Forbes: The Thinker Interview: Marshall Goldsmith, by Neelima Mahajan, CKGSB

by Neelima Mahajan | CKGSB | Oct 22, 2012

Marshall Goldsmiths brand of leadership appeals to everyone from corporate CEOs to the lay man. What makes him so popular?

At first glance, Marshall Goldsmith, a bald, sprightly man with icy blue eyes, a fringe of white hair and ears that stick out, looks like a pixie. He darts around the room with the energy of a two-year-old. It’s fun to watch him walk – not an easy walk to imitate. When he teaches, he bounces from one end of the room to another, while his head stays stiffly in place and his arms straight. On most days, you’ll find him wearing a green Polo shirt and khaki pants, his trademark attire somewhat akin to Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck and blue jeans. His face breaks into an easy smile as he talks about his favorite subject, leadership and executive coaching. The words ‘no’, ‘but’ and ‘however’ do not exist in his vocabulary and if you make the grave mistake of mentioning any of these words in front of him, he’ll probably grab your hand mid-sentence and reprimand you for that.

When you meet him the first time, it’s hard to take him seriously–and easy to dismiss his teachings as cloying, and him as just another self-help guru. But when you look deeper, you’ll realize there is more to him than meets the eye. Goldsmith has the CEOs of many Fortune 500 companies eating out of his hands. People like Ford CEO Alan Mulally swear by him and pay through their nose to have some face time with him. He has worked as a consultant for companies like 3M, IBM, Philips and American Express. Over the years, Goldsmith, one of the world’s foremost executive coaches and a “philosophical and psychological Buddhist” by his own admission, has built a stellar reputation in the leadership firmament and rubs shoulders with the likes of superstar coaches like Ram Charan and Gary Ranker. He was ranked among the top five executive coaches according to Forbes magazine, and has consistently featured in the Thinkers 50, a ranking of business and management thought leaders.

More here: http://knowledge.ckgsb.edu.cn/2012/10/01/management/the-thinker-interview-marshall-goldsmith/

Forbes: The Key To Effective Coaching

Center for Creative Leadership

Candice Frankovelgia, 04.28.10, 12:37 PM ET

Business coaching has gone from fad to fundamental. Leaders and organizations have come to understand how valuable it can be, and they're adding "the ability to coach and develop others" to the ever-growing list of skills they require in all their managers. In theory, this means more employee development, more efficiently conducted. But in reality, few managers know how to make coaching work.

According to the 2010 Executive Coaching Survey, conducted by the Conference Board, 63% of organizations use some form of internal coaching, and half of the rest plan to. Yet coaching is a small part of the job description for most managers. Nearly half spend less than 10% of their time coaching others.

With such limited time devoted to coaching, organizations need to be sure their managers know how to do it right. To improve the quality and impact of your coaching efforts, start by giving your individual managers tangible information about how to coach their direct reports. Typically, managers meet their coaching obligations by giving reviews, holding occasional meetings and offering advice. For coaching to be effective, they need to understand why they are coaching and what specific actions they need to take.

Coaching focuses on helping another person learn in ways that let him or her keep growing afterward. It is based on asking rather than telling, on provoking thought rather than giving directions and on holding a person accountable for his or her goals.

Broadly speaking, the purpose is to increase effectiveness, broaden thinking, identify strengths and development needs and set and achieve challenging goals. Research from the Center for Creative Leadership has boiled down the skills managers need to coach others into five categories:

1) Building the relationship. It's easier to learn from someone you trust. Coaches must effectively establish boundaries and build trust by being clear about the learning and development objectives they set, showing good judgment, being patient and following through on any promises and agreements they make.

2) Providing assessment. Where are you now and where do you want to go? Helping others to gain self-awareness and insight is a key job for a coach. You provide timely feedback and help clarify the behaviors that an employee would like to change. Assessment often focuses on gaps or inconsistencies, on current performance vs. desired performance, words vs. actions and intention vs. impact.

