Summary
Seven things you should keep in mind when you engage a coach:
A coach is not a consultant;
A coach is not a therapist;
You need to be committed to changing;
You need to have realistic expectations for success;
You need to tell the coach everything that is on your mind;
You gotta believe!
It’s up to you to do something.

We often say to our clients, you will get out of this coaching program what you put into it. Although sometimes there is an ah-ha moment, usually growth in management and personal effectiveness comes with work, persistence and patience.

Here’s a list of seven (it’s always seven!) things you should keep in mind when you engage a coach:

1. A coach is not a consultant.
Consultants are retained to solve problems; a coach is engaged to help you solve your own problems yourself. In particular, AFS Consulting provides coaching in interpersonal effectiveness: the art and science of influencing others to do what we need them to do. We don’t provide coaching in the mechanics of management, dealing with specific operational, strategic, planning or marketing issues – that is more like consulting.
It is useful for the coach to have good understanding of organizations and sound business acumen; and he/she needs enough information about your actual situation to challenge you with relevant questions. He may even provide helpful suggestions, but don’t expect the coach to solve the problem for you.

2. A coach is not a therapist.
Your sessions with your coach may be extremely restorative for you – it is always helpful to have someone listen to you empathetically and provide support. But if the problem is a deep-seated psychological issue, your coach isn’t going to solve that for you either. It would be very unwise if your coach even presumed to try, though he may be very experienced in observing human behaviour, and may even have an opinion. A good coach may help you identify that the problem is more than situational and can encourage you to find the help you actually need. As Rajesh Setty* suggests, you get a coach because you can benefit from figuring out how to perform more effectively or even to resolve dysfunctional organization behaviors, but not when something is [seriously] broken.

3. You need to be committed to changing.
The changes you need to make to become a more effective manager/leader/person have to come from you. And oftentimes we shy away from doing the really hard work of dealing with our own personal effectiveness. It’s not a matter of, “I’ll make the change if it’s not too inconvenient”.

4. You need to have realistic expectations for success.
If your goals are overly ambitious or you seriously over-estimate your true talents and abilities (and motivation, see 3 above), you will not get the results you should from your coaching program. On the other hand, if too simple, not ‘stretchy’ enough, you won’t realize useful change. Coaching is more than providing you with some insight or awareness; it’s about converting insight into real performance improvement goals.

5. You need to tell the coach everything that is on your mind.
Some coaches are pretty good at ‘mind reading’ or at least will recognize when there is more to this story than is being told. And a really good coach will challenge you to tell the whole story. But why make it so much work for him, or yourself. If you hide crucial details, the solution you come up with will be suboptimal.

6. You gotta believe!
Of course you don’t engage your coach on blind faith. You’re entitled to test and challenge your coach to ensure that he/she has the knowledge and insight and strength of character to challenge you and help you grow. But if you doubt the coaching process will yield any useful outcomes, you would be right!

7. It’s up to you to do something.
The coach will help with awareness, and seek your agreement on desired goals and development plans, but without action nothing will result. And only you can take action and realize your goals. The coach guides you and encourages you, but you have to play in the game.

As Setty claims, for most people lack of knowledge is not the problem; lack of [correct] action is.

*Adapted from Rajesh Setty’s blog, http://www.rajeshsetty.com/main-page/seven-reasons-why-most-coaching-programs-may-not-work-for-you

Summary
We learn our management lessons in many ways: courses, experience, mentors and role models. One of the lessons I learned, and find myself still teaching, is management by FEAR. There are two ways to look a that, both good and bad, just like role models.

Article
We learn not just from textbooks and experience, we also learn from role models. You can count yourself as blessed if you have had a mentor in your life, especially if you have been able to observe his or her behaviour (do what they do, not just what they say to do). Role models don’t have to be active mentors – you can find them on your own and quietly observe their behaviours.

We also can learn from negative role models, assuming we can discern the difference between positive effective behaviour and bad.

I once had a boss who provided me with examples of both. He was psychologically insecure and he compensated for that by managing by intimidation. Big and gruff he tended to cause junior and senior staff alike (even his own executives) to feel they had to justify themselves all the time. He’d surprise people and challenge what they were doing, rarely giving direct positive feedback or acknowledgement. (Yet he was a great champion of his team outside the organization.) Socially awkward, probably deeply introverted, he did not engage easily and tended to avoid social situations, even to the point of ignoring you, causing resentment and unease. Moreover, he knew he intimidated people and seemed to enjoy it.

It was sufficiently distressing for me that I dreaded my one-on-one weekly meetings with him. Talk about a negative role model.

On the other hand he was a referential experienced executive: he believed in continuous improvement and learning from mistakes; and in management education. He was especially proud of his own participation in the six-week Banff School for Advanced Management Executive Program (whose model is a tyrannosaurus rex and the slogan, adapt or perish). In many ways he was a good role model for management because he tried to actively apply the techniques he learned at management school and from his own past mentors. (One of whom himself had a reputation for being unreasonably demanding – he once convened a meeting on Christmas Eve (evening!) on a trumped up plant situation to demonstrate his power and gauge loyalty and commitment from his management team.)

