THE MASTERFUL COACHING FIELDBOOK Grow Your Business, Multiply Your Profits, Win the Talent War! Second Edition pdf

THE MASTERFUL
COACHING
FIELDBOOK
Grow Your Business, Multiply
Your Profits, Win the Talent War!
Second Edition
Robert Hargrove
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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THE MASTERFUL
COACHING
FIELDBOOK
Grow Your Business, Multiply
Your Profits, Win the Talent War!
Second Edition
Robert Hargrove
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
ffirs.qxd 1/30/07 11:23 AM Page iii
Copyright © 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
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ISBN: 978-0-7879-8602-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hargrove, Robert A.
The masterful coaching fieldbook : grow your business, multiply your profits, win the talent war! /
Robert Hargrove. — 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-7879-8602-5 (pbk.)
1. Teams in the workplace. 2. Industrial efficiency. 3. Employee motivation. 4. Employees—Training of.
5. Group relations training. I. Title.
HD66.H372 2007
658.3’124—dc22
2006033434
Printed in the United States of America

SECOND EDITION
PB Printing 10 987654321
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CONTENTS
Figures and Exhibits vii
Preface ix
Introduction: Grow Your Business Exponentially, Multiply Your Profit, Win the Talent War xv
PART I: MASTERFUL COACHING—THE METHOD:
WAYS OF BEING, MIND-SET, AND SKILL SET
1. THE CEO AS COACH 3
Coaching Is Job #1 in the Age of Talent
2. MASTERFUL COACHING 21
The Power to Make the Impossible Happen
3. MASTERFUL COACHING IS ABOUT HOW YOU ARE BEING,
NOT JUST A MATTER OF TECHNIQUE 39
4. COACHING IS A SPECIAL KIND OF CONVERSATION, NOT
A SPECIAL EVENT ON THE CORPORATE CALENDAR 63
5. THE MASTERFUL COACHING METHOD 95
A Five-Step Coaching Model
PART II: YOUR MASTERFUL COACH IN A BOOK: HOW
TO REALIZE AN IMPOSSIBLE FUTURE
AND WIN IN YOUR BUSINESS
6. MASTERFUL COACHES INSTILL A WINNER’S MIND-SET 129
7. COACHING EXECUTIVES TO CREATE AN IMPOSSIBLE FUTURE 153
8. COACHING THE TEAM STRATEGY SESSION 183
Building a Winning Game Plan
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9. EXECUTE WITH ACTION COACHING 205
Leadership and Business Breakthroughs

10. CODA 221
Coaching in Business as the Ultimate Self-Development and Growth Experience
PART III: CROSSING THE CHASM: INTERVIEWS
WITH LEADERS DOING COACHING
11. MIKE ESKEW,THE VISIONARY UPS CHAIRMAN 241
What Can Brown Do for You?
12. HERB KELLEHER, EMMA SCHERER, AND TERESA
LARABA OF SOUTHWEST AIRLINES 247
Sourcing a Powerful TPOV and an Extraordinary Leadership Culture
13. DAVID BINKLEY OF WHIRLPOOL CORPORATION 255
The Most Leading Edge Corporate Coaching Program in the United States
14. JEFF KAUFMAN OF ALLSTATE 261
A Coaching and Mentoring Tale
15. JAY ABRAHAM 267
Marketing Genius and Money Maximizer
16. HUBERT SAINT-ONGE OF THE MUTUAL GROUP, CANADA 275
Dragon Slayer of Human Resource Myths
17. J. MAYS OF FORD MOTOR COMPANY 283
Coaching Design and Innovation
18. ART WILSON OF CRITICAL PATH STRATEGIES 291
Coaching Big, Complex,Team-Based Sales Across Boundaries
Notes 303
Index 311
The Author 321
Contents
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FIGURES AND
EXHIBITS
FIGURES

