Masterful Coaching

Robert Hargrove

• Publisher: Pfeiffer
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780470443279
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Mentoría y coaching

When the first edition of Masterful Coaching was published, it quickly became the standard resource for anyone who was a coach, considering becoming a coach, or curious about being an extraordinary coach. In this completely revised third edition of his groundbreaking book, Hargrove presents his profound insights into the journey to of becoming a masterful coach along with guiding ideas, tools, and methods.

PART ONE

MAPPING THE TERRITORY OF COACHING

Part One maps the territory of Masterful Coaching for professionals, leaders, and managers. The chapters address the vision of Masterful Coaching, “Better Leaders; Better World,” and emphasize that becoming a Masterful Coach requires resetting your mind-set to the fact that coaching for results, not changing behaviors, counts. It introduces the Masterful Coaching method, which is based on Impossible Futures, winning, and transformational learning.

Chapter One shows how the cumulative effect of change is making coaching not just a good idea but also a necessity. As organizations are disembodied through outsourcing and offshoring, the span of control shortens and managers increasingly have to coach small teams of top talent on game-changing projects. This requires that command-and-control leaders transform themselves into leaders as coaches who can bring out the best in genuinely talented people who don’t fit job descriptions and have no interest in punching a time clock. The chapter introduces the Masterful Coaching method, which is all about Impossible Futures, winning at the great game of business, radical innovation, and personal and organization transformation, as opposed to predictable futures, coming in second, continuous improvement, and behavioral tweaks.

If you want to reinvent the organization, reinvent yourself first.

The Masterful Coaching method is not for everyone, so if possible, choose your clients rather than just hungrily accepting any assignment that you get. Chapter Two advises looking for extreme leaders who push the envelope in terms of vision, build teams of talented deviants, and take bold and unreasonable action versus middle-of-the-road moderates who are leaders in name only and who hate vision, fake teamwork, and tend to retreat at the first sign of opposition. Extreme leaders not only raise the bar, they are, surprisingly, the most coachable. This chapter also discusses how to deploy coaching on an enterprise-wise level to achieve power and velocity in reaching goals.

Masterful Coaching is about inspiring, empowering, and enabling people to live deeply in the future, while acting boldly in the present.

Let’s say you are now coaching a leader and it’s going swimmingly, but how do you know whether you are showing up as a Masterful Coach or teetering on the edge of a so-so evaluation—one that you will never actually hear about until your contract is cancelled? Chapter Three provides a kind of GPS with four waypoints so you can tell whether you are in the zone of Masterful Coaching or way off course and heading for the rocks: (1) the coach has a real seat at the table, not a casual consulting relationship; (2) coaching is about standing in an Impossible Future and getting your client to take action to make it a reality versus getting distracted; (3) coaching is about engaging clients in personal (organization) reinvention, not a competency tune-up; and (4) a coach is a thinking partner on puzzles, dilemmas, and conundrums.

CHAPTER ONE

COACHING IS AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME

The Masterful Coaching Vision,
Mind-Set, and Method

Leaders today need to become revolutionaries or risk becoming irrelevant. Welcome to the revolution. This book is a call to arms—an invitation to take a stand for the future. The winds of change are blowing at gale force against the barricades of the status quo. We are shifting from the age of the machine to the age of talent, from a mass economy to a creative economy, from “The world is our colony” to “The world is flat.” Think Wal-Mart versus Sears, Apple versus Sony, Google versus AOL, Whole Foods Market versus Safeway, YouTube versus MGM.

CEOs have no choice but to become revolutionaries or risk becoming irrelevant at the hands of their competitors. This book is for leaders at all levels whose aim is to make a difference in their world and for coaches who desire to play a catalytic role in this process. This book is a manifesto and manual. It’s for people who believe that an Impossible Future is something you create, not just something that happens to you by luck. It is a book for innovative leaders who are unwilling to play it safe and for coaches who want more than just another contract. I introduce the Masterful Coaching vision, mind-set, and method—a powerful and concise step-by-step process. Before going further, let me set the table.

