Mike Bell's Blog

Friday 23 December 2011

Choosing a Great Leadership Coach

Choosing a Great Leadership Coach

By Mike W Bell

Coaching provides the opportunity for you to get direct, personal and focused guidance, teaching and support in the development of you leadership capability. It is vital that you get the best from your coach and build a relationship of trust as you tackle their real leadership challenges in improving organization performance.

For many leaders it is developing their 'character' and the whole range of personal and interpersonal skills that make it up, that is the key to unlocking more of their leadership potential: their creativity and imagination, their emotional flexibility, their capacity for building relationships and for taking decisive and courageous action.

Foundations of Great Leadership Coaching

As the client you should expect to be treated as a whole person complete with a vast amount of natural talent and potential. The aim should not be to 'fix' you but to help you develop and release what is already there. Each of us is on our own learning journey and there is no blame or judgment about where we are on that journey.

It is not possible to separate who we are from what we do. While the focus may be leadership in the workplace, coaching will often explore elements of body, mind, emotion and spirit and how they are impacting all aspects of your life.

It is up to you to decide what you want to achieve. The coach should do not set the agenda but help you to look beneath the presenting issues and to be really clear what outcomes you desire.

The coach is not the expert. They don't prescribe solutions and the best results come when the coach and client acknowledge their interdependent relationship and use this as a source of power and learning.

Each coaching relationship is individual. The approach and design evolves as client and coach understand more of what is needed to produce the desired results.

At the intake stage expect to establish a clear Coaching Contract for agreement and signing. It is also good to undertake an Expectations Exchange so both client and coach are really clear about what they can expect and not expect of each other.

What Outcomes can you expect of Leadership Coaching?

1. Sustainable Excellent Performance

You should expect to agree high measurable standards by which you, and your organization, can assess the outcomes of the coaching.

2. Self-Observation

Because of the coaching process, you should become more able to observe when you are performing well or not. You should learn to make the needed adjustments to your behavior without depending upon the coach.

3. Self-Learning

The coaching process should help you to learn how to learn. So the process of improvement continues when the coaching project is complete.

Wishing you a great coaching experience.

Mike W Bell has been a senior executive, leadership coach and organizational development consultant for over 30 years. For the last 15 or more of these I have been weaving an old wisdom tradition with the latest science and research to find more whole and balanced approaches to leadership and organization. My latest ebook, a modern fable entitled Leadership Intelligences in Action can be previewed at http://mutualinspiration.co.uk/leadershipintelligences/liaebook/

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4 Essential Inner Leadership Skills

4 Essential Inner Leadership Skills

By Mike W Bell

Many leaders today are finding that more being asked of them. Not just more in quantity, but more of the qualities needed to be successful.

It is becoming clear that intellect alone is insufficient to develop innovative, flexible and responsive teams and organizations that honor, develop and retain individual and collective talent and capability.

Today's leaders need to draw on more of their inner potential: to be creative, collaborative, decisive, courageous, visionary, inspiring, and caring.

Leadership is as much an expression of who we are as what we do. These four inner leadership skills will transform your leadership capabilities and make you a more effective leader of yourself and others.

1. The Wise Leader

Do you find that the expansion of information and knowledge coupled with complexity and change are making it more difficult to make sound decisions?

Paul Nutt in his book, Why Decisions Fail, reports, "For more than twenty years I have been studying how decisions are made - the key finding is startling - decisions fail half of the time".

Wise Leaders make better decisions by drawing on individual and collective knowledge, experience and genius in ways that generate deeper insights, more profound thinking and clear, purposeful action.

2. The Centred Leader

Do you stay centred and calm whatever challenge you face?

Each of us has many different facets and qualities, we all contain a cast of many characters that constitutes our 'self'. In the very centre, the essence of who we are, is the leader.

When there are many voices with a multitude of suggestions, opinions and ideas and the situation calls for leadership, it is only our still centre, our leader within, that can take command effectively and can stay calm under fire.

3. The Balanced Leader

Can you access your full potential - when you choose to?

We all have the capacity for creative expression, for adventure and change, for caring and sustaining, and for courageous and decisive action. Often, some of these qualities are more developed in us than others and we rely on and use only the stronger ones, even in situations where they are not appropriate.

Balanced leaders draw on their natural and innate talents in all of these areas, balancing creative vision with the need to sustain, exploration with the need for clear action.

