do not tend to take to think for themselves and instead take the mentally easy way and to let others think for them. They take the path of less resistance. Coaches can confront clients when they follow the herd.

5. Conflict and confrontation — Conflict is not to be avoided — indeed, it is through conflict that we forge real relationships and relationships of trust. We need the very people who drive us crazy. Conflict is not only essential to human relationships, it is the very foundation of authentic living. There is no benefit, to the existentialist, in getting along. We must challenge, confront and be real with others.

6. Absurd — We are wired to make meaning, yet we cannot. We wish to understand, but we consistently fairly to do so. Life is full of brutal contradictions that we cannot possibly control. Most of us are tempted to ignore this reality, to deny it, or to pretend it is not true. We create order in things and we insist that our order be honoured. But even though it is important to establish order as best we can, it is a mistake to insist that our order prevail. The very nature of life shatters our orderly illusion.

Ten guidelines for the coach:

1. Honour individuality — approach each client with freshness and learn about them

2. Encourage choice — encourage them to make their own choices

3. Get going — the time for waiting is over. Take risks, live dangerously, life is finite.

4. Anticipate anxiety and defensiveness — everyone is anxious about change

5. Commit to something — get involved with the regular activities of every day life and do it with a passion.

6. Value responsibility-taking — don’t duck results, accept responsibility and keep yourself accountable.

7. Conflict and confrontation — keep relationships real and engage in healthy conflict

8. Create and sustain authentic relationships — don’t manipulate, tell the truth, treat with respect

9. Welcome and appreciate the absurd — help clients appreciate how out of control life really is, and help them become more accepting and flexible. Help them find humour in the contradictions. If you can find the absurd to be humorous, you have got it made.

10. Clients must figure things out their own way — the truth requires self-discovery.

Social Psychology and Coaching

Social psychology is the study of interpersonal influence — how people influence one another.

Field theory — instead of focusing on personal qualities and shortcomings, it forces coaches to pay attention to the immediate social surroundings and associated pressures.

Cognitive Dissonance

- We have the need to feel consistent.

- We are comfortable when our thoughts, feelings and behaviours are aligned.

- When uncomfortable we strive to resolve the inconsistency either by changing behaviour or more typically changing what we tell ourselves about the situation or the behaviour.

- If you want someone to like you get them to do something for you.

Groupthink

- Judgment becomes impaired in those who become more concerned with retaining the approval of the fellow members of their work group than with coming up with good solutions to the task at hand.

Confirmation bias

- We see things based upon how we expect them to be. If we have an expectation in advance of an event, we perceive it in alignment with the expectation.

Availability heuristic

- When we make a judgment based upon how easily we can bring an example to mind. We tend to think something is truer if we can bring to mind a good, clear picture of it.

Representative heuristic

- Checks if the new info matches info in a category and then assumes that the new info is like all the other cases in the category.

Anchoring and adjustment

- Causes us to stick close to the first estimate of a situation.

Perseverance effect

- We tend to think in the same way over and over again even when there is no benefit to the tried-and-true thought pattern.

Great leaders research has shown we fall trap to fundamental attribution error — no personality or character or intelligence factors have been consistently associated with great leaders. Leaders are only modestly more intelligent than non-leaders, only a little more charismatic, and not consistently more driven toward the accumulation of power.

Emotional intelligence

Is what makes or breaks leaders.

The capacity for recognising our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships.

Basic components — self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills.

Interpersonal influence

Cialdini’s “Influence” is a comprehensive summary of the basics.

Reasons — if you want someone to do something for you, give them the reason (or at least say “because”)

Repetition — keep saying what you want to happen, eventually it sounds familiar and changes your behaviour

Owing favors — rule of reciprocity calls for us to repay favours. We are obligated.

Following the crowd — social proof — we watch one another to see what the trends are, and then we follow them

Similarity and Like factor — we like things and people who are similar to us and familiar, compliments are powerful, halo effect applies to attract or people with reputation, more approval when associated with food

Hypnotic communication

Most humans resist injunction (You do this!). We dislike being told what to do. We resent it, partly because it meant that someone else is smarter or better than we are, and partly because it means that we are not presently doing it properly, and partly because it represents a loss of control.

A couple of useful viewpoints:

1. Human change is nonlinear — the present does not directly lead to the future, and the efforts to direct change in a linear way are doomed to failure. The past did not directly lead to the present situation, and efforts to explore the past are futile. Paradox is at least as likely to prevail as sensible logic.

