Working Resources Blog

Executive Coaching for Respectful Leaders: The Respectful Mind

Executive Coaching for Respectful Leaders

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches help respectful leaders develop their leadership capability?  Does your company or law firm provide executive coaching and leadership development for high potentials and high performing and respectful leaders?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself is “Do I have a respectful mind?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive coaching and leadership development for respectful leaders at all levels of the organization.

The Respectful Mind

The respectful mind responds sympathetically and constructively to differences among individuals and groups. Those with respectful minds work beyond mere tolerance and political correctness; they develop the capacity for forgiveness.

Human beings naturally band into groups — and as soon as such groups form, members start to dislike one another. This pattern appears repeatedly in humans and other primates, for that matter.

Group members bond and define themselves relative to “outgroups,” which are typically characterized as inferior, dangerous or subhuman. Explanations for this tendency abound, with different scientific frameworks emerging over decades of exploration.

Currently, many look to evolutionary psychology for an explanation, though this sociobiological story is probably far too simple. Whatever the reason for outgroups, we must overcome our tendency to create them. With modern weapons, we make the world a dangerous place.

The solution is a relatively simple one: Cultivate respect for others. And while it does, indeed, seem like a tenet of Kindergarten 101, it is much harder to achieve. Teaching respectfulness in school is certainly a promising means of fostering tolerance, and many schools put it into practice by requiring students of various backgrounds to work on joint projects with shared goals. With this kind of foundation, students can continue to cultivate tolerance and respect when they graduate to the workplace and political realm.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders learning how to develop a more respectful mind. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to mbrusman@workingresources.com

Executive Coaching for Innovative Leaders: The Creating Mind

Executive Coaching for Innovative Leaders

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches help innovative leaders develop their leadership capability?  Does your company or law firm provide executive coaching and leadership development for high potentials and high performing and innovative leaders?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask is “Do I have a creative mind?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive coaching and leadership development for innovative leaders at all levels of the organization.

The Creating Mind

The creating mind goes beyond existing knowledge and syntheses to pose new questions, offer new solutions and configure new genres. Creation builds on one or more established disciplines. It requires an informed “field” to make quality, acceptable judgments.

Human creativity is at a premium. Businesses want employees who can develop a “new vision” and “extend existing product categories,” on top of completing their daily work.

It wasn’t always this way. In times past, society often feared or misunderstood creativity, dismissing it as a product of divine intervention or pure luck. Galileo was imprisoned during the Renaissance. Neither Johann Sebastian Bach nor Vincent Van Gogh were appreciated in their lifetimes. Freud, Darwin and Keynes received more than their share of ridicule.

Creative thinkers are no longer deemed exceptional; they’re the expected new hire. Psychologists have gained a better feel for what creativity entails and how people can develop it. Work by psychologists like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi show that creativity is not a lone endeavor, but three elements that interact to foster lasting breakthroughs: 

1. An individual must master a discipline or area and constantly work at it.
2. Creativity requires a “cultural domain” that provides models, rules and norms to work with or against.
3. The creative individual needs opportunities to perform.

The key ingredient is a creative temperament (which need not be innate). Creative people are dissatisfied with their own work and that of others. They go against the grain; it may be painful, but the alternative is even more excruciating. They notice anomalies and try to explain them, rather than explain them away.

Generally, creative people are tough, tenacious and undeterred by hard work or failures. Even when they do succeed, they look over the horizon to find the next mountain to climb.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders learning how to develop a more innovative mind. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to mbrusman@workingresources.com

Executive Coaching for Today’s Leaders: The Synthesizing Mind

Executive Coaching for Today’s Leaders

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches help today’s leaders develop their leadership capability?  Does your company or law firm provide executive coaching and leadership development for high potentials and high performing leaders?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask is “Do I have a synthesizing mind?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive coaching and leadership development for today’ leaders at all levels of the organization.

The Synthesizing Mind

The synthesizing mind is adept at selecting crucial information from the copious amounts available, across disciplines. This requires the skill of pattern recognition. You must recognize important new information and skills and then incorporate them into your knowledge base and professional repertoire. You must discern what merits your attention and what to ignore, organizing this information in ways that make sense to yourself and others.

Great synthesizers are nothing new. Plato and Aristotle sought to organize all human knowledge, as did Augustine, Aquinas and others philosophical giants. Today, scholars like E.O. Wilson continue the tradition, which is more difficult and critical than ever before. (Human knowledge apparently doubles every few years.) Without synthesis, much of this knowledge is unusable.

The good news?

