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104 50 TOP EXECUTIVE COACHES
sense of direction, and they need to make decisions about the future. Even those who are happy with their organizations are often dissatisfied with the effect of work on their personal lives.
With career-planning programs, organizations need to be sensitive to the nuanced differences of individual needs, motivations, talents, and values. When people find themselves in work situations where they feel valued, and in which their work speaks not only to their personal values but also to their strengths, their satisfaction, authenticity, and performance levels are all much higher. They certainly know a good thing when they see it, and tend to stay or jump ship accordingly.
When I work with HR or line managers, the vehicle I often use is their own personal career planning. Everyone is eager to do it. After all, who doesn’t recognize and enjoy the benefits of thinking more deeply about themselves in relation to their own career and future plans? But more importantly, receiv-ing such counseling provides managers with a greater understanding of work-place trends and a deeper appreciation for individual differences, which will assist them in coaching their own staff.
Human Resources practitioners and line managers should not play clini-cian/counselor. Few are equipped or inclined; and fewer still have the time. That’s where my tools come in. My Career Planning Workbook serves as the counselor by extracting information about desires, needs, skills, and aspira-tions. The manager builds on that data to promote career activism in the staff. In other words, the manager is not abdicating responsibility to the tools; rather the manager’s role focuses on dialogue and action steps. This makes the manager more efficient and effective because their career plan-ning duties can take place within a well-structured context.
The impact of this approach is often anecdotal but always clear. People call me up and say that employees were “really demoralized but now they’re buzzing.” “The teams are working more effectively together.” Managers re-late that although they are dedicating less time to career coaching, that time is “much more engaging and effective.” Employees themselves have a feeling of greater self-reliance in managing their own careers, even as they have connected in a more satisfying way with their managers. A typical reaction from manager and employee alike would be: “I just had the most productive career discussion I’ve ever experienced.”
There are degrees to which organizations make this enthusiasm come alive. For those that bring career activism to its full potential, it becomes part of the fundamental employment contract. It’s an aspect, in other words, of their per-formance management system; it helps in recruitment and retention; and it creates a basis for work-life balance and health and wellness programming.
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Because I coach a lot of coaches, among both internal practitioners and out-side counselors, I’ve come to formulate some strong opinions about which ex-periences and viewpoints are actually valuable and effective. When you look at those who find themselves in the career coaching business, some are obvi-ously very gifted, but many have been drawn to the profession because they had a powerful personal career experience and want to guide others toward similar revelations. Those in the latter camp tend to be like cheerleaders, often lacking a depth of knowledge of individual differences and personality char-acteristics or any real appreciation for the complexities of the contemporary workplace. They tend to hold a facile perspective, an “if you can dream it, you can do it” philosophy. Although that may be true in theory and ultimately a more authentic expression of self, it may also be unwise to encourage someone to quit their day job.
Another group of coaches includes those who have developed hard busi-ness skills, which they feel help them to understand the reality of work in an organizational context. They may have had experience leading a department or turning around a division. As a result, they have war stories, battle scars, and a certain degree of empathy for those dealing with the complexities of work and organizational change. That kind of perspective may help in coach-ing individuals or teams to better performance, but it’s unlikely that such coaches will have a sufficient understanding of psychological issues to take a humanistic, whole-person approach.
To be an effective career coach, I think you need to be an applied social psychologist to some degree. You must combine an intimate understanding of the new workplace and its dynamics with an appreciation for its impact on how people feel and what they need. In other words, you must think in terms of the nuances of contemporary life as well as the nuances of individual differences. For me, there are three principles in enabling people to be effective in the work world today. People need to know themselves and understand what they truly care about. They need to find work that speaks to their strengths and values, that is, their authentic selves. And they must be career activists to make both of those happen. A career coach is valuable to the extent that
he or she guides and supports that set of capabilities.
Good work is not a privilege, it’s a right. Yet the individual is responsible for making the decisions and choices that provide the right fit. There’s a lot of repressed quitting going on in organizations today. People have put their work desires on hold because of the uncertain economy. I come across two kinds of organizations in that regard. There are those which really do treat their peo-ple with care and sensitivity, because they are concerned with attraction and retention. And there are also those that have very short memories. The latter
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organization allows the weather of the day to dictate its behavior toward em-ployees. Although the war for talent has subsided in the short-term forecast, that will not always be the case. A turnaround will come, and the looming skill shortage is not going to disappear. When the ship is righted and condi-tions improve, people will pass clear judgment by voting with their feet on how well organizations live up to the terms of the new employment contract.
q Brian Tracy
Getting What You Want
Brian Tracy, Chairman of Brian Tracy International, is one of America’s leading authorities on the development of human potential and personal effectiveness. He ad-dresses more than 250,000 people each year on the sub-jects of personal and professional development. He has written 35 books and is the author/narrator of more than 300 audio and video learning programs. He can be reached by phone at (858) 481-2977 or via the Internet at www.briantracy.com.
y mission in life has been to liberate human potential by helping peo-ple set and achieve their most important goals. The coaching I do is
designed to bring people through a rigorous analysis of defining those goals and determining appropriate action steps. Once we’ve programmed a goal into the superconscious mind, it works 24 hours a day generating ideas, at-tracting the right people to our side, and activating our particular context so that we see things we might not have seen before. The results are a won-drous thing to behold.