2. It is impossible to not communicate — all behaviour, incl silence, is communication.

3. People have what they need to evolve, to change, and to improve — it is more important to study a person’s ways than to try to teach them something, Start fro your client’s point of view. The way that someone already does things reveals their path to growth and change.

4. It is often easier to influence through the implication that injunction — people listen hard for implications of things and are curious about them, even when they do not realise they are doing so. They are also more open to implication than injunction. People like to figure out things for themselves and do not like to be told what to do.

5. More of the same will not produce a new result — effective solutions are often strange ones. They are also often uncomfortable to initiate.

6. The map is not the territory — we live in both — the real concrete world and a world of our perceptions, attributions and construal.

7. The more flexible person gets her way — it is inflexibility that usually constraints us, not simply a lack of info, or lack of skill, or bad habit. People often continue to do self-defeating things out of a false sense of honour or pride in consistency. Encourage and support more choices rather than less. “Would you rather take out the trash first, or would you rather pick up your room” ß illusion of alternatives. Choice is preferable to injunction.

Hypnosis is communication that bypasses critical analytical thought. We use hypnotic communication when we influence each other without making a direct request. We bypass resistance.

Here is some practical magic:

Indirect suggestion

- “I wonder” — not an injuction or even request, but they plant an idea in a gentle, positive way. To plant an idea is to use indirect suggestion. When executives plant ideas, people who report to them listen and react.

- saying things to someone else, whilst the other person hears

- you can also make the message more powerful by pre-empting them, that is, by prefacing them with info that makes them paradoxically seem more important ie “I’m really not supposed to tell you this”, “I know this is going to sound kind of stupid”, “If you tell anyone I said this, I’ll deny it”

- you can also create a strawman of possible resistance by beginning with “I don’ know, the thing that you want would require a lot of work”, you can substitute work with effort, time, attention, listening skills or money — the strawman is easily knocked over by the client with “I don’t mind work! I like hard work”

- use comparisons to your advantage — ie “a lot of people don’t seem to understand the next part” — a suggestion to pay more attention and a challenge to be better than the average person

Specific language

- some words to avoid — “try”, “can’t”, “won’t” — it has failure associated with it

- “Right now”, “Yet”, “As” are powerful word implying an action that is desired in the future — “you haven’t learned how to do this yet”, “You aren’t putting in the time right now”, “Notice how things change as you learn how to listen to your team”

- “Need” is strange and powerful — it implies necessity — “I need more time and resources” — implies that you could not exist without them and that it would be disastrous if you did not get them.

Specific non-trance hypnotic communication

- be careful with positive and negative linguistic formulations, use positive words and sentence structures

Storytelling

- write stories down and memories them

- Create opportunities to practice stories

- Make up new stories and integrate one or two important indirect suggestions (do not repeat stories and never explain them)

- Let the client figure them out themselves

Imagery

- Help them feel what it is like to be in a position. Use images and use the word imagine regularly

- Can be large, general images

- Detail — Detailed ones tend to help when learning a new skill

- Copying — imagine someone who is already excellent at a desired skill

- Future — Help client visualise where they want to be in 5 years time

- Leveling — when difficult to confront or deal with someone, bring people on your own level — ie imagine audience naked, or boss in gardening gear

- Corrective — undo and redo mistakes, go back to the same situation and do it again

- Worst-case scenarios — go through what the worst thing that can happen could be

- Cathartic — imagine the worst possible reaction of boss, then you will not have to experience it in real life

- Empathy — imagine yourself in the shoes of an important other. Go through a situation in their position — experience what they are feeling

- Security — practice images which make you feel safe, can keep them around for when things are difficult

- Metaphors — Make us think and cause us to notice things that we had never noticed before, they bypass normal resistance and change

- Modeling — be a model of positive attitude and action yourself

- Reframing — shift context to derive new important meaning in messages “I hate you” vs “I yell at you as I care”

- Ambiguity — humans naturally complete the picture and connect the dots, let the listener chew on things

- As-if — behave as if you already know how to do things, then they will come more naturally

Emotional Intelligence

Two different models of EI

1) Mayer and Salovey’s Four-Branch Model

Skills and abilities depicted in hierarchical order called branches:

a) Perception, identification, appraisal and expression of emption — non-verbal ability to notice and read emptions in oneself and others and express them

b) Using emotions to facilitate thinking — integrate emotions into thought process, so you think about things differently

c) Understanding and comprehending emotions — ability to understand emotions and apply knowledge to label emotions accurately, to interpret meaning, to understand transition between emptions

d) Reflective regulation and management of emotion — ability to remain open to feelings and comfortable with the positive and negative feelings of others, expressing emotions without repressing them

