“I really don’t like doing it!” claimed Frank, the Senior Vice President, Business Development with a large corporate leader in the energy business. “Doing what?” I asked. “Control. I hate finding myself in the position to have to control my direct reports. It just doesn’t feel right.”

“So what do you want to do?” was my response. “There must be some other way!” Frank said in frustration (always a green light for my executive coaching). “Do you remember when we talked about the four key components of management a few weeks ago?” I inquired. “Yeah, I do” stated Frank. “So what were they?” I followed up.

“Well, if I can remember the first was good old planning. Then, I believe the next was getting organized around supporting the plan. Oh yeah, next was leading. This is about truly caring and creating the environment for my troops so that they become more motivated to make it all successfully happen, thus driving up their work effort resulting in high quality performance . The last component was about control. OK, now I remember, it’s about controlling the plan, not my people. I know you really emphasized this last piece when we previously discussed this. Man, I’ve got to really get this into the marrow of my leadership bones. It’s about controlling the plan and motivating my people!”

“Great on you my friend for getting this clear. Around the motivating piece, here’s a small gift that might help you. As I’ve said many times in our past coaching conversations, you can either keep it or throw it in the garbage. I’m never attached to gifts given to you. This particular one has worked well for both myself and many of my executive clients. By the way, I’ve been unable to identify who the author of this is, but here it goes.” 

HEALTHY CARING IS  

I can listen to you without interrupting

Because I am in a working relationship with you, I choose to listen to you and see how my behavior impacts you  

I will not control and manipulate you to get what I want

I will not punish you for saying “no” to me  

I will not fear your rejection. I understand that “no” to me is a “yes” to you. I truly care about you. I want you to take care of yourself  

If you end up leaving our group . . . the organization . . . I will experience definite discomfort and I know that I, we, can still be satisfied here without your valued support 

I will not ask you to give up who you are to be cared by me

Your security, satisfaction and development will be as important to me as my security, satisfaction and development

I will not try to take away your feelings or rob you of them so I can be comfortable

So there you have it dear reader, all of us are continually in choice as to how we relate! So what was the blinding glimpse of the obvious for you, your team, your organization in the above? I would love to hear your thoughts and gain your perspective. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

“I can’t believe those people. They just don’t get it!” was the response of my executive coaching client, Gerry, who heads up a key line of business with a leading defense contractor. I typically start off coaching conversations with a check-in question. After listening to Gerry further, I asked “So what’s in the anger my friend?” For a moment there was silence on the phone. I had learned long ago to always let silence do the heavy lifting! “Hmmm . . . , ” he expressed and then went on, “I really resent the fact that we had agreed on what had to be accomplished last week, and they haven’t even started on it. It’s simply damned unacceptable. I really feel let down. I could tear my office door off the hinges right now. I’m going into a meeting with them shortly and I think I’m going to straighten them out . . . make them new rear ends if I have to!”

“Well before you charge on in, are you game to take a few minutes to step back and take a look at what’s happening with you right now?” I asked. Gerry, to his credit had always been very open to self-exploration and said “Yeah, let’s go for it coach?” I love his honesty and candidness.

“So, if your boss was this angry with something you did or didn’t do, and stormed into a meeting with you having the same intent, how would you react?” In his typically succinct and earthy way he quickly responded, “Well I’d probably hang back, not offer much and look for an opportunity to get the hell out of there!”. “Given that, then what would you predict your people will do when you give them the old what for?” “Got it!”, he said with a bit of a snicker.

“So coach, I’d like to hear what the heck you think?” Gerry asked. “Sure. First of all, it’s not about them, it’s about you Gerry! Anger is actually a gift, not a weakness. It only becomes a weakness when this strength is taken too far. Kind of  like manure in the system that gets clogged up. Need I say more? Does that make sense?” “Completely.” Gerry responded.

“So, having said that, what’s in just enough anger for you?” I asked. “Well, for me,” Gerry shot back, “It certainly gets me up and running. Actually a source of energy. It sort of acts like a catalyst for making things happen. Come to think of it, if I become more aware of it in the moment I can actually use it to be more effective, otherwise it can get in my way. I think I prefer the former. Any thoughts on what I can do to regulate myself when the old fuse gets a tad short?”

“That’s a great question. Why don’t we take a quick moment and brainstorm some approaches?” “Ok”, Gerry said, “Maybe I should start not to sweat the small stuff as they say. Hell, if I learn how to better spot it when it shows up, I’d be better able to dial down the intensity a tad, not shoot first and figure out what I shot after the fact!”