4. The Conscious Leader

Is time your scarcest resource - or is it your attention that's scarce?

Do you find it difficult to concentrate for long periods and frequently lose focus as you attention is pulled away by emails, phone calls, and staff 'dropping in'? Then perhaps your attention is scarce and not your time. Time is a fixed resource, but your attention can be expanded.

Conscious leaders are able to stay present and hold an attention on many issues concurrently. They keep a clear sense of direction and don't get pulled off-track. They learn quickly and shift fluidly when they need to.

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4 Stages of Leadership Transformation

4 Stages of Leadership Transformation

By Mike W Bell

When you understand the human development process it will enable you to create a sustained positive change in your leadership behaviors. This will make you more effective at meeting today's challenges.

Leaders need to recognise that the thought processes and mental models that underpin their current behavior are the result of long periods of social conditioning. For example notice how we seem to 'absorb' and comply with the unwritten rules of acceptable and unacceptable behavior in any group or organization usually without any conscious choice. Some of this conditioning supports our leadership capability and some robs us of our leadership power to truly influence what is happening around us.

Transformation of these thought processes cannot be achieved by intellect alone. Whilst many of the new qualities required of leaders make great sense at an intellectual level, this alone does not enable leaders to make sustainable changes and adopt new behaviours. There is a way of 'knowing' that creates transformative change. This old Chinese saying captures the difference: "To know and not to do is not to know."

It is vital for leaders 'unlearn' old thought processes and replace them with more powerful ones better aligned with how they choose to lead. But before any journey of transformation can take place there needs to be a gap.

The movement to transformation will involve at least four stages

1. Identify the Gap

Firstly the gap between the where the organization is and the vision or strategy it aspires to.

Secondly, the acknowledged gap between your current capability and where you aspire to be as a leader. From your aspirations you can then create a series of committed goals and intentions that will move the you towards your aspirations.

2. New Concepts, Tools, Models and Strategies

Drawing from the latest management science, evolutionary science, positive psychology, ancient wisdom and other sources, the key is to discover alternative world views. These will challenge your existing thinking and provide powerful and practical ways forward. Be aware of attempts to deny, deflect and defend against the new. If you are not confused then you are still within your comfort zone and nothing will change.

3. Practice, Practice, Practice

Just like developing a better serve at tennis, for example, you need to practice your new chosen thought processes and behaviors in your everyday life and work until you embody them. It's helpful if you have a coach or learning community who can support you.

4. Review, Learn, Adapt

Regular reviews will help you reflect on and learn about the progress you are making and adapt as needed to stay aligned with your aspirations and intentions.

It will help to see these stages as a cycle rather than a linear A to D plan. Once you get to stage 4 you will see new gaps that you were not able to see at stage 1 and so your transformation will spiral.

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Balanced Leadership Development

Balanced Leadership Development

By Mike W Bell

Are you finding that your leadership challenges are changing? The traditional styles of leadership do not work too well for creating the adaptive, innovative and sustaining organisations needed to successfully compete today.

Business leaders and writers are giving some indication of what's important for leaders and leadership in this new time:

"you must also master listening to your heart"

"to include stakeholders, to evoke followership, to empower others"

"what a person is (character) and what a person does (competence)"

"the virtuoso in interpersonal skills is the corporate future"

"the world will belong to passionate, driven leaders who can energize those whom they lead"

"senior executives know they cannot command commitment"

"their convictions, their clarity, their personal commitment to their own cultivation"

Much of what is being asked of leaders today cannot be found through the intellect alone - the focus of much of our leadership development over the last 40 years. It requires leaders to bring more of who they are as human beings to their work. To be more balanced.

Gandhi said you have to be the change you want to see in the world. While many leaders speak of creativity, innovation, commitment, empowerment and self-management, many organizations are still waiting for the exemplary role models.

Our models of leadership have come from researching 'what is'. But when things change, this is no longer adequate. The traditional maps do not work when the territory shifts.

Drawing on old wisdom from indigenous cultures I offer a map of 8 inner qualities of Leadership:

Creativity- fostering generative growth, creativity and innovation,
Perception - sensing the emergent needs in your organization,
Emotional - a resilience and responsiveness, informed by emotions, meet challenges in a powerful way,
Pathfinding - bringing individual and organizational action into alignment with a larger sense of purpose,
Sustaining - supporting, maintaining and balancing organisational health, structures and new initiatives,
Prediction - discerning patterns and trends of coming cycles,
Decisiveness - awakening the simple clarity of right action,
Energy - perceiving what is needed to arouse vitality and integrity within the organisation.