Preface Enrollment Card xiii
I.1 The Pull Versus the Push Approach in Leadership Development xxi
3.1 The Four Interlocking Roles of a Masterful Coach 52
3.2 The Ladder of Inference 60
4.1 The Process of Drawing People Out 82
4.2 The Cycle of Reframing 85
4.3 Action Language Makes Things Happen 88
5.1 Translating Experiences into Teachable Points of View 102
5.2 Triple-Loop Learning 122
7.1 The Leadership Triangle: Coach Leaders in Three Areas 162
8.1 Left-Hand-Column Exercise 190
10.1 Leaders, Difference Makers, and High Achievers Love Living 225
in the Gap
15.1 The Diving Board Method for Growing a Business 272
15.2 The Parthenon Method for Growing a Business 272
EXHIBITS
4.1 Conversational Cues for When to Change Caps 93
9.1 E-Mail Conversation Between a Leader as Coach and a Coachee 217
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PREFACE
I aim to bring about a leadership revolution and change the world
through masterful coaching.
I have been coaching top executives for a decade. In this book I am going to share my secrets of
masterful coaching with leaders at all levels. When I wrote Masterful Coaching in 1995, I said
that I wanted to map the territory of coaching. I declared that coaching was about expanding people’s
capacity to realize an impossible future and win in the great game of business. I articu-
lated the notion that the fastest, most powerful way to develop extraordinary leaders is to coach them

to produce extraordinary and tangible results. At the same time, what makes the journey to masterful
coaching so fascinating and intriguing is that coaching people in business is the perfect alchemical
cauldron where people can have the ultimate self-development and growth experience. In many ways
I have been successful, but I am still working on getting people to see coaching from this perspective,
rather than as everything but the kitchen sink.
Coaching is about passion for life, impossible futures, standing in
people’s greatness, talent quests, great groups, transformational
journeys, cool projects, and winning results.
Since I wrote Masterful Coaching a decade ago, coaching has crossed the chasm; it has gone from
being a new, good idea that a small cadre of leading CEOs and companies were experimenting
with to a game-changing idea whose time has finally come, one that is ready to go mainstream.
It is already transforming the definition of what it is to be a business leader at a time when most
managers have a talent war raging right outside their window and the great game of business is
fraught with change, complexity, and competition. It is already displacing the role of both training
and consulting in many organizations because it focuses on implementation and winning results.
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I see my job as being not just a leader, coach, and mentor but also a change insurgent. I have spent a decade
coaching executives to realize an impossible future and win in their businesses. In this book I
want to share my secrets of masterful coaching with leaders at all levels. I have discovered that
even though companies value executive coaches from the outside, they want to be able to bring
coaching deep inside their organizations. They want to develop leaders and managers who are
masterful coaches in their own right and human resource departments that are coaching centers
of excellence and that have coaches skilled both in working with executives and in leading people
and groups to an experience of their own greatness.
This book is designed not just for CEOs but for leaders at all levels who aspire to become master-
ful coaches, whether in Fortune 500–type firms or emerging businesses and whether living in
the United States, Europe, China, India, Brazil, Korea, Russia, or wherever. I want to invite you
to engage in the journey to masterful coaching, and at the same time to give you not just the

roadmap but also all the gear you will need to be successful. I have taken the best of the best of
the masterful coaching approach and put it in this book. All these ideas and practices have been
field-tested, proven, and made foolproof.
I particularly want to extend a warm, welcoming invitation to you who are human resource pro-
fessionals who want to gain the inspiration, empowerment, coaching skills, and capabilities to make
the difference you have always wanted to make.This starts with defining the role of human resources
(HR) in a new way: HR (Talent) Strategy = Business Strategy, and HR Professional = Business Part-
ner, Coach, and Mentor. In this book you will be introduced to world-class colleagues in your own
profession who not only have created powerful partnerships with their CEOs but also have designed
top-notch coaching and mentoring programs, becoming masterful coaches in their own right.
I dare you to try to read it from cover to cover! This book is just what its title says, a fieldbook. It is
chock-full of everything you need to know to become a masterful coach, realize an impossible
future, and win in your business. I suggest you first get grounded in the masterful coaching mind-
set and methods; then use the book as a handy reference guide.The Introduction and Part One
are very important because they will give you the mind-set, guiding ideas, tools, and methods
you will need. Part Two teaches you to realize an impossible future and win in your business, and
Part Three gives you examples of how people have brought coaching into their organizations.
“OK,” you might think,“there is only so much I can learn about masterful coaching from a book. What
else do you have?” My colleagues and I have spent the last decade doing executive coaching,
Preface
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CollabLabs, and team-based action coaching with hundreds of leaders at all levels. Now we have
taken a new turn and are creating joint ventures with corporations and consulting firms, where
we transfer our technology and help people build their own internal coaching capacity. It’s a great
business opportunity for big consulting firms who want to establish a lasting relationship with
the CEO and a wonderful opportunity for human resource and development departments who
want to create an executive coaching center or certify rank-and-file managers as masterful
coaches. Here is what we are offering:

1. Masterful Coaching Certification in Executive Coaching: articulating an impossible future;
reinventing yourself and your organization
2. Masterful Coaching Certification in the Team Strategy Session: creating a winning game plan
3. Masterful Coaching Certification for Line Managers: a one-year program to be used in real
time with direct reports
4. MyGamePlan: the masterful coaching online coaching system used in conjunction with
the masterful coaching certification program
Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be
beaten, but they may start a winning game.
Goethe
I aim to lead a leadership revolution and change the world I believe in the notion of creating a cause,
not just a business. I want to lead a leadership revolution—command and control is obsolete; coach-
ing and mentoring are in as we all move from the age of the machine to the age of talent.Yes, a lot
of people are talking about coaching, but the topics in that conversation are left over from the days
of abstract leadership training programs focused on homogenized lists of competencies and behav-
iors and fixing broken people. I am here to start a new conversation about coaching and map the
territory (as I said in Masterful Coaching in 1995), and from what I can see, I still have a long way to
go.The reason? Even though the idea of coaching has caught on, mind-sets are slow to change.
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If you believe that the leader as coach is an idea whose time has come and if you believe in the masterful
coaching approach, please fill out the card at the end of this Preface. I have been talking about a leader-
ship revolution and the masterful coaching mind-set and method for a decade, using the
Technicolor language approach, making powerful distinctions to set this approach apart from
95 percent of the coaching programs that are out there today. For me, coaching is about passion
for life, the CEO as coach not organization man, impossible futures, winning results, talent quests,
cool projects, and transformational journeys. It is the ultimate self-development and growth
experience. I have clearly taken a stand, but it dawned on me in writing this book that what is
missing that could make a difference is a means for others to give me feedback: Do people really

buy into the approach here? Do people want to join with me in this stand?
I aim to get a critical mass of people to sign up for this cause—75,000 business leaders. Are you ready to
take a stand to lead a leadership revolution in your organization? Do you personally want to enter
the journey to masterful coaching, putting into practice the idea that coaching is about realizing
an impossible future and winning in your business and not about analyzing leadership gaps?
Do you want to set up a powerful leadership pipeline in your company based on the masterful
coaching approach—vision based, business connected, and results oriented rather than the worn-
out, burnt-out, psychological, mechanistic, behavioral-based approach that we often see today?
If your answer to these questions is yes, then I would like to ask you to take a stand simply by
signing the following enrollment card.When you take a stand you are saying that this is an idea
you believe in and a cause worth signing up for. It does not commit you to take any courses, and
it does not require you to be certified in masterful coaching or any other program. I know that
if you have a passionate commitment to becoming a masterful coach and taking on the master-
ful coaching mind-set, you will either come to my group or find the right coaching methods
or certification programs elsewhere. If you allow yourself to be misled by false prophets or have
a wrongheaded mind-set, your ideals will be dashed, your effectiveness diminished.
I would like to say thank you for picking up this book, and for entering the journey to master-
ful coaching. I look at this book as a conversation, not something written in stone. Let’s keep the
conversation going. Share with me about your coaching experiences or what you have done to
bring coaching into your organization, or ask any questions or make any comments.You can
contact me directly at or call me at 617-739-3300.
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LEADERSHIP REVOLUTION AND MASTERFUL COACHING ENROLLMENT CARD
I take a stand to be a change insurgent and to bring about a leadership revolution in my
company. Starting in my area, I take a stand for the masterful coaching approach.
1. I believe in the idea of the leader as coach and that coaching is about impossible futures
and winning in your business, not merely filling leadership gaps.
2. I believe that coaching people to produce extraordinary business results can transform

