The Coachable Leader: What Future Executives Need to Know Today

By Peter J. Dean and Monica L. Warner

The Coachable Leader speaks to executives who are serious and willing to reflect upon, refine, and possibly reconstitute their leadership practices.

If you want to be one of those people, its imperative that you remain coachable so you can gain insights on how to encourage positive behaviors and avoid executive actions that sabotage mutual success.

Use this book to seize your opportunity to become an exceptional leader. Through its clearly outlined chapters, complete with real-life business examples and comprehensive graphics, youll learn how to balance the seven fundamentals for effective leadership development:

collaborative convincement, emotional strength, integrative ethics, provident power, interactive influence, team forbearance, systems discernment.

With these foundational concepts, youll discover how to initiate a more cooperative and collaborative approach to leadership. As you seek to become a coachable leader, youll develop skills, techniques, and tools to inspire and accomplish tangible, bottomline results.

Achieve a more balanced approach to reaching your goals with The Coachable Leader!

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781462048908

Book preview

Copyright © 2011 by Peter J. Dean, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-4888-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-4889-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-4890-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011917965

iUniverse rev. date: 04/11/2012

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgment

Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Appendix A: Management

Appendix B: Leadership

Appendix C: The Three Elements of Speaking

Appendix D: Designing the Work System to Improve Performance

Bibliography

Resources to Build Your Own Leadership Library

Dedication

Thank you to all the executives we have had the privilege of working with over the last three decades and to all the future

executives who aspire to get leadership right. And to our own next generation of leaders: Isabelle Dean, Robert Richard,

Kurt Lunkenheimer, Brooke Owens, Ashley Lunkenheimer, and Starla Crandall.

Previous Books by Peter J. Dean, MA, MS, PhD

Leadership for Everyone: Essentials to Become a

Great Motivator, Influencer and Leader (2006)

Philosophy and Practice of Organizational Learning,

Performance and Change (2001)

The Physician’s Essential MBA: What Every Physician

Leader Needs to Know (1999)

Performance Engineering at Work 1994; Revised 1999)

Performance Improvement Interventions: Methods for Organizational Learning—Instructional Design/Training (1998)

Performance Improvement Interventions: Methods for Organizational Learning—Performance Technologies (1998)

Performance Improvement Interventions: Methods for Organizational Learning—Culture and Systems Change (1998)

Performance Improvement Pathfinders: Models for Organizational Learning Systems (1997)

A Critical Incident Study Investigating Effective and

Ineffective Leadership Behaviors (dissertation) (1986)

Previous Books by Molly D. Shepard, MS, MSM

Breaking into the Boys Club (2009)

Stop Whining and Start Winning (2006)

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank our parents for their leadership: Joseph and Helen Dean and Tom and Nancy Shepard. And in addition, we would like to acknowledge the many men and women who have believed in this work and have shared their time, energy, and wisdom even though they are too numerous to mention by name. Also, we would like to thank those who have allowed us, as leader development coaches, to witness their practice of leading in their organizations. We have a great deal of appreciation to those who have written works on leadership from which we gleaned important fundamentals of leadership. The collective knowledge from all these sources has given us invaluable lessons that added greatly to the content of this book. The insights and knowledge provided in this book were derived collectively from CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, COOs, HR partners, other authors, editors, researchers, professors, and deans and presidents of universities. The interactions, exchanges and individual studies of authors and writers have helped us describe our approach to the principles and practices of leadership development contained within The Coachable Leader.

Also, we want to especially thank John Gans, PharmD and Stephanie Zarus, PharmD for pilot-testing this book as the primary textbook for the graduate course in leadership at the Mayes College, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, PA, in 2009 and for their feedback on the content.

We wish to thank Philip Gerbino, PharmD, president of the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and Angus Russell, CEO of Shire Pharmaceuticals Inc. for the continuous support and insight into the practice of coachable leaders. We thank them for the endorsement of this book.

Lastly, our respect and thanks to Monica L. Warner, MS, an effective and efficient managing director and a brilliant future leader, who has braved this project with us.

Preface

Over the past three decades, we have seen numerous examples of poor executive leadership in many companies, such as Bernie Madoff or Ken Lay. It can be called no leadership—citing a lack of individual character development within the executives. It is time for executives to step up and take a stand for bold, honest, and positive leadership. Leader development needs to be put right!

