unleashed!

Unleashed!Expecting Greatness and Other Secrets of Coaching for Exceptional Performance

AUTHOR: Gregg Thompson (with Susanne Biro)PUBLISHER: SelectBooks, Inc.DATE OF PUBLICATION: 2007NUMBER OF PAGES: 144 pages

Unleashed! by Gregg Thompson (with Susanne Biro)

The Bid Idea

• Today’s fastest-growing human resource development process is coaching. Coaches are the sort of people who see the greatness in others, challenge them to live up to their own high standards, and hold them accountable for outstanding performance on a daily basis.

• However, what used to be the purview of HR or even external professional coaches is more and more becoming a responsibility of leaders at all organizational levels, who are being asked to be more coach-like with the people they work with. Many of those who are asked to do so are however ill-equipped to provide such coaching.

• This is where this book comes in. It provides a unique model and approach to help the managers and leaders of today overcome this challenge and win the war for talent within their organizations.


Why You Need This Book

• This book does not try to teach its readers to coach. Its advice is centered on the authors’ Great Expectations Model of coaching. This model provides readers with a remarkably simple and straightforward process that draws upon timeless approaches and best practices utilized by professional coaches.

• Thus the book challenges its readers to become the kind of person whom others actively seek out to learn from and who create relationships that confront real issues.


Expecting Greatness

Four things that need to be settled right at the start:• Leading today’s organizations is difficult work; organizations

are chaotic, demanding and messy. Coaching, however, is tougher.

• There’s no simple, multi-step coaching process that anyone can follow to become a good coach or leader. Coaching is a way of being, not doing.

• You have to change. Think about your interactions with those you work with. Are you getting the results you need or want to be getting? The answer is nearly always a ‘no’, so it’s obvious that a change is required.

• At least half of the people who work on your team or in your organization consider themselves “not engaged.” They feel and/or fear that they are not performing anywhere near their full potential. Worse, there may be some who you think are performing well, but in reality are not anywhere near their full potential.


Expecting Greatness

Some points regarding coaching now:1. If we are to coach for high performance, we must be able to

describe it. High performance is not an achievement but a journey. It’s realized when the Talent – the individual being coached – is on the road towards fully utilizing his natural capabilities, and not only in his work but everywhere in his life.

2. As someone in a leadership role, you are always on display. People constantly and continuously watch you to fulfill the human need to have a frame of reference when dealing with you. They want to know if they can trust you to coach them right.

3. There is no fixed process to becoming a great coach. Some aspects of coaching come naturally to people; others will need to be developed.

4. There are two key practices of great coaches: -- They establish potent, development-focused

relationships -- They engage in difficult, performance-changing conversations


Expecting Greatness

5. People live up – or down – to our expectations of them. They are remarkably perceptive and can pick up your assessments of them very well through a variety of verbal and non-verbal cues.

We also tend to spend more time with the star performers and even grant concessions to high performers, which we might not do with the low performers.

-- The Halo effect – one good characteristic can dictate the overall opinion of an individual. A strong rating in one area can affect ratings in other areas.

-- The Horn effect – when a person seems deficient in one key area, it’s often assumed he’s lacking in other key areas as well.

6. Adopt a new Coaching Perspective. Try to see the people you work with not as high or low performers, but as individuals with wonderfully wide-ranging personalities, talents and abilities. Choose to see poor performance as nothing more than unused potential.


Expecting Greatness

The Great Expectations Model• This model is predicated on you becoming a pioneer for

positive change. Focus on everything right, or on how to turn a challenge into an opportunity. Embrace this one philosophy and you will touch people in a profound and meaningful way. Be intentional in how you interact with others.

• Also, realize that you have to focus on the other person’s career and aspirations. That’s the leverage point of coaching – great coaches figure out what their talents most want and become an advocate for them to achieve it.

• This, then, is the Great Expectations Model of coaching. It consists of three guiding principles, each of which is to be discussed in its own section:

-- Earning the right to coach -- A perfect partnership -- Dangerous conversations


Earning the Right to Coach

AuthenticityFirst ask yourself this: are you an authentic leader?

Here are four characteristics and qualities of authentic leaders:• You must live your values. Your principles have to be evident

in everything you do. • Don’t equivocate. Make your yes mean yes, and your no

mean no. • Take full responsibility for your life. Be comfortable saying “I

am responsible.”• If you say it, do it! Follow through even on the smallest

things.