3) Challenging thinking and assumptions. Thinking about thinking is an important part of the coaching process. Coaches ask open-ended questions, push for alternative solutions to problems and encourage reasonable risk-taking.

4) Supporting and encouraging. As partners in learning, coaches listen carefully, are open to the perspectives of others and allow employees to vent emotions without judgment. They encourage employees to make progress toward their goals, and they recognize their successes.

5) Driving results. What can you show for it? Effective coaching is about achieving goals. The coach helps the employee set meaningful ones and identify specific behaviors or steps for meeting them. The coach helps to clarify milestones or measures of success and holds the employee accountable for them.

You should seed your organization with coaching role models. All managers need some guidance on the whys and hows of coaching, but most organizations can't afford to train them on a large scale, so the least you can do is make an effort to create a culture of coaching. The key is to create a pool of manager-coaches who can be role models, supporters and sustainers of a coaching mindset.

When you select the right people and invest in their development and position them as coaching advocates, you plant the seeds for expanding coaching well beyond the individual manager-direct report relationship. Your role models demonstrate effective coaching both formally and informally, and they help motivate others to use and improve their own coaching capabilities.

Always link the purpose and results of coaching to the business. Managers have to know the business case for coaching and developing others if they're to value it and use it effectively. Where is the business headed? What leadership skills are needed to get us there? How should coaches work with direct reports to provide the feedback, information and experiences they need to build those needed skills? Set strategic coaching goals, tactics and measures for the organization as well as including coaching as an individual metric.

Finally, give it time. It's not surprising that managers feel they don't have enough time for coaching. Even if you make learning and coaching explicit priorities, time is tight for everyone. But as your coaching processes and goals become more consistent and more highly valued, in-house coaching will take root. Your managers will have a new way to develop and motivate their direct reports. Individuals and groups will strive to build new skills and achieve goals. And your business will be on track to a more efficient, comprehensive system of developing people.

Candice Frankovelgia is the coaching portfolio manager for the Center for Creative Leadership.

Forbes: Executive Coaching From Prince Hal

By Nigel Roberts, London Correspondent, INSEAD Knowledge

3/12/2013

When Shakespeare was writing there were no corporations, no managers and certainly no courses in leadership.  Jung and Freud hadn’t been born and the academic disciplines of organisational change and employee engagement were not on the curriculum of the few ancient universities that existed in the 16th century. Yet the Bard managed to capture some universal truths about human nature and the complex way that individuals relate to each other which can provide useful lessons for today’s corporate leaders.

Increasing numbers of companies are using the plays of Shakespeare as templates for change. The dilemmas of ancient Kings and Princes provide a fresh perspective on the challenges facing CEOs in the 21st century.  Henry V is a case study in leadership and how to create loyalty. The Tempest a template on how to manage change without destroying the very thing you are trying to create. Julius Caesar an object lesson in how not to build a team.

All the challenges faced by today’s executive were pre-empted and laid bare by Shakespeare many centuries ago. When Henry V delivers his famous Crispin Crispianus speech on the eve of the battle of Agincourt, he is faced with a dilemma familiar to many managers: how to persuade a recalcitrant workforce of foot soldiers and untrustworthy middle managers (his noble lords) to go into battle with the French competition and put their lives (jobs) on the line.

That was the challenge facing a U.S.-based client who had a serious problem with its European operation. Poor performance and a need to cut costs meant that they dispatched the global IT director to restructure the division. The director had prepared a rational justification for the closure which made perfect sense in the Midwest of the U.S. but was likely to be explosive in Europe.

Hal’s Leadership Lessons

His prepared text for a company meeting shared many similarities with George W. Bush’s rhetoric in the ‘Axis of Evil’ speech. Here was a midwestern cowboy shooting from the hip and telling those pesky Europeans to get off the ranch. That might play well in the Midwest but would fail to impress in Europe.