Leadership is not about having a corner office or a lofty position title in an organization. Leadership is foremost about the executive’s character as he or she takes on a more responsible role. Executives have proven their competence prior to arriving at the executive suite, and now they have to demonstrate their character. The character of an executive is most visible by the people who look to him or her for leadership. What direct reports, peers, customers, and colleagues look for is whether or not the executive is coachable—and by coachable we mean being open to feedback from employees with the goal to develop skills or make changes in order to be a more effective leader—feedback about the impact of the executive’s leadership. Also, the executive needs to be willing to constantly reexamine his or her character and make adjustments when necessary.

The people will determine if the executive is obtuse and unwilling to change the flaws of his/her character and uncoachable to the impact of his/her leadership. The people in the workforce will be patient at first, but unless they feel supportive about the executive’s character and his or her willingness to be self-reflective and coachable, the work environment will not be as productive as it could be.

While there has been increasing interest by executives in understanding how to develop themselves as leaders, we have seen too many of them fail over and over again. Even the numerous leadership publications, both theoretical and practical, speak little of the practical and honest story of leadership.

Executives certainly need to know about the business mechanics of the market, as in Adam Smith’s invisible hand, to be successful. The Coachable Leader has been written to address the other invisible hand—the personal character of the executive and how well he or she is coachable to the insights from the fundamentals of leadership. These seven fundamentals of leader development are previewed below:

Seven Fundamentals for the Coachable Leader

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This book has been designed to be a feedback resource to executives for each of these seven fundamentals of leader development. Each of the fundamentals has its own chapter. The book is a coaching guide for those who seek to monitor and manage their personal character as an executive leader and to be coachable about their development as executive leaders. Simply put, executives may use this book to seize the opportunity for their own development in any or all of the seven fundamentals to become more effective in guiding others and their organization.

Executives who truly desire to become leaders must first know that while they may be called leaders, it is not about them. It is about everyone, as leadership doesn’t happen by the efforts of one person. If executives act as if they are the one best person to lead, they have missed the point. Second, what the executive is solely responsible for is to model a high standard of personal character in leadership and to be coachable—constantly monitoring, gauging, and enhancing his or her skills to lead others.

The Coachable Leader will bring executives many steps closer to a full repertoire of true leadership principles and practices that are at the ready to enrich the executive and benefit the people. If you want to lead or be a leader, then you must know the story of leadership as it could be and as it is set forth in this book.

Chapter One

The Coachable Leader: Congratulations, You

Are a Leader. But, Are You Coachable?

Arguably, many corporate executives have lost their credibility and our trust as successful leaders. Sadly, this is not the age to have doubtful leadership in our companies; the world faces economic confusion, extreme self-interest, aggressive materialism, lack of respect for human rights, and duties, and a violent utilitarianism that causes physical or financial harm to customers. Much of the blame is being put on executives. Whether it is a lack of good leadership, bad behavior, outright fraud, or just not stepping forward to take a stand for fair business, our executives have put in a lackluster performance as champions of business for society. It is critical now to reexamine comprehensively our notions about what it takes to be a successful and positive executive leader.

Current-day executives and those who hope to be successful executive leaders ought to be open to understanding the impact of their character and leadership on others. Feedback presented in the fundamental categories that constitute leadership is not easy for executives to receive, especially if the feedback suggests needed improvement of some areas, but it is essential for the following reason: as executives move up the ladder in organizations, the one thing they receive less and less of is developmental feedback about their competence, character, and positive impact as a leader. Without this multipronged feedback, executives can slip into a state of denial about their effectiveness.

An example of extreme backlash can be seen in the 2011 political uprising in Egypt that sent aggressive feedback by the masses to the leaders in that country. On a smaller scale, but no less important, executives can learn from this example that honest and continuous feedback is much more easily received by the executive than mass revolt, which for companies means losing talent and losing in the marketplace. Having witnessed the failure of leadership over and over again, in firms like Tyco, Enron, WorldCom, AIG, Lehman Brothers, and most recently BP, it is time to present feedback that helps executives move beyond the autocracy of linear decision making present in our corporate systems, where poor and sometimes disastrous results routinely emerge from narrowly focused, short-term, self-centered, and unenlightened thinking.