I concentrate primarily on entrepreneurs, business people near the top of their organizations, professionals such as doctors, architects and lawyers, and top salespeople. All currently earn a minimum salary of $100,000 a year— since that is a level, in my opinion, that indicates that a person has a strong
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sense of what she’s good at and what she doesn’t want to do. Our promise is that we will double that income while doubling time off. We work in groups, through a structured format, over a period of a year. The awareness that our coaching creates helps participants achieve their goals. It’s amazing how many people have doubled their incomes and doubled their time off within the first 30 days.
The key to the success of our coaching is its structure. I developed it by considering hundreds of different sources. The emphasis is extremely practi-cal. Our focus is not on instructing but on questions. We deal with four aspects of our clients’ lives: first, their career, work, and income; second, their rela-tionships; third, their overall financial situation; and fourth, how much they intend to be worth. We make a strong distinction between income and worth. There are three other critical parameters that we consider—personal and pro-fessional development, community and social involvement, and spiritual devel-opment. But we do not contemplate these as deeply because they are more personal and time consuming, and require a different level of coaching.
Instead, in each of the first four areas, we discuss how to organize our lives to reach a higher level of satisfaction. I call this the focal point process. Participants have come to the session having done prework on these areas al-ready, the purpose of which is to get psychologically out of their existing space and force them to think through questions about who they are, what they want and how they’re measuring up. Now, it’s time to bring that initial thinking into greater clarity and action.
Working in small groups of five people helps generate a different level of creative possibility. This idea is related to the Mastermind concept in which the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the people you hang out with. When like-minded positive people come together to share ideas, amaz-ing things happen. Sometimes, a great conversation with a really interesting person turns on all kinds of lights in our minds. In our program, we create a structured Mastermind in which everyone asks each other a series of ques-tions and goes through a series of exercises. One such question is “What are the points of intensity in your life?” Intensity is defined as a point when you make a decision that has a multiplier effect on the actions or outcomes of many other people. For example, we ask: “What are the intensity points in your work?” Contemplating that, people reflect on whom they would work with, what markets they would get in or out of, and what skills they would need to be more successful. Once we’ve decided to learn a new skill, what kind of multiplier effect will that have on our lives?
Out of those questions comes one more, just as important: “What action will you take immediately as a result of your answers to the preceding questions?” I
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tell everyone to share and discuss the answers. The conversation is made rig-orous by a series of consulting-type questions: “Why will you do that?” “How will you measure it?” “How will you know if you’ve been successful?” Out of those answers comes greater clarity and a further refinement of the goals and action steps. The results are written down on an action-planning form. Then, we go onto the next in the series of 12 thinking exercises.
The experience is like going around a darkened house and turning on the lights, one by one. By the time people have gone through the first session, all the lights are on. Suddenly, they are able to think clearly about the things that they are doing now that they wouldn’t be doing otherwise. When they con-sider that question, there’s almost always something in place that is a major clog in the drain of their lives. By the time they come back for the next ses-sion, they’ve broken up their partnership, started a new business, reorganized their lives, increased their income, and gotten rid of their headaches.
Once the drain has been unclogged, people are ready for the higher work. I have a seven-step process for examining the areas of their life, which we fol-low in logical sequence. First, we determine true values. People know that they have general values, but they also have values specific to areas of their lives. We have values with our families, with our communities, and with our work. We even have values specific to our colleagues and customers. Second, we look at personal vision. I encourage people to imagine that they have a magical wand. What would each area of their lives look like in perfect form in three to five years? People think of how much money they would be earning, how much time they would be spending with their families, and so on. Then, I ask people to think about their goals. Goals are tangible things that must be re-alized to achieve vision. Even though the soft side of life, such as relationships and family, is ultimately more important, I keep bringing people back to their business and work because I believe that it is more quantifiable and improve-ments in those hard areas lead to dramatic improvements in the softer areas.
After goals come skills. What specific skills will they need to develop or improve to achieve their goals? There’s a skill connected to every goal. The reason people haven’t achieved a goal is because they have not yet developed that skill to a high enough degree. Most people think, “I am what I am.” I tell them to get over that. To allow yourself to be held back because you lack an eminently learnable skill is a terrible waste.
From skills, we move on to qualities or habits. What qualities will you need to develop these skills? In reality, all fundamental change occurs when we de-velop certain qualities. We might need to become more disciplined, func-tional, respectful, or patient. If these are qualities of personality and character that are absolutely essential, what activities would you need to
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