Our Western culture has tended to focus on the development of Decisive Intelligence - that ability to identify and gather resources, develop strategy and take decisive action. Increasingly we see, however, that a leader's capability in this area is interconnected with his/her capability in the other seven domains. It is these that we now need to pay attention to and develop.

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How Leaders Can Make Better Decisions

How Leaders Can Make Better Decisions

By Mike W Bell

Today's business challenges cannot be resolved by logic and knowledge alone. Only leaders with wisdom can learn to make better decisions when faced with the conditions of what Doug Engelbart calls: "complexity multiplied by urgency."

As the evidence below shows, leaders are faced with a real challenge of how to make better decisions in a world that is continually changing. It seems that the tools and approaches they have learned are not adequate. They belong to a slower, simpler time but do not work well today. They are anchored in an out-dated worldview that sees people and organizations as machines.

As a result many leaders do not understand what is needed to make better decisions and take more effective action.

How do we best decide what is the most effective action?

"In an increasingly dynamic, interdependent and unpredictable world, it is simply no longer possible for anyone to figure it all out at the top" Peter Senge, "The Fifth Discipline."

What Peter Senge is describing here as dynamic, interdependent and unpredictable is one way to think about complexity. It was Karl Popper who popularised the distinction between problems that are clock and those that are clouds. Clock problems relate to mechanical systems that are predictable and, if they break down, no matter how complicated, the cause and effect relationships can be understood and the broken parts replaced.

Most big problems in business are not 'clocks' however, they are more like clouds; they are complex - made up of myriad interconnected parts where the cause and effect relationship are almost impossible to understand (like a weather system) and predicting the outcomes of changes is very difficult and can have disastrous unforeseen consequences.

"Many change programmes fail - and the traditional assessment of failure is 75% of the attempts - often because they do not take into account that they are working with a living system and not a machine." - Professor Keith Grint, Professor of Public Leadership & Management at Warwick University, UK.

What is suggested here is that many decisions fail because they assume that the organization, market or ecosystem is a machine and complicated rather than a living system and complex. Complex systems do not yield to IQ, logic or deduction.

An additional challenge presented by human organizations is that they are also adaptive. They learn from past behaviours and change how they respond to a similar stimulus in the future. This adds to the difficulty in predicting outcomes with any degree of certainty.

In summary, how leaders can make better decisions is by understanding how complexity affects their business.

Mike W Bell has been a senior executive, leadership coach and organizational development consultant for over 30 years. For the last 15 or more of these I have been weaving an old wisdom tradition with the latest science and research to find more whole and balanced approaches to leadership and organization. My latest eBook, a modern fable entitled Leadership Intelligences in Action can be previewed at http://mutualinspiration.co.uk/leadershipintelligences/liaebook/

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Leadership and the Wisdom Value Chain

Leadership and the Wisdom Value Chain

By Mike W Bell

In many businesses today productive conversations are the source of wealth-creation. There is an essential value chain of intangibles: from data to information to knowledge and then to wisdom. Leadership and the wisdom value chain must be explored if organizations are to thrive.

Knowledge and Wisdom

Knowledge we can think of as contextualized information that moves to action. Peter Drucker in The New Realities said "Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody - either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different of more effective action."

An older unknown Chinese sage said "To know and not to do is not to know".

Wisdom has to do with intuition and the long-view through understanding systems in the context of their larger whole. Wisdom is also to do with acting in resonance with what is known to be true and lasting.

Wisdom and Culture

Wisdom requires that we move beyond the limits of logical linear thinking. It is likely that the organizational culture has many conscious and unconscious protocols that make it a challenge for wisdom to come forward. It is necessary for people to speak from their heart, their emotions, their body and their spirit if wisdom is to emerge. Many organizations do not acknowledge emotions are part of a human that is acceptable at work.

By limiting conversations and decision-making to our logical brain, organizations cut off their access to the collective genius of their people. A friend, Heather Campbell, writes that businessmen wear ties as a symbol of the separation of their head from their heart!

Wisdom and Environment

We also need to consider wisdom in the context of the organization in its environment. Wisdom has to do with understanding the relationships among things and therefore seeing the whole system.