As a leader in your organization you are under constant scrutiny and are continuously scanned for trustworthiness. Every action is on display for all to see. We may strive for it and even practice it, but we can only be or not be authentic through the eyes of others.

Human beings are hardwired to seek out trustworthiness or untrustworthiness.



We move through our daily lives assessing everyone around us; we attempt to detect sincerity and its lack, and adjust our behavior accordingly.

Honesty, too, is significant; it is an essential prerequisite to an effective coaching relationship. As is integrity; these are your values in action.

Lastly, you must make sure you are the genuine article – honest, true, and authentic. Be genuine in all you do. Who are you when no one is watching? Do you stick to your values or play fast and loose?



Self-Esteem• We all have self-doubt; we fear at some level that we lack

the ability to succeed in certain areas of our lives. Left unchecked, these fears severely limit our development– and the development of others as well.

• The point is to listen to the voice of self-doubt, recognize the things it says for the baseless insecurities that they are, and act in spite of it. Enough said.

• We must exercise self-control and curtail our tendency to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with our values and our beliefs. Specifically, we need to manage our need to control others, or this will eliminate the natural vitality and creativity in any coaching encounter. Practice not dictating the pace of the talks and not dominating with your own ideas.

• Lastly, a key principle – first apply the principle of appreciation to yourself. Self- esteem depends on looking at everything and everyone through the same lens. To truly see another person with an appreciative eye, you must be able to look at yourself the same way.



Noble Intention• Despite having the best of intentions, we all, at one point or

another, want to be so helpful that we make coaching all about us and our need to feel useful instead of focusing on what our Talents really need. By doing so, we fail to truly help our Talents.

• Those with noble intention, therefore, are completely dedicated to the development of the talent. They suspend their own needs and issues and focus exclusively on the other person’s advancement. They bring all their resources to bear, including time, knowledge, experience, and even connections.

• This of course is very hard work as the process involves deliberation and consideration to ensure that the Talent’s interests are of primary concern at all times, and that the Talent himself or herself is focused on at all times as well. The more the coach is removed from the agenda and this is passed over to the Talent, the greater the impact the coaching relationship will have.



• It’s also significant to know how ‘high’ you can coach. Are you comfortable coaching someone to a higher level of performance than you yourself have achieved? Or do you feel threatened by the potential – or already realized – accomplishments and successes of others?


A Perfect Partnership

When the Leader Coach can appreciate the best in his or her Talent, confront him or her with his or her aspirations and potential, and hold him or her accountable to perform at his or her absolute best, this will result in a relationship that is nothing short of a perfect partnership.

Appreciation• An appreciative relationship is one in which you see the

very best in the Talent, expect the best from him or her, and guide him or her towards seeing and expecting the best in himself or herself as well.

• Appreciation cannot be faked. You either truly believe in the potential of another human being or you do not. Either way, moreover, they know how you feel.

• Research suggests that pointing out and celebrating success in an organization, rather than focusing on flaws and failures, results in greater improvement in overall performance.



Confrontation• While Great Expectations coaching is distinctively

appreciative and seeks to identify the best in others, it’s hardly warm and fuzzy coddling; as a matter of fact, effective coaching requires us to challenge others with excruciating honesty and candor.

• Confrontation in this sense is best defined as a courageous encounter with the truth – whatever that truth might be.

• The Leader Coach thus should confront the Talent’s ideas, assumptions and perspectives, and enable him to find possible new ways of acting and thinking; he should let the Talent come face to face with his perspective on the status quo and move beyond the limits he has set for himself. A reluctance to confront all too often results in a lost opportunity to remove a hindrance to higher performance.

• Because it can be quite the opposite, truth should be associated with love and confrontation with kindness in order for true learning and coaching to take place. We need to watch out for the way we say what we want to say as well – oftentimes this is what really makes an impact.



Accountability• We typically define this concept by using words like

responsibility and liability, but the definition for our purposes is better enlarged by adding the concept of an authority to act. This means that with the responsibility for results comes the power to take whatever actions are necessary to bring them about.

• Personal accountability and personal development are two sides of the same coin. This is why coaches are dissuaded from merely becoming ‘sounding boards’ for their Talents – in this way they simply create more opportunities for their Talents to whine on and on about their problems. By doing so, the more the Talent will fall into the illusion of being the victim of circumstance, rather than the architect of her own future.

• The Leader Coach has two key roles regarding accountability:

-- To model accountability in his own life. -- To expect it from others.