“I love what you’ve come up with.”, I said. “You might also consider talking yourself down, for example saying to yourself, hey, this is no big deal, can I put this issue on the backburner for the time being? Perhaps I should give this some thought before I shoot. Why don’t I take  a couple of minutes to just let every muscle in my body, from my toes right up to the top of my head, just relax and decompress. You do whatever works for you.”

“So, when you do walk into the meeting after decompressing, how do you need to be?” I asked. “As opposed to what I would do?”, he responded. “Yes, exactly,” I retorted. Gerry then continued, “Probably be calm, more focused on them rather than me. I need to be honest with them in a respectful way, by sharing what my thoughts are in a fairly specific way, how I feel about it all in terms of its importance to me and what it is I think we should consider doing about it.”

“That sounds like a superb approach, but what might you do even before that?” I asked. “I think I know what you’re driving at. Rather than adversely pre-influencing them in a way that they think they’re getting my orders, it might be a hell of a lot better if I asked them collectively and individually what they thought, felt and wanted regarding the issues at hand, and then do the former. Yeah, that’d work a lot better. Probably generate a lot more information and data that would help us make much more informed decisions. Man, that’s my game plan!”

“What are some other potential payoffs of your taking this approach? I asked. “Obviously, it’ll be a heck of a lot safer place them, we’ll build more trust, they’ll feel heard, buy in will clearly go up, and the solutions we collectively come up with will  probably be a lot more effective as a result.” said Gerry.

“So what’s the take away for you my friend?” I asked in bringing our meeting to a close. “Well I guess it’s that I can use my anger in service of myself, my folks, our customers and our organization, or I can quite frankly let it control me and then blow it!” “If it is the latter,” I asked, “What might be the adverse consequences for you?” “I don’t want to even think about it . . . too scary!” Gerry concluded. “May the force be in you my friend with the upcoming meeting. I know you’ll be more than successful!” I offered.

Does your temper rise at times and get away from you?  Do you find that under stress your anger, anxiety, fear and/or shame show up a tad too quickly?  Do you even notice it?  If you do notice, what do you do with it?  I’d love to hear your insights and experiences. Take care.

Any transition to a new role, while exciting and an acknowledgement of what the organization thinks of us, is a time of anxiety for the newly transitioning leader.

A few of the common errors of a new role leader include trying to do too much too soon, failure to understand the de facto culture/sub culture, and/or misinterpreting the expectations of their superior. Danger lurks ahead….. in the form of mistrust by others, leader fatigue, compounding anxiety with over preparation, and creation of an unsafe environment for employees. As stress intensifies for the new role leader, can you really be making the best decisions for the organization as a whole, your team and yourself?

A recent research article from the University of Washington reported the findings of imposing stress on rats. It took only one uncontrollable stressful episode to greatly effect the behavior of a rat. It actually took the rat several days to recover from the effects of the stressor and return to normal decision making ability. The learning of the stressed rat control group was delayed. As well, this group was unable to readily adjust to alterations made in the imposed stress exercise. Stress altered the ability to learn, the ability to remain agile, and the ability to make decisions. How does this convert to humans? Well, the scientific community has been using rats as study participants for years…there must be something to their selection.

As I look to newly transitioning leaders whom I have coached over the past 5 years, I relate to the news of the above study. Stress has a tremendous effect on performance levels and at a time when a leader is under the microscope and readily judged by others. Clients have shared with me how this has manifested for them and projected in all areas of their life. Many suffer from extreme sleep disturbances and/ or dietary challenges.

I have worked with leaders who admitted that they had hardly slept in two months and leaders who existed on a pop and pizza diet. It is rewarding as a coach to support leaders in these circumstances and be part of the process that allows them to gain back a feeling of balance and control……rewarding them with restful nights rather than a continuum of wide eyed 3 AM note taking sessions. With invested and targeted support, these leaders can bring about greater contribution to the organization in a shortened time frame as they learn to manage their stress, embrace the transition, garner early credibility and move powerfully forward with their leadership.

What is the cost to an organization of not readily investing in the transitioning new role leader? As this is an area of continued research for me I repeatedly see transitioning phases of 14 – 24 months in executive level roles. More complex portfolios can exceed this timeframe. This is not just about the leader’s transition. One must take into consideration the transitional impact on those who surround the leader and the cost to the organization when their performance falters as a result of how the new role leader shows up for others.