The Seven Fundamentals of Leader Development

In order to receive feedback in the seven fundamental categories that comprise the content of this book, one must be coachable. That is, open to truly hearing and receiving the feedback with the intent to make the relevant changes necessary to be better leaders. To act on being coachable, an executive can hire an executive coach, who will collect the feedback and fold in the knowledge of the fundamentals in leader development. Once assembled into a report, the coach will offer the feedback to the executive and put the suggestions into observable behavior. A second alternative is that an executive can learn the kind of feedback that is important from a progressive MBA curriculum designed to connect and apply the many disciplines from which leader development draws its knowledge. Finally, a third option is that executives can take direction from this book, which has been written from the perspective of the disciplines of leadership, from actual experiences of executives in programs of leader development, and from our research and practice in the field of leader-development studies.

The seven fundamental categories in which feedback is given to the executive are depicted in the visual below. It is important to note that all seven fundamentals speak to the executive directly about what he/she has control over in his/her own practice of leadership. If all seven fundamentals are utilized to some degree in an executive’s repertoire of leadership practice, then the executive’s impact of leadership is more seamless, contiguous, positive, trusted, and longer lasting. In other words, executives who have been coached in all seven fundamentals have a more positive impact on others.

Seven Fundamentals for the Coachable Leader

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The Coachable Leader has been written to provide executives with proper coaching in leader development. It is a unique and comprehensive resource for learning and implementing the seven fundamental components in the practice of positive leader development. Each of the seven fundamentals—collaborative convincement, emotional strength, integrative ethics, provident power, interactive influence, team forbearance, and systems discernment—is discussed in separate chapters and represented by foundational fulcrums balancing two different forces within each fundamental (see fulcrum figure on the next page).

For example, the fundamental of collaborative convincement represents the balance of management with leadership; the fundamental of emotional strength speaks to the balance of a healthy ego with the proper use of empathy; the fundamental of integrative ethics addresses the balance between properly intended rules and good results; the fundamental of provident power unpacks the necessary balance of professional power with personal power; the fundamental of interactive influence describes the balance of feedback for the self with disclosure to others; the fundamental of team forbearance is represented in the balance of positive team behaviors for task completion and group relations; and the fundamental of systems discernment addresses the balance of perception of meaningfulness at work with work systems surrounding people at work.

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The application of the knowledge contained within each fundamental is sadly lacking in today’s global market. The seven fundamentals, which draw from the disciplines of psychology, sociology, political theory, philosophy, communications, systems theory, management theory, and leadership principles and practices, are designed to be a resource for those who want to develop more as a credible and legitimate leader. Also, they can be used as a coaching guide for those who seek to help themselves develop new skills and want to remain coachable about their impact. Coaching helps executives gain insights about leadership if they are courageous enough to remain coachable. Simply put, executives can use this book to seize the opportunity for their own leader development and to help in the development of other leaders.

The Promise of The Coachable Leader

Being properly coached about the seven fundamentals for positive leader development provides executives with the necessary ingredients to remain coachable about their practice of leadership. The willingness on the part of the executive to remain coachable—and again, by coachable we mean seeking out feedback from those being led in order to gauge current effectiveness and determine areas of improvement to motivate and lead—is vitally important. It is the coachable leader who is able to use the seven fundamentals to understand, empathize, analyze, engage, share, communicate, and attend to others for a balanced approach to getting work done and to bring about a climate of true collaborative leadership in organizations.

We can say with certainty that the skill of becoming and remaining coachable about the impact of your leadership is not for the faint of heart. It takes courage to be open to receiving feedback. Compliments are in order for those who can remain coachable in the difficult job of being a leader. Each executive can receive feedback through the seven fundamentals for leader behavior, or lack of leader behavior, if the executive remains coachable. If coachable, an executive can seize opportunities for leadership that exist in everyday interactions with colleagues, bosses, customers, analysts, bankers, vendors, and so forth. The Coachable Leader will bring executives many steps closer to embracing a full repertoire of leadership principles and practices. It is time for executives to step up and take a stand for bold, honest, and positive leadership by knowing the flexible framework of the seven fundamentals for leader development.