them into extraordinary leaders, giving them access to an ultimate self-development and
growth experience.
3. I commit to begin the journey to masterful coaching and to stand for the success of the
individuals on my team—whatever happens.
4. I commit that my coaching will be vision based, business connected, and results oriented,
not behavior based and not about fixing people.
5. I am committed to having my coaching be transformational—altering who people are
being rather than just getting them to fit the homogenized, corporate competencies list.
6. I commit to designing coaching and mentoring programs that are focused on real goals
and real situations and conducted in real time, not done just as separate activities in a
classroom.
Name Date
Mail your signed card to Robert Hargrove, 1732 Beacon Street, Brookline, MA 02445, USA
Preface
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INTRODUCTION
Grow Your Business Exponentially, Multiply
Your Profit,Win the Talent War
This book is about you! This book is for leaders at all levels. Perhaps you are the CEO of a
Fortune 500 company that wants to be a truly global organization, or perhaps you are the leader
of an emerging $50 million business who has a passion for growth but has somehow hit a wall.
Or perhaps you are a research and development chief, director of marketing, or team leader who
has to achieve an extraordinary result or meet an impossible deadline.The Masterful Coaching
Fieldbook is designed to help you become the kind of leader who can realize an impossible future
and produce winning results. It will provide you with the guiding ideas, tools, and methods to grow
your business exponentially, multiply your profits, and win the talent war.
THE BUSINESS CONTEXT IS WILDLY ALTERED AND SO ARE THE
RULES OF THE GAME

Are you up for realizing an impossible future and winning in your business? Before we get started
let us not forget that today’s business context is wildly altered. Globalization, rapid innovation,
and the ability of three billion new capitalists to collaborate and compete have altered the rules
of the business game. Consider these changes in our thinking: the shift from “CEO as organiza-
tion man” to “CEO as coach and teacher”; from “big dogs own the street” to “small emerging
businesses in emerging markets will rock your world”; from “being No. 1 or No. 2 in your mar-
ket” to “creating something new, and cool and owning your market niche”; from “shareholders
rule” to “the customer is king”; from “be lean and mean” to “collaborate and create”; and from
“hire MBAs” to “hire passionate people.”
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MY INTENTION IS TO MAP THE TERRITORY OF COACHING FOR LEADERS,
MANAGERS, AND CONSULTANTS
Masterful coaching is about passion for life, transformational
leadership, impossible futures, winning results, talent quests, cool
projects, extraordinary results, and the ultimate self-development
and growth experience, not homogenized leadership competen-
cies, behavioral modification, and attitude tweaks.
Excuse me while I rant. I wrote Masterful Coaching in 1995 with the sincere and honest inten-
tion to map the territory of coaching. Coaching is as distinct from training as training is from
consulting. So what is masterful coaching about? A passion for life, transformational leadership,
impossible futures, winning in your business, talent quests, great groups, cool projects, daring
adventures, the pursuit of excellence, breakthrough results, and the ultimate self-development
and growth experience. I have a beef with those people in the coaching world who are into fill-
ing leadership gaps based on homogenized corporate competency lists, along with behavioral
modification and attitude tweaks. Some would tell you that this accomplishes the same objec-
tives that I am aiming for, but I do not believe that is so. The difference is the same difference
you see between the typewriter and the PC, the iPod and the Walkman, the electric oven and