2. Goleman’s EI

Built on four domains of emotional intelligence:

a. Self-awareness — perception and accurate understanding

b. Self-management — emotional self-control

c. Social awareness — awareness of relationship surroundings, empathy, understanding of emotions of others

d. Relationship management — working effectively in the social arena, accomplishing goals with and through others, collaborating

First two are about self, the other two about others, two about recognition, two about regulation

Coaches should choose the best method of assessing for themselves — there are many available tests.

It’s the perfect vehicle for the smuggling of more interpersonal and intrapersonal skills into the workplace. It can legitimise important so-called soft-skill training and coaching. Chosen carefully, EI can be an ideal package for the transmission of crucial but undervalued enhancements.

Lessons from Athletic Coaches

Common Themes:

1. Drive

Most humans do not possess their brand of single-mindedness.

All of the coaches say highly successful people are driven, focused, and single-minded in their dedication to their craft. They work much harder than normal people and do not have balanced lives.

Most stress the importance of dreaming and setting goals.

This can be a starting point — where does your work fit into your life’s dreams? Priorities?

Consciously choose one or the other (single-mindedness or balanced life) and remember that you made the choice. Take joy in the outcome, but do not make one choice and expect the fruits of the other. Each path has its benefits and liabilities.

2. Teach the fundamentals

They stressed redundant coverage of the fundamental skills, even to highly talented players with huge egos. They repeated and repeated these lessons until the skills were second nature so that they could be executed under the extreme pressures of white-hot competition at the national level. These coaches simply refused to accept an athlete’s reluctance to go over and over the basics. They forced the issue, using their best teaching techniques.

Sell the basics, especially when your clients think they seem simple or when it seems embarrassing to admit they are missing a skill.

Ie listening skills, not sending thank you notes, time management, late for a meeting, return phone or email fast, presentation, behave in meetings, dress, delegate

3. Use individual approaches, flexibility and ingenuity

Absolute rules are counterproductive because athletes must be treated as individuals. Some people learn one way, some another.

4. Play against yourself

Striving to better your own best performance. They advocate setting goals relevant to your own progress and measuring performance against those, rather than against an opponent or scoreboard.

If you’re always striving to achieve success that is defined by someone else, you’ll always be frustrated. Define your own success.

5. Visualise

Football coaches call this rehearsal vision. Rehearse exactly what you will do dozens of times. When you actually play, you have the feeling that you’ve done it all before and that it now is second nature.

6. Video feedback

Athletic coaches would not think of coaching without video.

Show clients how they look, how they act, and how they speak and sound. Record meetings and evaluate them later. Practice new skills on tape and review them. Audio recordings can be a powerful tool. With your clients’ permission, record messages that your clients send. Listen and practice them until they are perfect. It is much easier to learn how to leave an effective voice message when you can hear yourself and get a coach’s feedback than it is to read about it in the book.

7. Learning from defeat

Virtually every coach’s and athlete’s book makes reference to the importance of adversity and one’s response to it.

8. Communication, trust and integrity

Several coach books emphasise the importance of direct, frank and honest interaction. They point out that this may create difficult moments, but that benefits clearly outweigh the negatives.

As the old expression goes, honesty shocks people. Serious, high integrity, communicated directly, enables you to stand out of the crow, especially over the long haul, assuming that you are not obnoxious or dogmatic about it. This is a tough standard, but it is absolutely worth it.

A couple more nuggets from athlete coaches:

1. Innocence — give without expecting things back, pay it forward

2. Clear contract — have a clear set of agreed-upon principles to reduce conflict and depersonalise criticism

3. Goal setting is overrated — goals can get in the way of present-moment living, make the most out of opportunities and the energy you have today. Goal setting is important but it is the attention to details and follow-up on a day-to-day basis that make things work

4. Curiosity and confusion — Reframe the feelings of confusion to awaken curiosity and opportunity

5. Perpetual change — keep updating goals and reexamine where you’re at

6. Patience is not a virtue — Proactiveness is better than believing that things will just work out in the end

7. Love, Fun and Work — the master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labour and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. To him, he’s always doing both.

