Executive Coaching: An Investment in Creating Masterful Leadership As a result of the chaotic and transformational business environment of the '70s and '80s, the art and science of management has also been radically transformed. Consequently executive coaching has become a highly valued resource within coorporate life. Our firm has been coaching top leadership since 1986. Regardless of how you look at it, you are your primary instrument of interpersonal influence, organizational impact, and personal accomplishment and fulfillment. So, elevate your game. Get a coach. The Management Landscape Has Undergone a Sea of Change The Industrial Age Please superiors Command-and-control Stable Meddle Conforming Need-to-know Fiefdoms The Information Age Delight customers Empowering and participatory Agile Enable Outside-the-box action Open and transparent Interdependent networks In the prior Age, management skills stemmed from the heroic military model - plan, control, delegate, coordinate, and motivate. As the Information Age hurtles forward toward the next millennium, within a business environment characterized by permanent whitewater, the high impact leadership compentencies are now dramatically different: The Explorer Forges a vision and is an agent of change The Beacon Instills trust and inspires passionate commitment to the vision The Advocate Clearest voice in support of visionary, strategic, and values-driven behavior The Facilitator Creates a consultative and teaming workstyle within the culture The Partner Encourages a collegial, supportive, and collaborative workstyle The Coach Brings out the best in the organization's people, in terms of their aspirations, potential, performance, and contribution This set of six leadership roles, when used, creates extraordinarily powerful leverage for the executive. Do you know how far from criterion you are on each of the six? Do you know the best ways to close the gap? Well, just as in sports and in the performing arts, it's now increasingly becoming the case in business that the more succcessful you are, the more likely it is that you will use a coach to deepen and extend your success. Tune up your game. High-Performing Executives vs. Under-Performing Ones We now actually understand a great deal about what differentiates the successful leader from the under-performing one. Successful people are aggressive learners. They are individuals who: Constantly seek feedback and are extremely analytical about their successes and failures. Possess a finely tuned capacity for self-reflection and self-awareness. Seek a wide variety of experiences, out of both a sense of curiosity and the sense that experience is the best medium for self-discovery. Constantly strive to learn something new and different by searching for comparisons, contrasts, and generalizable insights. Find ways to apply new learnings to new situations. Use strengths to modify weaknesses. The bad news is that only about 10% of us are by nature active learners. The good news, though, is that much of what it takes to be an aggressive learner is coachable. So, What Does It Take? Much of what our coaching model focuses on is building a set of skills that helps the candidate become a more agile learner. Increasingly greater agility is pursued in four different spheres, each of which has a marked influence on a person's learning curve and on their performance as a leader. I. Mental Agility. The candidate discovers ways to more consistently: embrace complexity confront ambiguity expand their interests and perspectives pursue complexity out of heightened curiosity view penetrating questions as more important than answers II. Interpersonal Finesse. The candidate develops more techniques with which to: self-reflect and augment self-awareness catch their own counter-productive behavior and modify it vary their role and style to the situation embrace conflict and harness it for creative ends III. Change Mastery. The candidate's executive repertoire is broadened when they: learn how to behave as strategically as possible employ hypothetical modeling in their thinking and problem-solving embrace the underlying spirit of continuous improvement come to understand how critical tenacity is in any change initiative IV. Goal Orientation. The candidate hones a high-impact results orientation by adding or refining the following capabilities: create a presence and inspire others by consistently acting "on purpose" (i.e., acting strategically) address their own performance and others' in a systematic, developmental, and strategic way differentiate among various levels of priorities and act accordingly (i.e., the two-by-two matrix of Urgent x Important) deliver on promises and expectations