He believed in management by FEAR and actively practiced it. He was very disciplined about scheduling and holding weekly one-on-one meetings; each meeting had the same agenda: review of issues raised at the last meeting, evaluating progress, and an implicit invitation to raise any other issues as early warning signs; monthly the agenda made reference to items in the strat plan or other major issues; and periodically he would ask questions about my own professional development. This was his notion (or BSAM’s) of management by FEAR, an acronym for Frequent Evaluation And Review, and he was very disciplined about applying this fundamentally sound technique of management.

I find it ironic that now I advise my clients to adopt this practice as a basic ‘secret of management’. But without the ‘fear’ factor.

Summary:
To be an effective manager you must know the mechanics of management:
Know the business
Have requisite expertise in area of responsibility
Master the management processes
– Planning, Organizing, Staffing
– Project management
– Metrics
– Financials

But that is not sufficient to be a truly effective manager. You must also have mastered the dynamics of management:
Interpersonal effectiveness,
The capacity to influence others’ behaviors, and that
These things change situationally and over time.

Article:
There are a number of activities and associated skills that are essential to the practice of management: analyzing and organizing the work, describing it, recruiting people and staffing those jobs; monitoring, measuring and evaluating the work; understanding the language of business: financial management and accounting terminology, project planning and scheduling; defining quality results, measuring outcomes, reporting. These are the mechanics of management. To be an effective manager you have to learn these basic skills – through courses, in-house training, on-the-job instruction, observation, feedback; doing it. But if you only learned the mechanics of management you would know less than half of what you need to know.

The art of management is to know, understand and master the intangibles of management; the uncertainties, ambiguities and the unexpected of everyday activity in an organization. If the activities and events in an organization in a day or a week or month were actually programmable we would only need smart robots to do it. But because we are challenged daily with unexpected events we need to respond accordingly: process the new information, figure out what it means and what can be done about it. And for this we need people, adaptive workers, not programmable robots. But people bring their own intangibles to the workplace: their attitudes, feelings, values, moods and emotional episodes. They not only respond to external events, preferably affecting positive outcomes, but they also respond to each other and to other events in their lives. Managers must manage these events in the organization daily. These are the dynamics of management: managing constant change, uncertainty and ambiguity, expectations and conflict, of events and interpersonal interaction; and not only for today, but every day. For the business of dynamics is that, what works today may not work tomorrow. The challenge of management is the challenge of dealing with ambiguity uncertainty and intangibles.

The human mind finds this unsettling, unnatural. We want predictability, certainty, in our lives. So if you aren’t comfortable with ambiguity, if dynamics make you uneasy, even though you have mastered the mechanics of management you will not make an effective manager.

Management as a True Calling
Summary:
Management isn’t for everyone. If your talents are better suited to a another career don’t take on a management role for reasons of remuneration, titles, status and promoting self-esteem. To experience career satisfaction in management requires three elements: to see business as an intellectual puzzle, to influence others behaviours, to overcome conflict.

Article:
In the previous two articles we talked about the foundations for career success: One, that a successful career is not the goal of life but the means, albeit a critical means. Our life goal is to be the best version of ourselves we can be and in the process achieve personal happiness; in doing so we need to construct a satisfying career, identify our talents and put them to use. Second we talked about basic motivation: the drive to acquire, the drive to bond and the drive to know. And again career success will be optimized or maximized if we put ourselves into situations where all three of these drives are being satisfied.

Many people aspire to management because it seems the best vehicle to satisfy the drive to acquire through remuneration, titles, status and promoting self-esteem. But that is not a sufficient reason to seek a career in management. Management is not for everyone and there are other paths to career success.

There are in my view three over-arching elements that are prerequisite to having a satisfactory career in management, a career in which we feel fulfilled. One, to thrive in management you have to see business, whatever the ‘business’ is, as an intellectual challenge. Management is a key function in any organization to ensure its survival. The management of a business is itself a large puzzle. To feel success in a management career you need to see solving business problems as fun.

Second management is primarily a matter of dealing with people. The challenge of management is to get people to behave in ways that allow the organization to achieve its goals. For the most part this is a positive endeavour but if you find influencing others’ behaviour is difficult, manipulative, or even distasteful, management isn’t for you.

Third, Management is frequently a matter of dealing with conflict. People may resist aligning themselves or their actions with your organizations goals. Or there may be other factors at play which impedes their effectiveness – competence, health, problems at home, interpersonal conflict at work. All these negative behaviours have to be redirected by the diligent manager. The person who sees conflict as unpleasant or distasteful, who avoids dealing with it, is unsuited for a career in management. Instead the manager has to see the problems of dealing with people as individual challenges or puzzles. How can you as a manager create conditions under which the employee can be successful? And when you’ve tried every reasonable measure, termination is the only answer; an action not to be shirked. Managing people issues are necessary steps in managing the overall business.