Companies need revolutionary leadership and business models in order to compete. We have reached a tipping point where the cumulative effect of change demands revolutionary new business (management) models. The future of management is with the visionary leader, profit mechanic, and coach. The leader will be a visionary who changes the game while others sleep—a profit mechanic and a people developer. Creative intellectual capital (think Microsoft, Google, Apple), not a big organization on merger steroids, is the key to success.

If we aim to realize an Impossible Future and change the world, we better get together the best professionals in the world. Nothing less will do. Organizations need to be acting as organizers, not just employers (think Visa International, Amazon.com, or Linux software). Hierarchy, bureaucracy, and employee IDs will give way to hot zones, a stew pot full of joint ventures and astounding projects. Look for more brassy brands and professional service firms. The focus will be on creative intellectual capital, superb client relationships, and turn-key, life-altering solutions. Here are some of my favorites that have already succeeded in this realm:

IDEO—innovation is a team sport
Cirque du Soleil—ultimate entertainment experience
Whole Foods Market—gourmet healthy fast food
eHarmony—compatibility matching system
UPS—“What can Brown do for you?”
Everything on the Internet: Web2.0 (web businesses), not Web1.0
(just brochures)

Second, big centralized organizations are giving way to “empires of the mind” consisting of twelve people. The value of industrial-era M.B.A. degrees and huge, sprawling, centralized organizations with overlapping product divisions all but disappears as we make the shift to the age of talent (creative economy), and the trend toward outsourcing and offshoring continues. At the same time, the value of visionary leadership, together with creative intellectual capital and radical innovation, comes boldly into view. Bill Gates and Microsoft, with an empire of a dozen minds surpassing General Motors, America’s biggest corporation, in market capitalization was a sign of the times, as was IBM selling its PC business to China’s Lenovo.

Prediction! Even the best CEOs will find it hard to keep organizations like GM, IBM, GE, and so forth from being broken up in the next decade, as 90 percent of white-collar jobs “disappear” and or become reconfigured beyond recognition. The CEO as steward of the big company who had little choice but to be a command-and-control manager in order to coordinate the efforts of tens of thousands will be passing into history. The CEO as entrepreneur with an empire of a dozen minds (Apple, Google, Facebook) and a vision of an Impossible Future based on a dramatic difference will come to take their place. One thing is certain: if the people on your team are some of the smartest people in the world, command and control isn’t going to cut it. Nor will running the company according to the laws of physics that dictates if you want to grow, buy a big company.

Third, coaching has become an idea whose time has come as millions of business leaders seek an Impossible Future and 75 million baby boomers retire. In the next decade, coaching will become an idea whose time has come as CEOs discover that the old-fashioned management muscles needed to deliver predictable results and occasional incremental improvement aren’t sufficient to lead a team of talented people to an Impossible Future based on game-changing products, exciting new services, and spellbinding experiences. Increasingly they will tap into a growing army of coaches and consultants drawn from the ranks of 78.2 million baby boomers used to a high standard of living, loaded with expertise, not ready to retire, and looking to get the most out of the rest of their life.

For example, when Jeff Immelt became CEO of General Electric, he said that his primary task as a leader was not to wrestle a thousand-pound gorilla to the ground (stay on top of everyone and everything), but rather to act as a coach who would take people to an Impossible Future based on 8 percent growth a year for the company. His coaching started with a winning game plan. He personally got involved in building a talented cross-functional team to launch a new company, GE Infrastructure, a general store to third-world countries. His coaching duties also involved helping to transform a culture of general improvement efforts into a culture of radical innovation. Immelt believes that no executive can reach his or her potential without coaching, and one of his first acts as CEO was to retain his old boss, Jack Welch, as his executive coach.

THE LEADER AS COACH IS DISPLACING THE LEADER AS COMMANDER

Leadership from on high based on command and control, a poltergeist from management’s past, will finally be exorcised, and the leader as coach based on stimulating imagination and radical innovation will take its place. The unit of organization has shifted from a big organization to a great group with a hot project, where each person is free to discover his or her own greatness. Interestingly enough, the best role models are coming from outside the United States. N. R. Narayana Murthy, with the formal title of chairman and chief mentor of Infosys in Bangalore, India, launched the $20 billion company that employs fifty-five thousand people with the creative intellectual capital of six talented software engineers and a $250 loan from his wife.

