LeadWorkPlay

Here’s how most of us work – we are constantly ON. Period, end of story.

We are constantly on-line and on our cells.  We seldom take vacations and even then we check email and voice mail.  We use our weekends to “catch up” on family time, household chores and yes, to do more work.  Even when we try to sleep, work thoughts are running rampant through our brains.  So it doesn’t really matter whether we left the office at 5 p.m. or midnight — we are mentally on-call for work any time day or night.  We never turn it off.  Why does that matter?  Because:

THIS IS THE REASON MANY OF US DON’T REALLY LIVE.
THIS IS THE REASON WE DON’T REALLY ENJOY OUR LIVES.

Despite our best intentions (to paraphrase Deepak Chopra) we turn ourselves into machine-like “human doings” and leave on the table the many joys of “human beings”.  We literally miss the happiness that is available to us, in any given moment – because we are constantly chasing after what’s next or worried about what might be.

In my previous post, I gave a definition of capacity that is actually not the number one definition (aka, in the order listed in the dictionary).  The #1 definition of capacity is the ability to receive or contain.  So here I am talking about the importance of expanding our ability to receive and contain happiness – our own very personal experience of fun, laughter, peace, hope, faith and love.  On a very practical level, this looks like regularly practicing our ability to play.

There is solid business sense for this – play is the brain’s mechanism for creativity and innovation.  (A company with no room for play will not evolve its products/services and eventually fall behind its competitors in the rapidly changing, global marketplace.)  In the Information Age and with the rise of the Knowledge/Creative Worker, the winners will be the companies who proactively invest in their employees’ ability to play, innovate and create.  (One company comes to mind here that you might have heard of — Google.)  More on this topic later.

But for now, I don’t want to take away from my bigger message here: success without play, without happiness in your life every day, is no success at all.

The good news is that you don’t have to leave your job to find it (while at times you may feel like you’d be crazy NOT to leave it, if you could). I find that is rarely necessary and truly a place of last resort.  Leadership coaching is a powerful process and support to help you live more of the life you want and still have the career you’ve worked so hard to build.

I heard once that the definition of “capacity” literally refers to one’s ability to do work.  Dictionary.com defines capacity a bit more broadly, as the actual or potential ability to perform, yield or withstand.  Given the crazy-busy, 24/7 world leaders operate in today, that second definition is worth thinking about.  Is your capacity as a leader–to perform, yield and withstand–growing? Shrinking?  Or sitting at rock-bottom?

If you’re like 95% of the leaders I see, you are probably somewhere between shrinking and rock-bottom.  From my recently published article on mindfulness and leadership in the December 2009 issue of the Neuroleadership Journal: “Across the globe, people today deal with a veritable tsunami of chronic high-stress, increasing complexity, information and communication overload, rapidly evolving technologies, and a hyper-competitive, 24/7 work world.  As a result, leaders are trying to achieve more with less, primarily by defaulting to various forms of multi-tasking and hoping that technology (from their ever-present Blackberries to their Outlook email and calendar) will save them.  These tools will only take leaders so far; what is really required is a fundamental re-thinking of how leaders value and use their capacity.”

Because global business is driven by technology, which is in turn driven by ideas and innovation, there is no more important business resource any of us have today than our own brains.  In fact, most of you reading this blog were hired and advanced in your career because of what you can do with your brains, not what you can with your hands.  (In the heyday of the Industrial Age, that would have been a very different story.)

Yet, there is nothing that most of us take for granted, neglect and abuse more than the care and feeding of our own brain.  Contrary to popular belief, neuroscience is showing us just how delicate brain matter is and how incredibly energy-intensive it is to run.  Literally in terms of brain functioning, no human being can perform at their best 24/7.  It is physiologically impossible. Yet, most of us are trying to do just that – because our jobs, our families and the world today now require us to be on top of our game, every day.

Whether you call it by the name of “work/life balance” or “energy management”, your brain requires that you learn to take some regular time-off-the-clock.  In our work-addicted society, it can be challenging to do that on your own.  Leadership coaching can make the difference between breaking through to a new level of self-care you can sustain …or breaking down because engrained habits keep pulling you back.

So why would YOU ever want or need leadership coaching?   First, because of who you are. If you are reading this blog, you already deeply care about your professional success and personal growth.  And second, because to achieve the kind of growth and success you know you are capable of, you know that you have to invest in yourself.

More than ever, you cannot rely on your boss or your company to develop you.  While you can ask for their help and support (including making a financial investment in your coaching program) at the end of the day you are the one who must manage your own your career. Growing your skills (capabilities) to lead is the obvious place to start.