What is your personal experience in a recent transition, either as the leader or as a direct report to a newly transitioning leader? While you are drinking from a fire hose, what soothing techniques have you found that help to manage anxiety and stress for you? In hindsight, how do you feel your decision making during a recent leadership transition may have been impaired?

“I’m responsible for Strategy.” said Mike Payne, General Manager – Strategy & Portfolio with Shell Gas & Power, while on a Continental flight from Houston, Texas to Seattle, Washington. We just finished introducing ourselves and had an interesting discussion about organizational strategy, employee loyalty and corporate cultures and how they positively or negatively affect organization performance, particularly during these white water times. The whole concept of corporate strategy, its development and implementation have always fascinated me. Having led and facilitated strategic change both in organizations in executive roles and as an executive coach/consultant, I’ve always believed that strategy development, which of course is critical, is really where “the rubber hits the sky.” Strategy implementation on the other hand is where “the rubber hits the road”! The latter is where real management change takes place. I’ll come back to this shortly.

Strategy development is critical, but my experience and observation is that most senior leaders would simply rather chew through their left arm than spend the usual inordinate amounts of time working through a long laborious strategic management process facilitated by high priced consulting firms over many months (even years). The end result is a strategic document so massive that one could hit a moose between the eyes with it and drop him right on the spot. Typically, along with the other ‘pressing demands’ that await them back at the ranch, the participants never truly want to revisit these documents no matter how well initially intentioned.

So what’s the alternative? Most will agree that organizations have to have a clear vision and supportive strategy! In these turbulent times being faced with imperfect organization systems, people and the world around us, there are truly no right answers. But there is a way to accelerate the development of powerful strategy with the foregoing imperfections. By utilizing full involvement of the whole organization from top to bottom you will be able to maximize understanding, ownership, commitment of the people that have to make it happen (not the executive) and quickly increase the probability of the organization’s strategic advantage and success.

This means moving forward in a way that fully involves the organization’s people while driving up the collective dissatisfaction of all involved with the organization’s current state of affairs and producing substantive clarity around what improvement would look like. Collectively determine the first steps toward moving quickly and powerfully forward on that vision and clarify the capabilities that need to be developed to accelerate the changes needing to take place rapidly thus resulting in the organization overpowering the ever present inertia that resists any planned change.

Now that your organization has a quick and well developed strategy it’s ready to move forward! Whoa Nellie, not so fast. Remember that inertia piece previously referred to. Well it has been temporarily disabled and if you don’t exploit it quickly it will solidly re-establish its dysfunctional presence. You must start to quickly redesign your organization to assure you successfully achieve your organization’s new dream: the strategic plan. The focus now is on redesigning and changing your organization in ways that will enable it to quickly realize the new strategy. This requires you to revisit your organization’s current structure, systems, staffing, competencies, leadership style and the way we do things around here (often referred to as your organization’s culture, those principles that guide how people are expected to work with each other and the organization’s customers/clients).

These key areas must be revisited and fundamentally changed creating full alignment with and producing the strategic results planned for. Otherwise, as Edward Deming put it, every system is perfectly designed for the results it produces! So if you want different results, i.e. achieving the organization’s new strategy, then by definition you must change each of the foregoing components of your organization or it will simply continue to create the results produced to date and perhaps further deterioration of same. Oh, the dangers of being an executive in this day and age! No wonder these positions are affectionately known as ulcer jobs!

Here’s a small insight, the most important aspect of the foregoing is not the strategic planning, strategic management and change in management processes, but rather having the ‘leadership cajones’, courage and confidence to make it all happen! This requires a very unique leader and these are truly a very rare breed, thus being paid the big bucks as they say. However, if the desire is squarely there, then surrounding oneself with the right team who first prepare to invest in themselves working from the inside out, rather than the outside in (i.e. strategic planning, management and change) then you have a fighting chance of success.

This is really all about the CEO and his/her team being different individually and as an executive leadership team as opposed to simply doing things differently. Otherwise, as was previously inferred, the probably of bringing about needed change will be minimal. If anything it will probably become worse. Being different at both the individual and leadership team levels necessitates having the courage to work with highly seasoned executive coaches, being ready to engage in quick and powerful diagnostics, and preparing to first make the personal changes necessary to assure that the new strategy truly sticks to the wall and doesn’t just slide away. Otherwise the whole strategic management process will be an enormous waste of time, money and organizational energy. And if this is the case, it will clearly contribute to executive candidacies for transfer outside the organization!