First of all, I must say that God has been very kind to us because, as Louis Pasteur once said, that when God decides to announce his presence, he comes in the form of chance.

N. R. Narayana Murthy

He had a vision of an Impossible Future of Infosys being one of the world’s top three software firms and creating wealth for the Indian professional population based on the PC revolution, offshoring, outsourcing, and an army of talented, English-speaking Indian engineers. He also had a vision of leadership without formal authority based on the Indian tradition of the guru, which his title of chairman and chief mentor reflects. He lives in the same house he lived in when he started the company, starts each day by scrubbing toilets, and drives a locally made car to work at 7:00 A.M., when he frequently holds meetings with the board on strategy or coaches software engineering teams on the Infosys values of honesty, respect, and decency (charity).

I would like Infosys to be a place where people of different genders, nationalities, races, and religious beliefs work together in an environment of intense competition but utmost harmony, courtesy and dignity, creating more value for our customers.

N. R. Narayana Murthy

As big companies that make and sell things morph into professional service firms that offer customized solutions through joint ventures and hot projects, the chain of command has been decimated, and the senior person who used to see it as part of his or her job to mentor talented junior employees to get them up to speed has either disappeared or is working on a project in Dubai, London, or Singapore. Most newly hired talent rarely gets one lunch a year with the boss and often doesn’t see much of a stretch assignment either. Companies are going to need coaching and mentoring to realize an Impossible Future and win the nonstop talent war. It’s one thing to bring on a mentoring program, another to create a mentoring culture.

Bruce Wasserstein, chairman of Lazard Ltd., is a leader who has embraced both ideas. A masterful deal maker in 2005, he launched the seemingly impossible 2006 coup at Lazard in which he famously disassembled the family ownership and took the fractious merger and acquisition firm public. In 2007, he coached his veteran team of investment bankers on $300 billion worth of deals, something that always involves offering a CEO’s advice: Are you sure you are going to keep the number two guy in the company you are acquiring, because the number one guy is definitely going to leave? Wasserstein invests heavily in attracting a network of young stars. Every junior staffer gets a mentor who teaches this person the ropes and at the same time stimulates his or her imagination. The idea is to create a hothouse where young talent is encouraged to think deeply and creatively about the client relationship.

Today’s leading CEOs, who have mind-bogglingly complex jobs as tough as climbing Mt. Everest, are increasingly realizing they can’t do it alone. When Sir Edmund Hillary went to take on the Impossible Future of climbing Mt. Everest, one of his first acts was to hire his sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, as a guide. Leading CEOs are now increasingly looking for a coach to guide and instruct them in reaching their goals and dealing with dilemmas.

How do you attract New York Yankees’ top talent level with a Nashville Sounds’ low budget? How do you break out of the no-growth morass? How do you transform a big organization that stifles game-changing ideas and create a gathering place that is as stimulating as Google search and as engaging as eBay, MySpace, or YouTube? In most cases, it’s not about the coach having the answers but about coach and coachee discovering the answers together.

The image of the CEO as a solitary Zarathustra-like figure is giving way to the image of the CEO and Masterful Coach whose destinies are joined at the hip. In Nietzsche’s book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, the hero proclaims that God is dead and then attempts to conquer the world on his own, only to die early in battle having failed to create allies or take counsel from the wise. Nietzsche unknowingly created an apt metaphor for today’s CEOs who are being fired in record time and record numbers for much the same reasons. My Pentagon pals have said of Donald Rumsfeld that during his years at the Pentagon, he acted as if he was so smart that he neither brought in the team nor requested coaching; however brilliant and powerful he may have been, the goals and complexities of Iraq proved too much for him.

In my opinion, in the years ahead, CEOs will stop drawing their identity from the solitary Zarathustra-like figure and start drawing their identity from the image of the CEO in partnership with a Masterful Coach who together go after an Impossible Future that would not be attainable individually. Can you imagine Sir Edmund going for the summit of Mt. Everest without Tenzing Norgay? No. Can you imagine Jeff Immelt becoming CEO of General Electric without the coaching of Jack Welch? No. Can you imagine Tom Brady winning four Super Bowl rings without Bill Belichick? No.

The CEO needs to get personally involved in bringing in coac...