In my coaching programs I often encourage my clients to see the management of people as intellectual puzzles to be figured out rather than personal problems felt too keenly. Not to make too fine a point of this, management of an enterprise is a game; each little problem is simply another move on the game board. One way or another the problem has to be solved so that the game can continue.

Management is a true calling when you realize that you are deploying your talents to the benefit of your organization and the people in it.

Are you engaged in the game of life? Is your job as a manager a game to be played and enjoyed? Or a burden that you carry?

Summary:
Anyone whose main function in an organization is to get things done through others must be both a manager and a leader. Management is about how things are to be done, leadership is about how to get others to do it. Not all leaders are managers but all managers must be leaders; executives too need to know how to do both.

Article:
There has been a lengthy debate over the years (foolish in my mind) about the difference between management and leadership. Here’s my take.

The cliché about management is that managers are mechanics and technicians, concerned with process and results. Occasionally it is accepted (sometimes grudgingly) that effective managers need to be good with people. But they are not leaders.

Leaders on the other hand (and this is usually code for executives) are all about charisma and vision, encouraging and exhorting others to follow. But leaders are never tainted with the tedium of administration. That’s for managers.

While leaders can occur anywhere in an organization, executives need to be leaders! (But not managers?)

These are extreme views admittedly but I’m betting most of you found yourself generally nodding in agreement with these characterizations.

I prefer not to make a distinction between leaders and managers, at least in the context of organizational structure. I think all managers must possess some degree of leadership (especially in the sense of attracting the commitment of their employees (the followers?) and all senior leaders/executives must have mastered the science and art of management.

I remember reading an article (don’t remember the title or the sources) in which a distinction was made between managers and leaders in terms of tactical and strategic. Plotted on a graph with Tactical on the vertical axis and Strategic on the horizontal, Supervisors and Managers would be high tactical and low strategic; Directors would be a mixture, and Vice-Presidents and General Managers would be high strategic and low tactical:

I think this is a fair distinction between the work of managers – more tactical and operational – and the work of senior leaders or executives which is more strategic, visionary and long term purposeful.

But that’s not the whole discussion on what’s the difference between managers and leaders. Too many senior executives seem to think that their main focus is strategy and long term results; in the short term they may focus on monitoring results and contributing to critical deal making. But the management of people is often seen as irrelevant, even distracting, from the executive function. Managers deal with people; executives deal with ideas. Or so the thinking goes. Plotted on a graph it would look like this:

Or, conceding that executives do not live in a vacuum when it comes to dealing with people the argument often goes that executives are externally faced while managers are internally faced. It would look like this:

All these graphs have the same bias: senior leaders may not need people skills to the same extent as managers and supervisors.

But how can this be true? Senior executives have subordinate managers who need attention. Those subordinates may themselves be experienced senior executives but they are still people and need communications, appreciation and development too. My belief is that senior executives have all the same responsibilities for managing their people as any lower level manager. Moreover, senior leaders have to communicate credibly with every employee, whether one-on-one, in town hall meetings, MBWA or even through external media events. Leaders attract followers, not just because they are good at crafting and articulating a vision, but by creating a will to follow. And that requires well developed interpersonal skills.

Maybe we should talk some more about leaders and managers from the perspective of their people responsibilities. Certainly managers are responsible for planning and organizing the work; assigning it to employees and giving effective expert instruction; and measuring and evaluating the results. But managers can’t manage by authority alone. They must also have what we might call influencing skills, personal power, the capacity to cause others to do what needs to be done. These are characteristics or aspects of leadership which every manager should have. The manager needs to relate to employees, so that employees can identify and be engaged with the manager. if you don’t have this capacity to influence subordinates to engage in purposeful behaviour you can’t get your goals achieved.

Senior leaders or executives have the same challenge: they also need to be able to guide and give necessary direction to their subordinate managers; and they also must be able to do this by relating to people and attracting followership: to cause people, or influence people, to do what is needed to be done. Of course executives have the additional expectation that they provide a sense of purpose, vision, strategy, the overall direction for the organisation that the followers buy into and are willing to follow. But that is not their only job.

And so for me when it comes to leadership in management all managers and all executives must have strong leadership skills. Managers use their leadership ability to translate strategy into operational effectiveness or results; executives use their leadership ability to conceive the direction the organization is going to take and convince followers of the rightness and appropriateness of goals. But both managers and executives must have effective leadership skills, that is, effective people skills, in order to influence purposeful behaviour.

And so we might want to re-think the relative roles of managers and executives in this fashion: Successful Executives need to be high in Strategic Leadership AND high in People Leadership. They also need to have high appreciation of management process. Executives low in People Leadership (influencing purposeful behaviour) and too immersed in Tactics will not be successful in the long run.

Successful Managers must be effective in management process but also need to be high on Tactical Leadership (converting strategy to execution) as well as high in People Leadership. (Ironically, Managers who fail in people leadership lose their jobs; too often, Executives who fail in people leadership keep their jobs!)

{This 3 dimension space (or is it 4?) is hard to chart. If anyone can create a picture of this, send it to me!}

If you are an Executive, are you cultivating both kinds of leadership skills? As well as honing your management skills?