Sometimes It’s Not Your Client

The word “coaching” usually brings to mind efforts to help individual clients perform better. Maybe they don’t read people well (low empathy) or maybe they shoot from the hip (low impulse control). Such coaching can have great value. But sometimes the individual is not the right focus. Sometimes it is the organization that needs attention. Picture this: You’ve been coaching someone for a while, a senior leader in a successful organization. It’s gone well. This person is smart, engaged, and a quick learner. In other words, a joy to work with. Let’s call him John. Six to twelve months into your coaching engagement, John says, “I’m worried about my company. We’ve done awfully well for a long time. It is a good company, with good people, as you know. But I see danger on our horizon. What has brought us success for so long is getting outdated. The market is…

More Choices for Leaders: Last in the Series

This is the last in a series of four blog posts that provide a model you can use to help your clients make their organizations more profitable (which of course will go a long way toward your getting ongoing business from those organizations). Because not everyone may have read each of the previous three posts, here’s a brief review. We started by reporting research shared by Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee in their book Primal Leadership. That research found that an organization’s climate, profitability, and leadership styles intertwine. Companies with emotionally positive climates (think EQ) are much more profitable than those with negative climates. Leadership style directly controls 50 – 70% of climate, which in turn controls 20 to 30% of profitability. There are a number of learnable leadership styles. To maximize leader effectiveness, leaders should match leadership style to situational needs. In posts two and three of this series, we…

Leaders Have More Choices

Want to help your clients make their organizations more profitable? This is the third in a series of four blog posts that provide a model for you to do just that. Thus far, we’ve examined how an organization’s climate, profitability, and leadership styles relate, as reported by Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee, in Primal Leadership: Companies with positive climates are much more profitable than those with negative climates. Leadership style directly controls 50 – 70% of climate There are a number of learnable leadership styles To maximize leader effectiveness, match leadership style to situational needs. In our previous post, we described two of the six leadership styles discussed in Primal Leadership: Coercive (or Directive), and Visionary. We looked at: times when each of those styles can work well times when they shouldn’t be used which EQ skills support their success, and the five steps which you, as a coach, can take…