It is in this area of interrelationships that organizations show themselves to be particularly short of wisdom. In the development continuum that moves from egocentric to ethnocentric to world-centric, most organizations are stuck at the equivalent of the ethnocentric level. They will do anything to ensure their survival even if it means ignoring and ultimately destroying the world on which they totally depend for their survival.

For many leaders, their previous experience and success is a handicap. It limits them to an out-dated way of thinking. It limits the information they are able to take into their awareness. It leaves them only half conscious. And we cannot expect half conscious leaders to create a wise organization, or a wise world.

As RD Laing, the Scottish psychiatrist, said in his own inimitable style:

"The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little that we can do to change, until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."

Lets hope that leadership does not fail to notice the wisdom value chain.

Mike W Bell has been a senior executive, leadership coach and organizational development consultant for over 30 years. For the last 15 or more of these I have been weaving an old wisdom tradition with the latest science and research to find more whole and balanced approaches to leadership and organization. My latest eBook, a modern fable entitled Leadership Intelligences in Action can be previewed at http://mutualinspiration.co.uk/leadershipintelligences/liaebook/

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Practical Wisdom and Self Leadership

Practical Wisdom and Self Leadership

By Mike W Bell

Before we can lead others successfully we have to be able to lead ourselves. Accessing our practical wisdom can be thought of as the pinnacle of self leadership.

What is Wisdom?

Wisdom has been described in many different ways over the centuries. Here Joseph W. Meeker sums it up in a profound paragraph from his article "Wisdom and Wilderness":

"Wisdom is a state of the human mind characterized by profound understanding and deep insight. It is often, but not necessarily, accompanied by extensive formal knowledge. Unschooled people can acquire wisdom, and wise people can be found among carpenters, fishermen, or housewives.

"Wherever it exists, wisdom shows itself as a perception of the relativity and relationships among things. It is an awareness of wholeness that does not lose sight of particularity or concreteness, or of the intricacies of interrelationships. It is where left and right brain come together in a union of logic and poetry and sensation, and where self-awareness is no longer at odds with awareness of the otherness of the world.

"Wisdom cannot be confined to a specialized field, nor is it an academic discipline; it is the consciousness of wholeness and integrity that transcends both. Wisdom is complexity understood and relationships accepted."

Practical Wisdom

Aristotle identified two types of wisdom - the esoteric/metaphysical and the practical wisdom - what Coleridge referred to as "Common sense in an uncommon degree." I suspect both are linked and that a journey into practical wisdom and self leadership would eventually take you to a metaphysical level.

Leading the Self Wisely

It seems that the journey starts with the self; with what goes on within the self; all the thoughts, feelings, values, meaning etc and the extent to which we are conscious of them. For many of us, for much of the time, the thoughts in our heads are random; they come and go seemingly dependent upon the range of stimuli we are exposed to moment by moment. For example, I am out for a walk and see a dog, it reminds me of a good friends dog that died recently and how upset she was, and I remember that I have not been in contact for a while and I feel guilty and my mood changes and the rest of my walk is clouded by this guilt that takes me a while to shake off.

It is unlikely that this type of randomness will lead to wisdom. It is more likely that wise people have developed or learned a way to bring to structure or form to their thinking. They may meditate to quiet these thoughts and begin to let the real self emerge.

They pay attention to what they are sensing and use this information to learn from and guide their actions. If I am in a meeting and am not totally present; my mind is following the random paths it often follows then I am not truly present. In fact I am not fully conscious. And in this condition there is a lot of information that my senses pick up that stays in my unconscious.

Not only might I miss some of the content of the meeting, I will miss valuable information about how I am feeling about what's going on and how others are behaving. If I don't notice that I am getting angry or frustrated then there is every chance that I will react from these feelings without choosing. If I am not sufficiently present to pick up the cues about how others are feeling from the tone of their voice, their body posture etc, then I will not fully understand what is going on and perhaps behave inappropriately.

So a wise person is likely to be more fully present; connected to and aware of the information that is coming from their senses and using this information to learn about themselves in the moment and act in alignment with what is needed to achieve the desired outcome.

I think Otto Scharmer puts the topic of practical wisdom and self leadership very well in this comment from "Illuminating the Blind Spot of Leadership":

"What counts is not only what leaders do and how they do it, but the inner place from which they operate"

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