the microwave. They may do some of the same things, but what we are talking about here is
state-of-the-art technology versus something that should be in the Smithsonian.
Today coaching is hot; as many as 80 percent of Fortune 500 com-
panies make use of executive coaches or coaching in some way.
Today leaders more often than not go to one of the big five consulting firms or big five search
firms when they have a business problem to solve or a talent to find. Further, the people who
run these companies have a set of standard industry principles and practices they follow.The field
of leadership coaching, however, has no standard industry principles or practices. As a friend,
Grace Cheng, president of Russell Reynolds, China, told me,“With coaching there are thousands
Introduction
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of firms, and you don’t know who is a reliable source, or even what it is you are getting.”There
are self-appointed certifying bodies, like Coaching College, International Coach Federation,
Coaches Training Institute, and so on, but who is certifying the certifiers? The sad fact of life is
that coaching is a blinking word that means entirely different things to different people.
WHAT IS A MASTERFUL COACH?
Let’s take a look at what I mean by mastery and also what I mean by coaching. A master is some-
one who has found out how to enlighten people—Buddha, Muhammad, the Ba‘al Shem Tov.
A master is someone who has found out not just how to deliver a virtuoso musical performance
or paint within a certain tradition but also how to do it in a way that elevates the human spirit
and creates a new tradition—Beethoven, Michelangelo, Picasso. A master is also someone who
has found out how to dominate the competition and win—Lord Admiral Nelson (“mastery of
the seas”),Vince Lombardi, Red Auerbach. If leadership in business is an art, then names like
Alfred P. Sloan, Jack Welch, and Steven Jobs come to mind. These men pursued mastery not
mediocrity in terms of developing talent, designing their organizations, and creating insanely
great products.They not only played the management game within an established tradition but
also changed the game and became legends.
A business guru is a wise man or woman who listens carefully,

has a powerful and profound teachable point of view, and can say
the one thing that can make a difference.
A masterful coach is someone who has found out how to realize an impossible future and win at the great game
of business. Now that we have defined the term mastery, let’s acknowledge that mastery always takes
place in a given context or game—business, the performing arts, sports. As far as the context of this
book is concerned, we are talking about masterful coaching as it pertains to realizing an imposs-
ible future and winning at the great game of business.We need to take into account that this involves
the pursuit of mastery in a whole lot of things—talent quests, dream making and motivating, busi-
ness concept innovation, creating great groups, creative collaboration, wow projects, fast prototypes,
driving for results, and never settling for less than excellence.The pursuit of mastery also involves
recognizing that winning at the great game of business is not just about great products and great
service; it is an opportunity “to lead people to the experience of their own greatness.”
1
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Great coaches lead people to the experience of their own greatness.
Warren Bennis
Masterful coaching’s flip side is recognizing talent and providing people with the ultimate self-development and
growth experience. On one side of the coin a masterful coach (and leader) is someone whose entire
orientation is to realize a mission impossible and win at the great game of business.Yet if you flip
the coin over you will discover that what masterful coaching is really about is making everyone
a player in the great game of business so that the end result is not just a promotion or raise in
pay but the ultimate self-development and growth experience. There is a whole way of being
that goes along with reaching an impossible dream, building winning teams, designing soul into
man-made products, creating exciting services, and driving projects to completion.Your job is to
call it forth in people. There is a way of thinking and interacting with people that allows them
to break through whatever walls they have been staring at, and your job is to help them discover

and express that ability.
WHAT SEPARATES WINNERS FROM LOSERS? GREAT COACHING, GREAT
MENTORING, GREAT TEACHING
We’ve done a tremendous amount of research and we have found
that leaders who have the best coaching skills have the best busi-
ness results.
Tanya Clemens
2
What is it that separates winners from losers in the great game of business? For twenty years I have
researched both winning companies and losing companies, looking for the answer to that question.
As far as Fortune 500 companies are concerned the winners have one thing in common—they con-
sistently rank in the top quartile of the S&P 500,maintaining annual revenue growth of 20 percent,
and at least a 10 percent return on capital employed. Having said that, wins and gains achieved by
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buying market share and slashing the payroll, rather than by organic growth, cannot be sustained
over the long haul. Companies that are on the Fortune 500 list today are often gone tomorrow.
In contrast, why is it that companies like General Electric, PepsiCo, Intel, and Southwest
Airlines consistently show up in Fortune’s list of the most admired corporations, not just for
setting new records for financial performance but also for coming up with game-changing
strategies, recruiting top talent, designing great products, and wowing customers. Added to that
they seem to be able to sustain this success over the long haul. The X factor here? They are
led by men and women who think and operate from the bone-deep belief that if you are a
leader, you are a coach and teacher. Former and current CEOs like Jack Welch of General Electric,
Roger Enrico of PepsiCo, and Jeff Fettig of Whirlpool, who have created inspired, high-
performing organizations, have spent a gasp-worthy 30 to 60 percent of their time coach-
ing and teaching.This is in contrast to most managers, who spend little or no time in coaching
and teaching.