8. Awareness is everything — you must be open to what is happening now — in the present moment, right here.

Coaching Women

It is absurd to put a woman down for having the very qualities that would send a man on top.

[This chapter comes with a long preamble about generalisation, etc — please read it to understand the full view of the author — the below read by itself is out of context]

Here is a map useful to understand gender differences:

1. We are all alike because we are all human. We have that in common.

2. We are all unique. There is no one on the planet who is just like you.

3. We all possess some characteristics that are associated with our gender.

What coaches need to know:

1. Workplace

- Glass ceiling is real

- Lots of reasons for it — lingering prejudice, resistance to female leadership, family demands and different responses to it, difference in work activity participation

- Male centric culture — war/sport metaphors (keeping score, kicking goals, etc), work activities are centered around sports and drinks which can leave out women

- Mentors and role models — can be hard to find, male mentors are not likely to treat female proteges in the same familiar way that they treat other men. They are not likely to have the same offsite, after work experiences that they might with other males

- Self-promotion — men claim airtime with confidence, women are less willing — self-censorship, career effectiveness requires visibility

- Communication style — women are inclined to make requests or suggestions rather than direct injunction, some women apologise compulsively, women say thank you to sustain positive feelings in a relationship, women ask for an opinion as a way to show consideration sometimes not to actually use that opinion, women see trouble talk as a rapport builder, women communicate indirectly

- Speaking up — women often have the experience of speaking but not being heard, need to find an assertive voice

- Leadership style — women are more inclusive and participatory in their leadership

- Multitasking — women more comfortable doing several things at once

- Response to role pressure — women spend more time and energy on family matters

How coaches can help

- Provide help with personal change in an unaccommodating environment without blaming the victim

- How to become more visible in an organisation without feeling too uncomfortable

- Coaches can serve as substitute mentors

Five forces that can provide a useful map for change in the org

1. Sphere of authenticity — internal consistency comes first — understand their own values and priorities

2. Women Leader Climate — how is the org? you’ll be shaping that climate

3. Individual psychology and interpersonal resources

4. Leader expectations — style, method, appearance

5. External commitments outside of work settings

Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office — is a mandatory reading for coaches, it includes a treasure chest of hard-hitting, specific suggestions for coaching considerations.

Benefit from experimentation with self-presentation. Coaches can observe, assess, and provide feedback to clients about their communication and behavioural style.

What orgs can do:

- Maintain gender diversity indicators without creating quotas — awareness

- Implement flexible working arrangements

- Make recruitment, appraisal and career management more women-friendly

- Nurture women ambitions — coaching, mentoring and female networking

Psychopathology and coaching

There are lots of diseases and disorders worth looking out for.

Stress makes everything worse.

The coach has a performance focus, not a therapeutic one. It is not the coach’s job to help fix personality problems. Coaches must resist the temptation to attempt therapy.

This might include a referral for a more definitive diagnosis or a recommendation for effective therapeutic help. It might include a discussion of how to minimise the impact of traits in the workplace and career.

Leadership

“Art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it”

“A process of giving purpose (meaningful direction) to collective effort, and causing willing effort to be expanded to achieve purpose.”

There are lots of different theories — trait based (interested in characteristics — intelligence, personality, values and habits), situational (qualities of the context and its challenges), contingency (focus on interaction — fit and match)

Styles

- Autocratic — productivity high, less creative — aggressive or apathetic

- Democratic — self-motivated, less productive, higher quality and more creative, morale high

- Laissez faire — least productive, no cooperation, disorganised

Theory X

- People are inherently lazy

- Will avoid work if possible

- The managers job is to find ways to motivate and control

Theory Y

- People appreciate work

- Tend to seek and accept responsibility and enjoy the accomplishment

- Collaborative and participatory

- Believes in untapped potential of workers

Charismatic leaders:

- Strong need for power and social influence

- Bold vision that differs from the status quo

- Relentless optimism, energy, and determination

- High self-confidence and a general sense of self-worth

- Strong conviction in their own belief and ideals

- Ability to articulate vision in a compelling way

Trait theory — leaders have specific traits

- Intelligence — not supported, often high intelligence is resented

- OCEAN

- Openness to experience (curious, interested in a variety of things) — high correlation to leadership effectiveness

- Conscientiousness (self-disciplined, well regulated, reliable) — highly correlated

- Extraversion (outgoingness, enthusiasm with others) — especially correlated with leader emergence, also consistently associated with leadership effectiveness

- Agreeableness (cooperative, willing to compromise, optimistic about others) — NOT highly correlated