Instead of modelling himself on George W. we reframed and rewrote his address to his troops by looking at Henry V’s call to action before the battle of Agincourt. We made him realise, that like Hal, he faced an almost impossible task. Trying to persuade his men to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the company required a fundamental change to their mindset. Many of Hal’s soldiers faced certain death. Some of his workforce faced certain redundancy. How do you sell that? Certainly not by shooting from the hip and telling them they had no choice. He had to persuade not just order them to do what he wanted.

We deconstructed Hal’s Crispin Crispianus speech, examined the clever rhetorical devices that appealed to people’s emotions, and then reconstructed a presentation that pushed all the right emotional buttons with the audience. By crafting a call to action that focused on the positives rather than the negatives and appealed to a higher calling than individual self-interest, he managed to persuade them to accept the restructuring. A similar process was adopted in developing the messaging and strategy for negotiations with a pugnacious Works Council. The end result was a seamless restructuring with no sabotage or industrial action. He won a battle that he had looked like losing.

The reason why exploring the characters created by Shakespeare can help 21st century corporate managers perform better is partly because it gives them a fresh perspective on their challenges which helps them to reframe their response to events. But the other reason is that it provides a narrative that helps to communicate more effectively with their stakeholders. Don’t just transmit information and hope it is received and understood – weave that information into a story and it is more likely to persuade people to behave the way you want them to.

Telling Tales

I would argue that most companies fail to communicate effectively because they don’t tell their story effectively. They present information but fail to have a meaningful conversation.  As another playwright George Bernard Shaw said, “The problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Most companies generate a huge volume of internal and external communication with no way of knowing whether it has been received and understood. One client told me: “We’re very good at cascading information down through the company but as a management team we’ve never acquired the habit of listening. Listening and watching the lessons of Shakespeare has made me a better a better story teller and manager.”

Storytelling is the heart of communication. From the cave painters through Greek myth to the fiction factory of Hollywood, people have sought to make sense of their world by developing a compelling narrative. This serves not just to record where they have been but also to help work out where they want to go.

No executive or organisation can afford to ignore the power of storytelling. No other narrative structure can move hearts and minds in the way that a well crafted story can. Whether you are making a corporate presentation, holding a press conference, communicating strategy or leading your company in a competitive environment, stories help you engage your audience.

Stories are part of our collective unconscious.  Jung argues that, in addition to our personal unconscious (a unique personalised psychic dumping ground for all our experiences, anxieties, neuroses and repressed thoughts) we all also share the same template in the form of archetypes, which help us understand and explain the world in which we live. The collective unconscious is rather like the operating system on our computer and it is by exploring those archetypes in the plays of Shakespeare, that corporate leaders can enhance their rational and analytical core competencies.

But it’s not just individual executives who can benefit from lessons by the Bard. Companies have souls and personalities too which are made up of rational conscious processes and subconscious archetypal cultural energy. Therefore Shakespeare can be used to improve the performance of teams.

It is a sad truth of corporate life that most mergers fail to deliver shareholder value. There is much talk of cost synergies, but these often fail to materialise because cultural differences between the different personalities of the merging organisations clash and subvert the process.

Rough Magic

The Tempest is a good model to help reframe an organisation’s approach to mergers and cultural change and also to build more efficient teams.  As a business case study it operates on many different levels and Shakespeare provides Jungian insights into political and organisational dynamics.  Prospero uses his “rough magic” (soft leadership skills) to challenge and subvert his estranged brother and his court who wash up on the shores of his “island of mystery” (newly merged organisation).You can chose your friends but you are stuck with family in the same way that many executives are stuck with an uncooperative management team post-merger.

The sheer volume of unfocussed and external communication in the corporate world calls to mind another Shakespearean quote. “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Explore the characters and stories of Shakespeare and I guarantee that your communication will mean something and give you “….a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention”. Now that’s something you won’t find on an email or PowerPoint presentation.