Coaching is the exception, not the rule. Walk into a hotel conference room, as I have, to make a speech
to 200 to 300 decision makers and talk about winning leaders. Say to people,“Put up your hand if
you spend at least 30 to 60 percent of your time coaching and teaching.” At most you will see one
or two hands go up, along with mutterings like “Impossible!”“Never!”Then say,“Put up your hand
if you have had a great performance review from your boss that told you your strengths, weak-
nesses, and exactly where you stand in the organization.” Again, you will see one or two hands.
Question: “When was the last time you had a coaching session
with your boss?” Answer: “Never!”
The prevailing mind-set around coaching is wrongheaded. What’s wrong with this picture? Why do
so few business leaders, even those who would secretly like either to be the next Jack Welch or
to drop out of the corporate picture altogether to become a coach and teacher, spend so little
time being coaches and teachers on their day jobs? The answer has to do with the fact that the
prevailing paradigm of coaching is frighteningly wrongheaded. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said
that everything you say reveals you. In speaking with executives over the past decade or so about
leadership and coaching, I find that everything they have said has led me to the conclusion that
their mental model of coaching is shrouded in wrongheadedness.
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My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people.
Mindsets play strange tricks on us.
Muhammad Yunus
3
THE FIVE MYTHS OF COACHING
Five myths of coaching are at the heart of the reasons why most leaders and managers miss out
on the opportunity coaching provides to attract, excite, and develop talent in the service of
realizing an impossible dream and winning in business. Let’s look at each one.
If somebody said to me, “Herb, I’d love to be a great leader and

coach, but I don’t have the time to do it,” my response to them
would be, “You don’t have time to do anything else until you
accomplish that.”
Herb Kelleher
4
MYTH 1 COACHING IS NOT THE LEADER’S AND MANAGER’S
NO. 1 JOB BUT SOMETHING DONE BY HUMAN
RESOURCES AND CONSULTANTS
Leaders are called decision makers, but the long-range consequences of their decisions are often
not obvious. One of the most insane decisions made in the history of bureaucracy was to put line
managers in charge of performance and the lowly personnel manager in charge of development.
The long-range result of that decision is that the vast majority of managers automatically delegate
such activities as coaching and training to the human resource folks or to consultants. In recent
years, however, a handful of CEOs have recognized the power produced when CEOs define their
jobs in terms of maximizing both performance and development. Once CEOs take this responsi-
bility, they can then get a powerful assist from human resources or consultants as needed.
Introduction
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MYTH 2 COACHING IS AIMED AT FILLING LEADERSHIP GAPS,
NOT AT AN IMPOSSIBLE FUTURE AND WINNING
Walt Disney,Warren Buffet, and Steve Jobs did not become some of the greatest leaders of this
century and some of the richest men in the world because someone pointed out their leadership
gaps.They became great leaders by leveraging their talents and gifts and because they had a dream
that was burning a hole inside them.They kicked off their leadership journey by making declarations
like “We aim to change the world.”The traditional approach starts with identifying and filling leader-
ship gaps.The masterful coaching approach to leadership development is a pull approach, which starts
with a goal or result people passionately care about, rather than a push approach, which starts with a
list of behaviors (as illustrated in Figure I.1). People discover and call forth their leadership ability in
the process of learning to love politics, build teams, mount projects, and clear hurdles.