- Neuroticism (emotional instability and self-defeating intrapersonal processes) — leaders have fewer unstable personality traits

Small number of widely support characteristics:

- High energy — typically have high physical and mental energy

- Good stress tolerance — handle relentless pressure, hectic pace, and unending demands without panicking or blaming others

- Self-confidence

- Internal locus of control — they believe that what happens is a result of their own efforts, not fate or chance or others

- Emotional maturity — emotionally stable with self-control, care about others and have empathy

- Integrity — they walk their talk

- Power motivation — seek power and positions of authority

- Achievement orientation — strong drive to excel and accomplish real goals

- Need for affiliation — work well with others, but are able to put the mission first

- Interpersonal skills — listening skills, manage people

- Conceptual and tacit skills — make sense out of ambiguity and prioritise competing goals

Managers vs Leaders

Managers seek order and control and are almost compulsively addicted to disposing of a problem even before they understand their potential significance.

Managers are about control, get the day to day done. They tame complexity. They direct people, reinforce the desired behaviour and punish that which does not conform. They regulate and safeguard the company’s resources, and pay close attention to what is happening in the present moment. They know where everything is, and they work hard to meet established goals. They know where the bodies are buried.

The managerial personality is best when it is calm, rational and analytical. Managers are tolerant but demanding. They are on the lookout for problems, for shortages, and for deviation from the system. The successful ones are diplomatic. They are sensible and reliable. They tend to be realists, and they do not like risk.

Leaders are responsible for the overall outcome, and they determine the overall direction of the company. They create the organisation’s vision, and they align people and things to realise that vision. They create a process by which the social order of the organisation is formed or shifted. Their focus is usually on change. They sometimes create chaos that managers then have to clear up. Leaders influence the reality and direction of an organisation.

Classic leader behaviours include breaking paradigms, motivating people to see things in a new way, causing others to shift priorities, and disrupting the status quo.

Leaders tend to be restless as a personality style. They love change and hate mundane, repetitive work. They like to use their imagination and they trust their own intuition. They enjoy being along and like to reflect on things. They are comfortable with risk and understand their role and importance. They tend to be competitive by nature, and this translates into a desire to be the best, to be on top of the heap.

Although it is a plus when leaders are also good managers, it is not essential. If real leaders are rare, then real leaders with good management skills are even more rare.

Leaders communicate with organisational outsiders. They present the vision and image of the org and stockholders, funding sources, gov agents, etc

They pay attention to the interests of those parties and bring feedback to the org so that adjustments can be made. They manage board,s. They establish life or death interpersonal relationships with important outsiders.

They integrate new ideas into the organisation they lead. Managers have not time to think. They are paid to be on top of the details, resources, and deadlines. They do not have much time, and they are not paid to take time. Leaders, in contrast, are paid to reflect.

Coaches are hired for two reasons:

1. Help fix problem people

2. Help a person make a transition from one career step to another

There are four roles the coaches can play:

1. Coaching for skill

Public speaking, listening, personal org and time management, presentation of self, teaching of cold call, even industry experience

2. Coaching for effect

Coaching in current job to get better — clients often do not know what is wrong or lacking, but have reason to believe that they need to improve

Ie analytical skills, team building, org architecture, operations management problems

3. Coaching for development

Prepare a person to move to the next level, involves analysis of essential skills required for the future, evaluation of skils in place and comparison of the two.

Ie unlearning of behaviour, future career plans, define goals

4. Coaching for the executive’s agenda

Help leader develop and evolve organisation

Can be ongoing coaching for longer period, sounding board and reality check

Ethics

Confidentiality has to be at the absolute highest level and you really only get one shot at that. If at any point I tell you something and somehow it leads out and I find out, we’re done… absolutely done... you don’t get a second chance.

Making the transition

Focus on one or two core competencies. This is a central concept, as it defines what you do and keeps you pointed in the proper direction. A core competency is defined as the single thing that you do the best, and it distinguishes you from others. It is what you are all about, and it includes your unique strengths and qualities. It is your speciality that which you have organised your efforts around for a long period of time.

Two overarching principles:

1. Be the kind of coach you would like to work with

2. Aim to be a Great coach, do not settle for being a good coach. After working with hundreds of coaches from virtually every background of training and experience, I’ve concluded that it is relatively easy to be a good coach.

Aim high and enjoy the ride.

👇My Newsletter — SUBSCRIBE HERE👇

Batko OS