You can learn to be a better synthetic thinker. Start by understanding the different types of syntheses, such as narratives (perhaps the oldest form). Think of stories from the Bible, myths and legends, or finely crafted historical works.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders learning how to create a synthesizing mind. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to mbrusman@workingresources.com.

Executive Coaching for Brain Development: 5 Highly Valued Minds for the Future

5 Highly Valued Minds for the Future

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches are hired to help high future leaders develop their leadership capability?  Does your company or law firm provide leadership development for high potentials?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask is “Am I learning how to think and learn in new ways?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive coaching and leadership development for leaders at all levels of the organization.

5 Minds for the Future

In a ruthless, globally competitive market, companies cannot afford the luxury of holding onto more employees than they need. With economic constraints and technological advances, some jobs are being eliminated completely — a trend that will surely continue.

A new generation of sophisticated information and communication technologies, together with new forms of business reorganization and management, is wiping out full-time employment for millions of blue- and white-collar workers.

What does this mean? There is work, but it’s not the same as it used to be. There are jobs, but not the same ones offered a few years ago. And unless you want to go after menial work, you’ll need to acquire a disciplined education and variety of experiences, while also developing a highly valued mind.

We’ve all read about accelerating globalization, information overload, the drastic ascent of technology and science, and the threat of growing competition. Each of these challenges will require new ways of thinking and learning for those hoping to create a successful future.

Our Mind(s) Matter

In Five Minds for the Future (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), author and noted psychologist Howard Gardner says our mind — actually, minds — matters. We achieve greater professional success by learning how to think and learn in new ways.

Gardner, well known in psychological circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, believes five different kinds of minds are critical to remaining a highly prized asset in your organization, especially in times of economic cutbacks. Human capability, he asserts, cannot be reduced to a single metric: IQ.

According to Gardner, five cognitive capacities will be in great demand in the years ahead:
1. The Disciplined Mind
2. The Synthesizing Mind
3. The Creating Mind
4. The Respectful Mind
5. The Ethical Mind
Developing these mental capacities equips us to deal with future expectations, as well as that which cannot be anticipated.

If we fail to develop these minds, we’ll be at the mercy of forces we can’t understand: overwhelmed by information, unable to succeed in the workplace, and incapable of making judicious decisions in personal and professional matters.

The first three kinds of minds deal primarily with cognitive abilities. The last two deal with our relations to other human beings. Unless we increasingly place value on diversity and common good, we risk our survival.

In our interconnected world, it’s not enough to state what each group needs for survival on its own turf. In the long run, it is not possible for parts of the world to thrive while others remain desperately poor and frustrated.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders learning how to think and learn in new ways. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to mbrusman@workingresources.com

Executive Coaching for Talent Development: What About Passion?

Talent Development

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches are hired to help high potential leaders develop their leadership capability?  Does your company or law firm provide leadership development for high flyers?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask is “What are you so passionate about that drives you to succeed?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent leaders at the top make executive coaching and leadership development available for leaders at all levels of the organization.

What About Passion?

Talent is not what determines success at developing high-level capacities. Rather, those who care the most will rise to the top. Exceptional performance depends on what we decide to do with our lives and the passion that drives us.

One of the most purchased articles from the Harvard Business Review is a 1968 piece on motivation that explains our three main drives:
1. Achievement
2. Power
3. A sense of community and desire to help others

No matter your driving force, you have to care deeply enough to work hard to become exceptional.
Nothing can make you endure the pain and sacrifice of deliberate practice for decades unless you’re  carried by an intrinsic compulsion to do so.

But allowing people to follow their intrinsic drives and work on projects of their own choosing is not something most organizations tolerate. In their fervent application of solely extrinsic motivations, organizations may actually prevent people from developing their passionate abilities.

Talent Is Never Enough

In Talent Is Never Enough: Discover the Choices That Will Take You Beyond Your Talent, (Thomas Nelson, 2007), leadership expert John C. Maxwell suggests talent is "often overrated and frequently misunderstood." He  advises readers to build their strengths to become a "talent-plus person," defined by the following tenets:
• Belief lifts your talent.
• Initiative activates your talent.
• Focus directs your talent.
• Preparation positions your talent.
• Practice sharpens your talent.
• Perseverance sustains your talent.
• Character protects your talent.

Even if you hold onto the notion that you’ll always survive because of your innate talent, you must still prepare, practice and persist. The scientific research is in, and it’s conclusive. Hard work—not talent—contributes to high performance.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders tap the passion that drives success. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to mbrusman@workingresources.com

The Business Case for Executive Coaching – The ICF Coaching ROI Global Study

The Business Case for Executive Coaching

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches help leaders develop their leadership capability?  Does your company or law firm provide executive coaching and leadership development for high potentials and high performing leaders?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask is “Does providing executive coaching for company leaders have a direct effect on the company bottom line?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive coaching and leadership development for authentic leaders at all levels of the organization.

