Enhancing Effectiveness

"Even if executive coaching cost $50K (which it doesn't), it's barely a rounding error to invest in the coaching of a key player who has responsibility for millions of dollars and for key human resources. Coaching is a success if one direct report, who used to be too intimidated to speak up, comes up with an innovative idea."

- CEO, Fortune 100 Company

A person's strengths and weaknesses as a leader are largely a function of their basic personality.

"Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or anything else, is always a portrait of himself..."(1903)

- Samuel Butler
Novelist

Leaders must learn how to optimize their primary tool - their "self"- if they are going to be fully effective as executives and leaders. Their "self" is the foundation for their ability to impact, to influence, to motivate, and to deliver results.

- Mark Brenner, Ph.D. Brenner Consulting Group

"An executive's manual dexterity in using (their 'self') as an instrument will be only as good as their knowledge of themselves. Knowing what their instrument is capable of doing, enables them to capitalize on strengths. Being aware of what it cannot do, makes it possible for them to limit the damage done by weaknesses. Executives who operate in this heads-up way perform much more effectively because they adapt better to the ever-changing situation - they are more flexible."

- R. E. Kaplan, Ph.D. Center for Creative Leadership

"Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are."

- Malcom Forbes

"You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself."

- Galileo

"The foundation of national wealth is really people - the human capital represented by their knowledge, skills, organizations, and motivations. The primary assets of a modern corporation leave the workplace each night to go home to dinner."

- Hudson Institute Workforce 2000

Enhancing Effectiveness: Coaching Managers, Professionals, and Leaders

Objectives

To accelerate and optimize the development of key contributors to the organization
To build high performance leaders and future leaders who can fulfill the organization's vision, goals, and business strategy
To maximize managerial benchstrength and overall organizational capability: have the right person for the right job at the right time
To link the behavior of high-impact contributors to the business plan
To retool command-and-control managers into effective leaders of the flattening, information-based organization

How We Do It

Specializing in optimizing human performance, our firm has designed a powerful individual coaching program that integrates our core competencies:

Advanced expert systems that enhance psychological testing and assessment
Computerized 360 ° technology
Keen diagnostic skills
Advanced rapport-building methods
Accelerated development strategies
Motivating and creating true behavioral change

By integrating these performance development technologies, we assist the candidate in assembling the three essential ingredients for high performance: feedback (both broad and deep), multi-lateral motivation to make changes, and change partners for their development initiative. Together, these three elements serve as the infrastructure for a Blueprint for Action, which guides the candidate's achievement of measurable results.

Program Methodology

The program is designed around the principles of adult learning and around the structure of the adult learning cycle. It's now well established that adults:

Prefer self-direction when involved in learning and development.
Improve their performance best through experience, experimentation and low risk; adults develop most effectively and most efficiently on the job.
Develop only when there is a clearly perceived need (i.e., pressure) to change. In essence, learning for adults is a response to problems and challenges.
Are competency-based learners, in that they are motivated to learn and change only when they can apply the learning in a pragmatic way to immediate circumstances. That is, utility rules.
Can also be motivated to learn by appealing to personal growth and gain, i.e., WIIFM (What's in it for me?).
Can also be inspired to develop if enhanced self-esteem and/or empowerment are part of the deliverables.

The adult learning cycle is integral to the adult learning model. The four key steps in the cycle are:

Assess
Plan
Act
Reassess and Refine

Given this structure, our Enhancing Effectiveness Program unfolds as follows:

I. Assess

Conduct a series of life-career interviews with the candidate, focusing on:
- personal and work history
- interpersonal experiences
- attitudes, values, and interests
- aspirations
Assess the candidate, using an array of business-based psychological inventories and 360° tools, most of which are computer analyzed.
Integrate performance management data into the assessment.

II. Plan

Deliver an in-depth, confidential debrief of all assessment findings.
Identify the candidate's key strengths and areas in need of development, as they relate to personal aspirations and to the business strategy.
Clarify inner motivators for change and inner resistances to it. Harness the former and neutralize the latter. Clearly specify WIIFM and WIIFOrg.
Synthesize findings into a Blueprint for Action
- Detail the specific behavioral changes desired - precisely what does the candidate want to continue, start, and stop doing? Computerized assessment reports serve as an invaluable resource for development activities. In addition, we take advantage of dozens of activities for development-in-place (i.e., activities that do not require a job change).
- Identify all the benefits that will accrue to oneself and to the organization once the change objectives are achieved.
- Similarly, identify all potential impediments that could hinder the change effort - inner, interpersonal, organizational, and so forth.
- Specify the action steps required to achieve the prescribed changes.
- Determine how to enlist the involvement of others. Change requires support from others, playing an array of roles: coach, mentor, colleague, friend, role model, counselor, protégé, advocate, and so forth. Change requires change partners.
- Establish time frames and metrics, against which progress is measured.

III. Act

Recognize and reciprocate with those who gave feedback to the candidate. Enlist one or some as a change partner.
Debrief candidate's manager and involve them in refining the Blueprint for Action.
Begin action experiments during real-time, day-to-day work life, then debrief and further refine with coach.
Adopt high-impact behavioral change techniques.
Measure progress against plan. Design simple and practical feedback loops into work routine.

IV. Reassess and Refine

This final phase of the adult learning cycle works best when it is hard-wired into the Action Phase of the cycle. By designing monitoring and evaluation tools, the candidate can regularly reflect on progress and then recalibrate the Blueprint for Action.

Final Thoughts

If people are truly the primary resource of a company, as most organizations assert, then they must be managed and developed like other assets. It's really not unlike the management of any asset portfolio. That is, every person is like an individual portfolio with a strong potential for either managed growth or sub-par performance. The portfolio, however, is a least partially opaque, as regards its assets and liabilities. We have the expertise, though, to "value" the portfolio. If one is to optimize the asset-liability mix, the portfolio must first be valued, that is, assessed for its strengths and weaknesses. Then after this initial appraisal, we are in an excellent position to optimize the potential of that individual's set of assets. The optimization process involves maximizing the person's strengths, minimizing their weaknesses, and adding new "assets" to their portfolio (i.e., skills, behaviors, and attitudes), in order to maximize performance and protect against downside risk.

Whether we're talking about the development of key contributors, the turnaround of potential derailers, careerpath development, or even teambuilding, there is one strategy that is more effective than any other. People can change, but the most substantive and permanent change is realized when people develop from the inside out. This is the surest way to prepare and motivate someone to accept the new change opportunities made available to them. Consequently, whenever we're working to enhance an "individual human resource portfolio," the surest strategy is to begin at the beginning and focus on the inside (that is, self-awareness and self-understanding) before the outside (that is, skillbuilding and on-the-job development). This change strategy has proven to be a more certain way of assisting people through the process of behavior change, self-development, and performance enhancement.