Leadership is not just a job, it is a profession that requires certain abilities, both obvious (e.g., to set strategic direction for a team) and subtle (e.g., how to convey a tough message with realism and optimism, so employees don’t disengage).  I’m really talking about much more here than learning a few techniques about how to make a presentation, or just smoothing out your rough edges.

According to Charan, Drotter and Noel’s seminal The Leadership Pipeline, “at least 50 percent of the people in leadership positions are operating far below their assigned layer.  They have the potential to be leaders, but that potential is going unfulfilled.”   The reason why? Once you move from being an Individual Contributor into your first role as Manager (and at EACH new level of leadership beyond) the authors’ research shows that you must continually “acquire a new way of managing and leading, and leave the old ways behind.”

In my 20+ year career in business and human resources, I have coached and trained literally thousands of leaders.  Even the shining stars — when they stepped into their next, bigger role — had to unlearn old skills/behaviors that once helped them succeed but now could sabotage them.  As the old saying goes, what got you here won’t get you there (e.g., the skills that made you top performer hitting your quarterly sales may make you a mediocre to bad performer as a leader responsible for an operating division with a 3-year strategy and plan for growth).

To grow your leadership capabilities, you need to ask yourself two questions to get to the next level or role you want:  What do I need to learn?  And what do I need to let go of? These can be hard questions to answer on your own (we can’t always see ourselves objectively or know what it is that we are missing/should know).  Leadership coaching brings assessment tools, research and best practices to help you customize a plan to get you where you want to go.

Executive coaching has become an accepted best practice in the field of leadership development.  My colleague Brian Underhill, Ph.D., outlines some of the reasons why in his book Executive Coaching for Results:

• The ever-increasing pace of change that forces organizations to develop leaders more quickly and more often on-the-job;
• An intensifying talent war to obtain and retain top leaders and performers; and
• The wide-spread use of 360-feedback which pushes leaders to cultivate their strengths and address their blind spots (critical, yet hard to do on one’s own).

Brian goes on to say that “many organizations are now making external coaching a high priority in their leadership development strategies.  Some are now five to ten years into an in-depth coaching implementation, serving hundreds – if not thousands – of their executives.”  These type of development programs for high-potential leaders (HIPOs) are where I spend much of my time as a coach and a trainer – including a Fortune 50 technology company and a Big 4 accounting firm.

As I said in my last post, coaching is a highly personalized, on-the-job development program that delivers real-time results that leaders can sustain over time. In terms of qualitative measures, these results show up in things like talent retention and improved job performance, including gains in: productivity, quality of work, customer service, work/life balance and job satisfaction.

The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) estimates that large corporations spend over $2 billion a year on training.  Yet studies show repeatedly that the impact of traditional training can be notoriously short-lived due to: a) a lack of transference into the “real world”; b) a lack of reinforcement on-the-job; and/or c) a one-size-fits all approach.  So much of that spending literally never sees the light of day.

While attempts to quantify the ROI of coaching are still in their infancy, at least two studies found that the return on executive coaching is, on average, 5-6 times the dollar amount invested in coaching.  As great as that financial return can be for the company, the return for an individual leader is equally as powerful.   And sustainable – the leader carries these benefits forward, wherever they go in their work and their life.

Leadership coaching is coaching is a highly personalized, on-the-job development program that delivers real-time results that leaders can sustain over time. In my next few postings I’ll talk about how coaching as a best practice in leadership development and share with the ROI (return on investment) for companies and for leaders, like you.

So what happens in coaching?  A leader and a coach agree to work together for a period of time (typically six months).  The leader, with help from the coach, prioritizes his/her goals:

• What does s/he need to learn and/or to change, to succeed in their current role?
• And then to move forward, to the next level or role in their career?

The leader and the coach puts together a plan and then meet (usually via phone) on regular basis to discuss progress being made, work through barriers, integrate best practices and reinforce learning/changes in behavior.

In my 10+ years as an executive coach, I have worked with leaders across the spectrum of requirements for executive maturity and peak performance, including helping them:

• Manage successful role transitions
• Accelerate their learning curve/ability to deliver results in the first 90 days of a new job
• Use 360 feedback to improve current job performance (leverage their strengths and minimize their weaknesses)
• Develop new leadership competencies and skills
• Increase their self-awareness and self-management
• Improve their interpersonal skills (e.g., ability to listen, communicate, etc.)
• Sustain their performance through better energy management and greater work/life balance

What kind of results/return on investment can you and your company expect from leadership coaching?  Read my next three posts to find out.