What feelings surface for you on this subject? What to you think about it? What is it that you want to do with the information? I’m most interested in hearing from you: the good, the bad and the ugly!

“Those guys just don’t get it!”, “I’m thinking of going elsewhere given the new assignment they’ve forced me to take!”, or “This place is a zoo and no one knows which way is up or down!”. Often when engaged in coaching these and a myriad of other perspectives get voiced loudly and clearly. Although many of these clients don’t know it, being ‘stuck’ in a particular perspective or point of view is more common than not. They’re simply stuck because of his/her not being able to see ‘the blinding glimpse of the obvious’. With commitment from the client to ‘want to break through this’ (usually because of the associated pain and discomfort) and powerful coaching they typically make strong breakthroughs quickly and effectively.

So how’s this done? It’s simply a matter of coaching the client to step back and begin looking at the same situation but from different perspectives. Reviewing and clarifying these perspectives, and then making a choice that is ‘integrative’, that is taking in the needs of those significant other stakeholders and his/her own needs, creates a ‘win-win’ resolution and then ‘makes it happen’ as Kathy Dannemiller and Jake Jacobs would put it. Easier said than done, but then that is where a highly experienced senior executive coach comes in, particularly for senior executives, individual contributors and hi-potentials constantly wrestling with those organizational concerns where there is never a ‘right answer’.

A universal phenomenon that exists for us all is that we’re always in choice no matter the circumstances that face us. We’re in choice in the morning when we wake up. “What will I wear?”, “What will I have for breakfast?”, “How will I get to work?”, “Do I want to go to work?”, “How do I want to feel right now, today, tomorrow?”, “What attitude do I want to take toward my organization, boss, peers, sub ordinates, team members, customers/clients, family members, etc.?” The list is simply never-ending.

Another universal phenomenon (oh, they’re limitless), is that for every choice there is a consequence . . . good, bad or ugly! That is why knowing this information is key to our true success and fulfillment as children, parents, team members, employees, leaders and community members. Always consider your thoughts, wants and feelings (in equal amounts) before choosing. If the results impact others, always share with them what the foregoing are for you, and then also ask them what they think, want and feel about the same issue and use this collective information to make choices that satisfy.

Heck, even our dogs are in choice. Say that again! OUR DOGS ARE ALSO ALWAYS IN CHOICE! Let me give you a for example. In June of 2008 we adopted two new rescue Brittany Spaniels through the American Brittany Rescue Association. I drove Skya in from Nebraska, and drove Woody from Montana. Both were to replace two rescue Brittany’s who had passed away from old age a few months prior. Back to being in choice. Skya had been picked up off the street and was about to be euthanized in a Kill Shelter. Fortunately, someone stepped in at the last minute who rescued her turning her over to the American Brittany Rescue Association, and we picked her up a month later. In the interim, in that she came off the street and no one knew her real name, she ended up being called Sidney.

Of course, when I picked her up she did not respond to her assigned name. So on the drive back to Vancouver, BC from Nebraska I called Bev, my wife and fearless CEO of RWBA, and asked that she set up a meeting with Jerry Wong, a well known human and animal psychic. Jerry had worked very closely with Beau, our previous male Brittany who had passed away of cancer. The objective: have Jerry connect with Sidney.

Well to make a long story short, he did it. Initially, after some preliminary work with her he was not able to get a specific name from her. He worked hard at connecting, but to no avail. Then Bev said, “Why don’t you ask her what she wants to be called?” so Jerry went back to work with her. He simply put her in choice! She responded by showing Jerry a huge night sky with a plethora of stars throughout. Bev and I immediately shouted out the obvious: “Star! “ Jerry asked her and she communicated no. You’ve no doubt already guessed that she had chosen and communicated through images to Jerry that her name is Skya! When this was actually said out loud she immediately reacted by jumping up excitedly and running around our family room. I’m getting ‘verpluncked’ just sharing this with you. Yes, even our sweet Skya was and is always in choice. Thank you Jerry for coaching our little gal!

So there you have it, we, all of use, are always in choice! So what was the blinding glimpse of the obvious for you, your team and your organization in the above? I would love to hear your thoughts and gain your perspective. Thank you for taking the time to read this.