• Skilled coaches know very well the boundaries of their accountability: they know that they must help their Talents develop personal accountability, and thus know that they cannot and must not intervene or interfere in situations where their Talents can take a step towards developing this.


Dangerous Conversations

• Most office conversations involve the exchange of information, advice, opinions and instructions and have predictable outcomes. These, however, are ineffectual when it comes to the coaching process. Coaching conversations need to be more potent, more purposeful, more emotional – they need to be dangerous.

• In dangerous conversations, everything superfluous is burned away, leaving only the most valuable elements. Coaching often requires the confrontation of sensitive issues related to personal performance and can challenge deeply-held personal beliefs; therefore, the process can result in a variety of emotional responses, from anger to joy to fear to clarity.



The Coaching FlowHere are three phases through which great coaching flows.

(Note that the tendency to see these as linear phases must be resisted; every coaching relationship follows its own unique course. The most effective coaching results are achieved when the conversation is allowed to move back and forth between the phases as necessary, as the Talent develops.)

• Discovery – the Leader Coach helps the Talent understand his current perspective and see his performance and potential through fresh eyes. The Talent has to be challenged to dig deeper and ask more of himself than before; the Coach has to ask some basic and difficult questions, such as “What do you most value?”

• Creation – the Leader Coach helps the Talent take his new perspectives and then create possibilities for change. The Talent’s self-limiting beliefs must be challenged and he must operate at a higher and bigger level.

• Commitment -- the Talent chooses a new perspective and a new way of operating; plus he commits to enacting the necessary changes in his life and holds himself accountable for that decision.



The Four Coaching Power ToolsHere are four tools to help the Leader Coach be more effective.

Power Tool 1: Acknowledgment – fully recognizing who someone is and what they can bring to a relationship. Coaches need to acknowledge the Talent for having the courage and grit to embark on this sort of endeavor, and they need to be honest as well to acknowledge the Talent’s struggles and mistakes.

This is not synonymous with complimenting, which can be seen as superficial or phony.

The 10 big acknowledgments are as follows:• You are a very interesting person.• I enjoy working with you.• You have a wonderfully distinctive personality.• You are obviously a very talented person. • I see that you are having a very good/difficult time right now.• I think you have great potential.• I value your willingness to confront this issue.• I see you as quite unique.• Your fine work has not gone unnoticed• I like you.



• Power Tool 2: Big questions – well-posed questions are extremely powerful things. They force Talents to look for their own answers – answers he or she already has within himself or herself.

• Power Tool 3: Intuitional perspectives – Leader Coaches should also share the ideas and thoughts that seem obvious to them. Their Talents are thus provided with something they can react to and thus can end up diving deeper into their own thinking.

The 10 big intuitional perspectives are:• I think you are capable of much more.• I find that easy/hard to believe.• I think you do not realize how talented you are.• I believe you are being too easy/hard on yourself.• I think you are avoiding the real issue.• I see a completely different future for you.• It appears you are having a hard time letting go of this issue.• I think you are afraid to try.• I believe you give others too much credit/blame.• I think you have great courage.



Power Tool 4: Silence – Silence in coaching can carry a lot of weight. It can function as a structured environment designed specifically for the Talent to identify and analyze his own thoughts.

The Coaching WorkspaceA coaching conversation needs room to move, play, experiment, and

learn. The most important task the Leader Coach needs to attend to in a coaching relationship is to increase the workspace. This is the area of free movement available to the Leader Coach and the Talent. The Leader Coach’s role is to expand the workspace by constantly pushing the boundaries of awareness and knowledge in the relationship.

The Coach’s VoiceWhereas the artist has his brush and the conductor his baton, the

coach has his words. When he can assemble these into a special language that challenges and helps others excel, he will have found his coach’s voice.



The most powerful tool a coach can bring to any relationship with a Talent is dynamic language. Leader Coaches must first understand how their words are received and then choose them accordingly.

One of the greatest strengths of language as a coaching tool is its flexibility. Leader Coaches must make sure they are really saying something significant to the Talent. Coaching language – just like Leader Coaches themselves – must be provocative, sensitive and, above all, truthful in the truest sense.


BusinessSummaries.com is a business book Summaries service. Every week, it sends out to subscribers a 9- to 12-page

summary of a best-selling business book chosen from among the hundreds of books printed out in the United States. For more information, please go to http://www.bizsum.com.

ABOUT BUSINESSSUMMARIES

unleashed!

Health & Medicine

aspects of coaching

high performance

good coach

new coaching perspective

multistep coaching process

high performers

sort of people

coach authenticity