Approximately 25 to 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies use executive coaches, according to the Hay Group, an international human-resources consultancy. According to a survey by Manchester, Inc., a Jacksonville, Florida, career management consulting firm; about six out of ten organizations currently offer coaching or other developmental counseling to their managers and executives. Another 20 percent of companies said they plan to offer coaching within the next year.

Although it was once used as an intervention with troubled staff, coaching is now part of the standard leadership development training for executives in such companies as IBM, Motorola, J.P. Morgan Chase, Hewlett-Packard and many others. Brokerage firms and other sales-based organizations such as insurance companies use coaches to bolster performance of people in high-pressure, stressful jobs.

The ICF Coaching ROI Global Study

The 2009 International Coach Federation (ICF) Global Coaching Client Study reported the median coaching ROI to be 700%. The results of the study is rather dramatic providing much needed metrics for this popular leadership development strategy..

The International Coach Federation conducted a qualitative and quantitative global client survey and interview research project between May to December 2008.  The full research report was made available to the public on June 11, 2009.  Highlights related to the return on investment from coaching are reported here.  This is a crucial research topic -- what do coaching clients say is the value of coaching?

The design phase of the research consisted of three components:  First, fourteen in-depth interviews were conducted with an international sample of coaches to assist with the design of the questions to be utilized in the qualitative and quantitative study.  Second, the qualitative research phase consisted of five focus groups with a total of 41 clients participating.  The focus groups allowed for in-depth probing of qualitative issues.  Third, the quantitative research component consisted of 2,165 coaching clients from 64 countries participating in a 20 minute online survey. 

What do clients say motivates them to begin coaching?  The clients cited career opportunities and business management as their most important reasons for seeking coaching services.

Both coaches and consumers of coaching services are interested in Return on Investment (ROI) studies on coaching.  An often cited ROI study of executive coaching, Coaching for Increased Profitability: How to Deliver and Demonstrate Tangible Results to the Bottom Line by Merrill C. Anderson, Ph.D. MetrixGlobal (2003) had reported an ROI from coaching of 788%.

In an apparent confirmation of that finding, the ICF Global Coaching Client Study Executive Summary (April 2009) reports, "The vast majority (86%) of those able to provide figures to calculate company ROI indicated that their company had at least made their investment back.  In fact, almost one fifth (19%) indicated an ROI of at least 50 (5000%) times the initial investment while a further 28% saw an ROI of 10 to 49 times the investment.  The median company return is 700% indicating that typically a company can expect a return of seven times the initial investment."

Source:  ICF Global Coaching Client Study, Executive Summary, April 2009, in consultation with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, and Association Resource Centre inc.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders improve their leadership capability. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to mbrusman@workingresources.com.

 

Executive Coaching for High Performance - Deliberate Performance

What Is Deliberate Practice?

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements:

• It is an activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with the help of a teacher, coach or expert.
• It can be repeated frequently.
• Feedback on results is continuously available.
• It’s highly demanding mentally.
• It isn’t much fun and entails hard work.

If you think you’ve outgrown the need for a teacher or coach, it’s time to challenge this assumption. A business coach can see things a manager cannot and is trained to deliver feedback in a way that’s inaccessible to most managers.

Without a clear, unbiased view of your performance, you cannot choose the best practice activities.  Most of us lack the knowledge we need to design our own practice programs, and we cannot realistically provide objective observations and feedback to ourselves. As stunt people like to say, “don’t try this at home.” Hire a coach who can properly stretch you beyond your current abilities and help you move out of your comfort zones. Otherwise, human nature dictates that you’re likely to spend your time practicing what you already know how to do.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders develop the habit of diligent practice. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to mbrusman@workingresources.com

Executive Coaching for Developing Expertise: 10,000 Hours of Practice

Developing Expertise: 10,000 Hours of Practice

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches are hired to help high flyers develop their leadership capability?  Does your company or law firm provide leadership development for high potentials? One of the most powerful questions you can ask is “Are leaders given stretch assignments that allow them to practice new skills and gain expertise?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent leaders make executive coaching and leadership development available for leaders at all levels of the organization.

10,000 Hours or 10 Years

Malcolm Gladwell makes the case for 10,000 hours of practice to attain expertise in his book Outliers (Little, Brown & Co., 2008).

 “The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly 10 years, if you think about four hours a day.”