Introduction
xxi
Needs
Assessment
• Leadership, teams,
coaching, etc.
• Develop a generic
model
Human Resources
Identifies Gaps
• 360
°
feedback
• LDS attributes
• Behavior
• Competencies
Mandate Learning
• Abstract training
programs
• Taught by human
resources consultants
• Enforced by
carrots and sticks
People Declare
the Future
• Based on
personal,
collective
aspirations
• Goals/projects

• Performance
measures
People Declare
Their Own Gaps
• Are responsible
for their own
learning
• Coach is resource
• Human resource
tools are
resource
Coach Ignites
Learning
• Recognized leaders
teach key attitudes/
skills
• Performance and
development
integrated
• Daily coaching
conversations
FIGURE I.1 The pull versus the push approach in leadership development
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MYTH 3 COACHING IS NOT A GOAL-ORIENTED, RESULTS-
DRIVEN, REAL-TIME ACTIVITY BUT A SEPARATE
ACTIVITY DONE IN ABSTRACT TRAINING PROGRAMS
From time immemorial leadership development has been a separate activity, far removed from
the real world of producing business results. It has involved marching managers off to abstract
training programs where they are introduced to the 100 percent pure, homogenized leadership
competencies, are given their 360-degree feedback, do some exercises, and are asked how they

are going to apply what they have learned. And therein lies the rub—knowing what does not
equal knowing how. There is also a big disconnect between the leadership competencies and hav-
ing to produce results in your business with your colleagues and amid change and complexity.
When human resource managers and trainers decided it would be a neat idea to take off the
trainer’s hat and put on the coach’s hat, they kept doing the same thing, except under a different
label.What they often failed to recognize was that coaching is a real-time activity that takes place
around real goals, real problems, and real situations.
MYTH 4 COACHING IS A SPECIAL EVENT IN THE CORPORATE
CALENDAR (THE YEARLY PERFORMANCE REVIEW),
RATHER THAN A SPECIAL KIND OF CONVERSATION
As a leadership and coaching guru I have heard thousands of times:“I have an impossible job
and I basically don’t have the time to coach and teach.” I tell people,“We are living in an age
of talent, where the team with the best talent and the highest performance wins. If you do not
have time to coach because of your job, tell me, just what do you think your job is?”Think of
coaching as your day job rather than something you do at the annual review, given all the car-
rots and sticks that force compliance. Coaching is a special conversation, not just a special event
on the corporate calendar.Yet, at the same time, you have to calendarize coaching. Engage
in monthly coaching conversations with each direct report and each person you mentor.
No excuses!
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“
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Bill Gates, Steven Jobs, and Warren Buffet became great leaders
because they had a dream burning a hole inside them, not because
someone handed them a list of leadership competencies.
MYTH 5 COACHING IS NOT FOR WINNERS BUT FOR LOSERS,
A LAST-GASP EFFORT BEFORE THEY ARE SHOWN

THE DOOR
In the 1950s the ideas of coaching and counseling got introduced into business, usually in a context
like this:“Joe is a real problem. I should fire him, but since he has been kicking around here for
fifteen years and, frankly, I hate being confrontational with people (makes me damn uncomfort-
able), let’s get him a coach as a kind of last effort before showing him the door.”You can also see
that coaching in most organizations carries with it an onus of this type:“Wow, if the boss says
I need coaching, I must really be screwed up.” It is amazing that this point of view exists in busi-
ness, because in sports and the performing arts it is just the opposite. Olympic athletes, golfers like
Tiger Woods, and great musicians seek great coaches and spend huge chunks of time with them.
THE NEW, DYNAMIC MIND-SET AROUND LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
AND COACHING
The new leadership draws on a completely different mind-set, the
mark of which is inspiration, improvisation, and coaching people
to take successful action.
Most leaders and managers have a wrongheaded mind-set around talent and coaching, left over
from the days when people who worked in big factories were seen as interchangeable parts. On
top of that their coaching and teaching skills and capabilities are pretty much undeveloped.That
is the bad news.The good news is that I intend to provide you with a whole new, dynamic
“
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