To Be Or Not To Be?

“Victory comes to companies, not through the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get the best out of ordinary folk.” Anonymous.

We can all trace our success to two basic inputs: firstly, a series of developmental events that gave us experience, judgment, and insights; and secondly, we had a coach (possibly a manager) who took a special interest in our work, our career and personal development.


In the above figure, James Clear illustrates just how effective small choices over the long term are. They either cause decline or create exponential growth in your business.

Josh Bersin notes that the greatest impact on business is, “… executive and management coaching. This scored higher than setting goals, aligning goals, building core competencies, and recruiting high performers.”

In the past an executive coach was used to lift the outcomes of under-performers. Today coaching is mostly used as a tool to develop over-performers, leadership and organisational strengths, to focus efforts, clarify business strategies, and thus drive business results.

Executive coach operates within a formal, short-term environment. It is not a continuous, potentially life long process. Once the agreed issue has been addressed there may be no need for the coaching relationship to continue.

Another thing to consider is that coaching is not a leadership style. However, it is an essential skill for any empowering leader. It as a powerful tool for developing your teams, and is essential to help your people see the common goal of their team and the ultimate goal of your business as a whole. As an empowering leader, you need to consider your role as building a winning game plan, not simply managing people.

So a coach is engaged short term to focus on your strengths and incremental growth, and thus help you lift the outcomes of your business.

What is the role of the coachee?

To be willing to learn, to be challenged and confronted.

This is a difficult position to take because we have built our business’ or careers and believe that we know the “best” way forward. We usually don’t seek input until things don’t appear to be operating at their best.

As a coachee we need to be honest about our faults. This means being open to feedback, and being vulnerable. Vulnerability requires you to be proactive in preparing for the worst, and in preventing the worst excesses of our character flaws.

What can we do to prevent putting ourselves in a place where these flaws could cause damage?

It takes humility to admit you don’t know it all, that you may need help. In the West we see humility as weakness, and dominance as a wisdom. Contrarily most Asian cultures embody humility in their learning - they are brought up with the idea that humility ensures better learning.

Dr. Mike Armour noted that, “It’s this distinct relationship between humility and learning that makes humility so critical for leaders who would propel an organization to sustained peak performance. The faster we learn as leaders, the quicker we can take our organization to the top’.

Humility means having to grasp the fact that you do not yet understand enough to have all (, or any of) the answers, and then be willing to ask the questions that will lead to the best possible insights.

The purpose of a coach, then, is to guide you through your blindness so you can learn and mature as leaders.

A great tool for measuring your maturity and humility is your ability to cope with criticism.

This ability to humbly cope with criticism is a formula developed by author Dr Jim Underwood called Reaction and Recovery (R&R). R&R is the time between the Point of Reaction and the Point of Recovery. It is a measurement for how long it take you to move from a slap in the face till you turn the other cheek. The closer these two points become, the more mature you are.

Mature growth moves you from a childish, self-centered imagination and gives way to humble, mutual exchanges with others to create new ideas and information, to increase capabilities for yourself, and more importantly others.

Ultimately, your goal as a leader is to create a climate where the truth can be heard and brutal facts confronted, and a culture where your people have an opportunity to be heard.

This is the ultimate goal of the coach, and the coachee - to focus on your strengths and incremental growth, and thus help you lift the outcomes of your business through humbly learning about our self-perception and that the need to have all the right answers are flawed.

There is one more thing we need to note about an executive coach; they often come from an unrelated industry and may know less about your specific industries subject matter. For example, Lou Gerstner, the man who turned around IBM, came from Nabisco. However, Gerstner was a fantastic coach. Gerstner simply applied disciplines, and displayed the type of empowering leadership that IBM needed.

“If you want to re-energise an industry, don’t hire people from that industry. It’s much harder to unlearn bad habits. They’re trapped in the past. Remember, resurrection has only worked once in history.” Arkadi Kuhlmann

If we desire to see the best outcomes for our business, we need the best from our teams and individuals within our organisations. An executive coach helps leaders and their teams gain a deeper understanding of the challenges they face and the solutions that are available to them.

Our challenge as leaders is how not to be a slave to the average, but to be a leader who brings our very best to our organisation; and the teams and the ordinary folk within it?

Josh Bersin., Bersin & Associates.

Dr. Mike Armour. The Payback for the Humble Leader: Humility and Leadership

Jim Collins., Good to Great.