Almost all child prodigies in music, sports, chess and the arts seem to put in 10,000 hours before they attain expertise and produce significant results. The trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers "whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming" are nearly always made, not born.

Many of us have already put in more than a decade of doing what we do. The question is whether we’re practicing the right things, in the right way. Are we designing deliberate practice that actually develops the specific skills we need to make progress toward specific results? Or, to use a golf analogy, are you going to the driving range and hitting a bucket of balls the wrong way, for hours at a time?

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders develop the habit of diligent practice. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to mbrusman@workingresources.com

Executive Coaching for Developing High Performance: Is Talent Irrelevant?

Is Talent Irrelevant?

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches are hired to help high potentials develop their leadership capability?  Does your company or law firm invest in leadership development programs?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask is “Are leaders given stretch assignments to allow them to be exposed to new learning opportunities for professional growth?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent leaders provide leadership coaching and leadership development programs for leaders at all levels of the enterprise.

Recent research findings suggest that talent may be irrelevant. The concept of talent is especially troublesome in business. We label people and then assign expectations, some of which are unrealistic. When people are fast-tracked or deemed executive material, we assume they have special gifts. Worse, we fail to adequately emphasize the importance of  continuous training and coaching. Instead, we rely on their “natural gifts.”

Identifying these gifts has been extremely elusive. In fact, some business giants actually gave little early indication that they would become great.

Jack Welch, named by Fortune as the 20th century’s manager of the century, showed no particular passion for business, even into his mid-20s.

Steve Ballmer and Jeffrey Immelt were average employees at Procter & Gamble in the 1970s, with little evidence they would go on to become CEOs of Microsoft and GE before age 50.

In this age of genomic research, there should no longer be any question as to what is—and isn’t—innate. If a talent is innate, scientists should be able to identify the gene for it, and no progress has been made on this front.

Talent or Hard Work?

We can safely draw the conclusion that there’s plenty of opportunity for everyone. Many high-performing executives will tell you they don’t rely on their innate talents as much as their hard-earned skills. 

CEOs like A.G. Lafley of P&G and GE’s Immelt have said that being forced to manage through crises early in their careers enhanced their abilities in ways that were critical to becoming CEOs. They wouldn’t have achieved their status without surviving the storms that gave them hands-on practice.

Certain practices can make our experiences especially productive:

• Coaching helps.
• Receiving feedback allows us to fine-tune our skills.
• Working in a safe learning environment is essential.

Workplaces encourage practice and development, and mistakes should be viewed as learning opportunities. You also need to clearly define and develop a plan for achieving the abilities you wish to hone, including a measurable time frame. This will turbo-charge your performance and improve your chances of success.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders develop top talent. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to mbrusman@workingresources.com

Executive Coaching for Developing Your Leadership Capabilities: Creating Opportunity in Uncertain Times

Creating Opportunity in Uncertain Times

Are you working in a company or law firm where your Human Resources Department hires executive coaches to help high potentials develop their leadership capability?  Does your Human Resources Department currently have sufficient resources to offer employees essential training and development programs?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask is “Are leaders receiving the coaching help they need to stretch their inherent capabilities?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent leaders provide leadership coaching and leadership development programs for their best and brightest.
Crisis or Opportunity?

The upside of a financial crisis and recession is that they offer all of us the opportunity to stretch our skills in our current jobs—and I mean everyone. That means you. But you already know you’re being stretched, don’t you? You feel it. The question is, how are you going to welcome your own particular crises and use them to benefit your personal and professional development?

Managers often redirect people’s careers based on insufficient evidence that they have talent (or lack thereof). Unfortunately, we don’t give ourselves the same opportunity. We’ll try something new, and if it doesn’t come naturally or we don’t immediately excel, we conclude we have no talent for it. We often don’t give ourselves the time and effort it takes to establish new behaviors.

We abandon pursuit. We never give ourselves the chance to practice and make progress. We don’t like the feeling of discomfort that comes from doing something poorly, so we don’t hang in there. Scientific evidence, however, is beginning to show that our definition of talent is wrong. In fact, “talent” may not mean anything at all.

In studies of accomplished individuals, researchers have found few signs of precocious achievement before their subjects began intensive training. Similar findings have turned up in studies of musicians, tennis players, artists, swimmers, mathematicians and chess players. Accomplished athletes and artists get better by developing a strong work ethic and putting in hours of hard work to improve their skills.

Leaders at all levels can get better by getting out of their comfort zone and be willing to make mistakes as they learn and grow. Nothing can replace a lot of hard work and stickiness to achieve success in new endeavors.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders develop top talent. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to mbrusman@workingresources.com.