The Flexible Framework of the Seven Fundamentals

The seven fundamentals work with the tendency in life for humans to grow and develop. They are not linear or sequential as they must be when presented in a book. The framework simply identifies the seven content areas in which executives may need either fine-tuning or major overhaul over time.

Another unique aspect of this flexible framework is that in all seven areas, the challenge of working with and through people is the focus—not controlling or coercing people at work. In other words, the framework involves in an executive’s leadership the needs, expectations, and intrinsic motivation of the people at work. The centerpiece of the framework, collaborative convincement, connects to all the other six areas of the model in an ever-present way. The word collaboration involves the voice of the stakeholders who have a stake in the process of decision making. The convincement part means that all parties have had a chance to convince themselves or to be convinced through dialogue with each other. Near-consensus or almost complete agreement may be challenging to achieve, but involving everyone in the process is not hard to do at all.

From collaborative convincement, the executive can go to any or all of the other six content areas as and when needed. For example, if the feedback to an executive is that he/she comes off with a big ego to others, then the executive’s behavior is reviewed to see where the perception is being picked up. It is often found that a lack of empathy is a primary reason for that perception. So, the balance of ego and empathy becomes the topic of the feedback to the executive. Subsequently, the behavior of the big ego is replaced with other behaviors, and learning how to empathize and practice them is added into the executive’s repertoire. Overall, this is called the emotional strength fundamental.

Another example would be if the executive receives feedback that there may some ethical lapses in the accounting of numbers. The fundamental of integrative ethics is considered to be sure that there is a balance between principled rules and well-intended consequences for the accounting practices. This has to do with people working together to be sure everything is legal and ethical.

Similarly, each of the other fundamentals can be considered in the practice of collaborative convincement. Those are: provident power, the leverage executives can positively implement to get things accomplished in their organization; interactive influence, improving productivity through on-going communicative interactions; team forbearance, the creation of a team feeling in a work environment; and systems discernment, the understanding of how employees perceive their work. Yet the centerpiece, collaborative convincement, is always at the core of this flexible framework in the interplay of fundamentals that are used and practiced in each unique leadership situation for an executive.

So, the centerpiece of collaborative convincement is the starting point. The first question can be how do I manage this situation? Followed by, how do I lead in it? What is the feedback saying to me? What is the fundamental content area connected to the feedback given? The answers lead you in the framework to the fundamental content areas that are needed for the executive to be effective.

Flexible Framework for the Seven Fundamentals

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In the chapters that follow, we describe the foundational fulcrums of the seven fundamentals that enhance flexibility of the executive’s leader development repertoire and allow a leader to be and remain coachable to receive necessary feedback about his or her impact, character, and competence as a leader. The last chapter describes how executives can coach other executives to do the same.

Each chapter of the flexible framework emerges from a discipline that supports leader development, such as psychology, sociology, and so on. A visual to keep the simple goal of each chapter in shorthand is described below. Each chapter indicates a different coaching session within which one fundamental content area for feedback to executives is described. Chapter 1, The Coachable Leader: Congratulations, You Are a Leader. But, Are You Coachable? introduces the content of the foundational fulcrums of the seven fundamentals of leader development. Chapter 2, "Collaborative Convincement, reveals the balance necessary between the short-term focus on management with the long view of leadership. Chapter 3, Emotional Strength, unpacks how the executive can monitor the balance between having a healthy ego and having empathy for others. Chapter 4, Integrative Ethics, reveals a balance between principled rules and well-intended results. Chapter 5, Provident Power, comprises a balance of professional power and personal power. Chapter 6, Interactive Influence, includes the balance between receiving feedback about the self and disclosure of the self to others. Chapter 7, Team Forbearance, identifies the balance of positive team behaviors and what needs to be done for task completion and group relations. Chapter 8, Systems Discernment, shows that balance between people’s perception of the meaningfulness at work with the alignment of the work systems that are intended to support their success on the job. Chapter 9, Coaching Executive Leaders to Coach Other Executives," describes how to go about teaching other executives the elements of coaching.

The content areas that are the origins of each of the seven fundamentals (leadership studies, psychology, philosophy, political theory, communications, sociology, and systems theory) are represented below, with short statements that reflect the fundamental and ideal core character of an executive leader.

Flexible Framework for the Seven Fundamentals

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